Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

Murdered: April Tinsley

April Marie Tinsley (March 18, 1980 – April 1, 1988) was a child from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and murdered in 1988. Her murderer left several anonymous messages and notes in the Fort Wayne area between 1990 and 2004, openly boasting about April's murder and threatening to kill again.

Via DNA profiling, the Fort Wayne Police Department identified April's murderer as John Miller in July 2018. On December 21, Miller was convicted and sentenced to 80 years in prison on the charges of child molestation and murder.

Her case was investigated by the Fort Wayne Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was covered in the television series America's Most Wanted, Crime Watch Daily, and on Investigation Discovery.

Kidnapping and murder

Tinsley was a member of the children's choir at the Faith United Methodist Church, and a first-grader attending Fairfield Elementary School. On April 1, 1988, a Good Friday, she was playing with two of her friends and they were moving between houses. Tinsley went back to retrieve her umbrella and then disappeared around 3:00 pm.

John Miller, who later pleaded guilty to murdering Tinsley, said he had premeditated kidnapping a child, but he had not seen her before abducting her. He said that he asked her to get into his car and he took her to his trailer where he sexually assaulted and killed her. At night, he took her body to a ditch.

Tinsley's mother reported her daughter missing to the police when she did not arrive home for dinner that night. The initial search for Tinsley included 250 Fort Wayne police officers and 50 volunteers. A witness later reported seeing a white man in his 30s forcing a girl believed to be Tinsley into his blue pickup truck.

A jogger found Tinsley's body on April 4, 1988, in a ditch just west of Spencerville, Indiana. Near the site, investigators found one of Tinsley's shoes, and a sex toy in a shopping bag. A motorist later reported seeing a blue pickup truck near this site. Tinsley's autopsy report suggested she had been sexually assaulted and then strangled to death. The report determined that she had been dead for about one or two days before she was discovered, and that she had been placed in the ditch four hours before this discovery.

Two local radio stations established a reward fund on April 5, 1988. Additional funds were established for Tinsley's burial and her family. Tinsley's memorial service was held on April 8, 1988, at the Faith United Methodist Church, and she was buried in the Greenlawn Memorial Park.

Investigations

The early police investigation led authorities to a 34-year-old suspect, who was charged with child molestation in a separate case, but was acquitted of those charges the next month. Ninety members of the Fort Wayne community formed the volunteer group APRIL (Associated Parents Regional Independent League, or later Abduction Prevention Reconnaissance and Information League) on April 20, 1988, to help police solve cases involving missing children. On June 24, 2005, the Tinsley family held a press conference at the Allen County Courthouse asking for leads in the case. In June 2009, Indiana authorities asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) task force Child Abduction Response Deployment (CARD) to help them solve the murder.

On May 21, 1990, police found a message on a St. Joseph Township barn saying "I kill 8 year old April M Tinsley," and "did you find the other shoe haha I will kill again." The message was written with crayons which were found near the barn. Investigators initially believed it could be connected to the murder of 7-year-old Sarah Jean Bowker, whose body was found on June 14, 1990, in Fort Wayne. Local and state police formed a homicide team in April 1991 to investigate Tinsley and Bowker's cases. On August 7, 1991, the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit determined that, although Tinsley and Bowker's cases were similar, they were ultimately unrelated.