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DNA links suspect to 6 slayings (This article is reprinted from the August 6, 2000 issue of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Thanks to Susan Lindgren, San Diego Police Dept., for submitting this article.)
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM NEW YORK An investigator credited DNA science yesterday with helping police solve the serial killings of six women in Brooklyn. Not only did it link a homeless man to the crimes, he said, but it also cleared another homeless man a man who then befriended a detective and helped find the suspect. More than a week ago, the man who was cleared led detectives from the Brooklyn North Homicide Task Force to focus on a 5-foot-3-inch panhandler, Vincent Johnson, 31, the investigator said. And after DNA from Johnson came back with a match Thursday night, the other man also helped police track down the suspect. He saw the man Friday on a Brooklyn street wearing a bright orange shirt. The cleared man called police and followed Johnson until they arrived and arrested him, the investigator said. Yesterday afternoon, detectives were still questioning Johnson, and police officials said he would be charged in the strangulation killings in the Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of Brooklyn. Police said Johnson is a drug abuser who spent time at a hotel on Broadway in Williamsburg. The six women were stalked and strangled, and their bound bodies were left where they were killed. Two were found on rooftops in Williamsburg and one in a vacant lot there. Two were found in apartments in Bedford-Stuyvesant and one in a utility room under the Williamsburg Bridge, where Johnson once slept on a cot. Most of the women had been arrested in the past on prostitution or drug charges, police officials said. Police came across the man who helped them when investigators took DNA samples from 25 to 30 suspects, official said. The samples did not match the DNA the killer had left behind, said one investigator familiar with the tests. Among those cleared was a man who police had been told hung out with prostitutes in the area and had argued with one of them, an investigator said. But after the test showed he was not the killer, be befriended a detective working on the case, Steven Feely, and told him about another homeless man with whom he often smoked crack cocaine, a man who talked frequently about tying up women and having sex with them, the investigator said. Police said that when they brought Johnson in for questioning last week, he refused to provide a DNA sample and said he did not know any of the slain women, the investigator said. But one of the detectives who brought him in remembered that he had spat on the street outside. Detectives were able to take a saliva sample from where Johnson spat, and by Thursday night, the results showed that his DNA matched DNA found on four of the victims, police said.
This article was printed in “THE PRINT” |