Orlando police have charged a North Carolina man with first degree murder in the 1988 killing of a downtown service worker, a case that had gone unsolved for nearly 38 years, the department announced Thursday.

Willie J. Carpenter, 68, was arrested July 9 by the U.S. Marshals Service in North Carolina and is awaiting extradition to Orlando, according to a news release from the Orlando Police Department.

Diane Matthews, 43, a mother of three, was murdered Sept. 8, 1988, inside the Answer All Telephone Answering Service on Magnolia Avenue, where she worked. Her facial injuries were so severe that a co-worker identified her by her hair, according to the release.

Detectives collected physical evidence at the scene, including fingerprints and DNA samples, but no suspect was identified and the case went cold, the release said. DNA testing was not routinely used in criminal investigations at the time.

Diane Matthews, 43, was murdered Sept. 8, 1988, inside the Answer All Telephone Answering Service on Magnolia Avenue, where she worked. (Orlando Police Department)Diane Matthews, 43, was murdered Sept. 8, 1988, inside the Answer All Telephone Answering Service on Magnolia Avenue, where she worked. (Orlando Police Department)

Investigators got a break more than two decades later when Carpenter’s DNA was entered into a national DNA database following an unrelated arrest in North Carolina on a sexual offense involving an underage girl. His DNA was flagged as a potential match to evidence from the Matthews case, according to the release.

But while detectives interviewed Carpenter in 2013, he denied knowing Matthews and declined to provide a DNA sample, according to the release. He voluntarily gave a sample when detectives interviewed him again in 2024, and additional testing by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was completed in 2025. Detectives then sought an arrest warrant this year, according to the release.

Born in Georgia, Matthews came to Orlando when she was 2 and was raised in College Park. She was a graduate of Edgewater High School, according to an Orlando Sentinel news story about her murder from September 1988.

At the time of her death, she lived with her 19-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter, the story said.

Matthews, who did not usually work at night, was filling in on a shift that September night. She was beaten and strangled and not found until the following morning. No burglary was apparent at the time, according to a Sentinel story on the case from April 1989.