GUILTY WA - Susan Lowe, 19, raped & murdered, Bellevue, 23 April 1980

Police in Washington state finally solved a 32-year cold case involving a woman who was raped and murdered thanks to DNA testing that led them to the suspected killer.

Michael Allan Halgren, 56, a convicted sex offender with a history of violent crimes, was arrested this week and charged in the 1980 slaying of Susan Lowe.

Lowe, who was a 19-year-old beauty at the time of her death, was strangled with a pair of pantyhose inside her Bellevue apartment.
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On April 23, 1980, at around 10pm, Susan Lowe was alone in her apartment near Bellevue College watching the Seattle Supersonics game on television when she was brutally attacked by an intruder.

The next morning, her roommate found the 19-year-old's naked body lying in her bed with pantyhose tightly wrapped around her neck, according to a police report.
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A convicted sex offender pleaded guilty Thursday to killing a Bellevue woman 34 years ago.

Michael Allan Halgren faces 17 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to second degree murder in the April 23, 1980, death of 19-year-old Susan Barbara Lowe.

"There is a special satisfaction when we can solve a murder more than three decades old using modern forensic science," King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said in a Thursday news release.

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It turns out Halgren, 58, raped several other women since the 1970s.

"He admitted to a string of serial rapes in Bellevue over the course of many years. He admitted to that when he was being evaluated under the sexually violent predator law," explained senior deputy King County prosecutor Kristin Richardson.

Halgren was just days shy of his 24th birthday and lived just three blocks from Lowe at the time of the attack in April 1980. Lowe's roommate was gone and she was alone watching a Seattle SuperSonics game on TV when Halgren burst into her apartment, according to Richardson.

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A serial rapist who pleaded guilty to the cold-case sex slaying of a 19-year-old Bellevue woman 34 years ago on Friday was given a minimum 14½-year prison sentence, but the judge made it clear he hopes Michael Halgren spends the rest of his life in prison.

The maximum sentence for the April 23, 1980, strangulation of Susan Barbara Lowe is life, and King County Superior Court Judge Roger Rogoff said that would be his preferred sentence...

“It is the court’s opinion that Mr. Halgren should spend his life in prison rather than in treatment,” he said, handing down a minimum sentence that is likely to ensure parole — and a return to the SCC — won’t be possible until Halgren is in his 80s. Halgren, 58, will be required to serve his minimum sentence before going before the state Indeterminate Sentence Review Board, which can add up to five years at a time to a defendant’s sentence — up to life.

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