Fla. inmate charged in '96 assault and killing of Phila. teen

Anjeanette Maldonado, a 17-year-old aspiring artist, was sexually assaulted and strangled in 1996, her body dumped in a Kensington crackhouse.

Investigators thought they'd find the killer close to home. "The answer is right there," a police inspector said, referring to her neighborhood. She lived on Mascher Street. Her body was found three blocks away on Hope Street.

Sixteen years later, the answer turned up in a Florida prison.

Rafael Crespo, 46, was charged Monday with murder, rape, and related offenses for Maldonado's death.

Crespo has been serving a prison sentence in Florida for a sex crime and was preliminarily scheduled to be released in 2015, according to the Florida Department of Corrections website.

In October, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office placed a detainer on Crespo, according to the website.

Philadelphia police announced Tuesday that the cold case had been cracked thanks to a DNA match between a sample collected during the 1996 investigation and Crespo.

Police did not immediately say what connection Crespo had, if any, with Maldonado before her slaying.

Maldonado, a senior at Franklin Learning Center at 15th and Mount Vernon Streets, was last seen by her family leaving for school Oct. 2, 1996. When she didn't come home, they reported her missing.

Two days later, an addict who had climbed into an abandoned house to smoke crack found her naked body. She had been beaten in the head with something heavy and strangled.

Police believed she was killed elsewhere and then carried into the brick house through a hole in the rear wall.

Police questioned her boyfriend, who said he had an argument with her the weekend before she died, but he was not charged.

Maldonado, the oldest of three children, was described as quiet and hardworking. She took art classes at Moore College of Art and Design and Community College of Philadelphia.

She also took karate lessons and night classes in chemistry.

On Saturdays, she worked at 12th Street Cantina inside Reading Terminal Market.

She was an art major at Franklin Learning Center and dreamed of being a computer graphics designer or commercial artist. She was excited about the senior prom and graduation.

"She was at the highest point of her happiness," her father, Herbito Soto, said at the time.