Nearly 52-years since her lifeless body was found in an elevator, on Tuesday police revealed they’d finally found Susan Galvin’s killer.
On July 13, 1967, the 20-year-old administrative assistant was found dead in a parking garage elevator in the Seattle Center, having been strangled and raped.
For more than 50 years her death continued to baffle investigators as a number of leads, eyewitness accounts and potential suspect profiles continuously led detectives to dead ends.
One prospective culprit – a professional clown at the Center who had been seen with Galvin just a few days before she died, before quitting his job days after he death – was never charged for lack of evidence.
Susan Galvin was found dead in an elevator in the Seattle Center on July 13, 1967
The 20-year-old was first reported missing after failing to turn up for a night-shift on July 10, 1967, before her body was found three days later by an attendant in the parking garage of the sprawling events center, on 300 Mercer Street
The clown, found in Utah in 2016, was investigated as part of the cold cases’ re-opening three years ago, however a DNA test absolved him of any culpability and the trail went cold once more.
However, investigators found an unexpected breakthrough last summer when the Seattle PD applied the same scientific tools and lines of inquiry to Galvin’s murder as those used to solve the notorious ‘Golden State Killer’ case.
Officers provided the Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs with the killer’s five decade-old DNA, where scientists worked to create a family tree for the killer, using a public genealogy website database.
Ultimately, the lab identified potential suspect as Frank Wypych, a married Seattle man and former soldier who died of complications from diabetes in 1987.
Seattle police exhumed his remains from a cemetery earlier this year to collect DNA and confirmed it matched that collected from Galvin’s clothing.
They’re now looking into whether he may have killed anyone else while stationed in New York, Alaska and Germany while in the Army.
‘It’s the oldest case where genetic genealogy has helped to identify the suspect,’ CeCe Moore from Parabon said Tuesday.
‘It’s amazing the DNA was still viable. The original investigators who collected the crime scene evidence did such a great job, long before they could even have imagined what could be done with DNA.’
Frank Wypych, a married Seattle man and former soldier who died of complications from diabetes in 1987, was identified as the killer from DNA at the crime scene
Seattle police exhumed Wypych’s remains from a cemetery earlier this year to collect DNA and confirmed it matched that collected from Galvin’s clothing
An administrative assistant of the Seattle Police Department, Galvin (left)was found dead in a parking garage elevator in the Seattle Center, having been strangled and raped. According to police, Wypych (right) was known to spend much of his free time at the Seattle Center
According to police, Wypych grew up in Ballard, Seattle and served in the US army for a short time in the early 1960s.
He was 26-years-old and a married father when Galvin’s body was discovered.
Working as a general laborer and a security guard, Wypych was also known to visit the Seattle Center regularly in his spare time.
He and his wife divorced in 1971, and he was convicted of larceny the same year – his only criminal conviction.
Larry Galvin, the younger brother of Susan, thanked the Seattle Police Department for their tenacious investigation that has provided his family with a ‘sense of closure’
Wypych served nine months in jail and was arrested for a weapons offense in Seattle in 1975. The department said it no longer had records of the offense, but relatives told investigators he had been impersonating a police officer and making traffic stops in uniform, armed with a gun.
Galvin, on the other hand, was a civilian records clerk for the Seattle Police Department. She lived adjacent to the Seattle Center and was also said to have spent much of her free time roaming its grounds.
The 20-year-old was first reported missing after failing to turn up for a night-shift on July 10, 1967, before her body was found three days later by an attendant in the parking garage of the sprawling events center, on 300 Mercer Street.
The garage had been closed for several days and provided access to an elevated walkway used by Galvin during her commute to work.
Fingerprints were lifted from the scene and autopsy evidence samples were taken from Galvin’s clothing before being entered into the police department’s evidence files, where they would remain for several decades.
Seattle homicide detectives first re-reviewed Galvin’s case in 2002, and submitted several items found at the crime scene to a laboratory in the hope of recovering the killer’s DNA.
But despite recovering traces of the suspects’ semen from Galvin’s underwear, the profile failed to garner any matches on the FBI’s DNA database.
According to police, Wypych grew up in Ballard, Seattle and served in the US army for a short time in the early 1960s. He and his wife divorced in 1971, and he was convicted of larceny the same year – his only criminal conviction
Seattle homicide detectives first re-reviewed Galvin’s case in 2002, and submitted several items found at the crime scene to a laboratory in the hope of recovering the killer’s DNA. They managed to recover the her killer’s semen from her underwear, revealed to be Wypych’s 17 years later
However 17 years on, the use of the public genealogy databases – which contain DNA information from customers of companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com – to solve decades-old crimes have taken off in the past year, since investigators in California revealed they used the method to identify and arrest Golden State Killer suspect Joseph DeAngelo.
DeAngelo, a former police officer, is accused of having murdered at least a dozen people and raped 50 in the 1970s and ’80s.
At least 40 other cases have been solved since then, including five in Washington State. Among them were the killing of a young Canadian couple in 1987 and the rape and murder of a 26-year-old woman in 1994.
It was through the use of the same techniques that revealed the Wypych to be Galvin’s killer, on April 12 this year.
Seattle Homicide Detective Rolf Norton also credited the full co-operation of the Wypych family as another deciding factor in the case’s conclusion, after a relative of the accused agreed to under-go a DNA test to provide a comparison to the suspect’s sample.
The use of the public genealogy databases to solve cold cases has taken off in the past year, since investigators in California revealed that they used the method to identify and arrest Golden State Killer suspect Joseph DeAngelo (pictured: Seattle Police homicide Detective Rolf Norton, left, talks to reporters near a photo of Susan Galvin)
‘The family of Frank Wypych has not done anything wrong and therefore I would consider them peripheral victims of this whole incident,’ Norton said in a Tuesday press conference.
Larry Galvin, the younger brother of Susan, thanked the Seattle Police Department for their tenacious investigation that has now resulted in his family receiving a ‘sense of closure’.
But he insisted there was one mystery that genealogy DNA wouldn’t help to answer -preventing his family from ever fully moving on from the tragedy.
‘The loss was felt mostly by our mother, who did her best to keep us near her,’ Larry said in a written statement. ‘It would be hard for her to lose another child.’
‘For her the question was not necessarily who, but why. We children were young and resilient. We found our own ways to cope; as the years passed, we scattered to the winds.
‘52 years later we learn the who, but still have no clear understanding as to the why,’ Larry continued. ‘There will always be that lingering question.’