But now, at an advanced age, he’s become known to neighbors as a cordial but distant man who has struggled with alcohol and drug addiction.
But none of the crimes in New York that he was charged with were as severe as the gruesome killings he is now accused of having committed. This week, the police in Queens arrested Broadnax for the 1973 killings of two women who had been vacationing in Virginia, the police there said.
A cold-case squad in Virginia Beach identified Broadnax, who is in his 80s, as a suspect by using technology that did not even exist when the women, Lynn Seethaler and Janice Pietropola, both 19, were killed inside a motel cottage near the oceanfront.
DNA evidence found at the crime scene was used last fall to match Broadnax’s profile in a national database, a Virginia Beach law enforcement official said. The official did not say what type of DNA was collected from the scene and requested anonymity to discuss the pending case because doing so is illegal under Virginia law.
Broadnax, a native of Virginia, was arrested Thursday on a fugitive warrant issued by the Virginia Beach police. Officials there said he is charged with two counts of murder and one count of rape. He was being held on a New York City jail barge awaiting extradition, according to the police and jail records.
“Our objective now is to be able to bring justice for the victims, and for their families to be able to have a sense of peace and closure,” said Officer Linda Kuehn, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Beach police.
Seethaler and Pietropola were from Pittsburgh and were on vacation when their bodies were found in an oceanside motel on June 30, 1973, according to the local police’s online summary of the case.
William Haden, the retired detective who handled the case, said Tuesday that the killer strangled Seethaler, slashed her throat and shot her twice in the head; Pietropola was strangled, raped and shot three times, he said.
A motel clerk had called the police after the women failed to show up to check out at the end of their weeklong stay, Haden said. Investigators questioned two men who had dated the women but did not charge them with a crime. Then the case went cold. Haden left the Virginia Beach Police Department in 1998, but the case stuck with him.
“I am just relieved,” he said. “It was an albatross around my neck all those years, and that albatross has now been removed.”
The arrest stunned Adedayo Peterson, whose mother was briefly married to Broadnax in the 1970s. She said Broadnax had served in the Army and had been incarcerated in Virginia before he met her mother. “I didn’t expect nothing like that,” Peterson said. “But I wouldn’t put it past him.”
The marriage, his second, was short-lived and soured after Broadnax became violent. He once whipped her mother with a belt and, on another occasion, pulled a gun on her brother, Peterson said.
A public defense lawyer assigned to Broadnax’s case could not be reached for comment.
A local television station, WTKR, reported in 2011 that Seethaler and Pietropola were two of at least 12 women with similar physical traits who were killed or went missing in Virginia Beach between 1973 and 1985.
Although the police considered the possibility of a serial killer, investigators were unable to determine if the killings were connected, Haden said. Some of the women were killed in their homes and two were found floating in the ocean. Several other women vanished from the oceanfront and have never been found.
“Of course you look at that,” Haden said of trying to connect the killings. “You wouldn’t be worth the powder on your shoes if you didn’t.”
Broadnax has lived in New York since at least 1990, where he has been incarcerated three times for crimes including assault, according to corrections records. State law required him to submit DNA because he was convicted of a felony.
He was released from prison on parole in 2013, after serving most of an eight-year sentence for assault, according to state prison records. In that incident, the police said, he was selling metal scraps in Manhattan in 2006 when he got into a fight with a customer and broke the man’s arm.
He settled into a first-floor apartment in Queens, where neighbors said he was quiet but cordial, waving hello to neighbors and carrying on small talk.
“He was one of the older people in the building,” said one neighbor, who refused to give their name. “Sometimes he forgot things, like he had dementia. We all looked out for him, you know?”
A few months ago, Patrick Penafiel, 63, said, he saw three detectives in the hallway, questioning Broadnax before searching his apartment. Penafiel only recalled one occasion when Broadnax socialized, when he was invited to a tenants’ meeting.
“He told us he was a recovering alcoholic, and drug addict,” he said. “He showed us his diploma from a rehabilitation center. We all clapped for him.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.