Believed to have been abducted from a shopping center in nearby Owosso, she was found to have been raped and shot three times.

[3] On March 4, her body was discovered by two young brothers, Wayne and Bill Somers, who were tapping maple trees on their family farm in Saginaw County, Michigan.

The medical examiner found that Magyar had been raped and shot three times in the head and back with a .22 caliber gun.

In June 1974, a .22 caliber revolver, believed to be the murder weapon, was recovered from the Shiawassee River in Owosso.

The gun was traced to a pawn shop in Yuma, Arizona, where a man named Robert Shaw had purchased it in 1965.

A detective sergeant reviewing cold cases realized that advances in DNA analysis (which had not been available as a forensic tool when the earlier investigation was conducted) might yield evidence to identify Magyar's killer, as the county police had collected sperm specimens from Magyar's body at the time of the crime.

A few years later, Shaw told police that he remembered that, soon after they divorced, his ex-wife had dated a man named Jerald Leroy Wingeart.

[1][2] Police learned that Wingeart at age 20, then a married University of Michigan (U-M) engineering student with a scholarship,[7] had been convicted in 1961 for the rape of a blind female U-M student and armed robbery of her escort in Ann Arbor Township, Washtenaw County, Michigan.

[9] When police learned about him in relation to the Magyar case, Wingeart was 60 years old and living quietly in Center Line, Michigan, with his fourth wife.

[1][2][3] As police investigated, they obtained Wingeart's DNA from saliva on cigarette butts which he had used and discarded in his trash.

[1] Magyar's mother Eleanor and brother Larry Swan and his wife were alive to see justice served for Dawn.

[9] At the time of his conviction, Wingeart was under investigation for deaths of young women and other crimes committed in Washtenaw and Ionia counties in the previous ten years.

The case was dismissed before trial in 1982 by the Wexford County, Michigan, judge, who ruled that the police had violated Wingeart's rights in the course of a search for evidence.

He was known to have left the area after McVeigh disappeared and before her body was found, a month after her death; he moved to New York.