How a Single Envelope Exposed a Killer 30 Years After He Thought He Got Away

The letter should have been harmless.
Just a folded sheet of paper sealed in a plain white envelope.
No fingerprints. No return address.
Just a few sentences typed by someone calling himself a “concerned citizen.”

But inside that envelope was a secret — one so precise, so intimate, so brutally accurate — that investigators knew instantly:

Only Anna Kane’s killer could have written it.

For 32 years, that envelope lived in a quiet police file in Pennsylvania.
Untouched.
Unopened by the world.
A relic from a murder investigation that had gone silent decades earlier.

And then one day, forensic techs pulled it out, cracked the seal, swabbed the glue on the flap — the spot where a tongue had once pressed down — and exposed a ghost.

The DNA was still there.

A name appeared.

And a long-dead man was finally unmasked.

This is the story of how a single lick on an envelope solved one of Pennsylvania’s most haunting cold cases — a story that begins with a young mother’s violent death in the woods, and ends with a revelation no one saw coming.

THE BODY IN THE WOODSOctober 1988.
The air was sharp, cold enough to turn breath white. Morning fog clung low to the ground near Hamburg, Pennsylvania — a sleepy region where silence was normal, even comforting.

Until hunters made a discovery they’d never forget.

At first it looked like discarded clothing or debris tossed off a trail.
But as they approached, the shape sharpened into something human.

A woman.
Face bruised.
Neck wrapped with rope.
Body abandoned along the Ontelaunee Trail.

She was 26-year-old Anna Kane, a mother of three.

Her life was complicated, sometimes unstable, often difficult.
But she loved her children fiercely.
And on that cold morning, her story ended in a brutality that still rattles the hearts of those who remember her.

The autopsy confirmed what the scene already whispered:
Anna had fought hard.
There were signs of struggle.
But not of sexual assault — something investigators noted with confusion.

Someone had overpowered her.
Someone had tied that rope.
And someone had left her there — bruised, alone, and undiscovered until daylight.

Police collected DNA from her clothing and her body.
They knew they had a killer’s genetic fingerprint.

But in 1988, DNA databases were small, forensic tech was limited, and the science that now dominates modern investigations was still in its infancy.

So investigators waited.
And hoped.

But no arrest came.

 THE FRONT-PAGE TRIGGER

Two years passed.
No suspect.
No answers.
No closure.

Then, in 1990, the Reading Eagle — a local newspaper — published a front-page article about Anna’s unsolved murder.

It was detailed.
It was desperate.
And it asked a simple question:

Who killed Anna Kane?

Days later, at the newsroom, a single envelope arrived.
No one recognized the handwriting.
Inside was a letter from a man who claimed to be a concerned citizen.

But the content was anything but ordinary.

He knew things the public never knew.
Details police withheld.
Details only Anna’s killer could have known — positioning of her body, specifics of the injuries, circumstances that were never printed or shared.

Investigators realized the horrible truth:

The killer was writing them directly.

They swabbed the envelope.
They preserved it.
And they waited for the day DNA would catch up to the man who licked that seal.

That day came more than three decades later.

 THREE DECADES OF SILENCE

When a murder slips into cold-case territory, it becomes a strange kind of ghost story — alive only in old files, aging photographs, and the memories of detectives who never stop wondering.

For Anna’s daughter, Tamika Reyes, the years were even harder.

She was nine when her mother was murdered.
She watched her childhood fracture in ways no child should endure.
The years turned to decades, and hope dimmed but never disappeared.

“I didn’t think I’d see this day,” she told reporters.
“But I had hope.”

Her brothers were younger still.
Too young to have many memories at all.

For them, justice was a story they heard about, not something they witnessed.

Meanwhile, in evidence rooms, the envelope waited.

Time moved forward.
Forensics evolved.
Technology caught up.

And finally — finally — the break investigators had waited three decades for appeared.

THE LICK THAT BETRAYED HIM

With help from federal grant money and a forensic lab in Virginia, Pennsylvania detectives reopened the envelope containing the mysterious 1990 letter.

They swabbed the glue line.
And in that thin trace of dried saliva, they found what they needed most:

DNA.

The profile was crisp, complete, and strong.

But when they ran it through national databases, nothing matched.

The killer had never been arrested for a crime requiring DNA collection.

A dead end — or so it seemed.

Then investigators found a breakthrough:
a separate DNA sample belonging to a man named Scott Grimm, obtained through means authorities did not publicly detail.

They compared the two samples.

The match was perfect.

The killer was someone no one had ever publicly suspected:
Scott Grim, a Pennsylvania man who lived quietly, kept a low profile, and died in 2018 at age 58.

His cause of death was natural.
His crimes, it seemed, were not.

Grimm had been arrested once, in 2002, for harassing a business partner — a nonviolent offense that did not require DNA entry into federal systems.

He had lived, worked, and eventually died without ever facing judgment for Anna’s murder.

But the letter he wrote in 1990 — the letter meant to taunt — became the very thing that unmasked him.

 WHO WAS SCOTT GRIMM?

This is the part that unsettles people the most:

There was no known connection between Grimm and Kane.
No shared social circles.
No reported interactions.
No evidence they knew each other at all.

He lived in southeastern Pennsylvania his entire life.
He died still living there.
He had a minor criminal history but nothing that would suggest homicide.

And the details of his life remain strangely thin — no major records, no public deep dive into his past, no known history of violence.

It’s the kind of emptiness that makes the case even more chilling:

He could have been anybody.
And nobody ever saw it coming.

Detectives believe he zeroed in on Anna during a moment of vulnerability — a young woman alone, living on the margins, struggling financially, easy to overpower.

Anna disappeared in the early morning hours of October 23, 1988.
By daylight, she was gone forever.

THE DAUGHTER LEFT BEHIND

When closure finally came, it was complicated, emotional, and overwhelming — especially for Tamika.

“My emotions are all over the place,” she admitted.
“Happy, sad, angry.”

She wanted justice.
She wanted accountability.
She wanted answers.

But the killer’s death meant she would never get those moments — no trial, no courtroom statements, no opportunity to hear him speak or refuse to speak.

Just a name.

And a grave he will never answer from.

But for investigators, naming him mattered deeply.

“Every victim, despite their background, deserves closure,” authorities said.

And for Tamika, the name didn’t erase the pain — but it finally ended the silence.

 THE UNSAID, THE UNKNOWN, THE UNANSWERABLE

The case is closed — but many questions aren’t.

Why did Grimm write the letter in 1990?
Why did he feel compelled to insert himself into the investigation?
Did he want attention?
Control?
Power?
Or did guilt press on him in quiet moments no one witnessed?

And the biggest question of all:

Was Anna his only victim?

Police have not linked him to other crimes.
But the unsettling truth is this:

Men who kill strangers rarely do it once.

Investigators have said publicly that they know of no other cases tied to him.
But with Grimm dead, and much of his life still in shadow, some answers may never surface.

Cold-case detectives often talk about the “dark numbers” — the offenses buried by time, by lack of evidence, by decades of silence.

Grimm took his secrets to the grave.

What’s left are the pieces he couldn’t hide:
A rope.
A body.
A letter.
And the DNA he never imagined science would one day unveil.

THE POWER OF EVIDENCE THAT OUTLIVES A KILLER

At the press conference announcing Grimm’s identification, Sgt. Nathan Trate praised the original 1988 investigators.

Everything they collected back then — every fiber, every swab, every envelope they sealed — became the backbone of a case solved in 2022.

“It was preserved as it should be,” Trate said.
“They knew somewhere down the line what they collected could be that little piece of evidence.”

And that little piece — a dried line of glue — was everything.

This is the miracle and the tragedy of cold cases:
Time destroys some evidence.
Time reveals others.

DNA is the great equalizer.
It outlives excuses.
It outlives lies.
It outlives killers.

And sometimes, it outlives justice too.

THE FINAL WORD — A MOTHER REMEMBEREDAnna Kane was more than a case file.
More than a victim.
More than headlines about a body in the woods.

She was a mother.
A daughter.
A woman with dreams, frustrations, struggles, and hope.
A person who didn’t get the chance to watch her children grow.

Her life mattered.
Her story mattered.
And now, after decades of silence, her name is finally joined by another — the man who took everything from her.

He escaped justice in life.
He cannot escape truth in death.

Closure doesn’t erase grief.
But it gives it shape.

And three decades after the letter arrived at the newsroom — typed by a man who thought he was smarter than everyone else — the truth finally caught up to him.

All because he sealed the envelope himself.