BUFFALO, N.Y. — A former bartender convicted earlier this year in the 1993 strangling death of a mother of three children was sentenced Monday to 25 years to life in prison.
Dennis Donohue, 55, was arrested in September in the death of Joan Giambra after investigators retested DNA evidence. He had also been suspected of being involved in the death of a 13-year-old girl, Crystallynn Girard, seven months earlier.
Erie County Judge Sheila DiTullio says she "didn't agonize for a second" before handing Donohue the maximum penalty. In May, a jury found him guilty of killing the 42-year-old Giambra at her Buffalo home.
In February, Girard's mother, Lynn DeJac, was formally exonerated in the teen's death after spending 13 years and seven months in prison. She was awaiting retrial on murder charges when, in a startling reversal, prosecutors said a forensics review showed the girl died of a cocaine overdose, not from being strangled, as earlier believed.
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DeJac had already been released from prison and had her second-degree murder conviction overturned in November after newly analyzed DNA evidence placed Donohue, DeJac's former boyfriend, in the girl's bedroom around the time she died.
DeJac has maintained that Donohue is responsible for her daughter's death and has denied her daughter abused drugs.
