Jesus Aguilera was born in 1953 and is described in the reference accounts as Cuban. He had convictions for robbery before the killings.
He strangled three people in New York City with a ligature over about three weeks in the late summer of 1981, one of the killings in Manhattan and another in the Bronx. Guillermo Graniela, thirty, was killed on August 29. Tolita Brown, thirty-six, was killed on September 2. Josefina Cepeda, twenty-four, was killed on September 17. Rape was charged.
He was convicted of two of the three in 1982 and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment.
The killing of Tolita Brown stayed unsolved, and how it was eventually closed is the part of this case worth setting down. Clippings from her fingernails had been kept on file by the city's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner since 1981. Decades later its criminalists developed a new technique for separating out a small amount of foreign DNA from a mixed sample, and applied it to those clippings on the theory that she had taken some of her attacker's skin while the two of them struggled. They recovered a profile they labelled Male Donor A, ran it through the national database in 2010, and matched it to Aguilera, who by then had been in prison for nearly thirty years.
He pleaded guilty to her murder in February 2015, at sixty-one, and was sentenced on February 22 to fifteen years to life. The sentence made no practical difference to the two he was already serving. The Department of Correction observed at the time that the admission made him a serial killer.
In October 2019 the medical examiner's office used the case as its teaching example when it began training laboratories across the country in the technique.
Two small points on the record. His surname appears as Aguilero in some reporting. And the victim's forename is given as both Tolita and Tolila, including on this archive's own page, which carries both spellings.