Officials in Groton, Connecticut, on Monday announced the arrest of a man in connection with the murder of Suzanne Wormser, 58, whose body was found dismembered and stuffed into a suitcase near a cemetery on March 19.

Donald Coffel, Wormser’s 68-year-old roommate, is charged with murder, tampering with physical evidence and disposing of a dead body in Connecticut Superior Court after police found Wormser’s body on March 19, though they believe her remains were left in the cemetery sometime in mid-March.

“Both the victim and the suspect knew each other. This was a targeted event,” Groton Police Department Chief David Burton said during a Monday press conference announcing Coffel’s arrest.

Burton added that police searched another crime scene at the Groton residence Coffel and Wormser shared on April 17 and interviewed Coffel, a person of interest at the time who later became the primary suspect.

“Her family is still suffering and grieving her loss,” Bruckhart said.

A medical examiner found Leary’s cause and manner of death to be undetermined, but Bruckhard said there is no “indication that there’s any criminal involvement.”

New Haven police do not suspect any criminal activity in Denise Leary’s death at this time. (iStock)

“That doesn’t mean that we can definitively say there was not, but … in the totality of what we saw in our investigation, there was nothing to indicate that she was murdered,” the officer said.

“It’s easy to speculate, but that’s not something that we, the police, have necessarily the luxury of doing.”

— New Haven PD Officer Christian Bruckhart

Regarding the Wormser case in Groton, Bruckhart said police are “not seeing any links, certainly between Denise and anyone else,” and they also do not see a connection between Coffel “and the city of New Haven in general.”

“In a case of an alleged serial killer, if there was some connection that we had or that we saw, or it was a particular area, or there was a motive or whatever, we would want to put that out because we want to protect the public,” Bruckhart said. “That’s what we do. Now, that’s not to say that we would put out everything that we know, because again, if we’re trying to catch this person. Holding some of those facts and not publicizing them might help the investigation, might help that person get caught. In the case of Denise, we don’t see any of that.”

 A Facebook group making unsubstatiated connections between the cases, which was formerly called “New England Serial Killer,” has changed its name due to the social media company’s policies and now has more than 68,000 followers.