Commonwealth v. Emeny

• Decision Date: 08 August 2012
• Docket Number: SJC–10432.
• Citation: 463 Mass. 138,972 N.E.2d 1003
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. Walter EMENY.
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

463 Mass. 138

972 N.E.2d 1003

COMMONWEALTH

v.Walter EMENY.

SJC–10432.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts,

Middlesex.

Argued Sept. 9, 2011.

Decided Aug. 8, 2012.

Emanuel Howard for the defendant.

Marian T. Ryan, Assistant District Attorney (Anne C. Pogue, Assistant District Attorney, with her) for the Commonwealth.

Present: IRELAND, C.J., SPINA, CORDY, DUFFLY, & LENK, JJ.

DUFFLY, J.

On November 19, 1985, Patricia Clark was discovered stabbed to death in her Lowell home. At the time of the killing, the police investigation focused on the defendant, a former boy friend; Clark had ended their relationship earlier that year. Investigators interviewed the defendant and searched his automobile, but the case proceeded no further. In 2005, after reviewing photographs of items that had been found in the defendant's vehicle twenty years earlier, Clark's daughter provided “cold case” detectives with new information linking the defendant to the crime. He subsequently was indicted, and in 2007 a jury convicted him of murder in the first degree on a theory of deliberate premeditation.¹

The defendant claims that the evidence at trial was insufficient to support his conviction, and that errors at trial, including the improperly admitted testimony of a number of witnesses, as well as an unwarranted jury instruction on consciousness of guilt, created a substantial likelihood of a miscarriage of justice. The defendant asks also that we exercise our authority under G.L. c. 278, § 33E, to reverse his conviction and order a new trial. For the reasons that follow, we affirm the defendant's conviction and discern no reason to reduce the verdict to a lesser degree of guilt or order a new trial.

Background. We summarize facts the jury could have found, reserving certain details for our later discussion of the issues.

1. The murder. At the time of the murder, Clark lived in Lowell with her eleven year old daughter, Alecia, and her sons, Douglas, age seven years, and Mark, age four years. Clark, who was employed as a security guard, was assigned to work an overnight shift from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. At about 10:30 p.m., after putting Douglas and Mark to bed, Clark would leave Alecia in charge. Alecia would wake up in the morning before her mother arrived home from work, dress and feed her brothers, and walk to school once Clark returned home. Clark would then see the boys off to school. A bus picked up Mark before noon, and he was dropped off in front of the house at about 2:30 p.m. During that interval, the living room shades would be pulled down and the doors to the house would be locked, and Clark would sleep on a couch in the living room until her children returned home. This pattern was known to the defendant.

The defendant, who was employed by the same security firm as Clark and assigned to the same work site, became friendly with her when she began working there in 1985. They dated briefly, but while Clark viewed him as only a friend, his feelings for her grew stronger, and he proposed marriage. Clark rejected his proposal and ended their romantic relationship. In the fall of that year, when the defendant needed somewhere to live, Clark allowed him to stay at her house for a period of time. About one month before the murder, however, she asked him to move out. Also that fall, Clark filed a written report with her employer stating that the defendant, who worked the shift immediately prior to hers, had remained at her job site until 3 a.m. The defendant was told that he could not stay at the site after the end of his shift, but he continued doing so until the end of October, when he was informed that he would be moved to a new work site; the defendant thereupon resigned, and told his boss that he planned to move away from the area.

In early November, Clark and Alecia discovered that their spare house key, which opened both the front and back doors, was missing from its usual location in their kitchen. Clark told a neighbor that she suspected the defendant had taken it. Also early in November, on a day that she had stayed home from school, Alecia saw the defendant enter the house through the front door while Clark was sleeping; she observed the defendant remove a key from the lock and put it in his pocket. She then heard her mother and the defendant arguing. Clark told friends during the fall that she was frustrated with the defendant, particularly with respect to his pressuring her for a romantic relationship. Alecia noticed that, in the weeks before her death, Clark expressed relief whenever the defendant left their house.

On the morning of November 19, Alecia was late getting ready for school; it was the day school photographs were to be taken, and she was upset about her hair. To make her feel better, Clark retrieved several small jewelry boxes, opened them, and placed their contents on the kitchen table. She gave Alecia a ring that was part of a mother-daughter set. The rings were identical except that the mother's ring had sapphire-colored stones, while the daughter's were garnet. Clark also allowed Alecia to select other jewelry to wear. Alecia rejected a ring with white and blue stones, but selected a pair of earrings and a necklace. When she arrived at school, Alecia could not find the money she needed for the photographs. Because the Clark family had no telephone, Alecia telephoned a neighbor and asked her to tell Clark that she needed the money brought to school. The school principal, who spoke to Clark at 9:30 a.m. when she delivered the money, was among the last people to see Clark alive.

When Mark's bus driver pulled up outside Clark's house at 2:30 p.m., she honked the horn to signal their arrival. Clark did not appear. After waiting several minutes, the driver took Mark to her office. Sometime later, Alecia and Douglas arrived home from school. Alecia unlocked the front door, but was unable to open it more than a few inches because Clark's body was on the floor immediately behind it. Clark had been stabbed multiple times; one thrust had partially severed her spinal cord, while others perforated her heart and liver. Measurements of the width and depth of the wounds, along with bruising indicating that the weapon had a hilt, supported an inference that the murder weapon was a knife of a size consistent with that of a knife the defendant had possessed.² There was a torn and bloodstained sleeping bag on the floor next to Clark's body. The sapphire ring from the mother-daughter set was on the floor by her head. Police found bloodstains in the kitchen sink and on a bar of soap, and there was blood on a kitchen knife in a drying rack next to the sink.

Clark's house was located on a dead-end street. There was no sign of forced entry, and no one had been seen entering or exiting the front door by a neighbor who spent much of the day in the front of his house. Christine Murphy, a fifteen year old neighbor, stayed home from school that day. At the time, Murphy had a romantic interest in a man named Scott who owned a vehicle that was similar to, but distinguishable from, the defendant's red and white Chevrolet Monte Carlo automobile. Early that afternoon, Murphy's sister announced that Scott's vehicle was approaching, which drew Murphy to the window; but she recognized the passing vehicle as the “other” one, which in the past she had seen parked in front of Clark's house.

2. Police investigation. Investigators identified several individuals, including the defendant, to question in connection with Clark's murder. By November 20, 1985, police had contacted and ruled out potential suspects, but were not able to locate the defendant. On November 22, a State trooper found the defendant sleeping in his car at a rest stop. Unaware that Lowell police sought to question the defendant in relation to Clark's murder, the trooper checked the defendant's registration, determined that the vehicle was not properly registered, and had it towed. The defendant telephoned his mother, learned that police had been looking for him earlier in the week, and then, when he arrived at her house, telephoned and agreed to speak with investigators.

At the police station, after being read Miranda warnings and signing a Miranda waiver, the defendant spoke to a State trooper and an inspector with the Lowell police department. The interview was transcribed by a stenographer. The defendant denied having been at Clark's house on November 19.³ He said that he had eaten breakfast at a diner in Lowell at about 8 a.m., left for Boston in his car around 10 a.m., and arrived at a government building around noon, where he picked up a probation record that he needed to complete a job application. He then decided not to proceed with the application, but rather to pursue his plan of relocating to Texas. He said that he spent the afternoon driving and specifically recalled being at a rest area north of Vernon, Connecticut, at 4:15 p.m., and that he went to two shopping malls before checking into a motel in Vernon at 8 p.m. The next day, he drove to Hartford, Connecticut, stopped there to look for work, then proceeded toward New York. However, he changed his mind about moving to Texas and turned around, heading back through Connecticut toward Massachusetts. He spent the next two nights sleeping in his car at rest stops, until he received the motor vehicle citation and his car was towed.

After giving his statement, the defendant agreed to undergo forensic testing, which revealed the presence of occult blood on his hands. The defendant also gave permission for police to search his automobile, which was at an auto body shop after having been towed earlier that morning. Investigators photographed and conducted forensic tests on the vehicle and its contents. ⁴

In 2005, detectives from the Lowell police department's criminal investigations unit again interviewed Alecia. They showed her photographs of items taken from the defendant's vehicle, one of which depicted a...