Workers dug up a Queens backyard on Wednesday in a police search for human remains after a man imprisoned for murder suggested that he had left a body there, the authorities said.
After using a backhoe and digging and picking through the dirt all day and into the evening, the investigators came up empty-handed. The backhoe operator filled in the hole around 8:30 p.m., and the police said they did not plan to resume digging.
At the center of the investigation is Gregory Wynder, 56, who is serving a life sentence for killing a woman in Harlem in 2001.
Recently, the authorities received tips that Mr. Wynder had committed other crimes. After questioning him, they charged him last month with the murder of a runaway girl, Aja Grant, 16, in 1997.
Ms. Grant’s body, with stab wounds, was found that year in a lot across the street from the site of Wednesday’s search, on 170th Street near 105th Avenue in Jamaica, according to Kevin Ryan, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown.
At the time of Ms. Grant’s death, Mr. Wynder was a tenant in a house adjacent to the site of Wednesday’s exploration.
While being questioned recently, the police said, Mr. Wynder also made statements about a third murder and directed the police to the site that was excavated on Wednesday, they said.
No additional charges have been filed, nor has another victim been identified.
While the digging proceeded, residents of the house, which was built in 2003, peered out the windows. The site was an empty lot in the late 1990s, the police said.
Mr. Wynder’s former residence next door is a run-down brick house with a dilapidated porch and overgrown weeds.
A woman living there said that her mother owns the house and recalled Mr. Wynder distinctly. The woman, who declined to give her name, said that he was a violent man and that when her mother heard in the late 1990s that he was wanted, she called the police and he was arrested. Mr. Wynder has been arrested many times, and it was unclear what case the woman was referring to.
