Almost 20 Years After She Found Her Mother’s Body, a Cold Case Thaws

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.