New York man, 87, convicted of third killing
Hurubie Meko
New York: It took less than an hour this week for a jury to convict Harvey Marcelin of murder – in 2022, he killed a woman and dismembered her body.
Investigators found her torso in a shopping cart, her head and limbs in his apartment, and one of her legs near a garbage can blocks away.
The murder and dismemberment of Susan Leyden, 68, horrified prosecutors, but even more shocking was the criminal history of Marcelin, 87.
This marked the third time in 63 years that Marcelin was convicted of killing a woman. In 1963, he killed his girlfriend. In 1984, he killed the woman he was living with.
It was unclear how Leyden and Marcelin knew one another, though investigators found that they had lived in the same shelter in the Bronx about seven years ago.
Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, called the killing of Leyden “cruel and reprehensible”.
“Following the senseless murder, the defendant desecrated the victim’s remains in a manner that truly shocks the conscience,” he said in a statement on Friday (US time), after the trial in the state Supreme Court.
Leyden was “getting her life back on track” when she was killed, according to a prosecutor. Brooklyn Defender Services, which represented Marcelin, declined to comment on Friday.
Marcelin, who was listed as male in earlier court records, identified as a woman at the time of his 2022 arrest. But at the start of his trial last month, Marcelin told the court that he identifies as a man.
Gruesome discovery
The 2022 case against Marcelin broke into the news shortly after a man came across a shopping cart while on his way home to Brooklyn from a night out. The cart had been sitting at the intersection of Atlantic and Pennsylvania avenues for hours, the man recalled, so he decided to take it with him.
He pulled his electric bicycle onto the pavement and peeked into the bag.
“I found a body,” the man, Ramon Lopez, told jurors during his testimony.
A video played in court showed him riding his e-bike down the street in jeans, a brown jacket and a black backpack. After stopping and opening the bag, Lopez jumps back. He gets off his bike, moves it across the footpath and pulls out his phone. He slowly walks back to the bag, his phone’s flashlight on, and appears to check again.
He said he called 911 immediately.
In the bag, according to prosecutors, were some of Leyden’s remains. Surveillance footage showed Marcelin pushing the shopping cart the day before it was discovered, prosecutors said.
Evidence recovered
Over the following days, investigators ended up at Marcelin’s apartment. There, investigators found the victim’s head and limbs, as well as cleaning supplies, a hammer and the box from an electric saw. They also recovered more bags containing Leyden’s remains, blocks away from the building.
Surveillance footage taken on February 27, 2022, showed Leyden entering Marcelin’s apartment building on Pennsylvania Avenue in East New York. Leyden was never seen leaving the apartment, prosecutors said.
A lawyer for Marcelin, Alison Stocking, told the jury during the opening statements that prosecutors could not prove that it was her client who killed Leyden. The prosecution’s case “will not resolve the question of how Susan Leyden died and when,” she said.
Stocking said that a woman who was a witness for the prosecution could have been the one who killed Leyden.
“The question of who was in contact with Susan Leyden is completely separate from who killed her,” Stocking said.
Marcelin has served decades of his life in prison.
In 1963, he was convicted of first-degree murder for fatally shooting his girlfriend in a Harlem apartment building. He was given a life sentence, and the jury at the time was unable to decide whether to impose the death penalty, court records show.
He was released in 1984 on lifetime parole but was arrested less than a year later, after a body was found in a bag near Central Park. Prosecutors in Manhattan charged Marcelin with stabbing to death another woman with whom he had been living.
In 1986, he pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to six to 12 years in prison for that woman’s death, according to state records.
After several attempts to be released on parole, Marcelin was let out of prison in 2019.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
