Murder of Vanessa Marcotte

Vanessa Teresa Marcotte was born June 17, 1989, in Leominster, Massachusetts, and raised as an only child. She attended the Bancroft School in Worcester and graduated with honors from Boston University in 2011 with a degree in communications. She worked at WordStream and Vistaprint before becoming an account manager at Google in New York City, where she lived full-time while making frequent visits to her mother and aunt in Princeton, Massachusetts.

On Sunday, August 7, 2016, Marcotte left her mother's house on Brooks Station Road in Princeton in the early afternoon for a walk before a planned return to New York. When she did not come back after several hours, her family alerted police, who launched a missing-persons search. Her body was found around 8:20 p.m. in a wooded area less than half a mile from her mother's home. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled and had sustained additional blunt-force and burn injuries. Her clothing, cell phone and earbuds were never recovered, though a partially burned sneaker was found near her body. Foreign DNA was recovered at the scene. Witnesses reported seeing her on her phone after 1 p.m. and a vehicle following her along the road; authorities believed the attack occurred between 1 and 3 p.m. and that Marcotte fought back forcefully.

The case drew national attention and was frequently compared, though never officially linked, to the killing of Karina Vetrano in Queens days earlier. FBI profilers publicly assessed that Marcotte was likely attacked at random by a stranger familiar with the Princeton area. A tip line generated more than 1,300 leads. By February 2017, the Worcester County District Attorney's office reported that DNA evidence indicated the suspect was a Hispanic male in his late 20s to 30s with an athletic build, who likely had access to a dark-colored SUV and visible injuries following the attack.

On April 14, 2017, Angelo Colon-Ortiz, 31, of Worcester, was arrested after a state trooper recognized his vehicle as matching the one seen near the crime scene. Colon-Ortiz voluntarily provided a DNA sample that matched DNA found on Marcotte's hands. He was arraigned on April 18, 2017, and indicted by a grand jury on June 23, 2017, on charges including murder, aggravated assault, and assault with intent to rape. Colon-Ortiz's attorneys sought to suppress the DNA evidence, arguing a language barrier undermined his consent; a judge denied that motion on January 11, 2022. Colon-Ortiz had no prior criminal record, worked as a delivery contractor for FedEx in the Princeton area, and was reportedly known by neighbors and coworkers for making vulgar comments toward women. He ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and unarmed robbery and was sentenced to life in prison on November 2, 2022, with parole eligibility beginning in 2067.