Murder of April Tinsley

April Marie Tinsley was an eight-year-old second-grader at Fairfield Elementary School and a member of the children's choir at Faith United Methodist Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana. On April 1, 1988 — Good Friday — she was playing outside with two friends when she went back to retrieve her umbrella and disappeared around 3:00 p.m. The man later identified as her killer had planned to abduct a child that day without targeting her specifically; he asked her into his car, drove her to his trailer, raped and killed her, and took her body to a ditch that night.

Tinsley's mother reported her missing after she failed to come home for dinner, and the initial search included 250 Fort Wayne police officers and 50 volunteers. A witness later described seeing a white man in his 30s forcing a girl believed to be Tinsley into a blue pickup truck. A jogger found her body on April 4, 1988, in a ditch west of Spencerville, Indiana; a shoe and a sex toy in a shopping bag were recovered near the site, and a motorist reported seeing a blue pickup truck nearby. An autopsy found she had been raped and strangled and had been dead one to two days before she was found. Her memorial service was held on April 8, 1988, and she was buried at Greenlawn Memorial Park. Ninety Fort Wayne community members later formed the volunteer group APRIL to help with missing-children cases.

On May 21, 1990, a note found on a St. Joseph Township barn boasted of Tinsley's killing and threatened to kill again; investigators initially examined it for a possible link to a separate 1990 child-homicide case, which the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit determined in August 1991 was unrelated. During Memorial Day weekend in 2004, four more notes referencing the killing, along with used condoms and photographs, were left on girls' bicycles and in a mailbox around Fort Wayne; DNA recovered from the condoms matched the existing profile of the suspect, confirming the notes were connected to the 1988 crime. In 2009, the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit profiled the suspect as a 'Preferential Child Sex Offender' likely living or working in northeast Fort Wayne or Allen County, and a private lab later released and updated a DNA-based composite sketch of him.

In May 2018, a Fort Wayne Police Department detective submitted the suspect's DNA profile to the forensics company Parabon NanoLabs, which used the genealogy website GEDmatch to trace his relatives; the analysis narrowed the suspect pool to two brothers by July 2, 2018, including 59-year-old John D. Miller of Grabill, Indiana. After police recovered discarded condoms from Miller's trash that matched the profile, detectives interviewed him on July 15, 2018, and he confessed to abducting, raping, and choking Tinsley to death in his trailer. Miller was charged with murder, child molestation, and confinement and pleaded not guilty on July 19, 2018. He changed his plea to guilty on December 7, 2018, and on December 21, 2018, was sentenced to 80 years in prison — 50 years for murder and 30 years for child molestation. He died of natural causes in custody on September 4, 2025.

Fort Wayne later dedicated April's Garden, a memorial in the city's Hoagland–Masterson neighborhood, along with a tree and bench at Fairfield Elementary School. In May 2019, nine investigators from the Indiana State Police, the FBI, the Allen County Sheriff's Department, and the Fort Wayne Police Department received the National Association of Police Organizations' national policing award for their roles across three decades of investigation that led to Miller's identification and conviction.