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Suspect in ‘97 murder gets 27 years for soliciting child

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Staff

A former Carrboro resident suspected in the 1997 disappearance of a Carrboro woman was sentenced to nearly 27 years in federal prison on Friday for attempting to seduce underage girls in an Internet chat room.

Andrew Douglas Dalzell, 33, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to solicitation of a child by computer after he initiated explicit chats with an undercover officer posing as an 11-year-old girl and drove from Gastonia to the Asheville area to meet her in February 2009.

Dalzell confessed to the 1997 slaying of Deborah Key in 2004, but the confession was thrown out after a judge ruled that police fabricated documents prompting the confession.

According to police, Dalzell was last seen with Key at a Carrboro bar. Police never found Key’s body, but prompted a confession from Dalzell by showing him a fake arrest warrant charging him with murder and a fake letter from the district attorney’s office threatening the death penalty if he did not confess.

The murder charges were dropped, but Judge Martin Reidinger ruled that he had to take Dalzell’s murder confession into account in the sentencing last week.

– Staff Reports

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