Street astronomer ‘Jupiter Joe’ faces murder trial 26 years after Bronx girl’s body found

A street astronomer with a welcoming smile killed a young Bronx girl who dreamed of the stars — and kept the slaying a secret for more than 20 years, prosecutors said at the accused killer’s cold case murder trial.

It took a cutting-edge new DNA technique and a detective’s ruse in a diner to reveal Joseph “Jupiter Joe” Martinez as the alleged killer of 13-year-old Minerliz Soriano, Assistant District Attorney John Miras told jurors in Bronx Supreme Court last week.

“She wanted him to show her the stars. Instead, he threw her into the dumpster,” Miras said in his opening statement at Martinez’s trial.

Martinez lived a few floors below Minerliz in her Pelham Parkway South apartment building when she disappeared on Feb. 24, 1999. Four days later, a maintenance worker found her stuffed in plastic garbage bags in a dumpster behind a video store on Bartow Ave. in Co-Op City.

She had been been strangled.

As detectives struggled to find the killer, Martinez, 53, presented himself an affable grinning astronomy enthusiast who gave impromptu lessons to children and ran his own stargazing channel on YouTube. Videos show him interviewing fellow star-watchers, including young children, chatting with an author, unboxing telescope equipment and attending a festival to watch a 2017 eclipse.

“I taught myself how to use a telescope. Now, I do it anywhere I can in the city. Sometimes, I even teach lessons along the way,” he says in one video. “Anyone who’s passing by, coming home from work, heading out for a drink, whatever it is, they can stop by and take a look.”

But Minerliz’s murder lurked under the surface of Martinez’s starlit persona, prosecutors allege.

“Minerliz had a special interest. Minerliz liked telescopes and comets and the planets and the stars,” Miras said. She told her close friend, Kimberly Ortiz, all about how she’d be the first Latina astronaut from the Bronx.

“And Kimberly said, ‘They don’t make people like you and me astronauts.’ And Minerliz said, ‘You say what you want. I’m going to be an astronaut,’” Miras told the jury.

Minerliz wanted a telescope for her 13th birthday on Jan. 17, 1999, but her birthday came and went and she didn’t get her telescope, the prosecutor said.

Then five weeks later, on Feb. 24, 1999, she vanished. Kimberly stayed late for an after-school program at their school, Intermediate School 135 in Bronxdale, but Minerliz decided to go home. She never made it back.

“Kimberly never saw her again,” Miras said. “Minerliz was reported missing that evening and the investigation began. What happened to this little girl? And four days later, the answers started to come.”

At the time, nothing made Martinez stand out from anyone else in Minerliz’s building.

Detectives combed through the young victim’s life and routine but found nothing that would lead them to a killer. Every school day, she’d take a city bus home from school, then wait outside for her 7-year-old sister Nadia’s bus to arrive. She would then walk upstairs with her younger sister to their apartment.

The studious youngster had no boyfriend and no history of running away from home.

Detectives had DNA from the scene that helped eliminate other persons of interest.

“She’s found wrapped in a fetal position, all wrapped up in a ball with something called gaffer’s tape wrapped around her, placed in numerous garbage bags and thrown right into a dumpster,“ Miras said. “The killer… he left his signature on Minerliz. Her body’s taken to the morgue and on her sweatshirt are two drops of semen.”

But the killer remained a mystery for 22 years, until investigators ran a familial DNA search — a technique which gained prominence nationwide after it helped unmask the Golden State Killer in 2018.

Martinez’s deceased father, whose DNA was in a database after a sexual abuse arrest, was a partial match.

And that led detectives to think of Martinez, and his shared interest in astronomy, Miras said.

One detective reached out to Martinez, posing as a mom who was looking for an astronomy lesson for her daughter, and they set up a meeting at a diner in New Rochelle, N.Y., where Martinez was then living. Afterwards investigators snagged a straw Martinez used, tested it for DNA, and matched it to the semen on Minerliz’s shirt.

Martinez denies being the killer his defense lawyer said the DNA on the teen’s sweatshirt might not have been semen.

“They will not be able to say whether it’s semen, whether it’s saliva, whether it’s mucus, whether it’s perspiration,” defense lawyer Troy Smith said during his opening statements. “Why is that important? Because when people live in an apartment building, when they’re with each other and they’re in the elevator and they see each other, of course, the DNA, bodily fluids, saliva, perspiration — high probability of transference.”

Minerliz sold holiday candy in the apartment building and was frequently unsupervised, Smith told jurors.

“Countless neighbors, they see her in the lobby of the building,” he said. “They see her late at night outside, without parental supervision. She’s always doing laundry by herself. Neighbor after neighbor, many of them say the same thing.”

Smith also hinted at an inappropriate relationship between Minerliz and her stepfather, telling the jurors that the teen wrote in a e-mail, “If I were only 30 years older, you would be my man.”

“The evidence will show that she was a troubled kid that engaged in dangerous life behavior,” Smith said. “She tried to commit suicide. She cried out for help. She engaged in behavior that put her at risk.”

The trial continues on Monday.