A North Naples sexual battery from 1999 has produced an arrest after Collier County detectives turned to forensic genetic genealogy and the FBI collected a fork an Arizona restaurant diner left behind
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The Collier County Sheriff's Office says it has arrested a 71-year-old Arizona man on charges connected to the sexual battery of a Naples woman in 1999, after DNA recovered from a fork he left on a restaurant table was matched to evidence from the case.
WINK News reports the agency announced the arrest of Terry Lynn Denton on Wednesday. According to the sheriff's office, the attack happened on 2 June 1999, after the victim returned alone to her North Naples apartment following an evening at a jazz club in Bonita Springs, and a man grabbed her from behind as she unlocked her door. A sexual assault kit was collected at hospital, but the DNA in it matched no one in the national database and the case went cold.
How the sheriff's office says it got there
The agency says it sent the evidence to a private laboratory, DNA Labs International, in August 2025 for forensic genetic genealogy. The method builds family trees out of DNA in order to narrow a search to a small number of possible people, rather than relying on a direct match to an existing offender database.
By February 2026, according to the sheriff's office, the laboratory had narrowed the investigation to two people, one of whom was living in Glendale, Arizona. The agency says FBI agents then watched a restaurant where he was eating and collected what he left behind, including a drinking glass, a straw, a spoon and a metal fork.
The sheriff's office says a laboratory result on 18 June matched DNA from the metal fork to the DNA in the victim's kit, and that detectives later travelled to Arizona and took a sample directly from him that matched as well. The agency puts the strength of the fork match at more than 700 billion times more likely to have come from Denton than from an unrelated person. That figure is the laboratory's calculation as reported by the agency.
What has not been established
Denton has been charged. He has not been convicted, and no court has yet weighed any of the evidence described above.
The sheriff's office says that when detectives interviewed him at his home he denied ever having lived in Collier County in 1999, and that they put records to him showing a Florida driver's licence issued in 1998 that listed a Naples address less than a mile from the victim. That exchange is the agency's account of the interview.
He was taken into custody by the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office Fugitive Apprehension Unit and is booked into the Sarasota County Jail while he awaits extradition to Collier County.
The first one of its kind here
The sheriff's office describes this as its first arrest to come out of a forensic genetic genealogy investigation.
"For 27 years the victim waited for answers," Sheriff Kevin Rambosk said in the agency's announcement, crediting the technique, his detectives and the FBI. Rodney Crawford, the FBI Tampa Division Special Agent in Charge, said in the same announcement that advances in forensic technology combined with investigative work mean victims are not forgotten.
This desk was not able to read the sheriff's office release directly. The agency's website returned an HTTP 403 refusal on this run, so the account here rests on WINK News, which reported it in full, and on two other newsrooms that carried the same announcement independently on Wednesday.
Where we read it: WINK Digital Team at WINK News. Read their story.
The document: No public filing has been released.
