BOSTON, Oct. 18, 2012—A dead man identified as a suspect in one 1970s murder is now believed to have committed a second based on DNA evidence unavailable at the time of the crimes, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley and Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said today.

Conley and Davis today identified MICHAEL SUMPTER (D.O.B. 9/26/47) as the assailant in the Dec. 12, 1973, homicide and sexual assault of 24-year-old Mary Lee McClain in her Beacon Hill apartment. The investigation at the time revealed that an unknown perpetrator had gained access to the Mount Vernon Street apartment she shared with two roommates, raped her, and strangled her to death. Though Boston Police homicide detectives seized evidence from the scene and conducted several interviews, no suspect was identified until a grant-funded cold case investigation led to Sumpter in May of this year.

Murder victim Mary McClain in an undated family photo

Sumpter died of cancer in 2001.

“This is a story about an old case and new technology, but it’s also a story about hope and perseverance,” DA Conley said. “Mary’s family never lost their faith that her murder would be solved. Investigators stored the crucial evidence for decades under laboratory conditions even after the case went cold. When a new team brought the latest science to the table, that hope and perseverance paid off with a positive identification of her killer. After all these years, we hope this news and the finality of the suspect’s death to cancer can provide them some sense of closure.”

“Our dedicated detectives and our Crime Lab analysts worked tirelessly on this case,” Commissioner Davis said. “They never gave up, leaving no stone unturned to provide the family with answers. We hope this information gives them some peace.”

McClain’s homicide is the second to be attributed to Sumpter after his death. In 2010, authorities linked him to the 1972 rape and murder of Ellen Rutchick, 23, in her Beacon Street residence. He is also believed to have committed the 1985 rape of a 21-year-old woman inside a Marlborough Street apartment. Though chronologically the last offense Sumpter is believed to have committed, this 1985 assault was the first cold case linked to the suspect through DNA evidence.

At the time of his death, Sumpter was serving a 15- to 20-year prison sentence for yet another sexual assault – the 1975 rape of a 21-year-old woman inside her Beacon Street home.

In all three of the recently-solved cases, Sumpter was identified as a suspect after Boston Police detectives and Suffolk prosecutors submitted crime scene evidence to the Boston Police Crime Laboratory and, in turn, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, a database of DNA samples from unsolved crimes and known offenders.

Sumpter was first linked to the 1985 attack amid an early 21st century project to re-investigate unsolved sexual assaults using DNA evidence. In 2002, biological evidence recovered from the crime scene was processed and uploaded to CODIS.

That uploaded biological evidence was a “hit” – a match to a known suspect, later identified as Sumpter, who had been ordered to provide a DNA sample to the database after his conviction for the 1975 rape. Sumpter was already dead, however, and could not be charged.

In 2005, independent of this development, members of Ellen Rutchick’s family contacted Boston Police to see if her Jan. 6, 1972, murder could be reviewed for potential leads. Working under a National Institute of Justice grant that provides local law enforcement with resources to identify, review, and investigate potentially solvable cold cases, homicide detectives took a fresh look at her case using modern scientific techniques.

Because Rutchick had also been sexually assaulted, detectives attempted to upload biological evidence found at the scene but were unable to do so because of the manner in which it had been affixed to slides in the 1970s.

Investigators sent the slides to an independent laboratory specializing in DNA analysis, which was ultimately able to isolate a genetic profile from the slides. That profile was uploaded to CODIS and, in July 2009, hit on Sumpter’s profile.

Earlier this year and working under the same federal grant, cold case detectives submitted biological evidence recovered from the scene of McClain’s murder to the crime lab, where criminalists extracted a DNA profile and again uploaded it to CODIS. The result, officials said, was another “hit” on Sumpter’s stored DNA profile in May.

In addition to reviewing the evidence in McClain’s murder, police and prosecutors considered whether she might have had any legitimate connection with Sumpter. After interviewing witnesses from the 1973 investigative file and her only living relative, detectives could find nothing to suggest that the victim might have known or been familiar with Sumpter. Authorities also considered Sumpter’s documented offenses and the patterns of those offenses – specifically, his violent sexual attacks on women in the areas of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay.

Based on those reviews, Conley and Davis agreed that, if Sumpter were alive today, he would be indicted for McClain’s murder.

Last month, the same investigative techniques led to the conviction of serial rapist CHARLES H. BROOK, Jr. (D.O.B. 10/3/44), for the Nov. 31, 1989, murder of 87-year-old Zahia Salem in her South End home. Just as Sumpter did, Brook had DNA samples on file because of prior rape convictions and was identified amid a grant-funded cold case review.

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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.