page_title: Murder of April Tinsley
section_title: Investigations
hierarchical_section_title: Murder of April Tinsley / Investigations
caption_attribution_description: English: In 1990, two years after April Tinsley’s murder, this message appeared on a barn door near where her body was recovered.
context_page_description: April Marie Tinsley was a child from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was kidnapped, raped, 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. An episode of The Genetic Detective featured how CeCe Moore of Parabon NanoLabs used genetic genealogy to find two brothers, one of whom must be the killer. The Fort Wayne Police Department then followed the brothers until they were able to collect their discarded DNA, which proved that John Dale Miller was the murderer.
context_section_description: 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 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 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.
  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.
  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 which aired in 2016. Tinsley's case was featured in an episode of On the Case with Paula Zahn which 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.
caption: The message discovered in St. Joseph Township in May 1990 referencing Tinsley's death
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