ORLANDO, Fla. \u2013 Nearly 38 years after the murder of Diane Matthews, the Orlando Police Department has charged a suspect in her death.<\/p>\n
Willie J. Carpenter, 68, was arrested on Thursday by the U.S. Marshals Service North Carolina Regional Task Force and charged with first-degree murder. <\/p>\n
Matthews was found murdered Sept. 8, 1988, inside the answering service where she worked at 227 N. Magnolia Ave. in downtown Orlando. Police said her injuries were so severe she was unrecognizable, though an employee identified her by her hair.<\/p>\n
Police collected physical evidence \u2014 including fingerprints and DNA \u2014 but at the time, DNA technology was not routinely used in criminal investigations. The case eventually went cold.<\/p>\n
Diane Matthews (OPD)<\/p>\n
More than two decades later, investigators got a significant break. Carpenter\u2019s DNA was entered into the Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS, following an unrelated arrest in North Carolina for a sexual offense involving an underage female. That DNA was flagged as a potential match to biological evidence from the Matthews investigation.<\/p>\n
Detectives interviewed Carpenter in 2013, but he denied knowing Matthews and refused to provide a DNA sample. When re-interviewed in 2024, Carpenter voluntarily provided a sample. Additional testing through the Florida Department of Law Enforcement finalized results in 2025, further linking him to evidence from the crime scene, police said. <\/p>\n
Detectives then spent months reviewing evidence, consulting prosecutors and ruling out other potential suspects before seeking an arrest warrant in 2026.<\/p>\n
Orlando Police Chief Eric Smith credited the department\u2019s resolve in closing the case.<\/p>\n
\u201cTime does not diminish our commitment to justice. No matter how many years pass, the Orlando Police Department\u2019s Homicide Unit will continue to pursue the truth until every possible avenue has been exhausted and those responsible are held accountable,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n
Carpenter is awaiting extradition to Orlando.<\/p>\n
Breaking News Alerts<\/p>\n
Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by WKMG ClickOrlando – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORLANDO, Fla. \u2013 Nearly 38 years after the murder of Diane Matthews, the Orlando Police Department has charged…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[19535,1335,139,141,140],"class_list":["post-335681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-cold-cases","tag-orange-county","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}