Com. v. Healy

• Decision Date: 28 November 1984
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. Wayne Blyth HEALY.
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

Page 359

471 N.E.2d 359

393 Mass. 367

COMMONWEALTH v. Wayne Blyth HEALY.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts,

Hampden.

Argued April 3, 1984.

Decided Nov. 28, 1984.

Barry P. Wilson, Boston (Linda H. Morton, Boston, with him), for defendant.

William T. Walsh, Jr., Asst. Dist. Atty., for the Commonwealth.

Stephen Ansolabehere, Gary D. Buseck and Janice H. Platner, Boston, for Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Inc., amicus curiae, submitted a brief.

Before HENNESSEY, C.J., and LIACOS, NOLAN and O'CONNOR, JJ.

LIACOS, Justice.

On April 8, 1981, a Hampden County jury found the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree. He was sentenced to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole for the term of his natural life. On April 14, 1981, the defendant appealed from his conviction. On July 15, 1981, he filed a motion for a new trial, the subsequent denial of which he has also appealed. After the case had been entered in this court, the defendant filed a second motion for a new trial, together with other motions. ¹ This court ordered that those motions be retained and determined by it in conjunction with the defendant's appeals. Having considered the "whole case" pursuant to G.L. c. 278, § 33E, we now deny those motions, and we affirm the conviction of murder in the first degree and the denial of his first motion for a new trial.

We begin by summarizing the evidence submitted by the Commonwealth. Between 1 and 1:30 A.M. on August 8, 1980, the victim, Richard Frank Chalue, was heard screaming for help from inside his apartment in Holyoke. Chalue's body was found on his bed shortly before 2 A.M. He had been stabbed fourteen times in the chest, once on either side of the neck, and once on his right thigh. There was also a laceration on his left index finger. His hands had been bound behind him with socks tied together, and he had a gag of socks tied around his mouth. He was naked except for a towel wrapped around his neck and a pair of dungarees half-way down his legs. A pair of boots tied together with socks lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. On the table in the kitchen were a partially empty bottle of rum, two bottles of cola, one of which was partially empty, a glass, and an ashtray containing cigarette butts. The apartment was dark, since there was no electricity as a result of a fire in the building the week before. The victim's Doberman pinscher dog was locked in another room of the apartment. Both the front and the back doors were locked, the front door having been locked with a key from the outside.

Since the fire, the victim had been staying alone in the apartment, with the dog guarding his possessions. His girl friend and her two children, with whom he had shared the apartment for the last three years, were staying with her mother in her mother's apartment in a neighboring building. The victim, his girl friend, and the children were to have moved to a new apartment on August 8. On the evening of August 7, the victim had supper with his girl friend and the children in her mother's apartment and then took the children to a park. They returned at about 7:30 P.M., and he left at about 8:20 P.M. At about 9:15 P.M. his girl friend telephoned Chalue's apartment. There was no answer. She called back twice in rapid succession. Chalue answered the third time, sounding as though he had been running and was out of breath. He said that he had been downstairs at the apartment of a neighbor. Then she heard someone walk into the kitchen and say something to Chalue, and she heard them both laugh. She testified that it was the "very soft voice" of a man. Then Chalue became silent. She asked him who was with him. Finally, he answered that it was "Johnny," the neighbor from downstairs. She asked him several times whether everything was all right. He kept responding, "[S]ure, why wouldn't it be?" Johnny Arel testified at trial that he was not in Chalue's apartment, or indeed in the building, on the night in question.

Johnny's brother, Leo, who was staying in the fourth-floor apartment directly below Chalue's, testified that between 9 and 10 P.M. he heard someone going up the stairs; he went out to investigate, and spoke with Chalue, who was outside his own apartment and not within Leo's view. Leo then heard Chalue's front door close. Between midnight and 1 A.M. on August 8 he heard noises in Chalue's apartment as though furniture were being moved. A short time later he heard noises in the hallway and on the stairs outside his front door. When he turned off his radio and approached the door, the noise stopped. Leo was carrying a lantern, and its light was visible through his front door's transom. He heard the noise again twice, and, when he turned the radio off or approached the door, the noise stopped. A short time after the last noise, he heard the police cruisers arrive.

A cash register receipt for rum, cola, and ice was found, stained with blood, on the third-floor landing of the front stairs. The Commonwealth's fingerprint expert testified that he had found the defendant's fingerprints on the bottle of rum and on the partially empty bottle of cola. The Commonwealth's expert serologist testified that his tests indicated that four cigarette butts ² which had been taken from the ashtray on the victim's kitchen table had been smoked by someone who was a "non-secretor," i.e., who did not secrete blood group substances in his saliva. According to the expert's testimony, 20% of the population is composed of non-secretors. A test of the defendant's saliva showed that he was a non-secretor. Further, one of the four cigarette butts was found to contain cell material from a person with group B blood. The defendant has group B blood. According to the Commonwealth's expert, 2% of the population are non-secretors and have group B blood.

A bloodstained knife was found on the dresser in Chalue's bedroom. The Commonwealth's expert serologist also testified that tests performed on the blood on the knife showed it to contain A and B antigens, which would be consistent with the blood being a mixture of blood of group A and blood of group B. The victim's blood type was group A. Similarly, a long-sleeved shirt found in a search of the defendant's apartment had a bloodstain containing both A and B antigens. Finally, group B blood was found on the gear shift and brake lever of the defendant's automobile. ³

When the police officers questioned the defendant on the evening of August 8, he had a bandage on the palm of his right hand. The doctor who sutured the wound at about 8:20 A.M. on August 8 testified that in his opinion the wound had been between four and twenty-four hours old at the time he treated it. He testified that the wound could have been caused by the knife found in the victim's bedroom.

On August 8 at about 6:15 P.M. William McCarthy, captain of detectives with the Holyoke police department, dialed the defendant's telephone number, which he had found in the victim's address book next to the initials "W.H." The defendant told McCarthy that it had been three or four months since he had last seen the victim, who had once been married to the defendant's sister. He said that he had had a telephone call from Chalue at about 7 P.M. the evening before, inviting him to a "get-together," but that he had declined the invitation because he had other plans for the evening. ⁴ McCarthy asked Healy if he would come to the police station sometime to talk with the police officers and possibly to help them in the case. Healy made an appointment to meet with McCarthy at the police station on the following day. About twenty minutes later the defendant called McCarthy to ask whether he could come down to the station that evening, saying that he did not think he would be able to sleep that night "thinking about this." McCarthy agreed to the change.

The denial of the defendant's motion to suppress. Before trial, the defendant moved to suppress the statements which he had made to the Holyoke police officers on August 8. After hearing, the judge denied the motion. At trial, Captain McCarthy testified that the defendant told the police officers that on August 7 he left his apartment at about 8:30 P.M., bought a bottle of rum, two bottles of cola, and a bag of ice, drove to Chalue's apartment building, gave him what he had bought, talked with him for about fifteen minutes outside, and arrived home at about 10:15 P.M. Later in the interview, the defendant told the police officers that after leaving Chalue he had gone to two "gay" bars in Springfield and had arrived home shortly after midnight. When asked by the police officers, he stated that he was a homosexual. At all times on the evening of August 8 the defendant denied having gone into Chalue's apartment. ⁵ The defendant stated that he had broken a glass on his kitchen faucet and had cut his hand between his thumb and index finger at about 7:30 A.M. that morning.

The defendant argues that the judge erred in refusing to suppress all statements which he had made to the police officers at the police station on the evening of August 8. His argument is twofold. First, he claims that he should have been given the Miranda warnings when he arrived at the station but that he did not receive them until he had been booked. See Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 444, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 1612, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). In the alternative, the defendant claims that even if he were given the Miranda warnings, his waiver of his rights was invalid because of the coercive methods of interrogation used by the police.

The judge found that the defendant was accompanied to the police station by his roommate, George Roy. The defendant was ushered into McCarthy's office, and Roy was asked to wait outside. McCarthy began the interview by asking the defendant the names of the victim's friends, what bars and cafes the victim had frequented, and related questions. Then the defendant made the...