The 12-year-old murder of a Manhattan jogger is now a few steps closer to an arrest.
Police have “flagged” a person of interest in the killing of Sarah Fox, 21, who was found dead in a Manhattan park about a week after her 2004 disappearance, officials said.
The Juilliard student’s death is eerily similar to the killing of Karina Vetrano, a 30-year-old jogger who was sexually assaulted and strangled as she went out for a run in a Queens park on Aug. 2, 2016.
Fox went jogging in Inwood Hill Park on May 18, 2004, and never returned to her nearby apartment. Her nude body was found about a week later in a remote area of the upper Manhattan park. It was badly decomposed and surrounded by petals and branches from a tulip tree.
Police said at the time that the arrangement of the yellow petals appeared to be some sort of ritual or tribute.
A botanist confirmed for detectives that the petals came from elsewhere in the park, suggesting the killer was someone with an intimate knowledge of the landscape.
Investigators originally had two potential suspects for the strangulation, but one has since provided detectives with an alibi.
The second man has moved out of the country with his family.
“We have him flagged,” Nilsen said.
Neither suspect is Dimitry Sheinman, an artist and self-proclaimed clairvoyant who then-Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau declared was the “No. 1 suspect” shortly after the killing.
Sheinman was known for wandering the park with his unleashed dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback, sparking confrontations with other parkgoers.
But Sheinman was never charged, though he did re-emerge in headlines last year when he returned to New York from South Africa.
The married father of two proclaimed that the name of the killer came to him in a vision. Cops said it turned out Sheinman was seeing things.