Vince Faragalli paused as if the question was the most important of his life.

The retired Bristol police chief sat across from me in his living room. I was there to talk to him about the unsolved murder of Carol Ann Dougherty, the 9 year old raped and strangled in the choir loft of St. Mark Church in 1962. Thirty years had passed since he led the investigation that failed to find her killer.

I asked: “Where do you think things went wrong?”

The silence grew awkward.

“I ….” he said. Then another pause. “We just never got the break we needed.”

He knew there had been no justice for Carol’s parents, Frank and Dorothy, or for Kay, their younger daughter.

For Faragalli, it was a career-defining loss that he never discussed.

Chief Faragalli followed leads for years. He kept a photograph of Carol on his desk at the Bristol Police Department until he retired in 1979.

Long into his retirement, he kept that picture among framed family photos.

When he finally talked, it was for five hours. He discussed the murder, the evidence, the suspects.

'Murder in a Choir Loft'

That was in October 1992, as the 30th anniversary approached.

I was writing a series on Carol’s murder for the Bucks County Courier Times, in those last glorious years of dominant print journalism, when a Courier reporter could stroll from the Levittown newsroom down a corridor and watch their 1A story fly from two-story Goss presses that roared at midnight.

In that ink-on-pulp world, we newspaper people aimed to report like devils and write like angels.

In-depth reporting, with great writing and beautifully composed photos were print’s superpowers over TV and radio. “Make it sing,” the Courier’s copy editors would tell us writers, so readers wouldn’t lose interest by the time they hit the jump to page A4.

Killer revealed 1962 Bristol church murder of Carol Ann Dougherty finally solved. DA reveals killer

Long, multi-part newspaper series were in vogue. In the autumn of 1992, after reading the thick Dougherty clip file in the Courier’s library, I told my editor, Guy Petroziello, the story’s twists. He felt a three-parter for the 30^th anniversary was appropriate.

When the Courier’s executive editor, Len Brown, asked me about the story, he was fascinated. He upped the ante to six parts, and wanted it written as a murder mystery, each day’s installment ending in a cliff-hanger.

“I’ve never done anything like that,” I said.

“You’ll figure it out,” Brown said. He came up with a title: “Murder in a Choir Loft.”

I got to work.

After the series published, I wrote follow-ups for the next 33 years, something I never expected. Those follows ended on Wednesday, Oct. 29.

That’s when Bucks County District Attorney Jen Schorn announced that investigators had found what Chief Faragalli didn’t: Carol’s killer.

He’s William Schrader, a malevolent child predator and serial rapist, deceased since 2002.

Three key items convinced a Bucks County grand jury that Schrader did it: hair left at the scene, the man's confession to a friend that he'd killed Carol, calling it "the perfect murder," and his long, violent life as a child rapist who killed at least two little girls.

Short, slight and pale, with a rep as a “mean, nasty drunk,” according to the jury report, Schrader had dead eyes and two ugly gashes on the right side of his face, chin to cheekbone.

The report calls him a “psychopath.”

First time Frank Dougherty talks about the murder

Frank Dougherty, Carol’s father, received my letter in September 1992, requesting an interview at his home in rural Luzerne County. At first he was unsure, but then decided to talk about the murder publicly for the first time.

Carol, a fifth-grader at St. Mark’s, had returned from school Monday, Oct. 22, 1962. She told her mother she was going to ride her bike to the nearby Bristol Library to return books.

She stopped in the church, probably to pray as the nuns encouraged students to do, and likely to climb to the choir loft to look at the huge pipe organ, as a lot of kids liked to do. Back in those days the church was usually open.

When she didn’t return home for dinner, Frank and Dorothy looked for her. Seeing her bike -- her prized blue and white Londoner -- parked outside the church, Frank went in and found her semi-nude, twisted, dead.

It was a horror from which he never fully recovered.

The series contained those brutal details, told in a tight, unadorned narrative. Len Brown’s suspense approach worked.

As the series published, circulation rose by almost 1,000 at mid-week. Copies of the paper sold out at newsstands in Bristol. Readers sent me sympathy cards, asking that they be forwarded to Frank Dougherty.

Of the memories of that time, of the photographs we shot for the series, two are indelible. Chief Faragalli holding his photo of Carol is one.

The other, taken by staff photographer Art Gentile, is Frank Dougherty sitting at his dining room table at his lakefront home in Luzerne County. His face is grief-struck. Behind him is a large portrait of Carol, smiling.

A few years later, he lost that portrait and all of his photos of Carol in a house fire, and he died in 2000 not knowing who killed his daughter.

For years the Carol Dougherty story was the center of my newspaper life. When I told Len Brown how badly I wanted to solve it, he took me aside.

Solving murders isn’t the role of reporters or newspapers, he said. We are “alarm bells in the night” alerting the public, sure, but mostly the authorities who have the resources and expertise to find and convict killers.

That’s our lane, he said. Stay in it.

Chasing tips led me to meetings in dive bars, lonely mall parking lots and once, late at night, to the Bristol wharf to speak with a tipster who claimed to know the killer’s identity. He never showed.

Weird and cryptic notes arrived in the newsroom, continuing for years. One was left under the windshield wiper of my car as I attended Sunday Mass at St. Mark, my parish at the time.

It was reminiscent of 1962, when an eerie note from an anonymous sender was left at the Bristol police station the day after the murder, "Carol, come to the loft." Taunting phone calls followed: “Tell the police that the next one isn’t going to be a little girl.”

Was it the same person? I don’t know.

By 1992, Carol’s story had long dropped from the headlines. It hadn’t been reported on in years.

Then came our series. Bristol Det. Randy Morris reinvestigated. Soon he identified Schrader as the killer.

Before he could fully investigate, the DA’s office took the county file from Bristol and put the case before a grand jury, derailing Morris’s effort. Schrader was extradited to Bucks County from Louisiana, where he was serving 21 years in Angola prison for killing a 12-year-old girl.

When asked if he killed Carol, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment, and he was returned to Louisiana. The case stalled again. But the editors let me keep the story alive for years.

The killing haunted Bristol, especially among the kids of that generation. I interviewed some of Carol’s classmates, and the nun who taught her.

A demonic force had reached into St. Mark’s and snatched Carol from them. They were left bewildered and frightened. The nun kept a white rose on Carol's empty desk for the rest of the year.

Some never felt safe again. Years later, whenever they passed the church, memories returned.

But they also mentioned an unusual occurrence in October 1962.

The morning Carol was buried, a light snow fell on Lower Bucks County. It coated the cemetery. It made everything look beautiful and peaceful.

It brought comfort when it was most needed.

Why killer William Schrader slipped away in Bristol

Where did Faragalli and his team go off track?

Schrader, who was spotted outside the church on the afternoon of Oct. 22, 1962, lied about where he was at the time of the murder. He was given a polygraph and passed. Police took a hair sample from him, and let him go.

DA Schorn said that's because investigators had three good suspects: a parish priest who lied about where he was at the time of the murder, a local handyman who confessed to the crime, but under duress, and a Morrisville teenager whose parents told police he was the killer. The teenager proved he was in Virginia on Oct. 22.

The original investigators were alive in 1992, and I talked to them. Each chose either the priest or the handyman as the killer. They still argued among themselves as to who was had the right suspect.

Distracted by those two, Schrader fled to Florida, then drifted throughout the South.

Keeping a promise

Over the years, I told Kay Talanca, Carol’s sister, that I’d keep chasing the story as long as I was at the paper. When tipped that a county grand jury was looking at the case, I told her if it's solved, I’d call it a career and retire.

At the press conference, she reminded me of that. Now I’m not so sure.

I love this work, being a reporter, and would like to stay at it — just not for another 33 years.

JD Mullane can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: How a Courier Times reporter helped solve girl's 1962 Bristol murder