Kimberly Moore, 30, a woman, was found dead on May 24, 1996, in a room at the Trade Winds Motor Court on Yonkers Avenue, just north of New York City. The motel rented rooms by the hour, the kind of place where faces blurred together and encounters were meant to leave no trace, but that morning ended with police walking into a scene that didn’t fit the usual churn of the building.
Investigators described a pattern that felt deliberate: Moore was found nude, with her hands bound, and evidence pointed to a violent killing by strangulation.
Even then, the case didn’t sit alone. Detectives in Yonkers had been haunted by two earlier killings in the city—women found in a similar state years apart, their deaths echoing the same cruel staging. With Moore’s death, the similarities sharpened into something investigators could no longer ignore, and the work shifted from a single homicide to the possibility of a serial predator. DNA evidence recovered from the victims became the thin, stubborn thread that tied the cases together, even when no name could be pinned to it.
Years passed with no arrest. The DNA profile existed, but it had nothing to match against—no suspect in custody whose genetic fingerprint could close the circle. What finally changed the direction of the investigation wasn’t a sudden confession or a tip, but a sample taken in the course of another case: Francisco Acevedo was in custody on a drunken-driving matter when his DNA wound up in a place where investigators could compare it to old evidence. Authorities said that match connected him to all three murders, including Moore’s.
Once the match came back, the long-stalled cases lurched into motion. Acevedo was arrested on murder charges while incarcerated, and prosecutors framed the DNA as the victims’ voices finally pointing to a single defendant after decades of silence. The case against him was built around forensic evidence and the argument that the same person had left the same signature across multiple crime scenes. Acevedo insisted he hadn’t killed the women, maintaining that any DNA transfer came from sex rather than murder, and his defense tried to separate biology from violence.
In November 2011, a Westchester County jury convicted Acevedo of three murders. He was acquitted of rape charges associated with the same case, but the murder convictions stood, ending the central question that had hovered over Moore’s death since 1996: whether there would ever be a named suspect held responsible. In 2012, he was sentenced to an aggregate term of 75 years to life in prison, structured as consecutive sentences that ensured he would spend decades behind bars.
