Cops say DNA led police to suspect in '89 Hempstead killing

Nassau police said Wednesday that DNA evidence helped them crack a 20-year-old case in which a Haitian woman from New Jersey was raped and strangled and her body dumped near Hempstead High School.

Suspect Joey Bethea, of upstate Bainbridge, was 18 and living in Hempstead when Dorothy LeConte, of North Bergen, N.J., was killed in June 1989, Nassau police said at a news conference Wednesday.

Police retained DNA samples from semen gathered from LeConte's body. Her body was found by two custodians facedown in a stream under a footbridge. Police said then she had been raped and thrown or pushed from the bridge. She died from asphyxiation.

>>PHOTOS: Click here to see the latest photos in this case, and photos from 1989

Bethea, 38, who has a long rap sheet and was convicted of armed robbery in Nassau in 1992, was not a person of interest in the case and has no known previous connection to LeConte, police said.

LeConte, a student and restaurant worker, had taken the bus to Hempstead to visit relatives when she disappeared.

Police said Bethea failed to submit DNA samples after three upstate arrests since 2005. In August, he was contacted by State Police, who collected a sample from him via a swab at his upstate home. State crime lab investigators made the match in the LeConte case and notified state and Nassau police.

He was arrested Tuesday in upstate Nineveh and charged with second-degree murder and felony murder; the second charge stems from the alleged rape, said Nassau Det. Lt. John Azzata.

LeConte left behind a then-23-month-old son, Narses, who was living in Haiti, relatives told Newsday at the time.

Another brother, Alphonso, had been shot to death months before at age 19 after making an ATM withdrawal.

LeConte's father, Louis, said his daughter had been studying English and taking classes at a technical school and wanted to be a beautician or a computer programmer. She worked part-time at a Roy Rogers restaurant in New Jersey.

He said he had worked to bring his family to the United States after the death of his wife.

"I have little left," her father told Newsday. "I'm a hardworking guy. For 10 years, I have tried to get all my children here the legal way, only to have two of them killed."

>>PHOTOS: Click here to see the latest photos in this case, and photos from 1989