BELLA JURY WILL HEAR OF SATANIC OBSESSION
A judge has ruled that Bella Bond’s mother can testify she feared her demon-obsessed lover had supernatural powers when he is tried for murdering the 2-year-old girl — the child who was dubbed “Baby Doe” after her remains washed up on Deer Island in 2015 in a trash bag.
“The prosecution is trying to paint Mr. (Michael Patrick) McCarthy as some kind of nutcase,” the alleged baby-killer’s attorney Jonathan Shapiro protested during a pretrial hearing yesterday.
Suffolk Superior Court Judge Janet L. Sanders ruled at the hearing that Bella’s mother, the state’s star witness Rachelle Dee Bond, can testify that one of the reasons she waited nearly four months to turn McCarthy in is because she believed he had supernatural powers he could unleash to harm her. Bond has pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact of murder and is awaiting sentencing.
Bond, 41, claims that as the couple stood over Bella’s dead body in her Dorchester apartment, McCarthy, 36, assured her, “It was her time to die. She was a demon,” Suffolk Assistant District Attorney David Deakin told Sanders.
Sanders also gave Deakin the green light yesterday to show jurors internet searches he said McCarthy did between February and September 2015 regarding satanism within the NFL and Hollywood, satanic rituals and demons and aliens, but not interests he explored about right-wing conspiracy theories and mass murderer Charles Manson.
“Charles Manson is a very well-known name that would set off alarm bells,” Sanders said of her cherry-picking.
Jury impanelment begins Monday with opening statements tentatively slated for May 30. The high-profile trial will take place in Courtroom 906, where last month, former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez was acquitted of a double-homicide five days before he hanged himself in his prison cell. Sanders announced yesterday she is using the massive Hernandez jurorscreening questionnaire as her model for seating 15 impartial fact-finders. The case is expected to take more than a month to present.
Deakin said investigators suspect Bella was killed in late May or early June of 2015 and temporarily stuffed in Bond’s Maxwell Street refrigerator. Her body was found in a trash bag washed up on a Winthrop beach June 25, 2015. Three months passed before she was positively identified.
Deakin revealed that retiring state Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Henry M. Nields will testify Bella most likely died from an “asphyxia injury,” though Nields cannot rule out her heart was stopped by a blow to the chest. Her death certificate cites “homicidal violence;” however, without a definitive cause of death, Sanders will not permit Nields to testify that Bella was murdered.