Tolita Brown's fingernail clippings sat in the files of New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for almost thirty years. She was thirty-six when she was strangled in 1981, and the case went cold while the man who killed her was already in prison for two other murders. The clippings were kept on the theory that she had scratched her attacker while she fought him. Decades later criminalists at the medical examiner's office developed a technique for pulling a small amount of foreign DNA out of a mixed sample, and they applied it to her clippings. They recovered a male profile, which they labeled Male Donor A, and in 2010 it matched Jesus Aguilera in the national database.
Aguilera, who is described in reference accounts as Cuban and was born in 1953, had robbery convictions before 1981. Over a few weeks that late summer and fall he strangled three people with a ligature, one killing in Manhattan and another in the Bronx. The victims were Guillermo Graniela, thirty, Tolita Brown, and Josefina Cepeda, twenty-four. Reference accounts date the deaths to August 29, September 2 and September 17, 1981, which would put Brown's death between the other two; NY1, reporting his guilty plea, described the two convictions as killings within days of one another and the DNA case as a murder later that year. The published record does not reconcile the two. Her first name also appears as Tolila.
He was convicted of the two murders in 1982 and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment. Nothing about those cases connected him to Tolita Brown, and her killing stayed open.
The 2010 match came when he had been in prison for nearly thirty years. In February 2015, at sixty-one, he changed his plea in her case to guilty, and he was sentenced to fifteen years to life, a term with no practical effect on the ones he was already serving. The Department of Correction said the admission effectively made him a serial killer. His surname appears in some reporting as Aguilero.
In October 2019 the medical examiner's office used the Brown case as its worked example when it began training crime laboratories around the country in the method that had solved it.