California 1973 Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community
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A wordless way of saying this case was not over, that the girl in the photo had not received justice, and that anyone working at Newport Beach PD today inherited the responsibility for the unanswered question from the afternoon of July 6th, 1973.
Over the years, generations of investigators continued to review the case file in waves whenever new technology or new resources became available.
In the late 1990s, Newport Beach PD sent the biological evidence that Jim White had preserved since 1973 to the lab and created a suspect DNA profile from material that had been in storage for more than two decades.
In 2001, that DNA profile was uploaded to CODIS, the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, the National Criminal DNA database containing profiles of people who had been arrested and had their DNA collected.
There was no match.
Linda's killer did not have DNA in CODIS because he had never been arrested for a crime that required DNA collection and entry into the system.
While Newport Beach PD kept Linda's photo on the wall, James Allen Neil, the man who had sat behind the wheel of the turquoise van, was living a free life.
In 1973, he was using the name James Albert George Layton and living in Orange County, California, about a half hour drive from Corona del Mar, where Linda was abducted.
He was a man who had moved from Chicago to Southern California before the murder, with no deep roots in the Newport Beach community.
Not someone neighbors or colleagues knew well enough to suspect.
After killing Linda, Neil left California and moved to Florida, a geographic distance great enough to escape any attention from Newport Beach PD and enough to ensure his new life had no connection to the ongoing investigation in California.
But more important than the geographic distance was his decision to change his name from James Layton to James Neil.
A calculated move by someone who wanted to completely sever the connection between James Layton in Orange County in 1973 and any investigation that might reach that name in the records.
The man Newport Beach PD was looking for under the name James Layton had become James Neil.
Eventually, Neil settled in Colorado, living the normal life of an older man.
From 1995 to 2004, when he was in his 50s to 60s, he was accused of sexually assaulting two other young girls in Riverside County, California.
Two children, 30 years after Linda.
The same perpetrator, while Linda's case remained a cold case and her photo still hung on the wall of the Newport Beach Police Station as a reminder that the answer had not yet come.
On July 7, 2018, exactly 45 years after Linda Ann O'Keefe's body was found in the ditch near the nature trail at Back Bay, the Newport Beach Police Department paused all regular Twitter content and did something no police department in America had ever done.
They spent the entire day retelling the case in Linda's own voice, one tweet at a time, in chronological order from the morning of July 6, 1973, when Linda went to summer school, until the next morning when her body was found.
Each tweet was Linda speaking, Linda telling her own story 45 years after she was gone.
Spokesperson Jennifer Manzella later explained that the department wanted viewers to have that experience, walking home from school with Linda, standing next to the turquoise van, and then not making it home, so that people would not just read about the case, but feel it in a completely different way than a press release or a television news report.
Those tweets spread far beyond Newport Beach in a way no cold case press release had ever achieved.
Hi, I'm Linda O'Keefe.
Or Linda Ann O'Keefe if I'm in trouble with my mom.
Then 45 years ago today, I disappeared from Newport Beach.
I was murdered and my body was found in the Back Bay.
And the most important statement in the entire campaign, but now, 45 years later, I have a voice again, and I have something important to say.
There is a new lead in my case, a face, a face that comes from DNA that the killer left behind.
It's technology that didn't exist back in 1973, but it might change everything today.
The campaign ended with a video interviewing detectives who had worked on the case over the years.
Men and women looking into the camera saying they had never forgotten Linda.
Along with the Twitter campaign, Newport Beach PD released a suspect sketch created from DNA using phenotype prediction technology, reconstructing the face of the man who sat in the turquoise van in 1973, not from the witness description, but from the DNA he left on Linda's body.
This was the DNA that Jim White had preserved in 1973 without knowing that 45 years later it would create the killer's face.
The combination of the Twitter campaign and the DNA portrait brought Linda O'Keefe's case before millions of people for the first time in decades and created enough media pressure for Newport Beach PD to move to the next step with the latest technology that no one in 1973 could have imagined.
In 2018, while the Twitter campaign and the DNA portrait were generating a wave of national media attention, Newport Beach PD quietly took the next step by partnering with Parabon NanoLabs, a private forensic DNA analysis company with CeCe Moore as head of genetic genealogy.
She had been involved in dozens of cold cases nationwide using genetic genealogy.
The suspect DNA from the evidence preserved in 1973 was uploaded to FamilyTreeDNA, a public genealogy database where millions of Americans voluntarily upload their DNA to search for ancestors and distant relatives.
The database compared the suspect DNA profile with millions of available profiles looking for partial matches, not full matches, but matches strong enough to suggest blood relations, then built family trees from those matches to lead to the suspect.
In January 2019, the The came back.
The family tree pointed to James Allen Neal, a 72-year-old man living in Monument, Colorado who had lived in Orange County, California in the 1970s under the name James Layton.
After genetic genealogy pointed to Neal, investigators did not approach him immediately.
They placed him under surveillance and used traditional techniques to collect a DNA sample that Neal left behind in his daily activities.
The DNA from the sample collected during surveillance was sent to the lab and compared with the suspect DNA from Linda's body in 1973.
The result was a complete match, confirming that James Allen Neal, the man living peacefully in Colorado under an assumed name, was the person who had killed Linda O'Keefe 46 years earlier while she was walking home from summer school on that summer afternoon in Newport Beach.
In February 2019, James Allen Neal was arrested in Monument, Colorado and extradited to California to face charges of murder with special circumstances of kidnapping and committing a lewd act on a child under 14, plus charges of sexually assaulting two young girls in Riverside County from 1995 to 2004.
On February 20, 2019, Newport Beach PD and the Orange County DA's office held a press conference in Newport Beach.
The person [snorts] standing in front of the cameras reading the announcement was Orange County DA Todd Spitzer, who was 12 years old in 1973 when Linda was killed.
Nearly the same age as Linda, he had grown up in Southern California while Linda's case was a story the community never forgot.
This significant arrest is a confirmation that we never give up on solving cold cases.
"The unity of the community for justice, the cooperation of local law enforcement, and the use of strategic investigative tools like DNA are what helped find the answer for this family and this community".
Newport Beach Police Chief John Lewis said, "Linda never made it home that afternoon.
For 45 years, generations of our investigators never gave up.
We never forgot Linda".
On May 25th, 2020, James Alan Neal was taken to the hospital due to an undisclosed illness, not COVID-19, as confirmed by police.
On May 27th, 2020, James Alan Neal died at the age of 73 while awaiting trial for the murder of Linda Ann O'Keefe and the sexual assault of two other young girls in Riverside County.
The man who had sat behind the wheel of the turquoise van on the afternoon of July 6th, 1973, who had changed his name and fled across multiple states, died in custody before the jury had a chance to hear his name read in the courtroom.
The case never went to trial.
There was no conviction, no sentence.
No legal moment where Linda's family could sit in the courtroom and hear the declaration that the man who killed their 11-year-old girl had been found guilty.
DA Todd Spitzer said about it.
"James Neal's death before he could be brought to trial robbed the O'Keefe family of the justice they deserved and deprived the satisfaction of the officers who finally identified their perpetrator".
Newport Beach Police Chief John Lewis said, "We intended to bring James Alan Neal to trial to answer for the murder of Linda Ann O'Keefe.
Through the tireless efforts of generations of investigators, we hope to bring a measure of closure to Linda's family and loved ones".
The Linda O'Keefe case leaves three lessons.
The first lesson is about Jim White's decision in 1973.
A man who didn't know what DNA was in criminal investigations, but still collected and preserved biological evidence out of professional instinct.
That decision 46 years later became the sole foundation that solved the case.
No one in 1973 knew family tree DNA or genetic genealogy would exist.
Jim White simply kept the evidence because he knew evidence must be kept.
If you have a loved one who is a cold case victim, ask the investigating agency directly, has the biological evidence from the case been retested with modern DNA technology? Because the answer to that question could be the difference between a cold case remaining cold and the killer being identified.
The second lesson is about the 20 18 Twitter campaign.
Newport Beach PD had no new leads when they launched that campaign.
Only the determination to present an old question in a new way and reach a new audience with new technology.
That campaign directly created the pressure that led to the next step with family tree DNA and the result in January 2019.
If you feel the system is not actively pursuing your loved one's case, proper media pressure, the right channels, the right timing, the right story can create a breakthrough that no new lead could achieve.
The third lesson is the most painful.
From 1995 to 2004, while Linda's case was still a cold case and her photo still hung on the wall of the Newport Beach police station, James Neal continued to sexually assault two other young girls in Riverside County.
A cold case is not just delayed justice.
It is an opportunity for the perpetrator to continue harming new victims while the system has not yet found him.
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