Solved cold cases in New Jersey
4 documented cases.
April Kauffman
April Kauffman, 47, a veterans' advocate who co-hosted a weekly radio talk show and owned a catering business and a hair salon, was found shot in a bedroom of her home on Woodstock Drive in Linwood, Atlantic County, New Jersey, on the morning of Thursday, May 10, 2012. A person who came to feed the couple's pet birds found her. For more than five years nobody was arrested. In June 2017 her husband, Dr. James Kauffman, was jailed on weapons charges after displaying a gun when investigators arrived at his Egg Harbor Township medical practice with search warrants. On January 9, 2018, Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon Tyner announced murder and racketeering charges against him and against Ferdinand Augello, a member of the Pagans Motorcycle Club. Prosecutors said April had threatened to divorce her husband and expose a prescription-drug operation the two men ran, and that a hitman, Francis Mulholland, who died of a heroin overdose in 2013, shot her twice and was paid at least $20,000. Dr. Kauffman was found dead in a Hudson County jail cell on January 26, 2018, in an apparent suicide, before any trial. A jury convicted Augello on October 2, 2018, after two hours of deliberation, and he was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. He denies involvement.
Jennifer Persia
Jennifer Lynne Persia, a 16-year-old sophomore at Sterling High School, was beaten, bound at the neck with a ligature, and stabbed more than 20 times in her family home in Magnolia, Camden County, New Jersey, on April 4, 1994. DNA collected at the scene never matched a known suspect, and the case went cold for more than three decades. In 2025 New Jersey State Police re-tested clothing from the 1993 murder of 24-year-old Marebeth Welsh; the resulting male DNA profile matched the unknown blood profile from Persia's scene, linking the two killings. Investigative genetic genealogy and kinship DNA testing of relatives identified Francis T. Schooley, a Mantua Township man who had done construction work for Persia's stepfather and who died by suicide in 2000 at age 39, as the source of the DNA in both cases. Because Schooley was dead, no prosecution was possible; the Camden County Prosecutor's Office announced the findings on April 9, 2026.
Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Marie Kelly
On the afternoon of August 9, 1974, Mary Ann Pryor, 17, and her friend Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16, left their homes in North Bergen, New Jersey, to buy bathing suits at the Garden State Plaza in Paramus for a weekend at the Jersey Shore. They were last seen walking on Broad Avenue in Ridgefield; witnesses told police the girls were hitchhiking and got into a car driven by a white man nobody knew. Their families reported them missing that night. Five days later, on August 14, their bodies were found naked and face down in woods in Montvale, near the New York line, and were identified by their jewelry. Investigators exhausted every lead. After Richard Cottingham, a Lodi computer operator later known as the Torso Killer, was arrested in 1980 and convicted of murders in New Jersey and New York, detectives suspected him but could not prove it, and for decades he toyed with them. On April 14, 2021, after about fifteen years of prison interviews with Chief of Detectives Robert Anzilotti, Cottingham gave a sworn, recorded statement admitting he kidnapped the girls, held them in a motel room, raped them and drowned them in the bathtub. On April 27, 2021, aged 74, he waived indictment and pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in a virtual hearing before Superior Court Judge Keith Bachmann, under an agreement for two concurrent life sentences.
Nadal Haq
On March 30, 1997, in the South Paterson section of Paterson, New Jersey, Nadal Haq was shot to death execution-style and a second man, Isaam Atsham, was killed later the same day, with a third man, Adnan Ali, wounded in the leg. The weapon was a .38 caliber handgun. What made the case historic was not how it was investigated on the street but how the gun itself was traced: investigators ran the ballistic evidence from the Paterson shootings through the Essex County Sheriff's Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), an early computerized ballistics database, and the system matched the Paterson casings and bullets to a separate execution-style killing thirteen days earlier in New Britain, Connecticut, where a restaurant owner had been shot during a robbery. It was the first time IBIS had ever linked a New Jersey crime to an out-of-state crime, and the firearms match tied the same gun, and ultimately the same shooter, Gino Gentile, to both scenes. On February 19, 2000, Gentile was convicted of murder in what authorities describe as the nation's first case to obtain a murder conviction using IBIS-generated ballistics evidence. He was sentenced to 40 years for the two Paterson homicides and was later convicted in the Connecticut killing and sentenced to 100 years.