He spit on the sidewalk outside his home. Then police figured out he was the suspect in a 35-year-old cold case murder

NBC10

Your support helps us to tell the story

Support Now

A significant breakthrough has been made in the case of a young Boston mom who was killed nearly 40 years ago, with authorities finally charging a 65-year-old man with her murder.

James Holloman was arrested on Thursday afternoon in 25-year-old Karen Taylor’s death after police saw him spit on the sidewalk outside his home in Dorchester and matched his saliva to forensic evidence taken in 1988, according to cops. Prosecutor Lynn Feigenbaum said at a hearing last week that scrapings from Taylor’s right hand matched Holloman’s DNA, along with DNA found on a sweatshirt sleeve and a cigarette found in the young mom’s bedroom decades ago.

Taylor, of Roxbury, Boston, was last seen alive on the afternoon of May 27, 1988. That day, Taylor’s mom called her daughter — but it was her 3-year-old who answered. The child said her mother “was sleeping and she could not wake her up,” prosecutors from the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office said at the arraignment.

James Holloman (pictured hiding), 65, is charged with first-degree murder of Karen Taylor (NBC10)

The grandmother went to Taylor’s apartment after that alarming phone call, prosecutors said. She crawled through a window at the back of her daughter’s building and into the first-floor bedroom “where she discovered her daughter lying face-down in a pool of blood,” reported NBC10.

Taylor had been brutally stabbed 15 times in her chest, head, and neck area, an autopsy confirmed.

Following the hearing at Suffolk Superior Court on Friday, Holloman’s attorney told the press that he doubted his client’s DNA connection to the murder after all these years.

Prosecutors have asked that Holloman be held without bail. Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden praised investigators’ work in a statement.

“This is an example of superb investigative work by detectives and prosecutors using modern criminology science, but most of all it’s an opportunity for Karen Taylor’s loved ones to see someone answer for her death after so many years of unanswered questions," he said, according to CBS.

Holloman’s next hearing is set to take place on October 29.