A serial killer? How a Loyola student helped Howard County crack its coldest case.

The 1975 mystery of who killed a dancer in a Howard County industrial park started to unravel in a Loyola University classroom.

A forensic science student in a 2023 course on cold cases approached guest speaker Detective Wade Zufall, Howard Police’s one-man cold-case unit, with a question: Could the culprit be a serial killer?

The student’s hunch spurred the investigator to examine the possibility, identify a suspect and obtain a confession. It also launched an internship program with Loyola, which has propelled Howard investigators to make significant advances in other unsolved homicides.

In early 2025, Howard County Police announced that the nearly 50-year-old mystery of dancer Roseann Sturtz’s death had been solved. A month later, they arrested a man in connection with a cold case involving the 2020 shooting death of a pregnant woman. By the end of the year, investigators had also identified the Jane Doe victim in the county’s coldest case, reuniting two long-lost siblings in the process.

Authorities now say they’re actively working on leads in six unsolved homicides where previous investigations had turned up nothing but dead ends.

It’s a notable streak for a jurisdiction as small as Howard, which had just 31 cold cases when Zufall was hired in 2019 amid the county’s push to prioritize such investigations.

The definition of a cold case varies across agencies, but David Rivers, chair of Loyola’s forensic science department, estimates that Maryland has roughly 8,000 to 10,000 unresolved homicides.

Clues to these killings are scattered across the state in filing cabinets, evidence boxes, medical examiner records and memories. Connecting the dots to build cases can prove difficult for some resource-strapped investigators, which is why Howard County’s success stands out.

By tapping into the North Baltimore university’s pipeline of aspiring forensic sleuths, the department boosted its investigative resources and attracted more funding, which authorities hope will sustain the department’s momentum.

Zufall said he expects to hear about DNA testing in another case by the end of the year. A jury trial for another cold case — the 2020 killing of a pregnant woman, Rabiah Ahmad, and her baby, Ahja — is scheduled for April.

“Having the success that we’ve had over the last few years,” Zufall said, “I feel the pressure.”

The intern and the long-lost siblings

After the cold-case class concluded, Rivers and Zufall developed an internship program for Loyola students with Howard County Police in the spring of 2024. Since then, 10 students have worked on cold-case investigations with Zufall, significantly boosting the unit’s bandwidth to digitize and sort case records.

The work was tedious but important because it occasionally revealed forgotten investigative details that past detectives deemed irrelevant.

That was a lesson Zufall learned on the first cold case he reviewed in Howard County, the 1982 abduction and homicide of Laney Lee McGadney. Two witnesses told police that they saw a white Pontiac Firebird near the vacant lot where McGadney’s body was found, but the detail didn’t make it into later investigative notes.

It was, however, significant to Zufall. When police carried out a search warrant at the home of primary suspect Howard Jackson Bradberry Jr., they found a Polaroid photo of him in a white Firebird, Zufall said. He was arrested in 2021 and sentenced in 2023 to 25 years.

After authorities closed the McGadney case, original police reports, handwritten notes, and crime scene and surveillance photos for 30 unsolved killings remained in the cold-case unit’s seven filing cabinets.

The first Loyola intern, Julia Viveiros, set out to organize records for the oldest one, a Jane Doe case from 1971.

“All these years of evidence being stacked up and being moved from different places, it gets shifted, it gets mislabeled,” Viveiros said.

“There’s just so many small things that go into it that take an annoyingly long time,” she said.

Police records showed that there were four slides containing tissue from the woman’s heart, liver, lungs and kidneys. Zufall retrieved the samples from storage and discovered that there were duplicates of each, enough to risk expensive testing for a DNA profile.

The test generated a lead to a possible family member in Ohio named Charles Sharkey, who hung up on Zufall twice before finally agreeing to hear the detective out. Then came “the worst information that an investigator could ever hear,” Zufall said.

Sharkey’s parents put him in an orphanage at a young age, and the then-79-year-old knew little about his family. He’d gone looking for more information in Pennsylvania, where his birth certificate was issued, but struck out.

“That was a buzzkill,” Zufall said.

Still, Sharkey agreed to provide his DNA to help the investigation.

The cheek swab revealed that Jane Doe was his mother, Sarah Belle Sharkey.

He was shocked by the revelation and disappointed that he never got to meet her.

“All my life, I wondered where I came from,” Sharkey said. “It was weird, a weird feeling.”

Zufall continued piecing together the family’s genealogy and discovered that Sharkey had two sisters, one of whom lived in Illinois. Zufall recalled her telling him she’d been looking for her brother.

The detective connected the long-lost siblings and learned that another sister had died in New Orleans in 2020. Her ashes had never been claimed.

“Send her here,” Sharkey told Zufall. Her remains now sit on his shelf.

Although the Sharkey case remains open, the victim’s identification after 54 years paved the way for Howard’s cold-case unit to secure more DNA testing for other cases.

The department also hired Viveiros part-time, effectively doubling the number of employees in the unit.

Yes, a serial killer

It was a coincidence that the guest speaker in Loyola senior Kiliane Gateau’s cold-case class in the fall of 2023 happened to be the detective for the unsolved killing she chose as her term paper subject.

After class, Zufall met with Gateau and recommended that she review newspaper clips published around 1975, the year Roseann Sturtz died.

Sturtz was raped and strangled, news outlets reported. So Gateau looked for articles about similar crimes and found stories about a man named Charles William Davis Jr., who was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison for the killings of Kathleen Cook and Lydia Victoria Norman in 1975 and of Peggy Ellen Pumpian in 1976. After the sentencing, prosecutors dropped charges against Davis for a 1974 assault that the victim survived.

“I did exactly what Professor Rivers said not to do: I looked at serial killers in the area,” Gateau said. “I had to start somewhere.”

She noticed similarities between those cases and Sturtz’s. All three victims were sexually assaulted. Davis confessed to strangling Pumpian. He lured Cook and Norman from a Catonsville nightclub located not far from the Baltimore City club where Sturtz worked.

She told Zufall.

“He just turned out to be a really, really good suspect,” Zufall said.

The detective located misplaced investigative files dating back to the 1970s containing two pieces of forgotten evidence tied to Davis. One was an unmarked cassette tape of a 1981 police interview with Davis; the other was a prosecutor’s letter granting him immunity to discuss the Sturtz case.

The detective visited Davis at the Jessup Correctional Institution, where he’d been incarcerated since 1978, and obtained a confession. County State’s Attorney Rich Gibson reaffirmed Davis’ immunity from criminal charges, but the confession allowed police to close the county’s second-coldest case and provided closure to Sturtz’s surviving family.

Her sisters gathered with Zufall near where her body was discovered to leave red flowers and a photo in her memory.

Gateau and Zufall’s chance encounter was the spark that led to the internship’s creation.

“I’m one person working in the unit, so I could certainly use some help,” Zufall said of the program.

Gateau, who graduated and is now a producer for an Idaho television news station, said the benefit is mutual. Students gain academically and emotionally from working on these cases, she said.

“We get attached to these people we never met and want to bring closure to these families,” Gateau said.