After years of delay, a man accused of raping and murdering a teenage girl in 1993 will finally face trial in Washington State this week.
Melissa Lee was 15 years old when she disappeared from her Bothell, Washington home, late one April evening. Just one day later, her strangled corpse was discovered at the bottom of a ravine. A toxicology report revealed that the teen had both ethyl ether and heptane in her system, according to KING.
Lee's mother says that she thinks about her daughter - who would now be 46 years old - every day.
"When I wake up, I wonder what state she'd be living in, how many kids she would have, what she would be doing with her life," she told KOMO.
For decades, Lee's murder went unsolved but advances in DNA technology allowed police to unearth new evidence in July 2020. Investigators uploaded DNA found at the crime scene to an ancestry database and were able to deduce the identity of a potential suspect.
Alan Edward Dean was arrested and charged with Lee's death in 2020. He admitted to having met Lee on a night talk line and going on two dates with her, according to KING.
In the ensuing years, the charges against Dean were twice dropped on the grounds that he was not mentally competent to stand trial.
"To hear he was crazy, and then they would release him, and re-arrest him, it was a rollercoaster of emotions," said Lee's sister Kelli Littlejohn, according to KOMO.
Last February, Dean's public defenders and the county's prosecutors agreed that the courts could proceed with the case. It is expected that the trial will last for at least two weeks.
