An 89-year-old woman was raped and murdered in 1994. Now, DNA from her nightgown has identified her killer

Lillian DeCloe was an elderly woman with memory problems and little money to her name in 1994. So when a man came in through the window of her Pompano Beach home, looking for something to take, the 89-year-old dressed in a pink-checkered nightgown didn’t have anything to give him.

He ransacked the house, beat her, raped her, and killed her in broad daylight. She had less than $50 in the house; the only thing he took was her gold wedding band.

Despite the brazenness of the attack, Pompano Beach police detectives who investigated the case in 1994 came away with no named suspects or eyewitnesses. They asked the public for assistance, to no avail. The case went cold.

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But DeCloe’s killer had lived right around the corner, detectives now say.

He was convicted of crimes five years before he killed DeCloe, records show. Only months after DeCloe died, he was arrested again. But when detectives looked for him in the system, they did not find him.

Then, almost 30 years later, a DNA connection between DeCloe’s nightgown and her killer’s son led Broward detectives to name him Tuesday: Johnny Mack Brown, a Vietnam veteran who lived on and off the streets, but whose address places him only a few houses away from her in the early 90′s.

Despite the time it took, the Sheriff’s Office hopes the closing of the case will offer some closure to DeCloe’s family and her community, left reeling in the wake of a senseless act of brutality.

“When a murder is committed in any part of this county, it creates a shockwave, a devastation, a fear, an uncertainty, and an insecurity in the environment in which we live,” Sheriff Gregory Tony said at a news conference Tuesday. “And that doesn’t go away when a suspect dies, it doesn’t go away when a witness dies, it doesn’t go away when a victim, if they’re killed, is gone.”

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The day DeCloe died began as any other hot Saturday in April. In the morning, she went out to buy a newspaper. That evening, her niece, June Nicholas, came to bring her groceries.

“Auntie, where are you?” Nicholas recalled asking as she entered the house about 6 p.m. in a video released by the Sheriff’s Office. She remembered how she went down the hallway, looked to the right and saw her aunt’s body on the bedroom floor.

Drawers were left open. A floor lamp lay there, overturned. And DeCloe’s nightgown was askew, leading detectives to believe she may have been assaulted.

Afterward, Nicholas took a year off work to cope and had someone else care for her kids. She had trouble sleeping at night.

“I would lay in my bed and I would see her on the floor,” Nicholas said in the video.

In the days and weeks after DeCloe’s death, detectives pursued multiple leads, but they did not interview Brown.

“He wasn’t even on anybody’s radar,” Detective David Towsley said at Tuesday’s news conference. “We investigated numerous leads at the time, looked at numerous suspects. His name never came up.”

Detectives tested his DNA but did not match it to any other victims, Towsley said.

In 2004, detectives with the Broward Sheriff’s Office Crime Lab had begun DNA testing on cold cases. They reopened the DeCloe case and tested her nightgown. This time, they found traces of semen, which they ran through the state DNA database, but “didn’t get a hit,” Towsley said.

Brown had been arrested three times by then.

In 1989, he was convicted of grand theft and dealing in stolen property. Then, in October 1994, six months after DeCloe’s death, he was arrested on aggravated battery charges. In 2002, two years before the Sheriff’s Office tested the nightgown, Brown was again accused of aggravated battery and lewd or lascivious molestation of a child under 16.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement keeps a database of DNA samples from individuals either arrested or convicted for offenses including lewdness and theft.

It is unclear why the DNA found on the nightgown did not get a match, or if Brown’s DNA was in the system at the time. The Sheriff’s Office referred questions about the DNA database to FDLE, which did not respond after hours.

The case “sat” again until 2019, when the Sheriff’s Office launched its Cold Case Unit. By this time, new technology allowed detectives to use DNA to find possible family members of suspects who aren’t in the system themselves. The Sheriff’s Office asked the FDLE to search its database, in hopes it might turn up close relatives of the killer. This time, they found a match: a man who was very likely Brown’s son, whose DNA was on file because he had served time in Florida prison.

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Detectives looked into Brown for the first time since DeCloe was killed, realizing he had lived a few doors down. His family members said that he had PTSD and struggled with drug addiction.

Brown died in 2010, 16 years after the murder. He was buried as a veteran at the South Florida National Cemetery in Palm Beach County.

In August, detectives obtained a court order and unearthed his coffin from the ground to collect DNA from his remains. It matched the DNA left on the nightgown, mixed into traces of DeCloe’s own DNA.

DNA results come in the form of probabilities, and the probability of a match, and that Brown killed DeCloe, is exceedingly high: it is 66.8 trillion times more likely that the DNA on that nightgown came from Brown and DeCloe than from DeCloe and another person, according to Karen Crenshaw, the manager of Broward’s DNA Unit.

“It’s a very large number,” she said.

Though there will be no arrest or trial, the case is considered solved. Brown will never explain himself, or explain his seemingly random act of violence that April day.

“I think it was just an opportunity,” Towsley said. “He lived close by, only a few houses down. When he fell on hard times, and he went homeless, and he had a drug habit … it looked like a burglary gone bad.”