Judge convicts Michigan inmate in 1985 Christmas Eve kidnapping and murder of Jacksonville teen Leslie McCray

A Duval County judge on Thursday found David Nelson Austin guilty of kidnapping and murdering 17-year-old Leslie McCray, who was taken at knifepoint from her Jacksonville home in the early hours of Christmas Eve 1985 and found stabbed to death hours later. Circuit Judge Meredith Charbula convicted Austin, 65, of first-degree murder, two counts of armed kidnapping and one count of armed sexual battery at the end of a two-day bench trial, closing one of Jacksonville's oldest cold cases nearly 41 years after the crime.

Austin, who has been imprisoned in Michigan since 1991, faces a mandatory sentence of life without parole on the murder count. Prosecutors had waived the death penalty before trial, which allowed the case to be decided by a judge instead of a jury.

The verdict

Charbula announced the verdict on Oct. 22 after hearing closing arguments that morning. McCray's family, who had pushed investigators for years to keep working the case, reacted with relief. One relative told News4JAX of wanting to jump up when the judge said guilty on the first charge "and just shout, 'Hallelujah!'"

"God was in that courtroom today, and He saw fit to us having justice for Leslie," another family member said. Relatives also thanked Project: Cold Case, the prosecutors and the detectives, and said Christmas Eve has remained a painful reminder of their loss for four decades.

Sentencing will come at a later hearing. First Coast News reported that Austin is expected to be sentenced later in November.

What happened on Christmas Eve 1985

McCray, described in News4JAX coverage as a 17-year-old college student, shared a duplex on St. Johns Avenue with a 20-year-old roommate. In the early morning of Dec. 24, 1985, an intruder entered the home. The roommate testified that he woke to find a stranger standing over McCray's bed holding a knife. The intruder tied him up with canvas straps from a futon and took McCray from the apartment.

The roommate freed himself and called police. Investigators say McCray was sexually assaulted at knifepoint in a ravine, and she was found hours later, stabbed to death, off Old Middleburg Road.

The roommate, now 61, testified on Wednesday. "I felt terrorized and scared and shaky," he told the court. For decades he was considered the prime suspect, until DNA testing excluded him. After the verdict, he said he was thankful to the attorneys and detectives who never gave up on getting justice for McCray.

How DNA cracked the case

The breakthrough came from evidence collected during McCray's 1985 autopsy. Family members first asked investigators to reexamine the case in 2003, but the forensic technology at the time did not produce usable results, according to News4JAX.

In 2019, the family went back to Project: Cold Case and the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Cold Case Unit and asked them to try again with newer methods. That retesting was funded through a U.S. Justice Department grant to the sheriff's office's cold case unit. In April 2020, the work produced an investigative lead, then-JSO Chief of Investigations T.K. Waters said in 2021. "A DNA profile was matched to an inmate in the Michigan corrections database," Waters said at the time.

That inmate was Austin, who had once lived in the same St. Johns Avenue duplex before McCray moved in. Detectives later collected a DNA sample from him in Michigan, where he was serving a life sentence for sexual assault convictions there, and it matched a swab from McCray's sexual assault examination.

Assistant State Attorney Lauren Anderson credited the family's persistence. "It is a blessing that the family was persistent," she said after the verdict. "They picked up that phone, and that caused a spiral of events that ultimately led us here."

From warrant to trial

The case moved slowly once Austin was identified, in part because he was in custody in another state.

After the 2021 indictment, sheriff's office and State Attorney's Office personnel worked for more than a year to get Austin extradited from Michigan to Duval County, according to reporting by WOKV. Prosecutors had said they would seek the death penalty if he was convicted, but they later waived it, and Austin opted to have a judge decide the case.

The trial

Testimony began Wednesday, Oct. 21. Both sides agreed that Austin had lived in the duplex before McCray moved in, but they drew opposite conclusions from it. The state suggested his familiarity with the home explained why investigators found no signs of forced entry. The defense suggested his past residence could explain why his DNA turned up on the swab.

The lead cold case detective testified that Austin's name surfaced early because of that connection to the duplex. Former medical examiner investigator Lou Eliopulos described the condition of McCray's body when she was found, testifying that he saw no obvious ligature marks or defensive injuries. Arlene Monarch, a pathology assistant who helped with the 1985 autopsy and evidence collection, testified that she could not recall the exact order in which evidence was collected.

Austin did not testify, and the defense called no witnesses. Prosecutors played a recorded interview from Michigan in which Austin said he never knew or had contact with McCray, a denial they argued was undercut by the DNA.

In closing arguments Thursday, Anderson acknowledged that the case was circumstantial and that there were no eyewitnesses, noting that crimes committed in darkness often leave none. "Identity does not depend on eyewitness testimony," she said. Defense attorney Joshua Beard argued that the roommate, not his client, could have been responsible for McCray's death. Anderson tried the case alongside Assistant State Attorney Chyna Makarowski of the 4th Judicial Circuit State Attorney's Office.

What's next

Austin will return to court for sentencing, where Charbula is required to impose life in prison without the possibility of parole on the first-degree murder conviction. The judge will also hand down sentences on the kidnapping and sexual battery convictions. The conviction adds to the record of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Cold Case Unit and Project: Cold Case, the Jacksonville nonprofit that the McCray family turned to twice before the case was solved.