ARREST MADE AND CONFESSION OBTAINED IN 30-YEAR-OLD MURDER CASE

Cold cases are being solved right and left thanks to the emergence of DNA testing as an invaluable crime solving tool.

DNA BREAKTHROUGH HELPS POLICE ARREST CONNECTICUT MAN FOR WOMAN’S MURDER IN 1980
Leonard Jackson, 53, ‘admits’ to the killing after being confronted by police

By Sam Adams

Mail Online
August 17, 2012

A man has been charged with murder after a DNA breakthrough linked him to the body of a woman found strangled in a park more than 30 years ago.

The body of 30-year-old Estella Brantley was found lying half-naked on the grass in a park in Bridgeport, Connecticut on October 30 that year.

She had been beaten and strangled and was found with a $50 note lying beside her.

The identity of the person responsible for her murder remained a mystery for more than three decades.

But police have now arrested and charged 53-year-old Leonard Jackson with the killing in the city's Seaside Park, after linking him to her body using new DNA evidence.

Jackson, of East Main Street, admitted to the murder after being confronted with the DNA match, according to the police.

At the time of the murder officers thought it was one of a string of prostitute killings in the area.

'We want people to know she had a family with two kids who loved her very much,' said Ms Brantley's daughter, Gwendolyn Brantley, according to the Connecticut Post.

She was one of a number of Mrs Brantley's family who attended Jackson's arraignment hearing at the Golden Hill Street courthouse.

Jackson was held in lieu of $1million bond with the case set to continue on August 28.

The Police Department's Cold Case Unit made a breakthrough in the case last July thanks to new DNA evidence which had been preserved from Mrs Brantley's body.

The sample was found to match DNA from Jackson, who was then an inmate at Garner Correctional Center in Newtown, Connecticut.

He had been arrested in 2006 for illegally disposing of the body of a prostitute who had taken a drugs overdose.

According to his affidavit, Brantley said he had begun to hit Mrs Brantley during a walk in Seaside Park.

He had begun to shout at her for dating another man.

Her autopsy revealed she died as a result of being strangled, reports the Connecticut Post.

Jackson told police he could not remember whether he had strangled Mrs Brantley but said when he left Seaside Park she was still lying on the ground.

He said he was sorry about what had happened.

Students at the nearby University of Bridgeport had told officers at the time that they heard a woman screaming in the park in the early hours of the morning, but none of them called the police.

Despite his known involvement with prostitutes in the city, Jackson was not considered a suspect in the case until the DNA breakthrough.