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THE RECORD SINCE
Fort Wayne has been taking stock of its famous murders for as long as it has had them. The first stock-taking in this section is a newspaper's: the Sentinel's “Our Murderers” survey of November 1875, in which the city counted its docket and named its unsolved dead. The habit has not left. What has changed is the instruments — the anniversary article, the television episode, the execution-day retrospective, and, once, a statute.
April Tinsley's case never left the city's calendar. It was carried for thirty years by anniversary journalism and national case programs — America's Most Wanted, Crime Watch Daily, Investigation Discovery — and its ending became a second story told everywhere at once: the 2018 identification was national news, an episode of a national case program aired the very day of the arrest, and in 2020 ABC's The Genetic Detective made the case its “Deadly Playdate,” the telling through which most of the country now knows it. The case is cited in the professional literature of investigative genetic genealogy as one of the method's founding successes. Joseph Corcoran's case was revisited all at once, in a single week: the execution of December 2024 sent the national press back to both of his trials — to the Steuben County acquittal of 1992 and the Fort Wayne convictions of 1997 — and the retrospective coverage ran, for a few days, as a national argument about mental illness and the death penalty, with Fort Wayne's case as its text.
The other cases hold their places in distinct ways. The Lewis Street three are remembered by name and by the name their community gave them — “Our Three Brothers” — in anniversary coverage of a case that was, for its first weeks, a national story about who gets mourned and how. Stacy DeGrandchamp's case was retold for a national audience in 2023 as the premiere of Mean Girl Murders, with the family's seventeen-year refusal to drop it as the story's spine. Sarah Zent's children are remembered in law: Aubree's Law, the bill written from the empty chair at her killer's sentencing, carries the youngest victim's name into the statute books' debates whether or not it reaches the code. And Marcia Linsky is remembered institutionally — in the victim-impact record of her own courthouse and in the legal press that covered her case as one of its own. The through-line of this section is that a famous case is not finished when the court is: it passes into the custody of anniversaries, programs and, occasionally, legislation, and Fort Wayne's record — from a newspaper's alarm in 1875 to a statute's short title in 2026 — is the proof of its keeping.
Sources:
- Drawn from the sources of the entries above: the Sentinel survey of 1875; the Tinsley, Corcoran, Lewis Street, DeGrandchamp, Zent and Linsky records as cited in their entries