Texas transient held in 20-year-old SB County cold case

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Steven Sylvester, 57, has been sought by authorities since the 1992 killing of Dennis Robert in Victorville.

A Texas transient wanted nearly two decades in the beating death of a Victorville man is scheduled to be arraigned today in the High Desert on murder charges.

San Bernardino County sheriff's detectives returned Steven Sylvester, 57, to California from Amarillo, Texas, on Saturday and booked him in West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga. He has been charged in the murder of 52-year-old Robert Dennis.

"It's a miracle," said Dennis' sister, Patricia Federly, a north Utah resident. "We just really had given up."

Detectives say Sylvester killed Robert Dennis and left him in a hallway of his home in the 13200 block of High Desert Road on Nov. 5, 1992. His mother discovered his body and Dennis' 1983 Subaru station wagon was missing.

Investigators found photographs in Dennis' bedroom, including one of Sylvester, who family members said had been hanging around with Dennis at least a month before his death.

But after the attack, Sylvester vanished.

"They had identified him, but the case went cold because they couldn't find him," said sheriff's spokeswoman Jodi Miller.

Detectives reopened the case in 2010 after receiving information that Sylvester was in Shamrock, Texas, a town near the Oklahoma border. They traveled to Texas, where they handed out photographs of Sylvester to numerous homeless shelters in Amarillo and Shamrock. He eventually stopped in at one of the shelters.

"When he came in, an employee

recognized the photo that we had left them," said San Bernardino County sheriff's Cold Case Detective Greg Myler.

Deputies also received an address where Sylvester was having his mail sent. Amarillo police officers went to the address and arrested Sylvester.

Sylvester tied himself to Dennis' death during interviews with San Bernardino County sheriff's detectives, sheriff's officials said.

Federly suspects Sylvester attacked her brother because he caught Sylvester trying to steal property from his home and threatened to call the police.

She says Sylvester attacked Dennis from behind because Dennis was a much larger man at 6 feet and 250 pounds.

"Everybody thought he was a friend, but nobody knew he had this track record of meeting people and stealing from them," she said.

San Bernardino County Deputy District Attorney John Thomas, who works with the sheriff's cold case team and is the prosecutor on the Dennis case, said such cases come with many challenges due to the passage of time.

But the team still has had much success.

Jimmy Joe Cox, 71, who dismembered his live-in girlfriend in 1982, was sentenced Tuesday in Barstow Superior Court to 15-years-to-life in prison.

The investigation had been cold for decades before it was reopened by cold case detectives. They re-interviewed witnesses and gathered enough evidence to arrest Cox in May 2010.

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Reach Melissa via email or call her at 909-386-3878.

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Source: http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_19758213?source=rss

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