WaPo: Enhanced video helps bring arrest in '97 D.C. slaying

[#98QBKiller]

This story kind of hits close to home for me. When my g/f and I were moving back to DC a few months ago and looking for a place, the house that this happened at was one of our final two choices.

We actually decided to go ahead and take this place and we were approved by the owner, all we had to do was sign the paperwork. Well, the owner calls my girlfriend and tells her that we're good to go but says that he has one last piece of info to disclose: that someone was murdered at the place.

The fact that someone was murdered there wasn't a deal-breaker for us, but he told her that it happened 20 years ago when it really happened 12 years ago. Not to mention the fact that he waited until the last possible minute to disclose the info.

All of that combined with the fact that the killers were still on the loose, made us go for another place. Luckily, we love our new place and are glad that we opted for it, even though it's a little more pricey.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/24/AR2009112403650.html

Enhanced video helps bring arrest in '97 D.C. slaying

By Theola Labbé-DeBose

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Sharon Moskowitz was a young woman working at the Japanese Embassy and living in Adams Morgan in 1997 when she arrived home one afternoon and was killed.

D.C. police say Moskowitz, 25, returned to her apartment Jan. 21 after stepping out to buy some cold medicine. Two burglars in her building, in the 1900 block of Biltmore Street, attacked Moskowitz, tying her hands behind her back and binding her ankles with rope. She was strangled with her own white scarf.

The assailants stole her credit cards and used them in the days afterward at grocery stores in Maryland. Even though police released surveillance footage of the suspects shopping, leads dried up. The assailants remained on the loose -- for the next 12 years.

Police announced Tuesday that they had finally arrested someone in the slaying. Frederick Edward Morton, 57, was brought to the District on Monday from a federal prison in Allenwood, Pa., and D.C. detectives charged him on Tuesday with first-degree murder.

Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier credited enhanced surveillance video that police re-released in September with helping stir new leads in the case. The U.S. Secret Service were able to sharpen images of the two assailants pushing a grocery cart in a Giant Food store, and D.C. police released the video for a second time, asking the public for clues in solving the crime.

"The public came forward -- almost immediately, calls came in," Lanier said.

Lanier said that some developments in the dozen years between the crime and the arrest were helpful to closing the case, such as more sophisticated technology to improve the video quality and the increased willingness of once-reluctant witnesses to come forward.

"In many instances, members of the family think that in a cold case, we have forgotten. I assure you that we have not," Lanier said.

In the video, a man wearing glasses, an overcoat and a gray sweat shirt with "PITT" on the front is in the dairy aisle of a Giant in Shaw, at Seventh and O streets NW. He picks up a gallon of milk as a woman accompanying him pushes a cart. With the enhanced images, detectives were able to identify and track down Morton, police said. They did not say what happened to the other person in the video.

The killing rocked the quiet Adams Morgan neighborhood, with outraged neighbors flocking to community meetings and demanding more police protection.

At the time of Moskowitz's killing, she had been living in the District for just a few months, having moved from Connecticut. Then-boyfriend Simon Hirschfeld described her as "funnier and smarter than you can imagine."

"Someone made her suffer and took her life for next to nothing, and this happens every day," he told The Washington Post in 1997.

There's a video of the case here:

http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/local/arrest-sharon-moskowitz-murder-dc-112409

[Ghost of]

I vaguely remember that case, even though I lived in Philly or just moved to Michigan at the time.

After viewing the video, I'm not surprised.