Bothell cold case trial now in jury’s hands

EVERETT — Jurors began deliberating Wednesday afternoon in the first-degree murder trial of Alan Dean for the fatal strangulation of Bothell teenager Melissa Lee in 1993.

In his closing statement Wednesday, deputy prosecutor Craig Matheson played video showing the police interview when investigators arrested Dean in 2020. Snohomish County sheriff’s detectives left the defendant alone in the room. The video kept rolling.

“I’m sorry,” Dean can be heard saying to himself on the footage.

In his closing statement, public defender Daniel Snyder argued an apology is not a confession.

Matheson said there was “no doubt” who killed Lee.

“It’s this man, Alan Dean,” Matheson added, pointing at the defendant in the courtroom.

Lee’s mother Sharon and sister, Kelli, listened from the gallery as Matheson delivered his final argument for Dean’s guilt.

DNA evidence eventually linked Dean, now 66, to the killing after decades of technological advances. Blood and semen with his genetic profile were found on the clothes Lee had been wearing when bystanders found her body below the Edgewater Creek Bridge on April 14, 1993. This culminated in the former Boeing worker’s arrest in 2020 and this month’s trial.

Prosecutors rested their case Tuesday after a week of witness testimony in Snohomish County Superior Court. They allege Dean, then 35, met Lee, then 15, on a talk line. They went out twice in March 1993 before Dean broke into her Bothell-area home the following month, sexually assaulting and strangling her and dumping her body off the bridge, according to charging papers.

The fraught teenage relationship between T.J. Peters and Lee made up the foundation of the defense’s claim to Dean’s innocence. They had broken up just days before her death.

Judge Millie Judge issued a warrant earlier this month to apprehend Peters, so he could testify at the trial. Days before the trial began, he was booked into the Snohomish County Jail.

The defense’s case revolved around a gang called the Organized Crime Syndicate. Dean’s public defenders argued Peters was a member of the group and hired someone from the syndicate to kill Lee.

But in court Tuesday, the ex-boyfriend denied putting a “hit” on her life shortly before her death.

Under oath, he also testified he’d never heard of the Organized Crime Syndicate.

“Maybe a rap group or something?” Peters said in court.

However, his older brother, Tony Gonzales, later testified Peters was involved with the group. Noting that in his closing statement, Snyder accused Peters of lying on the stand.

“Why would he possibly lie?” Snyder asked. “You know why, ladies and gentlemen.”

Gonzales also said he was in the room for a conversation between Peters and Lee, when Peters told her he’d forgotten to call off a hit on her. On the witness stand, Gonzales confirmed a “hit” means to “unalive somebody.” Nervously, he clarified it means to “mur- mur- murder somebody.”

When Peters mentioned the hit, Lee immediately got scared, Gonzales testified. He said the hit never came to fruition.

In a written statement to police just days after Lee’s killing, Peters reported talking to Lee on the phone the night she died and telling her, “You’re marked, (expletive).” Peters added he didn’t mean it.

On the witness stand Tuesday, he didn’t recall telling her that.

“I don’t know why I’d say that,” Peters testified.

Peters said he cared about her and didn’t want her to die. Choking up on the stand, he called her death “shocking.”

He testified he was with his parents the night of April 13, 1993, and didn’t leave their Edmonds home.

After his testimony, the judge quashed the warrant for his arrest, granting his release from jail Tuesday.

Gonzales finished his testimony around 9:45 a.m. Tuesday, and the defense rested their case.

Snyder aimed to discredit the DNA evidence against Dean. He said it’s not clear when Dean’s blood and semen reportedly got on Lee’s clothes. It could’ve been from the two times they’d hung out and rode in his car the month before she died, he argued.

“DNA cannot tell a story,” Snyder told the jury.

In her rebuttal, deputy prosecutor Sarah Johnson countered: “DNA doesn’t lie, but people do.”

Dean chose not to testify in the trial, which lasted eight days.

The jury, made up of seven women and five men, has a few options. They can convict Dean of first-degree murder as charged, convict him of the lesser charge of second-degree murder or acquit him.

Jurors began deliberating around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Jake Goldstein-Street: 425-339-3439; jake.goldstein-street@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @GoldsteinStreet.