Lowell Sun - December 29, 2008
LOWELL — After a two-week trial and two days of deliberations, Jerry Meas heard the jury’s verdict that would send the 24-year-old Lowell man to prison for the rest of his life.

Earlier this month, the Lowell Superior Court jury convicted the notorious gang member in the June 13, 2006, slaying of Bonla Dy, of Chelsea, outside a 7-Eleven convenience store on Chelmsford Street. The motivation behind the slaying? Dy was wearing red, a rival gang’s colors.
 
The conviction capped a strong, two-year record of Lowell homicide prosecutions by Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone — a conviction rate of 94 percent.

Since he took office in 2007, Leone’s staff of prosecutors has won 16 of 17 homicide convictions, 11 of which were convicted of first-degree murder. With the exception of one murder suspect who was found not guilty, the others were convicted of either second-degree murder or manslaughter.

In Middlesex County, which includes Lowell, Leone has a 98 percent conviction rate for homicides.

Leone attributes his staff’s high conviction rate to “a system, a process and people.”

He says it is a “tried and true system of investigating and prosecuting these cases, a disciplined process of building a case that withholds legal scrutiny, and dedicated people who fight on behalf of others who have experienced the ultimate loss.”
 
The process begins, he said, with an experienced team of police investigators. He praised state police investigators and Lowell detectives working under Lowell Police Superintendent Kenneth Lavallee.

Then there is a team of prosecutors, paralegals and support staff in Leone’s Lowell office led by veteran prosecutor Thomas O’Reilly.

The conviction that got away was that of 65-year-old Lowell resident Roland Douglas Phinney Jr.

Phinney spent 16 years in state prison for the murder of a 22-year-old nursing student, Marriane Alexander, who was beaten to death in her bedroom on Feb. 8, 1980. Alexander was Phinney’s South Walker Street neighbor.

During a retrial last March, a Lowell Superior Court jury found Phinney innocent of first-degree murder.

“There were a number of challenges to bringing a murder case to trial 28 years after the victim’s death, including the fact that witnesses’ memories diminish over time,” Leone said. “But we presented our best case against the person we believed was responsible for her murder and must respect the jury’s verdict in the case.”

When Leone thinks of big murder cases, he thinks of people.

“I think of Sathy Men, the sister of three brothers who were brutally murdered in Lowell in 1995 by Vuthy Seng,” he said.

She was only 13 years old at the time of the murders and was shot herself, but survived. Sathy provided critical eye-witness testimony during the first trial in 1997, then took the stand again to testify against Seng when he was retried in 2007 after his first conviction was overturned on a Miranda issue.

Seng is now serving life in prison without parole.

“Sathy Men is someone who showed incredible bravery to overcome those memories, not once but twice, to stand up on behalf of her three brothers,” Leone said.

Leone credits Lowell police for pursuing the murder of Patricia Clark, whose 1985 slaying in Lowell went unsolved for 22 years.

“The Lowell police never gave up and our office never gave up,” Leone said.

In June 2007, Walter Emeney, Clark’s former co-worker and spurned lover, was convicted of first-degree murder in Clark’s 1985 slaying in her Lowell apartment.

Alecia Clark, who was 11 when she found her mother’s body in their apartment on Nov. 19, 1985, was the key to the case.

Police who investigated the murder 22 years ago testified there were no signs of forced entry into the apartment, suggesting Clark either knew her killer or he had a key. Emeney had been the prime suspect from the beginning, in part because Alecia told police about Emeney’s relationship with her mother. She also told police that Emeney had a key.
 
Police had some strong circumstantial evidence against Emeney 22 years ago, but nothing that put him in Clark’s 16 Morse St. apartment that day. The case went cold until the Lowell police cold-case squad reopened the investigation.

Then Alecia Clark, now 33, spotted something that had been overlooked. It was a small ring box she had seen only once, on the day her mother died. Her mother had given her a ring to wear for picture day. It was found in Emeney’s car trunk.

Also found in Emeney’s car on Nov. 22, 1985, were the Nov. 20 and Nov. 21 city editions of The Sun, featuring stories about the Clark slaying. Emeney told police he hadn’t been in Lowell since before the murder.

In thinking about the people affected by murder, Leone said, “I think of the fact that her then 11-year-old daughter was the one who first found her mother murdered, and as a 33-year-old woman saw her mother’s killer finally brought to justice.”

The children who are murdered or victimized by murders are “truly our most vulnerable victims,” Leone said.

Cases like Neil Entwistle, who was convicted this year of murdering his wife, Rachel, and their 9-month-old daughter, Lillian, or Michael Bizanowicz, a Lowell transient, who was convicted in 2007 of raping Joanne Presti and then murder Presti and her 12-year-old daughter Alyssa, who saw her mother killed.

“Those were just unimaginable, unforgivable crimes,” Leone said