How a coffee cup left at Philadelphia International Airport led to an alleged killer in a 1975 cold case

For decades, it seemed that Lindy Sue Biechler’s killer would never be found.

The 19-year-old newlywed’s stabbing death in her Lancaster County apartment in 1975 had stunned her community and shattered her family. As years passed, police kept working the case, slowly eliminating suspects as technology improved.

Detectives on the scene had managed to save a sample of the killer’s DNA. But for decades it had no match in DNA databases of convicted criminals. That’s when CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist at Parabon Nanolabs, a company that works with police to solve cold cases, decided to dig a little differently.

She and her colleagues in Reston, Va., identified the common ancestors of people who were partial matches to the DNA sample. They were all from a small town in Italy. And through generations and generations of genealogical records, authorities identified a prime suspect.

This week, Heather Adams, the Lancaster County district attorney, announced the arrest of David Sinopli, 68, a Lancaster native whose DNA, authorities say, matched the sample taken from the scene of Biechler’s murder nearly five decades before.

“It was a really good feeling to be able to get to this point,” Adams said. “It’s also just the beginning of the court process.”

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Biechler’s was the oldest cold case in Lancaster County. The flower-shop clerk with long, flowing hair and a gentle smile had been married for just a year to Phillip Biechler; the couple lived together at an apartment complex in Manor Township. On the evening of Dec. 5, 1975, Lindy had deposited her and her husband’s paychecks at the bank and headed out for groceries.

She would never get to unpack them. Shortly after arriving at her apartment, Biechler was attacked in her living room. Her aunt and uncle, who’d been planning to visit that night to exchange recipes, found her just before 9 p.m. She had been stabbed 19 times with two knives — one taken from her own kitchen — and sexually assaulted.

Adams credited detectives at the scene in 1975 for securing DNA evidence — semen found on Biechler’s underwear. As technology improved, the killer’s DNA profile was submitted into CODIS, a national DNA database that includes samples of convicted criminals. It turned up no matches.

In 2019, the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office formed a Cold Case unit, which took over the case. They enlisted Parabon.

Moore’s background is in theater and advertising; her interest in genealogy was sparked by her own research into her family history, and over the last decade she’s turned that passing interest into a profession. She’s worked at Parabon since 2018, and had previously helped with another Lancaster County case: the killing of Christy Mirack, an elementary schoolteacher raped and murdered in 1992.

Mirack’s and Biechler’s surviving family members had connected over the years, even paying for a billboard to plead for tips in their loved ones’ cases. In Moore’s mind, the two women — who died nearly two decades apart — were connected. She’d helped Mirack’s family; now she wanted to help the Biechlers.

But the case, like many that Parabon deals with, wasn’t simply a question of searching the right databases. About 10% of the time, researchers have to separate DNA from suspects and victims — and use statistical analysis to essentially fill in the blanks on old and degraded DNA, said Ellen Greytak, the director of bioinformatics at Parabon.

Moore uses DNA databases to search for potential familial matches for suspects. Sometimes, she can come up with a relative as close as a third cousin. For Biechler’s case, she started with GEDMatch — a database composed of DNA samples taken from people who used commercial DNA sequencing services, and then uploaded their own data to GEDMatch to allow law enforcement to use them for suspect profiling.

The closest matches to the suspect in GEDMatch were 10th cousins, Moore said.

“Typically, at this point, we would let the agency know this is not a viable case for genetic genealogy,” she said. But she was moved by Biechler’s murder — and began to work on it in her spare time.

The distant matches to the suspect in Biechler’s case, Moore realized, all shared common ancestors: natives of Gasparina, in southern Italy, population 2,174.

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“I went to Lancaster Historical Sources and researched who was coming into Lancaster. And the majority of Italian immigrants in Lancaster were from Gasparina,” she said. “Our suspect very likely had exclusively roots from Gasparina and nearby — all four grandparents, and all eight great-grandparents. There were about 2,300 people of Italian descent in Lancaster at the time of the crime. And I thought, this might be something I can manage.”

Moore scoured records of Italian social clubs, draft cards, and Ellis Island immigration logs. “Instead of building a family tree backward in time, trying to connect people to matches in the 1600s and 1700s, I was searching for the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of these people from Gasparina,” she said.

Eventually, she came across an old newspaper clip with a name: David Sinopoli. It included an address that was familiar to her: Biechler’s apartment complex, in Manor Township.

“It felt like a Hail Mary in some ways,” she said. “When I found he had potentially been a neighbor in that very small apartment complex, with all ancestors from Gasparina, we reached out to the Lancaster County DA and told them I felt I had generated a potentially interesting lead,” Moore said. She stressed that that’s all she and Parabon can do — provide leads. Because their DNA searches and profiles are so broad, they’re not admissible in court.

But DNA taken directly from a suspect can be.

Detectives trailed Sinopoli for some time before following him to the Philadelphia International Airport on Feb. 11. When he tossed a coffee cup in a trash can, they fished it out and tested the DNA evidence. It was a match, authorities contend.

Sinopoli had never been a suspect in the murder. But as reported by Lancaster Online, in 2003 he admitted to spying on a naked woman at Sissy’s Hair Boutique, where he worked, and was sentenced to one year of probation. He was charged with invasion of privacy and disorderly conduct.

On Sunday at 7 a.m. police arrested Sinopoli at his home and charged him with one count of criminal homicide. He is being held without bail. He could not be reached for comment.

“We’re here today because of genealogy research, and advances in DNA,” Adams said. “But it’s equally as important to point out that investigators in 1975, processing the crime scene and getting DNA, collected the right evidence that we can use now.”

Moore said she’s still struck by how unlikely finding Sinopoli was. “If his ancestors had gone to New York, and he was visiting Lancaster that week, and left, I wouldn’t have found him,” she said. “We just have to keep being creative. I was pretty desperate to help get answers to Lindy’s family — it was a case that pushed me to look at it in a different way.”