Woodmere cold case closed

A 24-year-old homicide case has finally been closed, as a Nassau County jury took approximately three hours on Monday to return a guilty verdict for Lewis Slaughter, 61, in the 1986 murder of Woodmere resident Samuel Quentzel.

Slaughter, who was described as a “career criminal” by District Attorney Kathleen Rice, was convicted of second-degree murder. He is already serving a 25-year sentence for another 1986 murder, but could receive up to 25 years to life when he is sentenced on Dec. 9.

“The Quentzel family has persevered for more than 24 years in hopes of seeing Samuel Quentzel’s killers brought to justice and that day has finally come,” Rice said in a press release.

On Sept. 4, 1986, at about 7 p.m., Slaughter and Clifton Waters approached Quentzel as he sat in his car in his driveway after coming home from work. He operated a family-owned plumbing business in Brooklyn.

Quentzel’s wife, Ann, was inside the house, meeting with an architect about possible home renovations, when they heard a car horn. From the window, they saw Waters, who fired a gun at Quentzel, slam the driver’s-side door of Quentzel’s Oldsmobile and run toward a van in the street. As Ann Quentzel came out of the house, she saw Slaughter run to the van. A third man, Roger Williams, waited in the van.

Quentzel, 54, died at the scene, and $2,500 was recovered from his pockets, which led police to think the murder began as a botched robbery attempt. The architect wrote down part of the van’s license plate number, and the vehicle was recovered less than an hour later, four blocks from Quentzel’s plumbing business. Police also recovered four cigarette butts, a bullet and a checkbook that belonged to Quentzel.

The case went cold until 2003, when police had the cigarette butts tested using DNA technology. A genetic profile was found on one of them, and it was entered into a national DNA databank, but no match was found.

Four years later, Ann Quentzel and her son, Andrew, got in touch with Rice about possibly reopening the investigation. Rice assigned Meg Reiss, an executive district attorney, who had Detective James Hendry of the Nassau County Police Department’s Homicide Squad assigned to the case.

Hendry reviewed the 21-year-old evidence and interviewed witnesses and others who said they had information on the case. The investigation received a lucky break when the State Legislature passed legislation that expanded the state’s DNA databank to include anyone convicted of a felony or a designated misdemeanor.

Though the law dealt only with samples from those convicted after June 23, 2006, it was applied retroactively to anyone convicted of an earlier crime if the person was still incarcerated or on parole.

That legal opening moved Williams into the DNA databank in December 2007, while he was still on parole. A month later, the district attorney’s office received notification from the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services that Williams’s DNA matched that found on one of the cigarette butts left in the get-away van in 1986.

Following that lead, Hendry discovered that Williams lived with his wife in Brooklyn at the time of the murder two miles from Quentzel’s Bedford-Stuyvesant business.

Hendry found that Williams was part of a crime “crew” that targeted businesses in Brooklyn and Queens on paydays. The crew included Slaughter, who was known to be the driver in several robberies, including the botched heist of a Queens Nabisco factory that left a woman dead — a crime for which Slaughter was convicted and imprisoned.

Monitoring Slaughter’s prison phone calls and interviewing people who knew both men, police found that Slaughter was also involved in Quentzel’s murder. (The third suspect, Waters, was killed in an accidental shooting in the vestibule of his Brooklyn apartment.)

Police and prosecutors arranged for Slaughter and Williams to meet, and secured a warrant to listen in on their conversation. For 10 hours they discussed the van and guessed that former crew members might be providing information in order to claim a possible reward.

“I could not be more proud of the work done by the members of my office and the Police Department, who never wavered in their commitment to capturing the men responsible for this terrible crime,” Rice said.