Carol Ann Doughtery: Investigators to provide update in 1962 Bucks County cold case

BRISTOL - Investigators will provide an update Tuesday on the 1962 cold case murder of a 9-year-old Bucks County girl following a grand jury probe into the decades-old killing.

What we know:

Investigators say on Oct. 22, 9-year-old Carol Ann Doughterty was riding her bicycle to return a library book when she stopped at St. Mark's Church to say a prayer. Dougherty was raped and murdered inside the church, and her body was found by her father after he spotted her bike parked outside.

What they're saying:

Mike Missanelli, best known for dishing sports takes on Philly sports radio, re-examined the decades-old murder case in his podcast The Coldest Murder.

"It was a crime that shocked the town – Bristol borough is a small, ethnically mixed town of about 10,000 people, everybody knows each other – so this was a major crime and it left a mark on a lot of people who lived in that town and even those who moved out," said Missanelli during a 2024 interview on Good Day Philadelphia.

Podcast investigates 1962 cold case murder of 9-year-old girl

Mike Missanelli, a figurehead in Philadelphia's sports radio, joins Good Day Philadelphia to discuss his latest podcast "The Coldest Murder." The series outlines the 1962 cold case killing of a 9-year-old girl in Bristol, Pennsylvania.

Missanelli said there were four major suspects, the largest of whom was later found to be a "predator priest" in Lynne Abraham's exposé on the Philadelphia Archdiocese. All four suspects are now dead, but Missanelli hopes investigators will be able to use the latest DNA technology to uncover Dougherty's killer.

"What I'm trying to do in this podcast is kind of re-explore the case, go into the background of the suspects, make it like the listener is following along and have their own opinions about who committed this crime," Missanelli explained. "At the end of this podcast, I'm hoping that DNA evidence will finally be able to solve this crime."