The Case That Will Never Be Tried

This month Chicago police announced that they know who killed her. The man they named died in 2006. There will be no arrest, no indictment, no trial, no appeal. The press conference is the whole proceeding.

Cases like this one are becoming common, and they raise a question that nobody asks at the press conference. When a case is solved and nobody is ever charged, what exactly has been established, and by what standard?

What Was Actually Announced

In 2010, investigators developed a male DNA profile from semen on Gloria’s clothing. It matched no one. In 2024, at the Chicago Police Department’s request, the FBI compared that profile against genetic data people had uploaded to public family-tree websites and worked outward to a name: Thomas F. McInerney Jr. Police also say a fingerprint lifted from the strap of Gloria’s communion purse matches prints he gave on a 1959 police job application. This is forensic investigative genetic genealogy, the same method behind most of the cold-case announcements of the last several years, not a new kind of DNA test.

The second point concerns who he was. Much of the coverage describes him as a Chicago homicide detective at the time of the murder. Reporting from NBC News and from Patch says otherwise: in November 1960 he was a twenty-four-year-old patrolman who had joined the department the year before, and he was not promoted to detective until 1964. Police said he appears to have had no prior contact with Gloria, and whether he had any role in the investigation was not clear. The distinction matters because “the detective on the case did it” is a different story from the one the record supports.

“Solved” Is a Term of Art

When a police department says a case is solved but nobody can be arrested, it is usually invoking a specific administrative category. The FBI calls it clearing an offense by exceptional means, and the criteria are published. An agency must meet four conditions:

• It has identified the offender.
• It has “enough evidence to arrest, charge, and send the offender to court for prosecution.”
• It knows where the offender is, precisely enough to make an immediate arrest.
• Something outside police control prevents the arrest and prosecution. The FBI gives the death of the offender as its example.

The threshold is enough evidence to charge and bring to court. That is the standard for starting a criminal case, not the standard for finishing one. No part of the test asks whether the evidence would survive a motion to suppress, a reliability hearing, cross-examination, or a jury instructed that it must be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.

This is not a criticism of the designation, which is a reasonable way to close a file and to stop counting a case as open. It is a point about translation. A department says cleared. A headline says solved. A reader hears proved. Those are three different claims.

What a Trial Would Have Tested

The useful way to see what a posthumous identification leaves out is to list what a defense lawyer would have done with it. In this case that list is long, and none of it will happen.

• The genealogy workup. The crime-scene SNP profile, the ranked match list, the family tree the genealogist built, the working notes, and the bioinformatics behind it. Prosecutors routinely call this an investigative tool to keep it out of discovery.
• The confirmatory comparison. Genealogy produces a name, not a match. Some laboratory then compares the crime-scene profile to a reference sample. That comparison is the part a reliability hearing actually reaches, and it has bench notes, validation records, and an analyst who can be questioned.
• Sixty-six years of custody. Where the clothing, the shoes, the bullet and the purse were held, by whom, under what conditions, through how many moves, and what the inventory records show at each step.
• The condition of the sample. Degradation and low-template effects, the risk of contamination across six decades of handling by people who had no idea anyone would ever extract DNA from these items, and whether a biological trace on clothing necessarily came from the offender.
• The fingerprint. Latent print comparison runs on an examiner’s judgment, with no required number of corresponding points and no error rate built into the method. A print from a 1959 job application compared against a latent lifted from a purse strap in 1960 is exactly the comparison a defense expert would want to look at.

None of that means this identification is wrong. Semen DNA plus an independent fingerprint is strong evidence, and the two lines of proof were developed fourteen years apart by different methods. A jury might well have convicted. The point is that no one will ever know, because the only mechanism we have for finding out does not run in this case.

Why That Should Bother a Defense Lawyer

Everything we know about how often confident forensic conclusions turn out to be wrong, we know from cases that were tested. Convictions that were appealed. Evidence that was retested. Testimony that was later reviewed and found to have been overstated. The record of forensic error exists because somebody fought about it.

A case cleared against a dead man never enters that record, in either direction. It is never confirmed and it is never corrected. It simply becomes the official account, and it stays that way, because the one person with a reason to contest it is not available and no one else has standing to try.

Multiply that across a decade of genealogy-driven cold-case announcements, a large share of which name people who are already dead, and you have a growing body of conclusions that the error-correction system cannot see. Most of them are probably right. We have no way to find out which ones are not.

The Texas Angle

Article 38.43 of the Code of Criminal Procedure requires governmental entities to preserve biological evidence from a felony investigation that could identify or exclude an offender. The retention floor is forty years where the actor has not been apprehended, and a sexual assault examination kit must be kept for forty years or the limitations period, whichever is longer, whether or not anyone was ever arrested. Evidence may be destroyed only after written notice to the defendant and the last attorney of record, and a written objection within ninety days stops it.

That storage discipline is what makes a Texas cold case solvable later. Under Article 64.03, a convicted person seeking post-conviction DNA testing has to show, among other findings, that the evidence still exists “in a condition making DNA testing possible” and that the chain of custody is sufficient to establish it was not substituted, tampered with, replaced or altered in any material respect. Then the person must show by a preponderance that he would not have been convicted if exculpatory results had been obtained. The same evidence locker that lets the State name a suspect in a sixty-six-year-old case is the one a defendant needs intact to prove he is not one.

There is a further consequence worth naming. When an agency clears an old case by identifying someone new, that announcement is potentially favorable evidence for anyone who was previously suspected, charged or convicted of the same offense. In Texas the routes are Article 39.14, the Michael Morton Act, for the underlying file; Chapter 64 for testing; and Article 11.073, the junk science writ, where the change is in the science rather than in the facts. A clearance is not only a closing document. For the right person it is a lead.

What an Identification Without a Trial Is Still Worth

None of this argues that these announcements should not be made. Gloria Kowalewicz’s family waited sixty-six years for an answer, and her brother, an infant when she was killed, has one now.

An identification announced without adjudication should be described for what it is. Police believe they have identified the person responsible and have enough to have charged him. That sentence is accurate, it is respectful of the family, and it does not ask a reader to accept as proven something that was never tested. The current vocabulary, where cleared becomes solved becomes guilty between the podium and the headline, does ask that.

The Bottom Line

Forensic genetic genealogy is a real advance, and in cases like this one it has produced answers that nothing else would have. Our post on a cold case solved with forty-five-year-old hair covers how the method works and where it is vulnerable.

But a case that ends at a press conference has skipped every step our system uses to find out whether it is right. The accused is dead, nobody has standing to contest it, no judge screens the science, no expert is cross-examined, and the file closes on a standard that asks only whether there was enough to charge. In the great majority of these cases the conclusion is probably sound. The problem is structural rather than case-specific, and it is this: we have built a way to accuse people that has no way to be wrong.

If you are dealing with a Texas case that turns on old biological evidence, in either direction, our firm can talk with you about the specific facts.

Deandra Grant is the managing partner of Deandra Grant Law, a Texas DWI and criminal defense firm with offices across Dallas-Fort Worth and Central Texas. She holds a master’s degree in pharmaceutical science and a graduate certificate in forensic toxicology, and she and her team challenge forensic evidence throughout the region.

Further Reading

• FBI Uniform Crime Reporting, Clearances (the four conditions for clearing an offense by exceptional means).
• Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 38.43 (preservation of evidence containing biological material) and art. 64.03 (requirements for post-conviction DNA testing).
• Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 39.14 (the Michael Morton Act) and art. 11.073 (relief based on changed science).
• Associated Press on the Chicago announcement; NBC News and Patch, which report that McInerney was a patrolman in 1960 and was not promoted to detective until 1964.
• Related on this site: a cold case solved with forty-five-year-old hair, on how forensic genetic genealogy works and where it is vulnerable; Texas’s junk science writ; and how forensic misconduct can unravel a conviction.

This post is an informational synthesis for educational purposes and is not legal advice. It describes a police announcement rather than a judicial finding; no charges have been filed in the Kowalewicz case and the person named is deceased and was never tried. Details reflect reporting available in October 2026. Anyone facing charges should consult a licensed Texas attorney about the specific facts of their case.