DNA drives conviction in cold-case murder of a teenager

WHEN A MONSTER snatched her beautiful teenage daughter off the street, raped, beat and strangled her and then left her like trash in a vacant Kensington house, a homicide investigator warned 17-year-old Anjeanette Maldonado's mourning family that bringing her killer to justice could take time.

"The first detective told me: 'You're going to have to wait. You have to be patient.' I thought he meant next week," Anjeanette's mother Paulette Smith, 59, said yesterday.

Now, nearly 19 years after Anjeanette was murdered on her walk to school, Smith's long wait for justice has ended. Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Minehart yesterday found Rafael Crespo, 49, guilty of first-degree murder, rape, corruption of minors and related offenses for the Sept. 30, 1996, slaying of Anjeanette, an aspiring artist and student at the Franklin Learning Center.

Crespo showed no reaction when Minehart announced his verdict. His sentencing will be Oct. 27. Crespo faces life in prison without parole after he waived his right to a jury trial in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty.

A tearful Smith said so much time had passed, she doubted she'd ever see her daughter's killer convicted.

"I'm just so thankful for the police, the detectives, the district attorney," she said after Crespo's conviction yesterday. "There was no way this would have gotten solved without them never giving up."

Police initially suspected Anjeanette's boyfriend Christian Vrabec, because the pair had a tumultuous relationship that she planned to break off the day she died, according to court testimony. He cooperated with investigators and was never charged.

But in 2012, police in Florida - where Crespo was behind bars for the sexual battery of a minor - found during a routine check of the FBI's DNA database that Crespo's DNA matched semen found on Anjeanette. When police then questioned Crespo, he told them Anjeanette was a prostitute with whom he'd had consensual sex in the abandoned house on Hope Street near Montgomery Avenue. He denied hitting her, said she asked to be choked during sex and insisted he'd left her alive in the house.

"The DNA basically establishes the fact that Mr. Crespo had sex with her at some point in time. It doesn't establish the fact that he killed her," Crespo's defense attorney Michael F. Giampietro argued.

Minehart didn't buy it, and Assistant District Attorney Carlos Vega blasted that tale during his closing arguments.

"He says she was a prostitute. A prostitute with a school uniform? A prostitute with school books and a school ID?" Vega said. "Bad enough that he raped and killed her, but now he wants to take and dirty her name."