N.Y. Police Still Seek Leads in Jogger’s Central Park Slaying

The jogger, thin and muscular, ran through the darkness in Central Park early Sunday, keeping her head down as she passed the murder scene that has transfixed the city.

One week earlier, at the same hour, in the same spot, Maria Isabel Monteiro Alves was killed. She was buried Sunday in Brazil.

Unlike Alves, who was snatched off the road and beaten to death, this jogger had a police escort. A blue-and-white cruiser and an unmarked car trailed the jogger, a police officer herself. She and another female officer had left Alves’ apartment at the time she usually did and run to the murder scene.

While the re-enactment was designed to give detectives a more exact time for the killing and a better idea of when and where potential witnesses may have seen Alves beforehand, it signaled how little the probe has progressed.

Police believe Alves, 44, who moved here from Brazil, was attacked in the darkness and rain. She was dragged down an embankment to a glen. She may have been raped. Her killer or killers smashed her skull and dumped her body in a stream.

Another runner spotted her body several hours later, just 350 yards from where another female jogger was gang-raped and beaten in the notorious “wilding” attack of 1989.

Since Alves died, police have overrun the park in search of witnesses and suspects. A roundup of homeless men and drug suspects produced two leads that fizzled fast.

In Brazil, meanwhile, people talked about the irony of Alves being killed in New York. Rio de Janeiro has an average of 20 to 30 murders a weekend, at least double New York City’s rate.

Alves’ body arrived home on Sunday. Her cortege escorted the coffin from Rio de Janeiro to Marica, a sleepy seaside town she loved to visit. About 200 mourners recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria. “Hold on to God’s hands,” Alves’ family called out.