When 15-year-old Nicole Reilly was found strangled in a desolate Kensington lot, wearing just boxers and a T-shirt, family and friends swore that she knew her killer.
They apparently were right.
Police announced yesterday that Nicole's alleged killer, Brian McDonald, 27, had finally been tracked down and charged with her 2004 slaying.
McDonald, of Firth Street near Jasper in Kensington, was actually taken into custody last week after physical evidence tied him to a rape from 2003.
Additional physical evidence connected McDonald to Nicole's slaying, said Capt. Benjamin Naish, head of the police Public Affairs Office. McDonald also was charged with kidnapping and raping the teen.
Naish said Nicole knew McDonald, who had "some connection to the family," but he wasn't sure what motivated McDonald to brutally slay the quiet teen.
Naish noted that detectives felt McDonald was a suspect from the start of the investigation. McDonald has an arrest record that dates back to 1997 and includes numerous drug charge convictions.
Nicole's friends told the Daily News in 2004 that the teen broke her 11 p.m. curfew on Aug. 23, the night before she was found dead and sat outside on her step into the early morning hours, talking to a teenage boy while wearing plaid boxers and a white T-shirt.
Neighbors organized a search party when Nicole's mother, Dawn Fox, found her daughter's pocketbook and cell phone in their home and thought that the teen was just missing.
But a man who was walking his dog near a weed-filled lot on Martha Street near Hagert - just a block away from Reilly's house - found her lifeless body on Aug. 24, 2004. She appeared to have suffered blunt-force trauma wounds to her head and body.
"She was killed by [McDonald's] hands in some way," Naish said.
The teen was a beloved sophomore at Kensington High School who delivered the Inquirer as a part-time job and dreamed of one day becoming a doctor.
In the days after her daughter's death, Fox said she was sure the killer was someone her daughter knew. "I just want him to step up to the plate and see what he has done to my child," she said, shortly after Nicole's slaying.
Naish said homicide investigators relentlessly pursued a resolution to the heart-wrenching case. The detectives "really worked extremely hard . . . to have some justice for this crime. They did an outstanding job," he said. *
Staff writer Simone Weichselbaum contributed to this report.