After Mary Thompson moved to Greensburg, Pa., in the mid-1990s, her sick mother told her something she never forgot.
“She told me to be careful in Greensburg because I had a sister that was murdered up there,” Thompson told The Washington Post.
Thompson’s mother died in the early 2000s, but her words stayed with her daughter — because she did have an older sister who disappeared on a fall day in 1967, when Thompson was only 4, and was never found.
From what Thompson was told, 13-year-old Teala Patricia Thompson left her home in the Homewood neighborhood in Pittsburgh in the early morning on a September day in 1967. That was the last time her family saw her. They reported her disappearance to Pittsburgh police, Thompson said, but investigators had come up empty.
Until now.
Teala was identified earlier this week. Her body had been buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery potter’s field next to the Westmoreland County Prison in Greensburg.
The discovery came after nearly two years of a cold-case investigation led by Pennsylvania State trooper Brian Gross, who was assigned the case in October 2014. One of his crime unit supervisors told him to look into an open homicide investigation that involved an unidentified girl whose body was discovered in a landfill in Salem Township, Pa., in 1967 — the same year Teala disappeared.
Last October, investigators received a court order allowing them to exhume the body. A dental charting done in the 1960s showed that the remains definitely belong to the girl from the landfill, Gross said. At that point, it was just a matter of finding out who she was.
Thompson heard about the exhumation in the news and immediately called Gross. “It’s my sister,” Thompson told Gross, remembering her mother’s words.
Investigators obtained DNA samples from Thompson and other relatives and sent them to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, which does DNA testing for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Click here to read more about how UNT DNA at testing helps identify a girl found dead in a landfill 49 years ago.
