In August 1998, James Christopher Johnson told police that he had found the lifeless body of his fiancee Andrea Cincotta, a librarian from Arlington, Virginia, in the bedroom closet of the home they shared.
The woman had been strangled.
For 23 years, the crime was a mystery to be solved, even after the woman's son, Kevin Cincotta, pressured authorities to move forward with the investigations.
But a few years ago the case was reopened, and the investigators now assure that
they found the culprit
: the same fiancé, although without giving any indication of how he was involved.
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Arlington authorities accuse Johnson, now 59, of hiring a man named Bobby Joe Leonard, 53, two decades ago to kill his fiancée, The Washington Post reported.
Both were arrested this week
on the charge of aggravated murder
, a crime that carried the death penalty before Virginia abolished it earlier this year.
"The passage of time does not diminish the need for answers and accountability in this senseless crime that took Andrea's life," said Police Chief Andy Penn.
When Andrea Cincotta was murdered she was 52 years old.
On his last day of life,
on August 21, 1998
, he planned to have lunch with a friend and then in the evening watch a movie with Johnson, with whom he had lived for seven years.
But he never showed up for any of those plans.
Police focused their investigation around the boyfriend and
a man to whom Cincotta had donated a computer
and who committed a similar crime in 1999.
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The fiancé said in an interview with The Washington Post in 2002 that he was investigated under tension and that there was an interrogation in 1998, shortly after the murder, which led to an incriminating statement that he said was false.
"It is based entirely on the information they gave me," he said.
"She was the love of my life
," Johnson said of Cincotta, denying killing her.
His lawyer, Manuel Leiva, vigorously defended his client on Thursday and said he was innocent.
He noted that the man allegedly hired to kill the woman "has long been a suspect in the death of Ms. Cincotta and was known to law enforcement officials as a very violent individual."
James Christopher Johnson and Bobby Joe Leonard, the main defendants in the 1998 murder of Andrea Cincotta, a librarian from Arlington, Virginia Arlington Sheriff's Office
Cincotta and Leonard met one day in late July and early August 1998 when she approached to donate a computer because she saw him next to a truck that looked like garbage collection companies, the woman's son said.
Police were after Leonard in 1998, in part because he had prior convictions for armed robbery, assault and forced sodomy, but could not link him to Cincotta's death.
But
Leonard committed a similar crime a year later
: He raped a 13-year-old girl, strangled her, and left her, thinking she was dead, in a closet in 1999. The girl survived.
For that crime, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
In a 2002 interview with The Post, from prison, Leonard denied any role in Cincotta's death and assured that he always cooperated with the authorities.
“I had a polygraph;
the examiner told me I passed.
I sent DNA and fingerprints.
They searched my apartment.
I fully cooperated, I never asked for a lawyer, "he said.
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The open cases unit
reviewed Cincotta's 2013 unsolved crime
, evidence, lab results, and interviewed additional witnesses, then presented it to a grand jury.
There was no indication of how Johnson and Leonard might have connected, the newspaper said.
Both are accused of killing Cincotta "with premeditation ... for pay."
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Kevin Cincotta said his mother grew up in the district and southern Maryland, graduating from Ballou High School and George Washington University.
She worked at the Arlington County Public Library and raised him as a single mother.
Johnson, meanwhile, worked at Home Depot in 1998, but had construction experience and was building a home with Andrea Cincotta.
