Cornelia Crilley

On June 12, 1971, 23-year-old Cornelia Michel Crilley, a TWA flight attendant, was found dead in her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled with her own stockings. The apartment showed no signs of forced entry, suggesting she had let her killer in.

The investigation by the NYPD was extensive but yielded no suspects. Biological evidence was collected at the scene and preserved. The case went cold as leads were exhausted, joining the ranks of New York City's unsolved murders from the 1970s.

Decades later, when DNA technology had advanced significantly, the biological evidence from the Crilley scene was tested and entered into the national DNA database. It matched the profile of Rodney Alcala, who was already on California's death row for multiple murders. Alcala had been living in New York City in the early 1970s while attending NYU film school under a pseudonym.

In 2012, Rodney Alcala pleaded guilty to the murders of both Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover, another New York woman killed in 1977. He received an additional 25 years to life for each murder, to be served concurrently with his California death sentence. The case demonstrated how DNA evidence could solve murders that were nearly four decades old.