Trial begins in 1989 Hempstead slaying of woman

The only thing connecting Joey Bethea to the strangled body of a woman found in the woods near Hempstead High School more than two decades ago is DNA, his lawyer said Monday.

There is no evidence that Bethea, now 40, knew Dorothy LeConte, 22, and no other evidence connecting him to the crime scene, his lawyer, Joseph LoPiccolo, said in his opening statement at the start of Bethea's trial.

But prosecutor Martin Meaney said that DNA is evidence enough to prove that Bethea is the one who raped and murdered the Haitian immigrant in 1989.

"He raped her. He killed her," Meaney said in his opening statement to a jury before Nassau County Judge Jerald Carter in Mineola.

But LoPiccolo said proving that Bethea had sex with LeConte, who had come from her home in North Bergen, N.J., to visit relatives in Hempstead, and proving that he killed her are two very different things.

"He is accused only because his DNA is in there," LoPiccolo said. "That's reckless."

The link that drew police to Bethea, of upstate Sidney, was a DNA match between semen found in LeConte's body and a cheek swab collected from Bethea in the summer of 2009, police said.

Bethea was arrested several times between 1991 and June 2009, when state police troopers arrested him on a misdemeanor petty larceny charge when he was accused of stealing a donation jar from a store counter while buying beer at a Bainbridge gas station. They obtained the DNA swab at that time.

On the day of the crime, LeConte had traveled by bus to visit her brother and aunt in Hempstead, police said. She never arrived. The next day, two school custodians found her face down below a campus footbridge just off Peninsula Avenue, a few blocks from her aunt's home.

Police said her body was found in a small pool of water in the creek bed. They said it appeared she'd been pushed or thrown from the bridge; her clothes were in disarray. The county medical examiner ruled that she died from asphyxiation.

Bethea was never questioned in the ensuing investigation, which resulted in no arrests and ended up as a so-called cold case, Nassau police said. In 2002, DNA samples from semen collected from LeConte's body were submitted to a State Police testing lab in Albany, but no match was found.When he was arrested in October 2009, Bethea, who has pleaded not guilty, denied he killed LeConte. When asked what he'd been doing upstate in recent years, he said, "working." Police said he's been employed at a lumberyard for about three years.

Since 1989, Bethea has been convicted of crimes four times, including at least twice for offenses that required him to submit a DNA sample for inclusion in a state crime computer database.

Days after his most recent arrest on larceny charges in June 2009 in upstate Sidney, Bethea was approached by State Police at his home in Nineveh and submitted to a cheek swab, authorities said. It was analyzed in a lab in Albany in August. Nassau police said they were notified of the match Sept. 16, 2009.