MOON

NAVARRO

More than seven years after Dr. Alfred C. Moon was found beaten to death in the bedroom of his Lincoln home, the police are closing the book on his killing, with a Florida man pleading no contest to the murder.

Angel Navarro, also known as Victor Medina and Angel Torres, 38, pleaded no contest to one count of second-degree murder in Superior Court on Thursday, said Michael Healey, spokesman for Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch. Navarro’s sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 15, but as part of his plea agreement with prosecutors, Healey said, Navarro, 38, whose last known Rhode Island address was 80 Curtis St., Providence, will face a maximum sentence of 60 years, with 40 to serve in prison.

The proceedings in Superior Court before Associate Justice Mark A. Pfeiffer took about two minutes, Healey said. Though Navarro admitted beating Moon to death, Healey said prosecutors will not discuss details of the case until the sentencing.

Heidi Keller Moon, Moon’s ex-wife, with whom he raised a daughter and two sons, and to whom he remained close after their divorce, said she wanted to hold off on any definitive comments until after Navarro’s sentencing, the official end of the case. But she said the seven-year effort by investigators showed “the process works.”

“It’s been a long, long time,” she said. “But we are in a good place in the process. That’s a relief. The process has worked.”

Healey said that while it may have at times seemed from the outside that no progress was being made, state and local police had never stopped trying to solve the case. In the first year, they interviewed more than 250 people, some from as far away as Key West, Fla. A year after the murder, four detectives were still on the case full time.

“The Rhode Island State Police, the Lincoln police, never, ever gave up,” Healey said. “But for their efforts, we’re not here. Seven years between the time of the horror and the disposition of this case, that’s a long time. A long time to wait for justice.”

“It’s a tribute to the tenacity of the Rhode Island State Police and the Lincoln Police that this cold case was solved so that a career criminal’s career is over,” Lynch said.

Though there were stretches in the first years after the murder when it didn’t look like the family would know who the killer was, Keller Moon said the family never got the feeling that police had given up.

“We’re grateful,” she said. “We’re grateful.”

MOON, 67, was murdered the night of Aug. 19, 1999. The police said they believed he let someone into his Briarwood Road home in Lincoln’s Kirkbrae Estates section who beat him to death with a brass lamp. His body was found in bed, his head so severely injured that he had to be identified by dental records.

The house, where Moon lived by himself, had not been ransacked, the police said, and robbery had not appeared to be a motive.

Moon’s murder stunned Lincoln and the state’s medical community. He was a popular radiologist who had worked at Rhode Island Hospital for 31 years and had been a clinical associate at Brown University since 1973. He was credited with bringing the first CAT scan unit to Rhode Island.

Moon was prominent in his hometown as well, having served as one of the founding commissioners on the Lincoln Housing Authority. He’d stayed on that panel for 23 years.

Friends and family recalled him as a man who enjoyed his garden and his grandchildren. At the time of his death, Moon had recently stepped down from the housing authority, to spend more time with his family, he said. He had also planned to retire from medicine at the end of the year.

THE DAY OF his murder, the police said, Moon had gone to his medical office in Providence and then returned home briefly after work. He ate dinner at a restaurant in North Providence and visited two bars in Providence that catered to gay men, The Club in Town and the Providence Eagle.

State police investigators theorized that Moon may have met his killer at one of those bars or somewhere else, and then the two returned to his home.

State and local police then began a high-profile investigation in the case. They initially announced they had trace evidence, such as hair, fingerprints and other unspecified forensic evidence from the scene, but for years there were no public signs or announcements of progress.

Then, in June 2004, the state police suddenly announced they’d found a lead that led them to arrest Navarro in Fort Myers, Fla., for violating his probation from a 1999 drug possession conviction. Healey said Navarro had been let out of prison on parole five days before Moon was murdered.

Navarro was extradited to Rhode Island for the parole violation, and then charged with Moon’s murder. He has been held at the Adult Correction Institutions since then. In October 2004 he was sentenced to serve four years for the parole violation.

Healey said the state settled on a second-degree murder charge in the case because a first-degree murder charge would require the state to prove Navarro had planned the killing. While assistant attorneys general Alan Goulart and Susan Urso were prepared to present a case to prove Navarro was the one who killed Moon, Healey said, they did not have enough evidence to show Navarro’s state of mind before he did it.