A man convicted of sexually assaulting a child more than a decade ago has been linked to two cold case murders out of the Fifth Ward, Houston police say.
Roy Dabney, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence in Fort Stockton, was back in Houston this week to hear the latest charges against him. Investigators say DNA evidence discovered with new testing is what helped them solve the 17- and 14-year-old cases.
I think there’s a lot of people out there that think they’ve gotten away with these crimes, and I want to tell them they have not. We are working these cold cases.
On Feb. 28, 2007, Hattie McFarland, 43, was found beaten to death in a white abandoned house on Davis Street. Police discovered a bloody brick next to Hattie’s body. At the time, no eyewitnesses came forward and no physical evidence was ever tested, according to court documents.
Three years later, in July 2010, police found Lavenia Glover, 28, facedown, dead on a mattress in a brick house on Newhoff Street, about a half mile from where McFarland’s body was left. The crime scenes were similar; Glover’s skull was also bashed in, police say.