A man who investigators say once lived in the same apartment complex as Lindy Sue Biechler has been arrested and charged with stabbing her to death.

David V. Sinopoli, 68, of the 300 block of Faulkner Drive, East Hempfield Township, has been charged with criminal homicide in the 1975 killing that Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams called the oldest unsolved cold case in the county.

Biechler was 19 years old when she was sexually assaulted and stabbed 19 times on Dec. 5, 1975, during a struggle in the living room of her Manor Township apartment. When police found her, the knife was still in her neck.

“We are here today due to advances in DNA technology,” said Adams, who credited genetic genealogist CeCe Moore, of Reston, Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs, with honing in on Sinopoli as a suspect.

Moore spoke remotely at a news conference Monday at Lancaster County Courthouse alongside the district attorney and local law enforcement officials.

She recounted how she used DNA from Biechler’s underwear to narrow down the suspect to someone whose family tree traced back to Gasperina, Italy. She cross-referenced that information with family trees from Lancaster County, which eventually led her to Sinopoli, who never left the county.

Moore described the process as “novel.” The Biechler homicide case is the first where she used immigration history to track a suspect. She has since used the methodology in two other cases, and said it works only with a “specific set of circumstances”  —  like coming from a small city in Europe to a small city in Pennsylvania.

Using Moore’s tip, detectives set up surveillance on Sinopoli, Adams said, and in February they followed him to a Philadelphia airport, where they were able to obtain DNA from a coffee cup.

They matched that DNA to blood found on Biechler’s pantyhose.

“We owe a debt of gratitude to Parabon,” Adams said.

This is the third cold case in four years in which genetic evidence obtained by Parabon NonLabs has led to an arrest. On June 26, 2018, police charged Raymond “DJ Freez” Rowe, 49, with the rape and murder of Christy Mirack, a 25-year-old schoolteacher who was killed Dec. 21, 1992. And in August 2021, Tara Brazzle was arrested and charged with homicide in the 2007 death of a newborn known as Baby Mary Anne.

The district attorney’s office in 2019 teamed with Manor Township police to hire Parabon to create a composite sketch of Biechler’s killer based on DNA evidence. The agency produced an image of a fair-skinned, dark-haired man at the ages of 25 and 65. Investigators at the time suggested her killer might no longer be living.

Sinopoli is being held in prison without bail.

According to newspaper records, Sinopoli was sentenced to 1 year of probation in 2004 after pleading guilty to invasion of privacy and disorderly conduct.

Sinopoli admitted spying on a woman who was naked in a tanning room at Sissy’s Hair Boutique in Mount Joy, where he was an employee.

In the weeks before she was killed, Biechler had told family and friends she thought someone was following her.

Biechler’s husband, Philip Biechler, was at work during the attack. In a 1976 interview, he said he believed the person who attacked his wife was someone they both knew.

Philip Biechler has not responded to calls for comment.

LNP|LancasterOnline has footage of the district attorney’s news conference on Facebook. A link to the livestream also can be found below.

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