Man pleads guilty to cold-case murder
Oct 03, 2017OUTCOME: 38 year prison sentence
Facing the death penalty, a 29-year-old North Carolina man pleaded guilty to capital murder Tuesday and was sentenced to 38 years in prison for kidnapping, stabbing and strangling his former co-worker. ... Michael Ryan Brown maintained his innocence but conceded that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him of capital murder and abduction with the intent to defile. Prosecutor Phil Evans agreed to drop three other charges. Circuit Judge Junius Fulton III sentenced Brown to life in prison for capital murder but reduced it to 38 years, in accordance with the plea bargain. He gave him 20 years for the kidnapping charge but included it in the time for the murder sentence. “Our goal was to save his life,” said Brown’s lawyer, Emily Munn. Brown, who was also represented by state-level capital public defenders, was accused of strangling his co-worker from the Norfolk Botanical Garden, Angie Lechlitner, after binding her and raping her with an object in January 2008 at her Fox Hall house on Shafer Street. He wasn’t charged until 2015. On Jan. 19, 2008, three days after Lechlitner last showed up for work, a co-worker went to her house with his wife, tried the front door and, after getting no response, went inside through the back. He found Lechlitner’s body, lying face-up on the bathroom floor. She was covered in a comforter, and her two socked feet stretched out into the hallway. The co-worker left and called police. An electrical cord was tied in a double knot tightly around Lechlitner’s neck, investigators have testified. Her hands were bound with electrical tape. She had been stabbed in the back, a wound that nicked her lung. An autopsy revealed that Lechlitner, a 28-year-old nursery technician, had trauma to her genitals, including cuts and bruising, medical examiner Elizabeth Kinnison said, according to court documents. Lechlitner died from the combination of being strangled and stabbed, Kinnison said. Brown was not an obvious suspect from the start. Police found her DNA and someone else’s on the murder weapon and the tape. Detectives eliminated others they knew had been in contact with Lechlitner around the time of the murder. They tested DNA found on cigarettes near the crime scene. Nothing hit. Investigators homed in on Brown when Botanical Garden workers told them Lechlitner gave him rides to work, Evans said. Brown, who’d worked there between 2005 and 2007, had trouble finding steady transportation to work and, because he lived right next to Lechlitner, she gave him a lift. Detectives tried to find Brown at his Fox Hall house but learned he’d gone to the Peninsula and then to North Carolina. Detectives traveled there in July 2009 but didn’t find him. Over the years, they continued working the case. Finally, in September 2015, they tracked down Brown in North Carolina. His DNA matched that found on the murder weapon – a boombox cord – and on the spool that had housed the electrical tape. Detectives also found his fingerprints in Lechlitner’s bathroom, near where her body was discovered. During an interview, Brown told detectives he’d never been inside her house. Brown was charged with murder and extradited to Hampton Roads. On Tuesday, Fulton complimented detectives for their tireless work. Without them, Lechlitner’s murder would’ve gone unsolved even longer, Fulton said. Cold-case detectives, including Vic Powell and Ray Smith, worked the case. Richard Brady, who was one of the original investigators, won 2016 Officer of the Year, in part for his work on solving Lechlitner’s murder. The judge also knocked Brown for failing to admit what he did, prolonging the Lechlitners’ heartache. Then Fulton offered his condolences to family members who traveled from Indiana and Pennsylvania to watch the hearing. Lechlitner’s father and mother were two of about a dozen relatives and friends who sobbed as Evans read their letters to Fulton.
