Police: Decades Old Murder Solved With DNA
MIAMI (CBSMiami) – A man police believe is a murder suspect was arrested and taken to jail Saturday on a first-degree murder charge.
The arrest of Rickey L. Davis, 52, comes nearly three decades after Joycelean Burrows was found strangled in a Liberty City vacant lot, according to CBS4 news partner, The Miami Herald.
Miami-Dade police homicide detectives learned of Davis after submitting crime-scene evidence for DNA analysis.
A match came back to Davis, a convicted burglar whose DNA had been entered years earlier in a state law enforcement data base.
Burrows, 26, was discovered on Jan. 17, 1989 in the vacant lot on Northwest 59th Street at 22nd Avenue.
Davis was a suspect in 1989, but there was not enough evidence to arrest him.
That day, a witness told police, Davis was seen covered in blood, using a hose to wash blood from the back of his truck. But Davis denied having had any recent contact with Burrows, according to the arrest report.
DNA technology was not available in 1986. The case remained unsolved for decades.
(©2014 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. CBS4 news partner The Miami Herald contributed material for this report.)
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