A man who killed a 36-year-old woman pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Wednesday in a Bronx case that had been cold for nearly three decades.
The man, Gregory Fleetwood, 69, admitted in State Supreme Court in the Bronx to strangling the woman in 1996 in front of her 4-year-old son. He is expected to be sentenced to 12 years in prison on Jan. 29.
On Wednesday afternoon, officers led Mr. Fleetwood into the sixth-floor courtroom, his hands cuffed behind his back. As he stood before the judge, Mr. Fleetwood appeared thinner and his hair grayer than three years ago, when he was arrested and charged in the killing.
“Did you cause the death of Jasmine Porter that day?” the judge, Ralph Fabrizio, asked him. Mr. Fleetwood said yes.
“And how did you do it?” Justice Fabrizio asked.
Mr. Fleetwood looked straight at the judge. “Strangulation,” he said.
On Feb. 5, 1996, Ms. Porter was found dead in her tidy, two-bedroom apartment on Davidson Avenue near West Tremont Avenue — across the street from where Mr. Fleetwood was living at the time. She was six months pregnant.
Her son, Jeremy Porter, told investigators at the time that he had seen a man get on top of his mother, and the police believed she might have been raped.
But detectives could not piece together who had killed Ms. Porter until late 2020, when Robert Klein, then a Police Department detective in the Bronx Homicide Squad, reopened the case.
Mr. Klein, who is now retired, had received a tip from a Bronx prosecutor who had overheard a jailhouse phone call in which an inmate mentioned that he knew who had killed Ms. Porter.
That spurred a nearly two-year investigation spearheaded by Mr. Klein, who dug into Mr. Fleetwood’s past and unearthed DNA evidence that would lead to his arrest.
The detective discovered that, in 1984, another woman who lived on Davidson Avenue — also across the street from Mr. Fleetwood — had accused him of rape. Three years later, Mr. Fleetwood strangled Linda Miller, a 25-year-old pregnant woman from Paterson, N.J.
He pleaded guilty in the Bronx to killing Ms. Miller and was sent to prison in 1988. He served less than five years before members of the New York Parole Board granted his release in the summer of 1994.
Soon after, Mr. Fleetwood moved back to Davidson Avenue. A year and a half later, he killed Ms. Porter.
In January 2021, Mr. Klein looked through the old Porter case file and saw that her fingernails had been “retained but not tested.” Mr. Klein wondered if she had scratched her assailant. By November, at his behest, the city’s medical examiner had tracked down the clippings.
The DNA under Ms. Porter’s nails matched a genetic profile in the state database belonging to Mr. Fleetwood. Mr. Klein and his colleagues arrested Mr. Fleetwood in August 2022.
On Wednesday, Mr. Klein sat quietly in the front of the courtroom gallery listening to Mr. Fleetwood admit to strangling Ms. Porter as she begged for help from her little boy.
“The brutality of this crime and the image of that child left alone with his mother has stayed with me since the first day I read the case file,” Mr. Klein said. “He is going to prison, and it is exactly where he belongs.”
Chelsia Rose Marcius is a criminal justice reporter for The Times, covering the New York Police Department.
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