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       A Northern Virginia man who was acquitted of a charge that he hired a career criminal to kill his fiancée in 1998 has sued the lead homicide detective in the case, alleging that she lied to a grand jury to obtain an indictment.

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       The plaintiff, James Christopher Johnson, alleges that Arlington County police Det. Rosa Ortiz enticed the admitted killer, Bobby Joe Leonard, into implicating Johnson in a long-ago crime he did not commit. More than two decades after the killing, Johnson wound up being charged with murder-for-hire, but he was found not guilty by a trial jury last year after less than an hour of deliberations.

       The lawsuit is the latest twist in the case of Andrea Cincotta, a popular public librarian in Arlington County who was found strangled in August 1998 in her apartment in the Colonial Village complex on North Rhodes Street.

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       Police initially suspected Johnson, her fiancé, and interrogated him intensely for three days immediately after the killing. But not until 23 years later, in 2021, was Johnson finally charged in the killing, based on statements to police by Leonard.

       According to trial testimony, Leonard, in 2018, told Ortiz, a cold case homicide detective, that a man had called him many years earlier and offered him $5,000 to kill Cincotta. At trial, Leonard said he didn’t know the man’s name and had never met him.

       In one hour, Arlington jury acquits man accused of murder-for-hire

       Leonard described killing Cincotta in grisly detail. He said he had been in the apartment she shared with Johnson once before, to take away a personal computer that Cincotta gave him. Leonard also said he spoke to Cincotta’s fiancé on the phone once, when he needed help using the computer. Leonard said the same man later called him, asked him to kill Cincotta, and told him that $5,000 would be waiting in the master bedroom closet, where Leonard said he left Cincotta’s body. But there was no money.

       Instead, Leonard said he took Cincotta’s Honda Civic and some coins and drove off. He said he never attempted to collect the $5,000 from Johnson because he knew that he, Leonard, was a suspect and feared that police might be watching him. The following year, Leonard was arrested for sexually assaulting and attempting to kill a 13-year-old girl in Fairfax County and was sentenced to life in prison, partly because of his lengthy criminal record.

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       As for Johnson, he maintained his innocence from the start, except for a brief segment near the end of a 28-hour Arlington police interrogation, in which he said he had a “vision” in which he knocked Cincotta down and she hit her head on a desk.

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       He later renounced this statement, and two experts — a criminologist and a veteran homicide investigator — told Arlington police that Johnson’s incriminating statement was false, in their opinions. Also according to trial testimony, the detectives involved in the case in 1998 falsely told Johnson that his fingerprints had been found on Cincotta’s body and that her time of death was after Johnson had come home from work.

       Still, he was not charged — until after Leonard, while in prison for attacking the 13-year-old girl, volunteered his account of Cincotta’s death in 2018. He eventually pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, testified at Johnson’s trial last year, and received another life sentence. At his sentencing in November, Leonard called himself “a very evil, sadistic person.”

       Killer sentenced to life in prison for 1998 slaying of Andrea Cincotta

       In Johnson’s four-week trial, though, the jury was not convinced that he had hired Leonard. Jury foreman Chen Ling said after the verdict that Leonard’s testimony was “the only thing the prosecution really had. There were too many other possibilities. We did not get beyond a reasonable doubt.”

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       In his lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Johnson alleged that Leonard’s story was “fantastically implausible” and that Ortiz had suggested to Leonard that he might get leniency if his story involved murder-for-hire. Leonard volunteered to tell the story only if he wouldn’t face the death penalty, and then-Commonwealth’s Attorney Theo Stamos agreed to that condition.

       The lawsuit alleges that Ortiz told an Arlington grand jury in 2019 that Leonard had identified Johnson by name to her — but Leonard later testified he never knew the caller’s name. Ortiz also allegedly told the grand jury that Cincotta’s injuries matched Johnson’s “vision statement,” even though Johnson had claimed she suffered a fatal head injury, and her actual cause of death was strangulation. The lawsuit also claims Ortiz told the grand jury that there were no signs of struggle. Yet Cincotta had multiple cuts and bruises on her head, upper body and legs.

       Ortiz did not return messages seeking comment. Arlington Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, who obtained the indictment against Johnson, also declined to comment.

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       Kevin Cincotta, Andrea Cincotta’s son, said after reading the lawsuit: “There’s lots of information in the public domain that suggests it was right and proper for the grand jury to indict both Bobby Leonard and Chris Johnson in my mother’s murder. I applaud the grand jury for getting it right, and I applaud Detective Ortiz for promptly executing the arrest warrants that flowed as a result of those indictments.”

       For two decades, Kevin Cincotta believed in Johnson’s innocence, but in 2018 he started to doubt his mother’s fiancé, conducted a recorded interview with Johnson to try to elicit admissions, and now contributes to a website which alleges Johnson is guilty. He said he does not own the website.

       Kevin Cincotta noted the website shows that Leonard knew details of Andrea Cincotta’s schedule that only Johnson would have known — she came home at lunchtime and was likely killed then, but didn’t normally come home at noon. The website notes that crime scene photos show Johnson had placed a laundry basket next to the closet door where Cincotta was found, but claimed not to have seen her until more than seven hours later.

       “Leonard identified the caller as ‘Andrea’s boyfriend',” Kevin Cincotta said. “Since she had only one boyfriend, this is equivalent to identifying Johnson.” He also said Leonard gained no benefit from confessing, since it added a murder conviction to his record and made him less likely to be moved to a less-secure prison, a condition he sought during the trial.

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