Murder of April Tinsley

April Marie Tinsley (March 18, 1980 – April 1, 1988) was an eight-year-old girl from Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States, who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in 1988.

On April 1, 1988, 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 planned to kidnap a child, but he had not seen April before abducting her.

He said that he asked her to get into his car, and he took her to his trailer where he raped 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 raped 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.

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.

Her killer 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.

On May 21, 1990, police found a message on a St. Joseph Township barn reading, "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 that 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.

During the Memorial Day weekend in 2004, four notes were found in the Fort Wayne area that are believed to have been written by Tinsley's murderer.

Three of these notes were left on girls' bicycles, and another one was left in a mailbox.

Three notes were placed in plastic bags, along with used condoms and Polaroid pictures of a man's lower body.

One of these notes read, "Hi honey... I been watching you....I am the same person that kidnapped an rape an kill April Tinsley, ... You are my next victim....if you don't report this to police an if I don't see this in the paper tomorrow or on the local news...I will blow up your house."

[sic] The DNA from the condoms matched the police's DNA profile of the suspect, leading investigators to believe the incidents were connected.

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 Rapid Deployment (CARD) to help them solve the murder.

In April 2009, the television program America's Most Wanted ran a segment on Tinsley's case and asked for tips.

The investigative series Crime Watch Daily covered the murder in an episode that aired in 2016.

Via forensic genealogy, the Fort Wayne Police Department (FWPD) identified April's murderer as John Miller in July 2018.

On December 21, Miller pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eighty years in prison on the charges of child molestation (rape) and murder.

April's case was investigated by the FWPD and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and was covered in the television series America's Most Wanted, Crime Watch Daily and The Genetic Detective, and on the cable network Investigation Discovery.

April Tinsley was a member of the children's choir at the Faith United Methodist Church, and a second-grader attending Fairfield Elementary School.

Tinsley's case was featured in an episode of On the Case with Paula Zahn that aired on July 15, 2018, just hours after an arrest was made in the case.

On October 26, 2018, the Indiana State Police honored three Fort Wayne investigators for helping authorities identify John D. Miller as a suspect in the Tinsley case.