DNA Helps Find Man Guilty in '83 Killing

French Visitor to D.C. Was Raped, Stabbed

In one of the first cases in the District in which DNA was used as key evidence in closing a decades-old investigation, a D.C. Superior Court jury yesterday found a former church deacon guilty of raping and murdering a 57-year-old woman in 1983.

Melvin Jackson Jr., 56, stood expressionless as the jury forewoman, after less than a day of deliberations, announced that the panel found him guilty of the rape and murder of Raymonde Plantiveau, a French citizen who was visiting her daughter in the Glover Park section of Northwest Washington.

At the time of his arrest in 2006, Jackson was a deacon at the Sonship Church Center, a small storefront church founded by his mother in the Northeast Washington neighborhood of Trinidad.

DNA evidence collected from the crime scene had remained untested in a box stored in a Southeast Washington police warehouse for decades.

Detective James Trainum of the D.C. police department's Crime Review Project, along with several unpaid police interns, discovered the box in 2004 and sent it to the FBI. In 2005, the FBI matched the DNA sample to Jackson's DNA profile, which was kept in a Virginia database after he was arrested in the 1970s for robbery.

According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Trescott, on Dec. 1, 1983, Jackson broke into the house where Plantiveau's daughter and her two female roommates lived. They were at work at the time.

Trescott said Plantiveau was napping in her daughter's bed and surprised Jackson during the burglary. Jackson then raped and stabbed her in her back 21 times, Trescott said.

Her partially nude body was found lying face down in her daughter's bloodied bed, according to medical examiner photos shown during the trial. A knife was next to her left leg. The phone cord had been ripped from the second-floor bedroom wall, and jewelry, her purse and about $100 were stolen from the house.

"That woman was stabbed 21 times," Trescott said during closing arguments, pounding his fist in his hand as he counted from one to 21. Trescott called the stabbings "violent overkill." Plantiveau's daughter Monique sat in the courtroom with her sister Annie and wept during Trescott's demonstration.

Trescott said the DNA evidence was all that prosecutors needed to link Jackson to the scene.

"In 1984, we didn't have DNA testing, but technology and law enforcement caught up to each other," he said.

Jackson's attorney, Ross D. Hecht, argued that his client, who was 31 at the time, had consensual sex with Plantiveau days before the slaying. He said no witnesses or evidence left at the scene linked his client to the murder and rape.