Carol Ann Dougherty was raped and strangled in St. Mark Church in Bristol 62 years ago. Since then, scores of police investigators and amateur sleuths have tried to solve the little girl's murder.
The latest to take on Carol’s case is Mike Missanelli , the Philadelphia sports talk radio host. He’s producing a weekly series of podcasts, “The Coldest Murder.”
“These cases are fascinating to me,” Missanelli said. “I mean, it’s beyond comprehension that we live in an era where it's relatively easy to solve a crime through DNA technology, and this has been a cold case for sixty-plus years . It doesn’t compute.”
On “The Coldest Murder,” he delves into the background of the killing, the suspects and Carol. Missanelli has a family connection to the case. His uncle is the late Vincent Faragalli, who in 1962 was Bristol’s police chief who led the investigation. Missanelli hopes the podcast sparks a new investigation, or a documentary.
As a kid growing up in Bristol, Missanelli spent Sunday dinners at his grandmother’s house, with his uncle at one end of the table. Despite the family closeness, the chief never spoke about Carol's killing.
“He internalized a lot about that, He was a good cop, not sharing any details of the murder," Missanelli said. "He really was aching inside over it for a lot of years. And probably that’s why he never discussed it with anybody.”
Chief Faragalli, 44, a widower at the time, never spoke to his three daughters about it, either, Missanelli said. Yet, until he retired 17 years later in 1979, he kept a photograph of Carol on his desk at the police station, and kept it in his home until his death in 2001 .
What happened to Carol Dougherty in Bristol?
On Tuesday Oct. 22, 1962, Carol, 9, stopped at St. Mark Church on Radcliffe Street around 4 p.m. She was on her way to the library to return a book. When she didn’t return home for dinner, her parents searched and saw her bicycle outside the church. Her father, Frank, went in and found her on a landing to the choir loft, dead.
The investigation took many twists, among them an unusual abundance of prime suspects.
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Frank Zuchero, an aging handyman and alcoholic who exposed himself to little girls, was seen stumbling drunk past old St. Mark School. Zuchero confessed, giving chilling details that some investigators determined only the killer would know. But when it was discovered that the police officer interrogating him got him to confess under duress, Faragalli dismissed him as a suspect.
There was Joseph Sabadish, 43, a parish priest, who could not account for his whereabouts at the time of the murder. He had previously threatened to rape two women (implicating himself on a secret tape recording), but passed a polygraph test in the Dougherty investigation. He was dismissed as a suspect, too. Years after his death in 1999, three people stepped forward to credibly accuse him of molesting them as children in his mother's basement in Branch Dale, Pa.
A19-year-old from Morrisville , was named by his sketchy parents as Carol’s killer. He was spotted at the Bristol Post Office just after the murder, with scratches on his face, as if he’d been in a fight. But he proved he was taking a driver’s license test in Virginia at the time.
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A reexamination of the case in the 1990s produced another suspect, William Schrader, who lived around the corner from St. Mark Church. He had lied about where he was at the time of the murder, and also was accused of molesting little girls. Schrader had been convicted of killing a teenage girl in an arson in Louisiana in the 1970s. Bucks County D.A. Alan Rubenstein extradited Schrader and placed him before a grand jury in Doylestown. Schrader pleaded the Fifth Amendment to every question. He was released.
With the exception of the Morrisville man, whose whereabouts are unknown, the suspects are dead.
What could solve the case? DNA. The police collected hair at the scene, which was assumed to be from Carol’s killer. It had been tested in the 1990s, but its deteriorated quality rendered it nearly useless. Technology has improved since then, and genealogical DNA is solving cold cases across the country.
Among the solved cases is the 1964 murder of Marise Chiverella , 9, of Hazleton, Pa ., long thought to be connected to the Dougherty case because of its eerie similarities. In February 2022, the Pennsylvania State Police announced they had identified Marise's killer. Investigators were aided by Eric Schubert , 20, a DNA sleuth from South Jersey who used the technology to name James Paul Forte as the murderer. Forte died in 1980. Police also concluded he was not in Bristol in October 1962.
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Missanelli was 7 when Carol was killed. Like most Bristol kids at the time, and like Chief Faragalli, he was haunted by its disturbing details.
“At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it,” he said. “There’s some sort of murderer in the neighborhood, and he’s gonna get me? He’s stalking around. I was scared for a really long time. Which is why I think about it even now. Those memories are vivid.”
JD Mullane can be reached at 215-949-5745 or at jmullane@couriertimes.com.
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Sports radio host Mike Missanelli looks at unsolved '62 Bristol church murder in podcast
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