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Judge Meredith Charbula (WJXT)<\/p>\nJACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2013 Closing arguments will begin Thursday morning in the murder trial of David Nelson Austin, who is accused of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and killing 17-year-old Leslie McCray in Jacksonville on Christmas Eve 1985.<\/p>\n
WATCH: News4JAX is streaming the trial live. Press play above to watch, starting at 10 a.m. (WARNING: Trial will include graphic content; News4JAX is not in control of what shows on the screen)<\/p>\n
Investigators say advances in DNA technology helped link Austin to the cold case decades later. <\/p>\n
He was indicted on a first-degree murder charge in August 2021 and has opted for a bench trial. That means his case will be decided by a judge and not a jury.<\/p>\n
Judge Meredith Charbula (WJXT)<\/p>\n
Prosecutors presented their case against Austin to Judge Meredith Charbula on Wednesday, and the defense countered with a motion to acquit, saying the state had not met its burden of proof.<\/p>\n
Charbula denied the motion and will hear closing arguments Thursday before deliberating and making her ruling. She indicated she would likely need about two hours to consider all the evidence after hearing the lawyers\u2019 final arguments.<\/p>\n
Austin opted not to testify in his own defense, and his attorneys called no witnesses.<\/p>\n
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David Nelson Austin speaks to the judge in his murder trial (WJXT)\u2018I felt terrorized\u2019: Survivor testifies<\/p>\n
Testimony began Wednesday with the judge hearing from the surviving victim in the cold case.<\/a><\/p>\n Now 61 years old, he told prosecutors that he had just turned 20 in December of 1985 and was living with McCray, whom he considered a friend, when they were attacked in their St. Johns Avenue duplex.<\/p>\n NOTE: News4JAX is not naming the man because he is a surviving victim.<\/p>\n The man acknowledged that he and McCray had been intimate for \u201ca week or two\u201d but said the relationship was open and he would not consider them a couple.<\/p>\n RELATED | \u2018I felt terrorized\u2019: Surviving victim testifies about the night a Jacksonville teen was kidnapped and killed in 1985<\/a><\/p>\n He said that when McCray came home on Dec. 23, he had fallen asleep in her bed after taking cold medicine, although it was unusual for them to sleep in each other\u2019s rooms.<\/p>\n He said McCray gave him another dose of cold medicine with codeine after she got home, and the two fell asleep in her bed.<\/p>\n The man then described waking up in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve to a stranger hovering over McCray\u2019s bed with a knife. He said it was too dark to make out any of the person\u2019s features, but it was clearly a man.<\/p>\n McCray\u2019s friend said the stranger told him to lie on his stomach, and then he took strong, canvas straps from the futon in the other bedroom and tightly bound his hands behind his back and his legs at the ankles.<\/p>\n He said he heard the stranger take McCray into his bedroom next door and heard her pleading with the stranger not to cut her. He said he heard them move downstairs and didn\u2019t know what happened after that except that they left the apartment.<\/p>\n McCray\u2019s friend said it took him a while to free himself from the bindings, but when he did, he called the police.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt terrorized and scared and shaky,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Once the police arrived, a search began for McCray, and hours later, she was found stabbed to death on Old Middleburg Road.<\/p>\n McCray\u2019s friend said he moved out of the duplex immediately because he didn\u2019t feel safe there while the killer was not identified.<\/p>\n McCray\u2019s friend was himself a prime person of interest in the case for decades because police questioned his account of what happened.<\/p>\n But when police began investigating the cold case again in 2019 and 2020, they contacted McCray\u2019s friend, who provided a DNA sample for comparison.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t a match to the 1985 sexual assault kit samples.<\/p>\n Solving the cold case<\/p>\n That sent cold case detectives in a different direction, concentrating on another name that had risen to the surface in the early days of the investigation: David Nelson Austin.<\/p>\n Austin had been behind bars in Michigan since 1991, serving a life sentence for convictions in sexual assault cases there, when investigators tracked him down to get a DNA sample.<\/p>\n When they compared Austin\u2019s sample to the 1985 evidence, it was a match.<\/p>\n The lead cold case detective said Austin\u2019s name first popped up in the case because he had previously lived at the duplex where McCray and her friend were attacked.<\/p>\n During opening statements, attorneys for both sides confirmed that Austin had lived there before McCray moved in.<\/p>\n The state implied that was the reason there were no signs of forced entry from the night of the attack. The defense, on the other hand, suggested that Austin\u2019s previous residence in the apartment could offer an alternate explanation for why Austin\u2019s DNA was found on one of the swabs from McCray\u2019s sexual assault kit.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, prosecutors played an interview cold case detectives conducted with Austin in Michigan. During the interview, he said he didn\u2019t know McCray and never had any contact with her.<\/p>\n Original investigation<\/p>\n Several criminal experts testified to their roles in the 1985 murder investigation that led to the discovery of McCray\u2019s body and the DNA that later pointed to Austin.<\/p>\n Former medical examiner investigator Lou Eliopulos described in graphic detail what McCray\u2019s body looked like when it was found in a vegetated ravine near I-295 and Old Middleburg Road hours after she had been taken from the duplex. He said he saw no obvious ligature marks or defensive injuries.<\/p>\n On cross-examination, Eliopulos said rigor mortis was present at the scene, which is generally seen within about 30 minutes of death, but he did not offer a more precise estimate of how long McCray\u2019s body had been there.<\/p>\n Pathology assistant Arlene Monarch testified that she assisted with McCray\u2019s 1985 autopsy and collecting evidence for her sexual-assault kit. She said samples were collected before the body was washed, but she could not recall whether outside investigators had collected other samples first or the exact collection sequence.<\/p>\n Those samples were preserved, and a grant from the U.S. Justice Department to JSO\u2019s Cold Case Unit covered the cost of having them re-examined in 2019, after McCray\u2019s family reached out to the Jacksonville-based group, Project: Cold Case<\/a>, and the JSO Cold Case Unit.<\/p>\n Copyright 2026 by WJXT News4JAX – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2013 Closing arguments will begin Thursday morning in the murder trial of David Nelson Austin, who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[265,170350,116,118,117,170351,5436,115],"class_list":["post-434800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-crime","tag-david-nelson-austin","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news","tag-leslie-mccray","tag-morning-show","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434800","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=434800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1792673894_238_KQJGQ2BJMZB6PI2D33E2GDXUW4.gif\"\/)
David Nelson Austin (Michigan Department of Corrections)<\/p>\n