Murder bust
Fingerprint on phone solves cord-strangle mystery
A FINGERPRINT on a phone that became a murder weapon helped Bronx detectives arrest a man they say raped and strangled two women more than 15 years ago, police said Thursday.
Christopher Gonzalez (photo left) was finally nabbed this week in Florida and hit with two murder charges in the deaths of 19-year-old Dora Almoteser (photo right) and 25-year-old Angel Serbey.
“I want him to rot. I want him to rot in jail,” Almoteser’s mother, Dora Delvalle, told the Daily News Thursday. “I hope he never comes out, ever.”
Bronx Detective Malcolm Reiman zeroed in on Gonzalez earlier this year after taking a new look into Almoteser’s murder.
Delvalle found her daughter’s nude dead body on a bed inside the Van Nest home on Dec. 2, 2000. Almoteser, who was apartment-sitting for her uncle, had been strangled with a phone cord.
The case heated up again on Sept. 3, 2005, when Serbey’s body was found dumped on the Sprain Brook Parkway. She had been raped and strangled and DNA recovered from her body matched DNA recovered from Almoteser’s corpse five years earlier, said Lt. William O’Toole, the commanding officer of the NYPD’s Bronx Homicide Squad.
When Reiman and Detective Matthew McCrosson reprocessed the evidence in Almoteser’s case, they got a hit on the fingerprint found on the phone the killer ripped the cord from. It was a match for Gonzalez, who was fingerprinted in New York in 2005 when he was arrested for driving a car with fake license plates.
Reiman — a dogged investigator who probed Almoteser’s murder when it happened — learned that Gonzalez had lived within a few blocks of both victims.
“Gonzalez had no right to be in the apartment and leave that fingerprint on the telephone,” O’Toole said. “We suspect these were crimes of opportunity.”
On Tuesday, Reiman arrested Gonzalez in Florida. The suspect was married and working at a Toys ‘R’ Us store. An extradition hearing has been set for Nov. 29.
“It was a long 16 years,” Delvalle said. “He could have a family, but not my daughter.”
Gonzalez’s prints and DNA don’t match any other unsolved homicides in New York, but detectives are widening their search to see if they can be linked to out-of-state cold cases, officials said.