Satan-worshipping killer of Boston’s ‘Baby Doe’ Bella Bond loses appeal

Michael McCarthy, found guilty of beating and tossing 2-year-old Bella Bond into Boston Harbor in a heartbreaking crime that transfixed the country, has lost his appeal over Satan worshipping and jury instructions.

That and other arguments were denied by the state Supreme Judicial Court Monday in a 15-page ruling packed with damning detail showing the child first known to the world as “Baby Doe” had no chance of survival.

McCarthy was found guilty in 2017 of the second-degree murder of his girlfriend Rachelle Bond’s daughter Bella two years earlier. The child’s remains were unidentified for three months after she washed ashore on Deer Island inside a knotted trash bag wrapped in two blankets.

The mother cut a plea deal to testify against McCarthy to escape extra jail time.

The drug-addled couple snorted cocaine, shot up heroin, and downed pills leading up to the child’s death, the court states. The mother had supported herself “by sex work and dealing drugs,” the SJC added.

Bond and McCarthy “both frequently asked (Bella) if she was possessed by demons; if she did not agree that she was, Bond sometimes spanked her,” the appeal states.

It got worse. One night in their Mattapan apartment, the court adds: “The defendant punched the (child) in the stomach so hard that she ‘bounced up.’ … ‘It was her time to die. She was a demon,'” McCarthy added, according to the appeal.

Baby Bella was dropped into the harbor at City Point in South Boston, a place McCarthy knew well from his youth in Southie.

The couple “injected heroin four to seven times a day” while trying to hide the unforgivable crime, the court added.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children generated a computer image approximating Bella’s image — calling her “Baby Doe” — in an appeal that went viral worldwide to help identify the child found in the bag. The U.S. Coast Guard even attempted to trace the tide to help solve the case. But it was a friend of the couple who alerted his probation officer to the crime.

Rachelle Bond pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder and to larceny over $250, for having continued to collect benefits for Bella after her death.

The SJC rejected McCarthy’s claim Rachelle Bond was the one who beat Bella, writing “the credibility of Bond’s testimony was for the jury to decide.” The mother said McCarthy was angry the night when the toddler didn’t stay in bed. And the medical examiner also backed up how lethal McCarthy’s blow was to the child.

Also, the SJC adds, McCarthy had a car, Bond did not. The court said he had access to weights and a bag to toss the child into the harbor, she did not.

The SJC also rejected McCarthy’s argument that the judge failed to properly instruct the jury how to go about deciding a verdict, saying “common sense” dictates jurors could easily determine if someone else was involved in the beating.

McCarthy argued the court did not prove the child was killed during “a Satanic ritual” nor what he “ultimately thought” about the occult.

Satanism was allowed, the SJC said, to corroborate testimony that McCarthy said the child “was a ‘demon’ and it was ‘her time to die.’ ” The court added McCarthy told of “epiphanies” involving “reptilian demons that kill children.” That, the SJC added, was a reason the mother was afraid to report her child’s death.

McCarthy is serving a life sentence but is still eligible for parole.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3fYkU0E