More than 28 years after a 89-year-old woman was sexually assaulted and murdered in her Pompano Beach home, detectives believe they know who killed her.
Lillian DeCloe, a former teacher and nurse, was relaxing in her home in April 1994 when the shocking killing happened and it had gone unsolved until the Broward Sheriff's Office Cold Case Homicide Unit formed in 2019.
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After looking at case files and using DNA evidence, detectives believe they've found her killer.
BSO officials announced Tuesday that they believe Johnny Mack Brown, DeCloe's former neighbor who is now deceased, was involved in her murder.
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"When a murder is committed in any part of this county it creates a shockwave of devastation and fear and uncertainty and insecurity in the environment in which we live, and that doesn't go away when a suspect dies," Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony said at a news conference.
Officials said their first breakthrough came after the testing of DNA the killer left on DeCloe's nightgown after he sexually assaulted her.
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From that evidence, BSO's Crime Lab developed a suspect profile, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement conducted a familial search of its State of Florida Qualifying Offender DNA Database.
The testing identified an offender who had spent time in a Florida prison and whose DNA was on file. The offender was a possible close relative of the DNA contributor in DeCloe's murder.
That led detectives to Brown, a former United States Marine who lived a few house away from DeCloe in the 1990s.
Family members said Brown was a Vietnam War veteran who struggled with PTSD and drug addiction. He has also been deceased for more than a decade, officials said.
A final breakthrough came this past August when detectives got a court order to exhume Brown's remains from the South Florida National Cemetery in Palm Beach County.
Investigators collected tissue samples from Brown's remains, and testing by BSO's Crime Lab showed that Brown's DNA was consistent with the DNA left at the crime scene, officials said.
"The results were more than conclusive – the DNA results are 66.8 trillion times more likely that they came from Brown and DeCloe than if they came from DeCloe and another person," BSO said in a news release.
Detectives presented their findings to the Broward State Attorney’s Office for review, and prosecutors agreed that Brown was involved in DeCloe's murder, officials said.
