DNA and genetic profiling eventually led to ex-college student accused of killing 20-year-old Sophie Sergie in 1993
Steven Downs hadn’t forgotten the murder of the young woman found dead in a bathtub in his dorm at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks nearly 26 years ago.
“I remember the pictures, it’s terrible, poor girl,” he said, according to a criminal charging document naming him Friday as the suspected killer in the 1993 cold-case sexual assault and killing of 20-year-old Sophie Sergie, a former student visiting a friend on the campus
Sergie had attended the university but dropped out to return home to the western Alaska village of Pitkas Point, the document states. She was visiting Fairbanks and staying with a friend in the Bartlett Hall dormitory when, after a night at the movies followed by pizza with her friends back at the dorm, Sergie stepped outside for a cigarette sometime after midnight on April 26, 1993.
She never returned.
The next afternoon janitors cleaning a women’s bathroom on the second floor of the dorm found her body in a bathtub in a small room separate from the shower stalls. She had been sexually assaulted, and police discovered three stab wounds to her face and a fatal gunshot to the back of the head, according to the charging document. Her cigarette lighter was under her body.
DNA swabs recovered from the victim, along with the bullet, offered leads but no initial answers as DNA technology was not then in use in Alaska. In 2000, a more advanced DNA analysis was used to help investigators build a profile of a male suspect, but by 2003 the case was considered cold.
With no concrete leads, investigators worked to identify everyone who was living in the dorm at the time of the killing. In 2010 they interviewed Nicholas Dazer, who told them Downs, his third-floor roommate, kept an H&R model .22-caliber handgun in their room.
Such a weapon would be consistent with markings on the fatal bullet, but was too common to suggest an immediate match, a forensics experts advised, according to the charging document. The case went cold again.
In 2018 the arrest of California’s Golden State Killer — authorities tracked down the suspect, Joseph DeAngelo, through the DNA of his relatives — initiated another push to find Sergie’s killer through further-advanced genetic profiling methods.
This time the search led authorities to an aunt of Downs.
On Wednesday, Maine State Police working with authorities in Alaska found Downs at his home in Auburn, Maine. Downs, who had no prior arrests and recently worked as a nurse, told them he was living on Bartlett Hall’s third floor as an 18-year-old university student at the time, but mostly stayed with his then-girlfriend on the fourth floor, where he alleged he’d been on the night Sergie was killed.
Questioned back then, “I never knew or saw anything to begin with,” he told Maine police.
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Maine officers returned on Thursday with a search warrant for Downs’ home, and collected DNA samples that they say matched the profile of the DNA sample developed from Sergie’s crime scene.
On Friday they arrested Downs, 44, on a charge of sexual assault and murder. He is being held in Androscoggin County jail with no bond pending extradition to Alaska, PEOPLE confirms.
It could not be determined if he has obtained an attorney to speak on his behalf.
“While an arrest doesn’t bring Sophie back, we are relieved to provide this closure,” Col. Barry Wilson, director of the Alaska State Troopers, said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE.
“This case has haunted and frustrated Sophie’s family and friends, the investigators and beyond. However, we did it,” he said. “Investigators never gave up on Sophie.”