After 20 years, woman's slaying may be solved, police believe

When two custodians at Hempstead High School found Dorothy LeConte's body one June morning in 1989, their discovery set in motion a mystery that, police believe, has been solved after 20 years.

The 22-year-old mother was a Haitian immigrant who had moved to the United States six months before she was killed, hoping to become a citizen. She lived in North Bergen, N.J., and was visiting relatives in Hempstead when, police said, she was attacked by Joey Bethea, an upstate New York man whom they charged with the crime this week after making a DNA match with semen found on LeConte.

She had boarded a bus in Manhattan to see her aunt and brother that evening. They were expecting her around midnight. But she never made it. Her body was found the next day around noon, lying facedown in a small creek on the edge of the Hempstead High School grounds.

Nassau Det. Lt. John Azzata said Wednesday that LeConte was unfamiliar with Hempstead when she arrived. "She never got to the aunt's house. She had to ask for directions to get on what bus to Nassau County," he said.

LeConte's father, Louis LeConte, told Newsday at the time of his daughter's killing that she was studying at the Technical Career Institute in Manhattan.

And other relatives said she wanted to be a beautician, or a computer specialist, adding that she was taking English language courses, classes she took very seriously.

She had a 23-month-old son, Narces, who was still in Haiti, and she held a part-time job at a New Jersey Roy Rogers restaurant where her sister worked as a supervisor.

"Why this?" Louis LeConte, then a building manager in a North Bergen complex, said at the time. Just months before, he had lost a son to murder. "I don't know how to feel. I raise them with no wife, no welfare, no mistress. My daughter didn't drink, smoke or do drugs. She loved to eat and drink sodas."