Naman Shrestha
In February 1984, the entire community of East Windsor, New Jersey, was shaken to its core due to the sudden disappearance of a bright 19-year-old woman named Donna Macho. After decades of investigation, the detectives managed to identify the perpetrator responsible for the crime, but it was too late by then. The episode titled ‘Lost but Not Forgotten’ of Investigation Discovery’s ‘On the Case With Paula Zahn’ chronicles the entire case in detail, including the decades-long investigation that followed.
The Search For Donna Macho’s Remains Went on For More Than a Decade
On October 16, 1964, Ronald Wayne and Betty Lou Thompson Macho welcomed Donna Dee Macho into their lives in Oconomowoc in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. The parents went their separate ways sometime later. While Ronald remarried, Betty also found love once again with Garland. The latter two tied the knot later, and Garland embraced Betty’s daughters as his own. Together, the pair built a beautiful life for themselves and their kids. Growing up, Donna had the support of her loving sisters, Julie and Toni Rene Macho. She was a Hightstown High School graduate and secured employment as a legal secretary. However, her true calling lay elsewhere. The bright and talented teenager had a dream of making a mark as a model in the world of glitz and glamor.
In the early 1980s, the close-knit family had been living a comfortable life on Cherry Brook Lane in East Windsor, New Jersey, when tragedy struck the household. On February 25, 1984, Donna and her 14-year-old sister, Julie, indulged in a late-night movie session in Donna’s room in the basement. Until 2 am, the sisters hung out and watched horror movies. Julie then went to her room and fell asleep. Unfortunately, what she didn’t know was that it was the last time she’d ever see her 19-year-old sister alive. The next morning, the family grew concerned when they found no signs of Donna in the house. Furthermore, her car was missing too. Worried about her safety, they reached out to the authorities, who rushed to the residence.
Not long after, the police found Donna’s car just a few miles away from their home. While she wasn’t found, they did discover blood spatters on the passenger’s seat of the vehicle. Based on the semen obtained from her room, the medical team determined she had endured sexual assault. After examining the evidence, the police believed she was abducted from her room, made to drive to an isolated location, and later killed. As an additional measure, her parents also set up a reward of $2,000 for any information about their beloved daughter. Sadly, they had to go through grief and pain for over a decade before receiving any answers about Donna’s fate. On April 2, 1995, skeletal remains were spotted by a Boy Scout troop in the woodland in the township of Cranbury in southern Middlesex County. They were determined to be those of Donna with the help of dental records.
Donna Macho’s Killer Was Identified Nearly Four Decades Later
In order to intensify the investigation of Donna Macho’s disappearance, her family took the help of psychics and trackers and also hired private investigators. With the aim of finding the killer and Donna, they spent loads of money, hoping to find the latter alive somehow. But it would take the investigators several decades to get to the bottom of the case. When Donna vanished from her house in February 1984, a man named Nathaniel Harvey was committing crimes against women, usually by entering unlocked residential properties and holding them captive. He used to work at the Cranbury farm, near which Donna’s remains were discovered in April 1995.
On top of that, her abandoned vehicle was also discovered at a sewer plant, which was just a few minutes away from his residence. Thus, in the initial phase of the investigation, the detectives suspected him of being responsible for Donna’s disappearance, but they couldn’t gather enough evidence against him. At the time, he was also linked to a series of sexual assaults and an unrelated homicide. After various decades, in 2023, when the authorities analyzed a sample of semen found in Donna’s basement using advanced DNA technology, it matched that of Nathaniel Harvey. On April 26, 2023, the New Jersey authorities officially announced that Nathaniel was Donna’s killer.
Nathaniel Harvey Passed Away Before the Police Connected Him to Donna Macho’s Killing
As mentioned above, Nathaniel Harvey had been involved in other crimes, including the rape and murder of Irene Schnaps, a 37-year-old woman from Plainsboro. For these crimes, he was put behind bars in 1985. While awaiting trial for Irene’s murder, he was also questioned by the authorities over Donna Macho’s killing, but they eliminated him as a suspect after DNA tests came back inconclusive. In 1986, his murder trial in connection with Irene’s killing commenced. It resulted in him getting convicted and receiving the death penalty. However, he appealed his conviction, claiming that the police didn’t read him his Miranda rights, and got his conviction overturned.
His second trial took place in 1994, which also resulted in his conviction and the death penalty. In an unexpected turn of events, the death penalty was abolished in New Jersey in 2007. After appealing again, the Supreme Court ordered new DNA testing and approved him for a third trial in 2015. While he was awaiting his third trial, the 70-year-old convict passed away in South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton in November 2020, a few years before he was linked to Donna Macho’s murder.
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