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Mugshot (l) of Luke Fleming, 39, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with raping, beating and strangling Deborah Dalzell (r.) In his Sarasota home in March 1999.
(Sarasota County Sheriff's Office)
A Florida man was arrested in 1999 for the murder of a 47-year-old woman who was raped and strangled with a T-shirt.
Deborah Dalzell was brutally beaten and gagged with a sock before being sexually assaulted and strangled, according to court documents. Her body was found at her home in Sarasota, Florida on March 29, 1999.
Investigators said the killer was an intruder who burst into the house.
On Wednesday, Luke Fleming, 39, of St. Petersburg, was charged with homicide.
Fleming lived less than one kilometer from Dalzell at the time of the murder, reported the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
"As a family, we dreamed of the day we would have the news that they caught their killer," said Dalzell's sister, Peggy Thistle, of Sarasota, according to the newspaper. "We now have a face and a name for this monster."
Friday was Dalzell's birthday.
"Happy birthday, Deborah," Thistle said.
Fleming was linked to the crime by DNA, the newspaper reported.
The coroner recovered sperm when Dalzell's body was necropsied.
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The seed was compared to Fleming's DNA and resulted in a match, according to the newspaper. The investigators obtained Fleming's DNA through "investigative means".
"His arrest did not happen overnight and it was not easy to find him," said Sarasota County Sheriff Tom Knight, according to the Tampa Bay Times. "But thanks to DNA evidence, associated with ancestry and genealogy, we finally connected the points on which the detectives have been working for nearly two decades."
Fleming was jailed instead of a $ 1.2 million bail.
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