DNA Evidence Links Colored Chap to Rape and Fatal Stabbing of White Woman in 1992

John Robert Capers.

Why did it take so long for a semen stain to get tested?

You’d think that’d be pretty high on the priorities list.

AP:

A Minneapolis man has been charged with second-degree murder in connection with the 1992 stabbing of a St. Paul woman whose partially clothed body was found near an old entrance to a streetcar tunnel, prosecutors said Wednesday.

John Robert Capers, 65, is scheduled to make his first court appearance on Thursday.

He’s charged in the death of 39-year-old Annette Seymour. A citizen discovered Seymour’s body on July 14, 1992 near the entrance to the old Selby Avenue streetcar tunnel below the St. Paul Cathedral.

She was clothed in only a T-shirt, and had 11 stab wounds to her neck, chest, back and arms. An autopsy showed she died of blood loss from her wounds.

The case went unsolved for years. According to the criminal complaint, in 2009, the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension tested some evidence in the case and found that DNA from a semen stain matched Capers.

Further testing in 2011 confirmed the match, the complaint said.

Annette Seymour.