FL: Nigger Arrested for Rape/Murder of 85-year-old woman

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/07/18/Southpinellas/Arrest_made_in_1976_m.shtml

Arrest made in 1976 murder

The 85-year-old victim had been raped and stabbed.

ST. PETERSBURG - For more than 30 years, the gruesome murder of Mary Jane

Barth remained unsolved, one of the department's oldest open cases.

She was an 85-year-old retiree who had grown senile and often wandered away

from home. On Sept. 17, 1976, police found her facedown inside Greenwood

Cemetery. She had been raped and stabbed 27 times.

Police worked overtime following leads. But the trail went cold.

Then, last year, investigator Brenda Stevenson submitted DNA evidence to the

state's crime lab, something police do regularly with cold cases in the hope

of getting a break.

And they did. Last month, police got word that the DNA from semen on a small

piece of Barth's clothing matched a profile in an FBI database: Alfonzo

Austin, 58, a convicted sex offender who was living in an apartment just

outside Quincy in the Panhandle.

He was surprised when officers showed up to arrest him.

"He had no idea why we were there," Sgt. Mike Kovacsev, head of the homicide

unit, said Tuesday, as he stood behind a scrapbook with old newspaper

clippings of the murder. "He really hadn't thought about it in 30 years. His

past came back to haunt him."

Austin, who was never a suspect in the murder, admitted killing Barth,

Kovacsev said, and faces a charge of first-degree murder. Austin also made

some comments that could link him to another unsolved murder that took place

just four months before Barth's killing.

Police say they are investigating whether he is responsible for the

attempted rape and stabbing of Ester Greene, a 67-year-old woman who was

found in the Jordan Park housing complex where she lived. Police have

submitted DNA evidence, but it has not been processed yet by the Florida

Department of Law Enforcement.

Austin lived just across the street from Greenwood Cemetery in 1976. He did

various odd jobs, including working as a day laborer. He told police that he

liked to go drink in the cemetery, at 11th Avenue S and Dr. Martin Luther

King Jr. Street.

He also has a lengthy criminal record that includes several sexual assaults.

Just a month after Barth's death, he was arrested for burglary and sentenced

to one year. On the day he was released, Austin tried to rape another woman,

police said. He got a six-month sentence and spent 4 1/2 years on probation

for that attack.

He moved to Gadsden County in the Panhandle. Then, in 1990, he was convicted

of a felony lewd and lascivious charge involving his stepdaughter, who was

younger than 16.

That's when Austin's DNA sample was entered into the FBI's DNA database. And

it was that sample that matched the DNA submitted by St. Petersburg police.

Beth Ordeman, a crime lab analyst with the FDLE, said she was very excited

after learning about the hit. Recent advances in DNA technology have made it

possible to obtain DNA profiles from even minute samples.

The technology used to identify Austin is called short tandem repeat, or

STR. It is considered the most powerful type of DNA analysis, and works by

comparing replicated genetic markers in DNA samples to those within profiles

in the database.

Despite his string of arrests, Austin spent the last few years living just

outside Gadsden with a retiree who was on Social Security, Kovacsev said. He

said Austin was very nervous while talking about the crime.

Mary Barth was born in 1890, and moved to St. Petersburg with her sister

around 1951 after running a guest home in Cleveland that catered to families

of patients at the Cleveland Clinic.

In newspaper clippings about the brutal murder, neighbors described her as

friendly.

Alice Barth was 78 years old in 1976, and died before Austin was arrested.

But after her sister's death, she told a St. Petersburg Times reporter: "I

hope they get that man off the streets, the one who killed Mary."