But here's a little additional info...
Posted on 11/20/2018 2:16:49 PM PST by ETL
Investigators may finally have a break in a cold case murder that has haunted the Boston area for almost 50 years.
The Middlesex District Attorney's Office is slated to hold a press conference Tuesday afternoon to announce a "significant development" in the unsolved 1969 killing of Jane Britton due to DNA testing.
"Over the past year our office has been in the process of conducting DNA testing on the evidence taken from a 1969 Cambridge homicide," Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said in a press release Monday. "I am excited to announce a significant development in the case as a result of that testing."
Prosecutors declined to provide more details before the press conference takes place.
Britton, a 23-year-old graduate student studying anthropology at Harvard University, was found dead in her fourth-floor apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the chilly afternoon of Jan. 7, 1969. A boyfriend discovered her body when he came to check on her after she didn't show up for an exam that morning.
Britton, a native of Needham, Massachusetts, had been sexually assaulted and bludgeoned to death, according to Cambridge police records.
The Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper of Harvard University, reported that police found "reddish-brown powder" scattered across the walls, ceiling and floor of Britton's apartment, as well as on her body.
Police questioned several people at the time, but investigators never identified a suspect and the case went cold for decades -- until now.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
The most loyal democrat voter.
Are these photos the mugshots they appear to be?
Concord, Mass, June ‘68, and the number 40058 are self-explanatory, but what does “C.I.” mean in this context? The 6d finishing nail-looking artifact above his ear is also curious.
Was he a Confidential Informant? Criminal Investigation? The articles sure don’t tell us much about his criminal history BEFORE the 1969 crime.
DAMN! I thought this was going to be about Vince Foster.
Too bad he’s already dead.
But here's a little additional info...
Here is the source for that last pic.
excerpt...
“In October 2012, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office identified Sumpter as the assailant in the Dec. 12, 1973 homicide and sexual assault of 24-year-old Mary Lee McClain at her Beacon Hill apartment in Boston.
Ivanka Trump Used Personal Email for Government Work: Report
At that time, McClain’s death had been the second attributed to Sumpter through DNA testing. Two years earlier, authorities linked him to the 1972 rape and murder of 23-year-old Ellen Rutchick at her Beacon Street resident in West Roxbury.
Prosecutors say they don’t believe Sumpter knew any of his victims.”
Re: “Ivanka Trump Used Personal Email for Government Work: Report”
Lol! Sorry. Freaking NBC had to stick a few Trump-bashers in the article (last excerpt I posted). Thought I removed them. They stick one in every few paragraphs. Yet they claim there’s no liberal bias in the media.
Thanks.
My money is on Mueller.
BOSTON, Oct. 18, 2012—A dead man identified as a suspect in one 1970s murder is now believed to have committed a second based on DNA evidence unavailable at the time of the crimes, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley and Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said today.
Conley and Davis today identified MICHAEL SUMPTER (D.O.B. 9/26/47) as the assailant in the Dec. 12, 1973, homicide and sexual assault of 24-year-old Mary Lee McClain in her Beacon Hill apartment.
The investigation at the time revealed that an unknown perpetrator had gained access to the Mount Vernon Street apartment she shared with two roommates, raped her, and strangled her to death.
Though Boston Police homicide detectives seized evidence from the scene and conducted several interviews, no suspect was identified until a grant-funded cold case investigation led to Sumpter in May of this year.
Murder victim Mary McClain in an undated family photo
Sumpter died of cancer in 2001.
“This is a story about an old case and new technology, but it’s also a story about hope and perseverance,” DA Conley said. “Mary’s family never lost their faith that her murder would be solved.
Investigators stored the crucial evidence for decades under laboratory conditions even after the case went cold. When a new team brought the latest science to the table, that hope and perseverance paid off with a positive identification of her killer.
After all these years, we hope this news and the finality of the suspect’s death to cancer can provide them some sense of closure.”
“Our dedicated detectives and our Crime Lab analysts worked tirelessly on this case,” Commissioner Davis said.
“They never gave up, leaving no stone unturned to provide the family with answers. We hope this information gives them some peace.”
McClain’s homicide is the second to be attributed to Sumpter after his death.
In 2010, authorities linked him to the 1972 rape and murder of Ellen Rutchick, 23, in her Beacon Street residence. He is also believed to have committed the 1985 rape of a 21-year-old woman inside a Marlborough Street apartment.
Though chronologically the last offense Sumpter is believed to have committed, this 1985 assault was the first cold case linked to the suspect through DNA evidence.
At the time of his death, Sumpter was serving a 15- to 20-year prison sentence for yet another sexual assault – the 1975 rape of a 21-year-old woman inside her Beacon Street home.
In all three of the recently-solved cases, Sumpter was identified as a suspect after Boston Police detectives and Suffolk prosecutors submitted crime scene evidence to the Boston Police Crime Laboratory and, in turn, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, a database of DNA samples from unsolved crimes and known offenders.
Sumpter was first linked to the 1985 attack amid an early 21st century project to re-investigate unsolved sexual assaults using DNA evidence. In 2002, biological evidence recovered from the crime scene was processed and uploaded to CODIS.
That uploaded biological evidence was a “hit” – a match to a known suspect, later identified as Sumpter, who had been ordered to provide a DNA sample to the database after his conviction for the 1975 rape. Sumpter was already dead, however, and could not be charged.
In 2005, independent of this development, members of Ellen Rutchick’s family contacted Boston Police to see if her Jan. 6, 1972, murder could be reviewed for potential leads. Working under a National Institute of Justice grant that provides local law enforcement with resources to identify, review, and investigate potentially solvable cold cases, homicide detectives took a fresh look at her case using modern scientific techniques.
Because Rutchick had also been sexually assaulted, detectives attempted to upload biological evidence found at the scene but were unable to do so because of the manner in which it had been affixed to slides in the 1970s.
Investigators sent the slides to an independent laboratory specializing in DNA analysis, which was ultimately able to isolate a genetic profile from the slides. That profile was uploaded to CODIS and, in July 2009, hit on Sumpter’s profile.
Earlier this year and working under the same federal grant, cold case detectives submitted biological evidence recovered from the scene of McClain’s murder to the crime lab, where criminalists extracted a DNA profile and again uploaded it to CODIS. The result, officials said, was another “hit” on Sumpter’s stored DNA profile in May.
In addition to reviewing the evidence in McClain’s murder, police and prosecutors considered whether she might have had any legitimate connection with Sumpter.
After interviewing witnesses from the 1973 investigative file and her only living relative, detectives could find nothing to suggest that the victim might have known or been familiar with Sumpter.
Authorities also considered Sumpter’s documented offenses and the patterns of those offenses – specifically, his violent sexual attacks on women in the areas of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay.
Based on those reviews, Conley and Davis agreed that, if Sumpter were alive today, he would be indicted for McClain’s murder.
Last month, the same investigative techniques led to the conviction of serial rapist CHARLES H. BROOK, Jr. (D.O.B. 10/3/44), for the Nov. 31, 1989, murder of 87-year-old Zahia Salem in her South End home.
Just as Sumpter did, Brook had DNA samples on file because of prior rape convictions and was identified amid a grant-funded cold case review.
http://www.suffolkdistrictattorney.com/dna-links-dead-man-to-second-cold-case-murder/
Here is a detailed piece from the always thorough DailyMail...
Several crime scene photos (*not* of bodies).
“The mystery has finally been solved and this case is CLOSED’: DNA match identifies deceased convict as man responsible in 1969 rape and murder of Harvard grad Jane Britton”
Nov 20, 2018
Probably...
Jane Britton, Mary McClain, Ellen Rutchick - the three women they Sumpter raped and murdered were all young white women with long dark hair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjenXUgbrFQ
Aha. Thanks for the follow-up info.
So the guy has an intake photo at a Correctional Institute in June 1968, and the young woman is murdered on Jan 9, 1969, meaning he must have been released not long before the murder. Depending on his prior offenses, a recently released con should have been a suspect... I’m going to be unfair and wonder whether competent policework might have solved the case 49 years ago and saved the subsequent victims.
Correction — Jan 7, 1969
Black-out? No pun intended.
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