Episode

51 Years, a Landfill, and a Pension: How DNA Finally Caught a Killer in Tucson

Podcast
COLD CASES SOLVED
Published
Jun 8, 2026
Duration seconds
372
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Summary

October 1975, the partial remains of a 73-year-old Tucson man named William Reginald Sipfle were found in a landfill near Ryan Airfield, with no identification, no missing person report, and no answers for the family he left behind. Fifty-one years later, forensic genealogy and DNA technology cracked open the cold case and pointed investigators directly at Sipfle’s own stepdaughter, Carol Ann Beall, now 79, who prosecutors allege killed him and collected up to six hundred thousand dollars from his pension in the decades that followed. This episode breaks down how the case went cold, how modern forensic science brought it back, and what this arrest reveals about the long reach of justice and the extraordinary tools now available to investigators working crimes the system once had no way to solve.