A murder case that had gone unsolved for more than three decades is returning to a New Jersey courtroom, revived by the kind of forensic science that did not exist when the crime was committed. Investigators say advanced DNA testing has linked Robert McCaffrey to the 1990 kidnapping and murder of 27-year-old Lisa Marie McBride, breathing new life into a case that had haunted her family and detectives for 36 years.
The case dates back to 1990, when Lisa Marie McBride vanished after a night out. Her disappearance set off a search that would stretch on without resolution, one of those cases in which a young woman simply did not come home and the trail, for years, seemed to lead nowhere. She was 27 years old at the time she went missing.
The mystery of what had happened to her ended in the grimmest way months later, when her body was found in the Delaware Water Gap. The discovery confirmed the worst fears of those who had been looking for her, but it did not immediately deliver the answer to the central question of the case, which was who had taken and killed her.
That answer, investigators now say, came through advances in DNA technology. Using advanced DNA testing, authorities were able to link McCaffrey to the kidnapping and murder, a breakthrough that transformed a decades-old cold case into an active prosecution and gave the McBride family a named suspect after years of uncertainty.
Police have also pointed to a personal connection between the suspect and the victim. According to investigators, McCaffrey was fixated on McBride during a period when the two worked together at a bank, a detail that points to the kind of obsessive interest that detectives often look for when trying to establish who might have targeted a victim.
Now the case is set to move forward in the courts. McCaffrey has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and the 36-year-old case is back before a judge, setting the stage for a legal reckoning over a killing that had, for most of the lives of those involved, appeared destined to remain unsolved.