New DNA tests have linked a District man to the 1997 murder of a woman who was found strangled in the heart of a hardscrabble neighborhood known then as “The Jungle.” D.C. police charged John Fitzgerald General, 46, with second-degree murder in the death of Deborah McKinney, 38. Her body was discovered nude from the waist down in the garage stairwell of a small apartment complex on the 900 block of M Street NW. A trail of blood was found leading away from McKinney’s body and up the stairs into the building. Four months later, a security guard at the same Mount Vernon Apartments discovered 19-year-old Jennifer Zoch bound, strangled and dumped in the garage. The neighborhood in Shaw had been a hangout for hookers and johns, but neither McKinney nor Zoch had criminal records in D.C., police said. Police looked at possibilities that the two killings were the work of one killer but found no evidence of a link. Until this week, both deaths had gone unsolved. At the time of the slayings, a man named Maurice Drew told police that on the night of McKinney’s death, he and another man used drugs with McKinney in the stairwell, according to a police report. Drew did not know the identity of the other man. Drew has since died, police said. In 2006, a DNA profile was taken from the semen collected from McKinney and entered into the FBI’s DNA database. In January, genetic evidence was found to match General. Police showed General a photograph of McKinney, but he denied knowing her. He acknowledged, though, that he had been arrested for possession of cocaine in nearby Dupont Circle a week before her death, and that he had been homeless and had slept in garages. General agreed to give a saliva sample to police, which was submitted, along with blood splattered on McKinney’s shirt from the crime scene, to the D.C. police crime lab, according to police. Last week, a DNA analyst concluded that General’s DNA matched that of the blood on the shirt and that the chances of finding such a match from a random person were about 1 in 5.4 quintillion. The analyst also eliminated Drew as a possible match.
