Stories about cold cases being cracked thanks to advances in DNA evidence are pretty common these days, though the New York Times notes that at least 340,000 unsolved murders over the last 60 years remain on the books. It still takes a slew of factors to come together to get one solved, writes Chelsia Rose Marcius, including luck and good old-fashioned detective work. The case Marcius writes about is a particularly brutal one: In 1996, a man murdered a pregnant 36-year-old Bronx single mom, Jasmine Porter, in her apartment and in front of her 4-year-old boy. The child remained with her after she died for about 24 hours, trying to revive her with an ice cube, before she was finally discovered. The case went nowhere at the time, and the boy went to live with his grandmother.
Flash forward to 2020, when Detective Robert Klein gets a call from a prosecutor who had heard "jailhouse chatter" about the murder. Klein began digging in, finally locating the case's physical records and learning that Porter's fingernail clippings had been saved but not tested. Those tests yielded a match that led to the arrest of 66-year-old Gregory Fleetwood, who had served six years for the 1987 murder of another woman (like Porter, also pregnant). Klein also interviewed a woman who accused Fleetwood of raping her a few years before that case. Klein arrested the "meek, calm, unassuming" Fleetwood last summer, and the case is pending. The story includes a photo of the detective posing with the now 32-year-old Jeremy Porter, the child who couldn't revive his mother. Read the full story. (Or read about other cold cases.)
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