DNA Evidence Solves 25-Year-Old Indiana Bank Robbery and Kidnapping Cold Case

A drop of blood the suspect accidentally left on a hostage's ankle during a 2000 home invasion just became the evidence that closed a 25-year-old Indiana cold case. The Indiana State Police Cold Case Unit announced on March 19, 2026 that genetic genealogy testing had identified the man responsible for the armed robbery of Holland National Bank in Ferdinand and a terrifying home invasion and kidnapping that preceded it — though the suspect, now deceased, will not be named publicly.

The morning of September 1, 2000 started with the home invasion. A man armed with a gun approached a young child outside a home on Ferdinand Road Northwest while the child's mother was getting her ready for school. He took the child by the hand, told her to come with him, and when she said her mother was inside, he forced both of them around back and into the house. He bound their hands behind their backs with plastic ties, taped their mouths shut with duct tape, and locked them in a closet. While restraining the mother, he dripped blood on her ankle. Police collected that sample.

The suspect then used the mother's car in the robbery. At 9:05 a.m., he walked into Holland National Bank wearing dark pantyhose over his head, took cash, stuffed it inside his shirt, and fled — dropping plastic ties on his way out. The stolen car turned up abandoned in the parking lot of Aristokraft Plant #22. The mother and child freed themselves, got to a neighbor, and flagged down a police officer outside. By then, investigators had already been dispatched to the home after learning the getaway vehicle was the mother's car.

The blood sample went nowhere in 2000. DNA technology at the time couldn't produce a database match, and the case went cold.

In 2024, the ISP Cold Case Unit picked it back up. Working with Seasons of Justice, a nonprofit that funds forensic testing for unsolved violent crime cases, investigators sent the DNA sample to Parabon NanoLabs Inc. for genetic genealogy analysis. Parabon produced a set of closest genetic matches, which an ISP genealogist used to build out a family tree. That tree pointed to three brothers, two of whom had lived in Ferdinand at the time of the robbery and within walking distance of where the stolen car was recovered.

One brother was still living outside Dubois County. Investigators obtained a search warrant, collected his DNA, and ruled him out. The other two brothers were deceased. Through what ISP described as "a process of elimination and the correlation of historical evidence," detectives narrowed the perpetrator's identity to one of the deceased brothers.

ISP Cold Case Unit detective Tony Walden described the method in a television segment: "That's the new technology that we can fall back on and say, 'Okay, now we have a genealogologist saying this is the family tree for that person and this is the closest descent of that person.'"

Because the suspect is deceased, no prosecution is possible. Indiana State Police characterized the outcome as a "conclusive resolution." The department confirmed it will not release the suspect's name publicly. The case joins a growing list of cold cases closed by the ISP Cold Case Unit, one of the newer divisions within the state police, using genetic genealogy tools that simply didn't exist when investigators first worked the scene on a September morning in 2000.