On June 27, almost exactly 20 years after police found the body of Jeeta Lynn Graeber in her South Austin apartment, APD cold case detectives charged 44-year-old Martin Torres with capital murder in connection with her murder, as well as in connection with the rape-murder of a second victim, 19-year-old Cerrelle Belt. Graeber, a Braniff Airlines flight attendant, was raped, strangled, and left in the bathtub of her apartment on June 29, 1984; nearly six years later, on June 3, 1990, police found Belt, who had also been raped and strangled, in her apartment in North Austin.
In 1998, the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Lab extracted a male DNA profile from evidence collected in the Graeber case, and in May 1999 the lab matched the DNA profile to evidence collected in the Belt murder investigation; still, investigators were unable to find a match in the DNA database. In October 2002, an APD fingerprint tech pulled an additional print off of a newspaper coupon found at Graeber’s apartment; two years later, in November 2004, police positively identified the print as belonging to Torres. (Torres lived in the same apartment complex as Belt and was initially interviewed by detectives canvassing the property for witnesses in 1990.) Nonetheless, it wasn’t until November 2005 that police were able to locate Torres, who had been extradited to his native Mexico in 1997 after being convicted of a marijuana-related charge in Austin; and it took another eight months before Mexican officials approved Torres’ extradition to the U.S. Torres was charged and booked into the Travis Co. jail last week on a $1.25 million bond. To secure Torres’ extradition, prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty for either murder; if convicted, Torres faces up to life in prison in each case.
This article appears in July 7 • 2006.