Genealogical DNA testing and the dogged work of the Livingston County Cold Case team closed one of the community’s highest profile unsolved cases: the murder of Christina Castiglione of Redford, whose body was found in Cohoctah Township in 1983.
This case is also the first in Michigan to be closed through funding provided by Season of Justice, a non-profit that provides grants to police agencies and families to help solve cold cases using advanced DNA analysis, like forensic genealogy, in pursuit of bringing resolution to unsolved violent crimes.
“Bringing closure to a 40-year-old homicide is a pretty big deal,” Murphy said at a press conference today at which he announced testing identified Castiglione’s killer as now-deceased Charles David Shaw.
Castiglione was just 19 on March 19, 1983, when she was taken from her hometown of Redford, raped, strangled, and left for dead on state hunting land. Her body was found by a hunter in Cohoctah Township on March 29, 1983, near Fisher and Fausett roads.
During the autopsy, the medical examiner located male DNA sources that were collected and preserved.
Lacking DNA technology in 1983, the samples were entered by the Michigan State Police Crime Lab in the early 2000s into CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), the national DNA database created and maintained by the FBI.
In March 2022, the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office applied for and received grant funding through Season of Justice to conduct advanced DNA testing on the samples collected in 1983. That evidence was sent in May 2022 to Othram, a private forensic lab in Texas, where a genealogical team produced some leads.
Those leads were returned to Livingston County’s Cold Case Team, which led to the identification of Charles David Shaw, confirmed by three separate familial comparisons. Sheriff Mike Murphy said the cooperation of the Shaw family during the investigation was paramount to identifying Shaw as the person responsible for the Castiglione’s murder. Based on information from Shaw’s family, Murphy described Shaw as a sex addict suffering from mental illness, struggling with his gender identity, and leading a disturbing life.
Shaw will never be held to account for Castiglione’s murder as he died in November 1983 of accidental sexual asphyxiation.
Shaw, whose uncle lived in Fowlerville, had been arrested in 1981 for the attempted abduction of a woman from the McDonald’s parking lot. He pleaded the attempted abduction charge down to aggravated assault and received a sentence of two weeks in the Livingston County Jail and probation, a sentence that Murphy said seemed “kind of light.”
In news coverage just after Castiglione’s body was found, then-Sheriff Dennis DeBurton said her murder held similarities to that a year earlier of Kimberly Louiselle, a South Lyon High School sophomore whose nude body was found in a wooded state game area in Green Oak Township in 1982.
