Prison for man in NYC hotel killing case with bite debate
NEW YORK — A man convicted of murdering a woman during a down-and-out tryst in a Times Square budget hotel was sentenced Monday to 25 years to life behind bars, capping a case that endured for nearly a decade and aired a dispute over the validity of bite-mark evidence.
Clarence Dean already has spent more than nine years in jail , awaiting trial and then sentencing in the August 2007 death of Kristine Yitref, whose battered body was found in a garbage bag underneath a bed in Dean’s room.
Dean was arrested a day after the discovery. But his trial was delayed for years, partly because of the bite-mark debate.
“Clarence Dean committed a merciless and brutal act of violence against a vulnerable woman,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement announcing Dean’s sentence. “He showed a complete disregard for human life.”