DNA database leads to an arrest in security guard's 1992 slaying

ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- A DNA specimen in New York state's inmate database might finally solve the puzzle of a security guard's slaying in 1992.

Christopher Salzarullo, 32, was making his rounds inside a radiator factory in Dunkirk early on the morning of Feb. 15, 1992, when he was shot twice in the head by a suspected burglar. With the plant closed for the President's Day weekend, his body wasn't discovered until three days later.

While the investigation quickly went cold, the murder "hit close to home for all of us" because the victim's father, Officer Anthony Salzarullo, had just retired from the police force in Dunkirk, a small city on Lake Erie's eastern shore, police Chief David Ortolano said Friday.

A long-awaited breakthrough arrived in July when a DNA sample collected last year from a man who drew a six-month jail sentence for draining a fire hydrant in the village of Cassadaga near Dunkirk matched unspecified evidence recovered at Dunkirk Radiator Corp.

After a four-month investigation by a police task force, Kevin Burlingame, 39, was charged Thursday with second-degree murder. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 25 years to life in prison.

The state's DNA databank of convicted felons, created in 1999, "is almost like a gift," Chautauqua County District Attorney David Foley said.

"Getting information 14 1/2 years later on basically a cold-case homicide is just really phenomenal," he said. "I think, as time goes on, we'll see this happening more often."

Investigators who combed the factory found four vending machines had been broken into and about $200 in change was missing _ as well as a watchman's clock carried by the victim.

"I was just a couple of years on the job when that happened, and all of us remember it," said Ortolano, noting that Salzarullo's father died a few years later.

"There's no question that was (something) he always wanted to see resolved before he died and it was unfortunate that it wasn't," the police chief said.