In the summer of 1979, twenty-year-old Anna Marie Hlavka was settling into her life in Portland, Oregon. She shared an apartment with her sister, Rose Ann, and worked at a nearby McDonald's. On the evening of July 24th, Rose Ann returned to their modest brick apartment building around 10 p.m. after her shift, expecting to find Anna. She called out her sister's name but was met with silence. Tragically, Rose Ann soon discovered her sister's body in the bedroom.
Anna had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death, the electric cord from her clock radio used as the ligature.
For decades, the brutal murder of the young woman with flowing brown hair and a bright smile baffled Portland police. Investigators explored numerous leads, administered polygraphs, and questioned several suspects, but each trail eventually went cold. The case remained unsolved, a lingering source of pain for Anna's family and a frustrating puzzle for law enforcement. In 2009, a break finally came when retired detectives submitted evidence from the crime scene for forensic analysis. A full DNA profile of an unknown male was recovered from underneath Anna's fingernails, a surprising development given the age of the evidence. Despite this, the DNA did not match anyone in the national database, and the case stalled once more.
The mystery finally began to unravel in 2018 with the emergence of a new investigative tool: forensic genealogy. Inspired by its success in identifying the 'Golden State Killer,' detectives submitted the unknown DNA profile to a lab that specialized in this technique. By building a family tree through public genealogy databases, investigators were able to zero in on a suspect who had never been on their radar: Jerry 'Animal' McFadden. McFadden was a notorious serial rapist and murderer from Texas with a violent criminal history.
Further investigation confirmed that McFadden had traveled to the Pacific Northwest in 1979, placing him in Portland at the time of Anna's murder. DNA samples from McFadden's relatives confirmed that the DNA found at the crime scene belonged to him. McFadden, however, would never face justice for Anna's murder. He had been executed in Texas in October 1999 for the 1986 kidnapping and murder of an 18-year-old high school cheerleader. His execution predated the routine collection of DNA from inmates for the national database, which is why his profile had not initially registered a match. Nearly 40 years after her death, Anna Marie Hlavka's killer was finally identified, bringing a long-awaited, albeit bittersweet, resolution to her family.
