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The case involving the murder of Karina Vetrano, a 30-year-old woman who was murdered while jogging in a Queens park in 2016, ended in a mistrial late Tuesday night.

After a day and a half of deliberations, 12 jurors returned to the courtroom split on whether to charge Chanel Lewis, 22, with the murder and sexual abuse of Ms. Vetrano on a late August afternoon in Spring Creek Park. The defense lawyers requested a mistrial, and Justice Michael B. Aloise of State Supreme Court in Queens granted the motion, supporting the jurors’ sentiment that their conclusion would not change. “I’m inclined to believe them,” he said.

During deliberations, the jury requested a number of key evidence parts that were presented throughout the trial. That included further examination of the DNA evidence, and a viewing of the confession tape, in which Mr. Lewis is seen admitting to the murder in two separate occasions, after repeatedly denying it to investigators.

Ms. Vetrano’s badly beaten body was found by her father on the night of Aug. 2, 2016, setting off a manhunt that involved scores of officers. In early February 2017, the police arrested Mr. Lewis on charges of murder and sexual abuse.

Mr. Lewis became a suspect after a police lieutenant said he had spotted Mr. Lewis loitering in Howard Beach in the months preceding the murder. The lieutenant, John Russo, told jurors that Mr. Lewis had been wearing thick clothing during the middle of summer and had avoided the police, which made him stand out. Later, the police reviewed a 911 call from May of that year that placed Mr. Lewis in the same part of the park where Ms. Vetrano’s body was discovered.

Soon after they identified him as a possible suspect, the police confronted Mr. Lewis at his home, and asked him for a DNA sample. He confessed to the crime during a four-hour interrogation after his DNA matched a sample found on Ms. Vetrano. “I was beating her and was mad at her,” he told a Queens assistant district attorney in an interview that was videotaped.

In a nearly two-hour closing argument on Monday, the lead prosecutor, Brad Leventhal, raised his voice frequently to describe Ms. Vetrano’s murder. Then Mr. Leventhal acted out the crime, using both hands to show how prosecutors say Mr. Lewis first punched and then strangled Ms. Vetrano.

”If you follow the evidence, it leads you to one location; it leads you to to one person. Right over there,” Mr. Leventhal said, pointing directly across the courtroom at Mr. Lewis. “Chanel Lewis. Murderer. Killer.”

Mr. Leventhal described Mr. Lewis, 22, as a loner, motivated by “anger and sexual frustration.” He said the defendant often roamed the streets of Queens and Brooklyn, where he lived, and did not have a job, friends or girlfriend.

The prosecution’s case relied heavily on Mr. Lewis’s videotaped confession and DNA evidence found at the crime scene that matched his profile. Prosecutors also focused on a hand injury that Mr. Lewis suffered the same day Ms. Vetrano was murdered that was consistent with punching someone.

Mr. Leventhal said that Mr. Lewis was upset when he left his home on the day of the murder because a neighbor was playing loud music, so he went to Spring Creek Park. He had previously visited the park at least seven times. It was a place, Mr. Leventhal said, where Mr. Lewis often “went to clear his head.”

The prosecutor said Mr. Lewis attacked Ms. Vetrano as she jogged through an overgrown section of the park. Medical evidence showed Mr. Lewis repeatedly punched Ms. Vetrano, then strangled her after climbing on top of her chest and sexually abusing her, Mr. Leventhal said.

Mr. Leventhal said the defendant had conducted 137 web searches on his phone after the police approached him and requested a sample of his DNA, including queries for the phrases “Miranda rights” and “sacrament of penance,” a Christian rite of atonement.

Robert Moeller, one of Mr. Lewis’s lawyers, argued that the police had coerced Mr. Lewis’s confession.

He also tried to cast doubt on the DNA evidence, suggesting the crime scene had been contaminated. He said Mr. Lewis might have touched a surface that Ms. Vetrano touched at some point, and a transference of small amounts of DNA might have occurred.

“People’s DNA can end up in places that they’ve never been,” he said.

Mr. Moeller noted that Mr. Lewis, on the same night he eventually confessed to the crime, had first denied to the police having anything to do with Ms. Vetrano’s death several times before he was put in a “windowless” room for several hours without being allowed to call his family. The defense lawyer also pointed out that several details in the confession were at odds with some of the findings in the autopsy.

At times, Mr. Lewis, who attended a high school for students with learning disabilities, appeared confused on the videotaped confession. He occasionally mumbled through his responses.

The cause of death had been ruled as strangulation, but Mr. Lewis told an investigator on the night he confessed that Ms. Vetrano had drowned in a puddle. He denied sexually assaulting Ms. Vetrano, but the victim’s body was discovered partially clothed with trauma to her vagina and rectum.

Finally, in closing arguments, Mr. Moeller said Mr. Lewis’s hand injury would have prevented him from throwing a phone 40 feet from the path, where the police later found it.

Mr. Moeller claimed the police investigation and prosecution had tried to make the evidence support their faulty theory. “The government is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”

Officials with the Queens District Attorney’s Office said that they planned to retry the case. A new trial is set to begin Jan. 22.

Sean Piccoli contributed reporting.

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