A Connecticut man recently arrested in a decades-old murder case was found unresponsive in his prison cell over the weekend.
George Legere was declared dead at a local hospital around 12:15 a.m. on Saturday, shortly after he was discovered at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, Connecticut Insider reported. He was 77 years old.
His cause of death was not provided and remains under investigation by the Corrections Department and Connecticut State Police.
Legere was arrested last month in connection with the murder of 21-year-old Janet Couture at her apartment on Cannon Road in Mayberry Village. She was found stabbed to death inside the residence on Oct. 13, 1973, after police said a man climbed through a window and attacked her while she was home alone.
Though Legere became a suspect early on, authorities did not have enough evidence to charge him at the time.
The case eventually went cold, but in 2021, investigators got a major break when Legere was arrested by Avon police for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman in a separate 1984 cold case. He had been jailed in Massachusetts on an unrelated charge since 2019, at which time his DNA was taken. That matched with a sample in a national database, ultimately linking him to the attack on Couture.
Legere, who’d been serving out a 25-year sentence at the time of his death, was also facing a murder charge in connections with Couture’s slaying.
