Waseem Daker, a prime suspect for 14 years, was charged Friday in the 1995 murder of a Cobb County flight attendant.
Karmen Smith was strangled to death while living in the in-law suite of a house owned by Loretta Spencer-Blatz, a medical worker who was stalked by Daker for more than a year. The former Georgia Tech honor student, who was just 18 at the time of Smith's death, was later sentenced to consecutive five-year sentences in the stalking case.
Daker was a suspect in Smith's murder from the start. Then-Cobb police Chief Culver Johnson said in 1995 that a number of theories were being investigated and that "it might be related to several stalking incidents that have occurred in the general area."
Smith's 5-year-old son Nicholas was stabbed during the attack but survived.
Cobb County Police spokesman Joe Hernandez said the evidence used to charge Daker with Smith's murder wasn't new. "It had been unidentifiable before," he said, referring to an absence of matches between the evidence and Daker's DNA.
But earlier this year, while revisiting cold cases, Cobb's forensics unit decided to ship DNA evidence from the Smith case to an out-of-state lab. "This time they came up with a match," Hernandez said.
Daker, who has a Lawrenceville address, was arrested without incident by Gwinnett County authorities and by Friday night's end he'll be booked into Cobb County Jail, where he'll be charged with murder and two counts each of aggravated assault, aggravated stalking and burglary.
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