’95 Murder of Denise Raymond Reopens After Vacated Convictions

The murder of Denise Raymond, in 1995, was extraordinarily savage by any measure.

The killers trailed Ms. Raymond, a Federal Express executive, into her Bronx apartment as she returned from work. They gagged her with a sock and duct tape. They blindfolded her and handcuffed and hogtied her legs and ankles. Then, as she squirmed, facedown, on her bedroom floor, they shoved two pillows over her head and fired two bullets into her brain with a 9-millimeter pistol.

It took about two months for the police to make several arrests in the case. Murder charges were brought. Convictions followed. And the story line of how Ms. Raymond came to die in a drug-related plot became gospel in her Soundview neighborhood.

But now, with three murder convictions vacated by a judge on Wednesday, the mystery of Ms. Raymond's death suddenly reopened, and at its heart was a basic question: If these three men did not kill Ms. Raymond, then who did?

"By focusing on these guys, they let the real killers get away," said Earl Ward, a lawyer who represented one of three men, Michael Cosme. "This was a brutal killing from 1995. Who knows where the killers are now?"

The Police Department has reopened the case, with a new team of detectives replacing long-retired ones who first worked it, Paul J. Browne, the department's chief spokesman, said Thursday.

Prosecutors have not abandoned their case against Mr. Cosme and two co-defendants, Devon Ayers and Carlos Perez, who were freed from prison after serving 17 years for a murder that they have always denied committing. "We are continuing the investigation to see if we can retry this case," said Steven Reed, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney's office.

A fourth man, Israel Vasquez, was also convicted in Ms. Raymond's murder, but a state appeals court, citing insufficient evidence, overturned that conviction in 2007.

The high-profile murder of Ms. Raymond on Jan. 17, 1995, ignited fear among residents in her 19-story apartment building on Boynton Avenue, a complex with 24-hour security and little crime.

Those who knew Ms. Raymond, 38, described a quiet, well-liked woman who had worked for Federal Express for more than a decade and took college courses at night to attain a master's degree from Columbia University.

No one could imagine who would do such a thing to her. It was thought at the time that perhaps Ms. Raymond knew her attacker, because her door, which had multiple locks, showed no sign of forced entry.

Detectives quickly zeroed in on Ms. Raymond's former boyfriend, Charles Edward McKinnon, a tall, handsome computer technician from Flushing, Queens. Prosecutors charged Mr. McKinnon with conspiracy to commit murder, alleging that he hired the men to kill Ms. Raymond because he feared she would go to the police about his involvement in a drug operation.

The prosecutors accused Mr. McKinnon, a married father of two children, of getting back in touch with Ms. Raymond shortly before her murder. His motive was not love, the prosecutors said, but a desire to enlist her to help him ship drugs through Federal Express.

"They had some cockamamie theory that she had to be killed because one of the drug dealers ordered it," recalled Edward Dudley, who was Mr. McKinnon's lawyer in the 1998 trial.

The theory was actually more elaborate. Ms. Raymond's murder was tied to another in the neighborhood, that of a livery cab driver, Baithe Diop. But when the Diop case fell apart last year, the Raymond case also became suspect.

Mr. McKinnon, who died about five years ago of a heart problem, was acquitted; testimony from two key witnesses was discredited by defense evidence.

Mr. Ward, the lawyer for Mr. Cosme, said detectives had been so focused on Mr. McKinnon and the other men that they had failed to develop leads in the case. For instance, he said, detectives had information that after the murder, someone had pawned a bracelet believed to have belonged to Ms. Raymond.

"I don't know who killed Ms. Raymond to this day," Mr. Dudley said. "The way she was killed, the way she was found, tied up and shot, it was crazy. It wasn't a robbery. It was a revenge-type thing for something. It was definitely not random."

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