Solved cold cases in Connecticut
4 documented cases.
Concetta 'Penney' Serra
Concetta 'Penney' Serra, a 21-year-old dental assistant, was chased through the Temple Street parking garage in downtown New Haven, Connecticut, and stabbed once in the chest on July 16, 1973. The case became one of Connecticut's most notorious unsolved murders, including the wrongful 1984 arrest of an innocent man, before forensic advances finally identified the killer. A bloody fingerprint left on a tissue box in the victim's car was matched in 1997 to Edward R. Grant, a Waterbury auto-body worker, and DNA from a bloodstained handkerchief at the scene confirmed the link. Grant was arrested in 1999 and convicted of murder on May 28, 2002, nearly 29 years after the crime.
Janet Couture
Janet Couture, 21, who was doing office work and some modeling, was found stabbed to death on October 13, 1973, in her Cannon Road home in East Hartford, Connecticut. Police said she was home alone when a man came in through a window. George Legere, who visited men who lived next door, was an early suspect. He told police he had been in her apartment to use the phone and denied harming her, and police said there was not enough evidence to charge him. The case stayed open for more than five decades. In 2019 a DNA sample taken from Legere in Massachusetts matched evidence in a 1984 kidnapping and rape in Avon; he was arrested in 2021 and sentenced in 2023 to 25 years. That arrest led East Hartford detectives to review older cases with similarities to Couture's. In 2025 a fellow inmate told police that Legere had admitted killing Couture and had signed a written confession in July. Legere then confessed to detectives, according to the arrest warrant affidavit, and was charged with murder on September 24, 2025. He was found unresponsive in his cell on October 3 and died early on October 4, before any trial. The cause of death was listed as pending further study.
Jumar Joiner
Jumar Joiner, a 25-year-old man from Windsor, Connecticut, was fatally shot on May 3, 2008, in the area of West Morningside Street in Hartford. According to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, he suffered multiple gunshot wounds. In the days, weeks, and months after the killing, investigators followed up on tips and leads but made no arrest, and the case went cold for nearly a decade. In 2017, the Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice's Cold Case Unit received new leads through its tip line, including the names of two men who told police they had witnessed the shooting. That witness information helped lead to the March 2022 arrest of Mark White, who was then in custody in New Mexico on unrelated illegal-handgun and cocaine charges. A Hartford Superior Court jury found White guilty of murder on March 7, 2025, and on June 6, 2025, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison with credit for about six months already served.
San Chiu Wong
San Chiu Wong, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in New Britain, Connecticut, was shot in the back of the head and robbed in his own kitchen on March 17, 1997. The killing went unsolved for years. The break came not from a witness or a confession but from a gun: thirteen days after the New Britain robbery, Gino Gentile fired the same .380 caliber handgun in a shooting in Paterson, New Jersey, that left one man dead and two others shot. When firearms experts at the Connecticut State Police Forensic Laboratory compared the ballistics, they proved conclusively that the same weapon had been used in both states, tying Gentile, by then serving a 40-year sentence for the New Jersey killings, to the cold New Britain case. Gentile was convicted of felony murder, first-degree robbery and conspiracy and sentenced to 100 years, and his getaway driver, Edgar DeJesus, pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 19 years.