SARASOTA, Fla. — Opening statements started Tuesday in the murder trial of the man accused of killing a Sarasota woman nearly 20 years ago.
The judge says he will not be seeking the death penalty against Luke Fleming, the man investigators say broke into Deborah Dalzell's home, sexually assaulted her and strangled her in 1999.
Ultimately, DNA technology led to his arrest in 2018.
The defense waived their right to an opening statement, while the state attorney used that opportunity to lay out why the DNA evidence is hard to ignore.
“It’s an exact and complete match to the defendant’s DNA profile,” Art Jackman said, the assistant state attorney. “You’re going to see photos of injuries to Deborah’s mouth as she struggled, fighting for her life."
He said Dalzell was found naked in her bathroom with a T-shirt wrapped around her neck and a sock down her throat.
Detectives found DNA samples at the scene. But for 19 years, no suspects were named.
“You’re going to hear in this case, although many people were eliminated during the subsequent 19 years, there was no suspect identified,” Jackman said.
It wasn't until 2018 investigators had a breakthrough in the case.
“They were able to develop a DNA profile of a single male contributor that left his semen on the body and in the victim of Deborah Dalzell," Jackman said.
“DNA is something we never imagined, didn’t know about," Sarasota County's Sheriff Tom Knight said. "It’s come to evolution of it and with people being able to trace back people’s genealogy, who their family members are, to identify them.”
Knight says it was after taking a cheek swab of Luke Fleming's 2-year-old son that a genealogy database found a match.
"When they compared the DNA from the semen on the scene there is a 99.99 percent probability of paternity in the case," Jackman told the jury.
That's when Fleming was arrested for the murder and sexual battery of Dalzell.
“The genealogy DNA that’s coming out now is just going to make many crimes that were committed years ago solvable now,” Knight said.
Knight says this advanced technology is going to make it easier to make arrests.
"If I'm somebody that committed a crime some years ago, and I left some type of substance around, blood, semen, sweat, something like that,” Knight said. “The opportunity to have that reanalyzed and to maybe even use your family members as a port of analyzing that DNA and the genealogy that we are able to deal with now is that the opportunity to get arrested has increased significantly."
It's a case investigators say it the first of its kind in the Tampa Bay area, but Knight says it won't be the last.
He's sending out the warning to all criminals: "I’d be looking over your shoulder all the time because the likelihood of getting arrested has just increased significantly," Knight said.
"We are on your trail with DNA."
Fleming's trial will pick up again Wednesday morning.
State attorneys say DNA experts will explain in detail how their DNA technology works and how it led detectives to Fleming.
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