In 1998, the body of librarian Andrea Cincotta, 52, was found dead in a bedroom closet in the Arlington apartment the single mother shared with her fiancé who found her. Police would consider him the prime suspect in the August 22 murder, interrogating him for 28 hours in the three days after he body was discovered.
But the case would go cold.
Cincotta’s son, Kevin, who was 24 at the time of her murder, would embark on a two-decade journey for justice. Kevin Cincotta tells Dateline in a two-hour episode that airs at 9 p.m. Friday that he thought it was the “computer guy” who committed the crime at the North Rhodes Street apartment, not Johnson.
“They had tunnel vision to the exclusion of almost everything else,” Kevin Cincotta says of the Arlington police in a preview of the “Behind the Closet Door” episode.
The Cold Case Unit of the police department would take up the case again in 2013. In November 2021 police would charge the fiancé, James Christopher Johnson, with murder-for-hire. They also charged convicted rapist Bobby Joe Leonard, with first-degree murder. Leonard claimed Johnson hired him for the killing. Cincotta had given an old computer to Leonard, the maintenance man who worked around her apartment a month before her murder.
After just an hour of deliberation, a jury acquitted Johnson and questioned why he had been charged, The Washington Post reported. In 2022, Bobby Joe Leonard, 54, would plead guilty to first degree murder.
Dateline‘s story interviews Kevin Cincotta, his father, Howard Cincotta, retired homicide detective Jim Trainum, attorney Manuel Leiva, jury foreman Chen Ling, and others.
Feature image courtesy Dateline
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