Man, linked by DNA, charged in 1976 St. Petersburg slaying

A convicted sex offender has been charged in the slaying of an 85-year-old woman in a case that remained unsolved for nearly 31 years before DNA linked him to the crime, authorities said Tuesday.

Alfonzo Austin, 58, was arrested Monday at his home in the north Florida town of Quincy, near Tallahassee. Authorities said he admitted killing Mary Barth, whose body was found on Sept. 17, 1976, near the entrance to a St. Petersburg cemetery. An autopsy showed she had been stabbed 27 times and raped.

Austin was being held in the Gadsden County jail Tuesday, charged with first-degree murder. It was not clear if he had an attorney yet.

Last year, St. Petersburg police resubmitted evidence from the case to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, whose analysts were able to obtain a DNA profile and compare it to others in a criminal data bank.

The sample matched the DNA of Austin, whose genetic information had been included in the database after a previous conviction. The state's sexual offender registry indicates Austin was convicted in 1990 of lewd and lascivious assault on a child in Gadsden County.

Technology developed in recent years allowed FDLE analysts to extract DNA from semen on an article of Barth's clothing, said Melissa Suddeth, analyst supervisor in the Tampa FDLE lab.

"Any hit is extremely exciting here in the laboratory," Suddeth said. "It's nice to get a hit on a case that's as old as this one. And this particular hit was able to give investigators a lead they wouldn't have had otherwise."

Barth suffered from dementia and wandered away from the house where she lived with her sister, police said. At the time, Austin lived across the street from the cemetery where her body was found, police said.

Sgt. Mike Kovacsev, who heads the St. Petersburg police homicide unit, said Austin at first denied committing the crime, then admitted it after Kovacsev confronted him with the positive DNA match.

"Here you are 30 years later and your demons are coming back to haunt you," Kovacsev said he told Austin. "He was kind of in disbelief."

During the interview, Austin said he was also involved in another slaying of an elderly women in St. Petersburg that occurred four months before Barth was killed, Kovacsev said. Investigators are trying to determine if they can charge him with that crime.

About a year after Barth was killed, Austin was arrested for an attempted sexual battery about a mile from where her body was found, and has been arrested at least twice on sexual battery charges since, police said.

Kovacsev said police are still looking for any of Barth's surviving family members. She was believed to have been from Ohio.

"It would be nice to tell them about it," he said.