JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Nearly 41 years after 17-year-old Leslie McCray was taken from her Jacksonville apartment and killed, a judge has convicted the man prosecutors tied to the crime through DNA.
Judge Meredith Charbula found David Austin, 65, guilty as charged Thursday on four counts: first-degree murder, armed sexual battery and a pair of armed kidnapping charges. Austin had given up his right to a jury, so the judge alone weighed the evidence over two days of testimony. The office of State Attorney Melissa Nelson said the murder count brings a mandatory life term in a Florida prison, and sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 18, 2026.
McCray, a University of North Florida student, and her roommate were bound inside their duplex apartment off St. Johns Avenue in the early hours of Dec. 24, 1985, before she was carried away. Her body turned up hours later beside Old Middleburg Road on the Westside, near a JEA substation, with stab wounds.
Investigators had evidence but not enough for charges, and the case was shelved in 1986. Relatives asked the cold case unit to revisit it in 2019. Retesting with newer methods in April 2020 produced a DNA match to Austin, who was then an inmate in Michigan serving two life sentences for sexual batteries committed in 1988. JSO cold case detectives went to Michigan to question him, and he was charged in 2021.
The defense argued at trial that the DNA proved only one thing: Austin had lived in the same unit before McCray moved in. The judge rejected that reading of the evidence. Austin chose not to take the stand, and his lawyers called no witnesses.
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