White, female, age 16. On the night of January 12, 1976, 16 year old Pamela A. Maurer left a friend's house to buy a soft drink and never returned. The next morning, January 13, a road crew found Pamela A Maurer's body fully clothed face down in a snowbank, her purse laying nearby, along College Road near Maple Avenue in west suburban Lisle.
She had been sexually assaulted and strangled; investigators believed a rubber hose discovered near her body was likely used as the ligature.
For decades Pamela's case sat cold, sustained by fragments of preserved biological evidence and the patience of DuPage County investigators.
In 2019, detectives turned to genetic genealogy: crime scene DNA was analyzed and compared through a Parabon NanoLabs investigation, pointing toward a suspect's family tree. Authorities then exhumed the suspect's remains to obtain a direct DNA profile.
On January 13, 2020, officials announced that the recovered DNA matched the man linked through genealogy, closing the evidentiary loop and publicly naming him.
The man identified was Bruce Everitt Lindahl, an Aurora area predator whom investigators now believe was responsible for Pamela A. Maurer's murder.
No arrests were ever made in Pamela A. Maurer's case; Lindahl had died in 1981, bleeding out after severing his own femoral artery while fatally stabbing 18 year old Charles “Chuck” Huber in a Naperville apartment.
In the wake of the 2020 announcement, authorities also described Lindahl as a likely serial offender tied by pattern and later DNA work to additional attacks and killings from the late 1970s, including the 1979 murder of Kathy Halle; his suspected tally has been described in double digits. The identification of Lindahl in Pamela A. Maurer's murder was therefore posthumous, and the case was “solved” through DNA rather than through an arrest. Finally bringing closure to Pamela's family and friends.
