Tolila Brown, a 36-year-old Black woman, was found dead in the Bronx in November 1981, her body discovered in a shack near Crotona Park at 1445 Minford Place. She was found partially clothed, hands and feet bound, with a ligature tightened at her throat. Investigators determined she had been strangled with a scarf that had been cinched using a chisel as a twisting tool. Fingernail clippings taken at autopsy were preserved even though the forensic tools to fully exploit them did not yet exist.

Decades later those clippings were reanalyzed and produced a DNA profile that pointed to Jesus Aguilera, a man who had arrived from Cuba in the early 1980s and was already known to authorities for other violent assaults and strangulations in New York. The DNA match led to charges and, after a plea, Aguilera pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Brown’s death. In February 2015 he was sentenced to an additional 15 years to life on top of the punishment he was already serving.

Does anyone have memories of Crotona Park or that neighborhood in 1981 that could shed light on Tolila Brown’s last days?