Cold-case witness says he ID'd the wrong man

More than a decade before Philadelphia police say DNA linked Rafael Crespo to the 1996 rape and slaying of 17-year-old Anjeanette Maldonado, detectives had another suspect - her boyfriend.

Maldonado's friends said she had broken up with Christian Vrabec, a classmate at Franklin Learning Center, the day before she disappeared. And James Moses, one of Vrabec's Kensington buddies, told detectives that Vrabec had confessed to him that he killed the teenager.

On Tuesday, Moses nervously admitted that he'd made it all up.

"I felt threatened," Moses testified at Crespo's nonjury murder trial. "If I'm going up the rails, I'm going to take somebody with me."

Moses, who gave two statements to detectives investigating Maldonado's Sept. 30, 1996, rape and slaying, testified that "I had the feeling they were going to pin it on me."

"They were hounding me and hounding me, and so I told them what they wanted to hear," Moses told defense attorney Michael F. Giampietro.

Pressed by Giampietro, Moses acknowledged that detectives never abused him or threatened to arrest him for the killing.

Moses was so uncomfortable walking to the witness chair that he asked for Vrabec's friends to leave the courtroom. Giampietro and Assistant District Attorney Carlos Vega agreed, and the friends left while he testified.

Several other friends of Maldonado said they, too, suspected Vrabec was involved in her death, because in the hours after she was found, he called and seemed to know a lot of details about the body and how it was found.

Vrabec, however, was never charged in the slaying. He could be called as a witness Wednesday when the trial resumes before Common Pleas Court Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart.

Maldonado was last seen on Sept. 30, when she left for school. She never arrived.

On Oct. 2, 1996, her nude body - beaten, raped and strangled - was found inside a vacant house in the 1700 block of North Hope Street.

Although detectives questioned neighbors and classmates over two years, the investigation stalled.

Then, in April 2012, homicide Detective John McDermott received a letter from police DNA analysts reporting that semen found in Maldonado's body matched DNA in the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).

The matching DNA belonged to Crespo; it had been collected several years earlier, when he was arrested in Florida for sexually assaulting a young girl.

The following month, McDermott traveled to a prison in Hardee County, Fla., to question Crespo.

McDermott testified that Crespo confessed that he accosted Maldonado at Front and Norris Streets as she walked to school.

Crespo's statement says he was looking for a prostitute and Maldonado offered to have sex for $20. Crespo said they had sex for about 45 minutes in the Hope Street house and Maldonado asked him to choke her during sex. When she became unconscious, Crespo's statement reads, he left her but did not know she was dead.

Maldonado's autopsy showed she died of strangulation, but also that she was struck in the face, dragged around the floor, and hit at least twice in the head with a blunt object, cracking her skull.

Crespo, 49, waived his right to a jury trial in exchange for the District Attorney's Office's not seeking the death penalty.

Despite Crespo's confession and the DNA match, Giampietro has called a series of witnesses to revisit their statements to police to bolster his contention that Crespo had sex with Maldonado but did not kill her.