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Andrea Cincotta, a 52-year-old Arlington, Virginia, librarian and single mother, was found strangled and hidden inside her bedroom closet on August 22, 1998. Police at first focused on her fiancé, James “Chris” Johnson, but the case went cold for nearly two and a half decades.
A prison-house confession finally cracked the file open, leading to a dramatic double prosecution, and handyman Bobby Joe Leonard pleaded guilty to the killing. At the same time, Johnson faced (and beat) a murder-for-hire charge.
Viewers can see how the investigation unravelled when Oxygen airs a fresh cut of the Dateline: Unforgettable episode, titled Behind the Closet Door, on Thursday, June 26, 2025, at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
Andrea Cincotta murder- from 1998 closet discovery to courtroom reckonings
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Shortly after 1 a.m. on August 22, 1998, Johnson phoned 911, claiming he had found Andrea Cincotta's lifeless body in the closet of their Colonial Village apartment.
There were no signs of forced entry, yet coins and Andrea Cincotta's Honda Civic were missing, details detectives logged but never definitively explained, as cited in an oxygen report dated July 28, 2022.
1998-2000, Early leads and a second suspect
Johnson endured three days of interrogation before being released. Meanwhile, investigators learned that Andrea Cincotta had recently gifted an old computer to Bobby Joe Leonard, a maintenance worker known around the complex.
Leonard was jailed the next year for an unrelated r*pe and attempted murder case, then disappeared from the Cincotta file as it gathered dust, as cited in The Washington Post report dated October 21, 2023
2018 - Jailhouse confession
As per The Washington Post report dated October 21, 2023, Leonard told cold-case Detective Rosa Ortiz he had strangled Andrea Cincotta after a man he believed to be her boyfriend offered him $5,000 to carry out the crime. He called himself,
"a very evil, sadistic person."
November 2021, Twin indictments
Both Leonard and Johnson were charged with first-degree murder. As per the Oxygen.com report dated July 28, 2022, Arlington County Police Chief Andy Penn hailed the break, saying,
“The passage of time does not diminish the need for answers and accountability in this senseless crime that took Andrea’s life”
On July 27, 2022, Leonard pleaded guilty and accepted a life-plus-ten-years sentence and agreed to testify against Johnson, though he admitted he never collected the alleged cash. In October 2023, Johnson was acquitted in under an hour.
Jurors took just 55 minutes to clear Johnson of murder-for-hire. As per an ABC News report dated March 8, 2023, he later told 20/20,
"I'm sorry I wasn't there to protect her."
Johnson's wife, Ginnie Grevett, added,
"It never occurred to me ever that he might have had anything to do with it whatsoever."
Cold-case confession revives investigation after two decades
Leonard’s 2018 confession arrived after years of pressure from Andrea Cincotta's son, Kevin Cincotta, who pushed Arlington detectives to re-examine the evidence. Leonard claimed a mysterious caller, "an engineer" familiar with the gifted computer, coached him on how to carry out the murder quietly.
Prosecutors argued that the caller was Johnson. Defence lawyers countered that Leonard, already serving life for attacking a 13-year-old girl, invented the payoff to curry favour.
Detective Ortiz's grand-jury testimony later became the centrepiece of Johnson's civil suit, in which he alleges the detective "manipulated" Leonard's story and withheld exculpatory details. The lawsuit is pending in federal court.
Verdicts and lawsuits
Leonard, 57, is housed at Sussex State Prison, serving consecutive life terms. Johnson, 62, lives in Maryland and seeks damages for alleged civil rights violations.
No witness ever corroborated the promised $5,000 payment, leaving prosecutors split between a burglary-gone-wrong theory and a contract-killing scenario. Kevin Cincotta remains vocal about systemic missteps, telling Dateline that "tunnel vision" plagued the original probe.
Stay tuned for more updates.
