A bench trial opened this week in Duval County for the 1985 Christmas Eve murder of 17-year-old Leslie McCray, a Jacksonville teen kidnapped from her Avondale apartment and found stabbed to death hours later along Old Middleburg Road. David Nelson Austin, now 64, waived his right to a jury and will instead have his fate decided solely by a judge, more than four decades after McCray's killing went cold.
Austin waived his right to a jury trial in September, setting up a bench trial presided over by Duval County Circuit Judge Meredith Charbula, according to First Coast News. As News4JAX reports, prosecutors have indicated they will seek the death penalty if Austin is convicted of first-degree murder in McCray's death.
McCray, a 17-year-old college student who had recently moved to Jacksonville, was kidnapped from the St. Johns Avenue apartment she shared with her boyfriend in Avondale on Christmas Eve 1985, per the station's report. Her boyfriend was tied up by the intruder and called police after freeing himself, and McCray was found dead on Old Middleburg Road hours later. At the time of her death, McCray was also working part-time as a waitress at Sliders Restaurant, worshipping at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, and pursuing a modeling career, according to the Generation Why podcast blog.
A Trail That Went Cold for Decades
Medical examiners determined McCray died from fatal stab wounds to the neck along with additional injuries to her head and chest, after searchers discovered her nude body along Old Middleburg Road near Interstate 295 on Christmas Eve morning, First Coast News reported. Early investigators initially focused suspicion on McCray's 21-year-old boyfriend, Edgar W. McCurry III, after detectives noted undisturbed cobwebs on the apartment's rear exit and no signs of forced entry — though McCurry was never charged, per the same account.
That early focus on McCurry appears to have diverted attention from Austin, who had been arrested in Duval County just two months before the murder, in October 1985, on an attempted sexual battery charge involving a person with intellectual disabilities. Those charges were dropped, and detectives never interviewed Austin at the time despite his name appearing in police reports, the station notes.
Cold Case Unit Reopens the File
The case sat unsolved for more than three decades until McCray's family contacted the Jacksonville-based nonprofit Project: Cold Case in 2019, which helped request that the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Cold Case Unit re-test biological evidence from the scene. The DNA testing that followed, developed with funding from a U.S. Justice Department grant to the JSO Cold Case Unit, led investigators to Austin, according to News4JAX. Sheriff T.K. Waters has said investigators developed the lead pointing to Austin in April 2020, with additional tests later conducted to confirm him as the suspect.
The push to revisit McCray's case carried a heavy personal toll for her family. Leslie's mother, Sarah Adams, was diagnosed in 2010 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and lost her verbal speech, prompting her niece Joey Bray to serve as primary caregiver and the public face of the family's push for answers, according to Project: Cold Case. When Austin was first charged in 2021, Bray said McCray had her whole life ahead of her and was not given the chance to live it, and that the family was relieved to finally be getting answers decades after her death.
From a Michigan Prison Cell to a Duval County Courtroom
By the time DNA evidence tied him to the killing, Austin had already been incarcerated in Michigan since 1991, serving a life sentence stemming from sexual assault convictions there. He had been serving two life sentences at Michigan's G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility for felony sex crimes committed in September 1988 and June 1990, First Coast News reported, following his departure from Florida after McCray's murder.
A Duval County grand jury indicted Austin on charges of first-degree murder, armed kidnapping, and armed sexual battery in August 2021, upgrading an earlier second-degree murder warrant that had been issued three months before, according to News4JAX's earlier coverage. He was ultimately charged with two counts of armed kidnapping and one count of armed sexual battery in addition to the murder count.
Bringing Austin back to Florida required nearly a year of negotiation. Florida law enforcement and prosecutors spent that time working out Austin's extradition from Michigan, securing his transfer to Duval County in September 2022 after navigating legal complications tied to Florida's pursuit of the death penalty, a punishment Michigan does not permit, according to Action News Jax. Now, four decades after Leslie McCray's death, that case is finally in front of a judge, with Austin's fate resting on a bench trial rather than a jury's verdict.
