Regina Granville was a 34-year-old Black woman whose death is dated July 14, 2000, in Brooklyn, New York. In the public record that is easiest to locate online today, her name does not appear consistently alongside the best-documented homicide investigations from that same Brooklyn timeframe, which makes it difficult to confirm the circumstances of her killing, the exact location where she was found, or whether investigators publicly tied her case to any single series.
That summer in Brooklyn is most often remembered for a string of strangulation murders in Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant that drove detectives to assemble what became known as the Brooklyn North Homicide Task Force, chasing a killer the press would dub the “Brooklyn Strangler.” Investigators initially focused on a homeless man who moved among sex workers in the area, but DNA testing eliminated him, and the case pivoted into a deeper street-level search for the person who kept returning to the same neighborhoods, the same vulnerable circles, and the same kind of violence.
According to widely circulated accounts of that investigation, the break came when the man who had been cleared by DNA stayed in contact with detectives and pointed them toward another homeless drug user, Vincent Johnson. When Johnson refused to voluntarily provide DNA, detectives collected saliva he left behind in public, and the resulting profile was reported as matching biological evidence from multiple crime scenes. The pattern the task force had been trying to hold in its hands—who, where, and how—suddenly had a name.
From there, the legal story moved quickly compared with the fear that had preceded it. Public summaries describe Johnson confessing to the murders of five women—Patricia Sullivan, Rhonda Tucker, Joanne Feliciano, Vivian Caraballo, and Laura Nusser—and later pleading guilty to one count of first-degree murder and five counts of second-degree murder, receiving a sentence of life without parole.
Those same summaries set the known Brooklyn Strangler series largely between 1999 and the first half of 2000, and the victims they name do not include Regina Granville. With that mismatch—between the commonly listed victims and the identifying details you provided—no arrest or charged suspect can be reliably described here as being publicly linked to Granville’s death in the mainstream accounts that document the Brooklyn strangulation cases and their prosecution.
