What you should know
- It was March 15, 2003. The body of a young woman was found in a field in the town of Wallkill in the town of Middletown in Orange County. She had been murdered. Her name was Megan McDonald.
- Her father was a retired NYPD detective who died in 2002, a year before McDonald’s death; the baffling case of the 20-year-old appeared on the Dateline series last year ahead of the 20th anniversary.
- New York State Police announced Thursday that Edward Holley, 42, has been arrested for second-degree murder; a press conference was scheduled for later in the day.
NEW YORK — A 42-year-old New York man has been arrested for the 2003 murder of Megan McDonald, whose baffling case was featured on “Dateline” ahead of the solemn 20th anniversary of her death.
New York State Police announced Thursday that Edward Holley of Wawayanda has been charged with second-degree murder in the McDonald’s death. He would have been in his twenties at the time.
A press conference is scheduled for later in the day.
McDonald’s body was found March 15, 2003 in a field in Wallkill, in the town of Middletown, Orange County. His car, a white Mercury Sable, was found two days later in a parking lot at Kensington Manor Complex, also in Wallkill.
McDonald, who lived in Orange County, was a student at SUNY Orange County Community College at the time of her death. He worked at the Galleria Mall in Middletown. And she died of blunt force trauma.
His father was a retired NYPD detective who died in 2002, a year before McDonald’s death, and the New York City Detective Endowment Association had offered a $10,000 reward, as had the FBI, for information leading to his death. assassin.
A decades-old mystery
The McDonald’s story was the subject of one of the “Dateline” stories last year in which detectives discussed the latest developments in the case. McDonald had a chat with two people he knew who were having a birthday party in Wallkill near Greenway Terrace. They reportedly tried to get her to join and she refused.
Detectives told Dateline that people who attended the party later reported these two people and told the rest of the group that McDonald had gone to hang out with other friends in Middletown.
She ended up at her friend’s house there and stayed there until around midnight, according to the Dateline report. She told her friend she had to go home because she had to get up early for work in the morning, detectives told Dateline.
The friend did not see her again, and detectives told Dateline that McDonald apparently returned to that party instead of going home. She left fairly quickly and told two other friends she was dating “someone”, detectives told Dateline. According to the report, she was seen walking away. This was probably the last time she was seen alive.
In a later interview, an early witness had a new detail, the New York State Police Detective. Brad Natalizio told Dateline: A vehicle with a loud audio system that was seen behind the McDonald’s car. The witness only noticed it because the volume was so loud, according to the Dateline report. It was probably a dark car that looked like a Honda Civic hatchback.
The McDonald family had only just begun to worry when they didn’t hear from her and she failed to show up for work on March 14, 2003. The next day, Natalizio told Dateline that the Bowser Road owners had called the police. report a body Investigators identified McDonald by her driver’s license and say they believe she was killed in the field.
She had been killed in her own driver’s seat, Natalizio told Dateline.
His father spent 20 years with the NYPD and did homicide detective work there, but died of a heart attack in 2002, McDonald’s sister Karen told Dateline. He was 47, and she told the show that watching him work over the years convinced her that investigators working on her sister’s case wouldn’t give up until it was solved.
“Seeing what my dad put in the cases and how it affected him personally and the care he took of the cases,” Karen McDonald told Dateline last year. “I feel sorry for the police officers who carried this for years for my sister. And I know it’s more, you know, it’s personal for them right now.”
There was apparently a second suspect. This individual is deceased.
Investigators amassed nearly 1,000 pieces of evidence during the 20-year investigation, and Natalizio told Dateline the hope was that forensic advances in DNA technology would eventually lead to new tracks.
It’s unclear if this car was related to Holley’s arrest. Information about a possible lawyer for him was not immediately available.