A man currently serving a life sentence for killing his former girlfriend in Weymouth in 2017 was arraigned Tuesday for allegedly stabbing another woman to death in her Dorchester apartment in 1999, officials said.
Cornell Bell, 54, formerly of Boston, was arraigned Tuesday in Suffolk Superior Court on a charge of first-degree murder in the May 1999 slaying of Caryn Bonner, 34, said Suffolk District Attorney Kevin R. Hayden’s office.
Bell pleaded not guilty and was ordered held without bail, which is largely academic since he’s already serving a life sentence without parole following his 2022 murder conviction in a separate case out of Norfolk County, officials said.
In that case, records show, he was found guilty of killing his former girlfriend, Michelle Clarke, in Weymouth in 2017.
Bell fled the murder scene in the victim’s pickup truck which was located in Florida several days later, officials said.
He was arrested after two years on the run in 2019 near Miami, police said.
On May 19, 1999, Hayden’s office said, Bonner’s sister “conducted a well-being check of Bonner’s 467 Columbia Road apartment after not hearing from Bonner for several days.“
She found her sister dead in her kitchen.
After Bell’s 2022 conviction in the Weymouth case, Hayden’s office said, his “DNA profile was subsequently uploaded into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. Suffolk County investigators linked Bell’s DNA to that found on a cigarette butt in Caryn Bonner’s apartment.”
Authorities “also re-discovered photographs of latent fingerprints in blood from inside the apartment and were able to individualize one of the prints to Bell,” Hayden’s office said.
Bell’s next hearing in the Bonner case is scheduled for Feb. 19.
“We never consider a homicide case unsolvable, no matter how much time has elapsed,” Hayden said in the release.
Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report.
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