What you should know
- It was March 15, 2003. The body of a young woman was found in a field in the town of Wallkill in the city of Middletown in Orange County. She had been murdered. Her name was Megan McDonald.
- His father was a retired NYPD detective who died in 2002, a year before McDonald was killed; the baffling case of the 20-year-old appeared on the Dateline series last year ahead of the 20th anniversary.
- New York State Police announced Thursday that Edward Holley, 42, had been arrested on a second-degree murder charge; a press conference was expected later in the day.
NEW YORK — A 42-year-old New York man has been arrested for the 2003 murder of Megan McDonald, whose baffling case was featured on “Dateline” ahead of the solemn 20th anniversary of her death.
New York State Police announced Thursday that Edward Holley of Wawayanda had been charged with second-degree murder in McDonald’s death. He would have been in his 20s at the time.
A press conference is expected later in the day.
McDonald’s body was found on March 15, 2003, in a field in Wallkill, in the Orange County city of Middletown. Her car, a white Mercury Sable, was found two days later in a parking lot at the Kensington Manor Complex, also in Wallkill.
McDonald, who lived in Orange County, had been a student at SUNY Orange County Community College at the time of her death. He worked at the Galleria Mall in Middletown. And she died of blunt force trauma.
His father was a retired NYPD detective who died in 2002, a year before McDonald was killed, and the New York City Detective Endowment Association had offered a $10,000 reward, as had the FBI, for information leading to his killer.
A decades old mystery
McDonald’s story was the subject of one of the “Dateline” stories last year in which detectives discussed the latest developments in the case. McDonald had a conversation with two people he knew who were throwing a birthday party in Wallkill, near Greenway Terrace. They allegedly tried to get her to join and she refused.
Detectives told Dateline that people who attended the party later reported those two people back and told the rest of the group that McDonald left to spend time with other friends in Middletown.
She ended up at her friend’s house there and stayed until around midnight, according to the Dateline report. She told her friend that she had to go home because she had to get up early to go to work in the morning, detectives told Dateline.
The friend did not see her again and detectives told Dateline that McDonald apparently went back to that party instead of going home. She left quite quickly and she told two other friends that she was going out with “someone”, detectives told Dateline. According to the report, they saw her driving away from her. That was probably the last time she was seen alive.
In a subsequent interview, an initial witness had a new detail, the New York State Police detective. Brad Natalizio told Dateline: A vehicle with a loud sound system that had been seen behind McDonald’s car. The witness only noticed it because the volume was so loud, according to the Dateline report. It was probably a dark car that looked like a Honda Civic hatchback.
The McDonald family had only just begun to worry when they didn’t hear from her, and she didn’t show up for work on March 14, 2003. The next day, Natalizio told Dateline that the people who own Bowser Road called the police to report a body Investigators identified McDonald from her driver’s license and say they believe she was killed in the field.
She had been killed in her own driver’s seat, Natalizio told Dateline.
His father spent 20 years with the NYPD and did homicide detective work there, but died of a heart attack in 2002, McDonald’s sister Karen told Dateline. She was 47, and she told the show that watching him work through the years made her confident that the investigators working on her sister’s case would not give up until she was solved.
“Seeing what my dad put into the cases and how it affected him personally and the care he gave to the cases,” Karen McDonald told Dateline last year. “I feel sorry for the police officers who have carried this for years for my sister. And I know it’s more, you know, it’s personal to them right now.”
There was apparently a second suspect. That individual died.
Investigators have amassed nearly 1,000 pieces of evidence over the course of the 20-year investigation, and Natalizio told Dateline the hope was that forensic advances in DNA technology would eventually lead to new leads.
It’s unclear if that car was connected to Holley’s arrest. Information about a possible attorney for him was not immediately available.
