Global Courant 2023-05-01 17:49:26
Authorities say DNA evidence has proven that a man who died in prison several years ago was responsible for the 1984 murder of a 19-year-old woman whose body was not found for more than a decade after she left her childhood home in New York. York had disappeared. Jersey.
The Mercer County Attorney General and District Attorney’s Office last week announced what they called “the final identification” of Nathaniel Harvey, formerly of East Windsor, as the person responsible for the assault and murder of Donna Macho.
Macho, 19, went missing on or about February 26, 1984, from the East Windsor home where she lived with her parents and sisters. A Boy Scout leader found her skeletal remains in a wooded area in Cranbury on April 2, 1995, and her identity was confirmed by dental records.
Around the time she disappeared, Harvey was arrested for several assault charges and an unrelated murder. Authorities said he was identified early on as a possible suspect in Macho’s murder “but the investigative leads disappeared and the case went cold.”
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“While committing his crimes, prosecutors say Harvey usually entered unlocked homes, where he imprisoned and raped young women,” authorities claimed.
DNA testing on evidence from the victim’s bedroom could not be linked to a specific person, but testing with current DNA technology put it in line with Harvey “determining that his DNA was the only DNA evidence in the room that should not have been present,” authorities said.
Macho’s body was found in a wooded area near a ranch where Harvey worked briefly around the time of her disappearance, and her vehicle was found abandoned at a nearby sewage plant, within walking distance of Harvey’s home, authorities said.
A New Jersey man who died in prison several years ago was found responsible by DNA testing for the rape and murder of a woman in 1984. (New Jersey)
Harvey was sentenced to death and later to life in prison in the 1985 rape and murder of a Plainsboro woman, but remained innocent for three decades and awaited a third trial in the case. He was incarcerated from the time of his arrest in 1985 until his death at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton in November 2020, authorities said.
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His former attorney, Eric Kleiner, said there was no evidence linking his client to the 1985 murder “other than Harvey doing a lot of bad things”. He declined to comment on the announcement of Macho’s murder, but warned that the evidence should be carefully examined given the difficult history of Harvey’s conviction.
“There are a lot of issues with everything related to Harvey,” he said, NJ Advance Media reported for NJ.com.
Macho worked as a legal secretary and hoped to make a career as a model. Julie Burger, who was 14 when her older sister disappeared, told NJ Advance Media for NJ.com that the case “destroyed my family, the searching, the watching, the marveling.”
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When she first spoke publicly about the case, she said the family had hired “private investigators, trackers, psychics” in an effort to find the person responsible.
“We spent all the money we had,” said Burger, now a Texas resident. “We still thought that somehow she might still be alive. Maybe she was just injured, or someone was holding her. … I’m glad the case is closed, and he was. But I got it feel like he got away with it.” .”