Anna Marie Hlavka lived in a small apartment in Portland, Oregon. She worked as a secretary at Tektronix, a job she took seriously. On July 24, 1979, she didn’t show up to work.
Her roommate came home that evening and walked through the front door. Everything looked normal—until she reached the bedroom. Anna was lying face down on the bed. She had been strangled with a phone cord. Her skull showed signs of blunt trauma. Her clothes were in disarray. She was just 20.
The scene didn’t tell a story. There were no shattered windows or broken locks. Her purse sat nearby. A few drawers were open, but nothing appeared stolen. Police arrived quickly and began collecting evidence. They took fingerprints, hair samples, and swabs. But in 1979, these samples couldn’t speak clearly.
Detectives interviewed neighbors and coworkers. They checked for recent break-ins. The case didn’t move. Over time, the file grew thicker, but it stayed on the same shelf.
Anna’s family buried her in Minnesota. Her name faded from newspapers, then from most people’s memory. Her case stayed unsolved for decades. But the evidence stayed sealed, marked with her name, waiting for a future that could listen better.
The Man in the Barn
Ten years after Anna’s death, Jerry Walter McFadden was running from the law in Texas.
He had kidnapped and killed an 18-year-old named Suzanne Harrison. Her body was found in a shallow grave. After the murder, McFadden escaped from prison. He became the focus of a massive manhunt, with helicopters circling the woods. Officers found him hiding in a barn, crouched behind hay bales.
By the time they caught him, McFadden had already served time for two previous assaults. He had a long criminal record. Texas courts sentenced him to death. He died by lethal injection in 1999.
At that point, his story seemed complete. Reporters covered his final moments. Families of his known victims watched as justice took its final step. His name returned to silence.
Thousands of miles away, Anna’s case remained open. Portland police reviewed it once in a while. But every review circled back to the same puzzle: no suspect, no known motive, and no further leads.
Then came a shift in technology. And with it, a new kind of detective work.
The DNA That Waited 40 Years
In 2011, detectives with the Portland Police Bureau reopened Anna’s case.
They sent preserved evidence to a crime lab. A male DNA profile surfaced. It came from material collected in 1979, stored carefully all this time. Oregon’s crime lab uploaded the sample to CODIS—the national criminal DNA database. The profile sat there quietly. No hits came back.
Years passed. Then something else changed. Genealogy websites began accepting law enforcement uploads. A new tool entered the scene. Detectives turned to Parabon NanoLabs. Genetic genealogist CeCe Moore took the case.
She started with third cousins and built backwards. She searched obituaries, census data, and social media. The tree took shape. Names narrowed. One name stood out—Jerry Walter McFadden.
He had lived in the south. His known crimes were in Texas. His family tree lined up. His profile fit the DNA from Portland.
Authorities requested confirmation. Texas still held DNA samples from McFadden’s past cases. The match came back: the same man who killed Suzanne in 1986 had also killed Anna in 1979.
There was no clear record of McFadden traveling to Oregon. He may have passed through while evading law enforcement. He may have stayed briefly, unnoticed. Whatever the path, he entered Anna’s apartment and left behind a secret that science could not reach until 40 years later.
McFadden never stood trial for Anna’s murder. The confession came from molecules, not words. Still, her case now had a name attached to it. A name the files had been missing since day one.
Her story moved from the cold case list to the closed case file. That box finally had a resolution.
