A Georgia man arrested last month in the 1997 killing of a Florida woman has been extradited to Orlando to face charges after detectives found new evidence linking him to the crime, according to reports.
Jimmy Lee Mahone, 51, was transferred Tuesday from the Bibb County Jail in Macon in the 23-year-old slaying of 42-year-old Donna Byrd.
Mahone maintains his innocence, although Orange County Sheriff’s officials who reopened the case in September said a bloody fingerprint and other evidence have emerged that connect Mahone to the woman’s death, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Three days after Byrd was killed, police arrested Mahone on drug charges about four blocks from the apartment where the woman was found beaten and strangled, according to the arrest report.
On the night of the killing, deputies were called to investigate a potential burglary after a homeowner found a broken window on the vacant apartment attached to her home, The Associated Press reported. Inside they found Byrd’s body.
Reports said Byrd worked as a prostitute and often sought vacant locations like this one to meet up with clients, according to the AP, which cited the arrest report.
At the crime scene, investigators found four fingerprints, including one in the victim’s blood on a wall in a bathroom of the apartment. They compared them to men in the area with a history of raping and killing women, but none matched, the Sentinel reported.
This past September, 23 years after the crime, officials ran the evidence through a nationwide criminal database known as AFIS, short for the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, where the prints were matched to Mahone’s, reports said.
Florida investigators immediately traveled to Georgia to interview Mahone, who denied knowing Byrd. He did, however, admit to hanging out with prostitutes back in 1997 in the Orlando area.
During questioning, Mahone told authorities he was a pimp, the arrest report said, explaining that he “protected the prostitutes.”
“Mahone denied ever beating or killing a prostitute or any woman in his life,” the report said.
Mahone is locked up in the Orange County Jail on a $100,000 bond for second-degree murder.
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