Things were off that morning. Her mother always called out “I love you, baby,” before leaving for work; there was only silence. And she always left the bathroom light on; only darkness.
Her childhood rituals disrupted, 12-year-old Brittany Robertson rose from her bed in the living room and opened the door to the only bedroom in their small Bronx apartment.
It was the cold Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 2005. The cooked shrimp and macaroni and cheese for the feast her mother had planned for co-workers was in the kitchen. And in the bedroom, the would-be hostess, Erica Robertson, 29, was dead on the floor, a knife protruding from her chest, a single glove by her side.
Nearly 20 years ago I wrote an About New York column about the murders of two young women. Both had moved to the city from Columbus, Ohio, and both had been stabbed to death in their apartments. One was Catherine Woods, an aspiring Broadway dancer who moonlighted at topless clubs and whose death on the Upper East Side generated headlines; she was white. The other was Ms. Robertson, a security guard at a shelter in East Harlem whose surname tended to be misspelled as Robinson in the scant news coverage; she was Black.
Within a month, a former boyfriend was arrested — and later convicted — in the murder of Ms. Woods. But the unsolved murder of Ms. Robertson receded from New York’s memory, and from mine.
Until last week, that is, when word came that an ex-boyfriend of Ms. Robertson had been returned from Ohio and charged with killing her. A little-noticed case gone cold had benefited, it seems, from what is often portrayed as the nemesis of police work: time.
Ms. Robertson had surprised her family by moving with her daughter to New York to be with a man from Ohio named James Devore. “It didn’t really sit well with anybody,” her older brother, Phillip, later said.
The family’s misgivings proved prescient. Ms. Robertson eventually broke up with Mr. Devore, though she continued to raise a daughter of his. Her own daughter, Brittany, recently said that her childhood impression of him was of a man forever yelling.
“Mean,” she said. “Always.”
The weekend before that Thanksgiving, Phillip Robertson, a truck driver, drove 540 miles east, picked up his sister and niece, drove them west for a family wedding in Columbus, then drove them back to the Concourse section of the Bronx, often listening to his sister talking excitedly about the holiday feast she was preparing for her colleagues.
Three days later, Mr. Robertson again drove the 540 miles to the Bronx, his parents and younger brother in tow. They identified the body, collected a shaken Brittany and returned to Columbus, where, in shock, they ate the Thanksgiving food prepared by their beloved Erica.
A few days after the murder, Mr. Robertson told me that the ex-boyfriend, Mr. Devore, had refused to return a key to the apartment, that his daughter had seen him leaving the apartment that night and that his sister’s co-workers had said he’d been threatening her.
Mr. Devore, who returned to Ohio, did not attend the funeral, Mr. Robertson told me. “He didn’t call or give his condolences. Nothing.”
For Daniel Scanlon, the lead New York police detective investigating the case, Mr. Devore was “in the middle of the frame.” Several days after the murder, he and his partner tracked down their suspect and interrogated him at the police headquarters in Columbus — but not before the detective had the foresight to empty the interview room’s wastebasket.
The questioning yielded little. Mr. Devore said he was hungry; they bought him McDonald’s. He said he wanted to smoke; they gave him cigarettes. The interview ended, the suspect left — and the detective collected the cigarette butts from the wastebasket.
“I put them in an evidence bag and brought them back,” Mr. Scanlon recalled.
The DNA gleaned from a cigarette butt matched the DNA on the glove at the murder scene, but the Bronx district attorney’s office determined there was not yet enough evidence to secure a conviction. “I was very upset, to say the least,” Mr. Scanlon said.
So began the murder’s inexorable relegation from active investigation to cold-case shelving, as that horrible Thanksgiving in the Bronx gradually blurred into Gotham’s ceaseless commotion. But it remained fresh for a wounded family in Ohio aching for a resolution that never came.
Ms. Robertson’s father, Phillip Sr., an equipment operator, died in 2017. Her mother, Sharon, a registered nurse, died in 2022. And her older brother, Phillip Jr., who frequently stayed on a futon in her apartment just to make sure she was all right, died unexpectedly, at 49, in 2019.
Mr. Scanlon retired from the Police Department in 2010. Still, he said, at the end of every November, his thoughts turned to Erica and Brittany Robertson.
Mr. Devore, meanwhile, continued to have run-ins with the law. In 2013, the Northern Ohio Violent Fugitive Task Force declared him to be a “most wanted” suspect for charges that included menacing by stalking. While awaiting trial in jail, a prosecutor told a judge, Mr. Devore tried “to connect with another individual for the purposes of hiring someone to use a box cutter to slash the victim’s face.”
He was eventually sentenced to seven years in prison.
As time passed, the forensic use of DNA became more sophisticated. A couple of years ago, the cold-case unit decided to revive the investigation into Ms. Robertson’s murder, eventually leading to enhanced testing of the victim’s nails, which had been clipped and saved.
The DNA material culled from her nails matched the DNA found on the cigarette butt and the single glove. The DNA, prosecutors say, of James Devore, now 54.
He was taken into custody by federal marshals in Ohio in late May. New York detectives from the cold-case unit collected and returned him last week to the Bronx, where he pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter and was remanded without bail.
“The defendant thought he successfully escaped responsibility for this heinous act,” said the Bronx district attorney, Darcel D. Clark. “Thanks to the forensic expertise and determination of investigators, he now faces justice.”
Brittany Robertson, whose girlhood ended when she opened that bedroom door, is now 30. She lives in her mother’s childhood home in Columbus, where she is raising three children of her own. A fourth child, Elizabeth, was struck and killed while crossing a road to her bus stop; she was 11.
Ms. Robertson sobbed as she searched for words that could convey what she felt. Bittersweet relief that justice might be achieved. Gratitude for the New York investigators who persisted. And maybe, even, a certain pride.
“My mother was a fighter,” she said, referring to the DNA found in her nails. “She basically solved her own case.”
Maria Cramer contributed reporting.
