‘SHE’S GOING TO BE THERE – IN SPIRIT’
Father of ‘Baby Doe’ visits grave before trial
The father of “Baby Doe,” whose death drew worldwide attention when her small body washed up on a beach two years ago, knelt at her grave in the Memorial Day rain and said he hopes the slain 2-year-old’s spirit will speak through him when he testifies at her murder trial, which begins today.
“She’s going to be there — in spirit,” Joseph Amoroso told the Herald yesterday after visiting his daughter’s grave at Winthrop Cemetery for the first time since her burial nearly two years ago. “Hopefully, she can somehow, some way speak through me when I’m up on the stand.”
Opening statements in the firstdegree murder trial of Michael P. McCarthy are scheduled to go forward this morning before Suffolk Superior Court Judge Janet L. Sanders.
Defense attorney Jonathan Shapiro told the Herald yesterday he has opted not to appeal to the state Supreme Judicial Court for an emergency stay of the proceedings. The lawyer had put Sanders on notice Friday he was considering asking for the high court’s intervention after the judge ordered him not to quote during his opening from “Mama’s Dream Journal,” the diary kept by Rachelle Dee Bond, Bella’s mother and the state’s star witness.
“My plans are to give an opening,” said Shapiro, declining to elaborate on his defense strategy going forward.
Bond, 41, pleaded guilty in February to helping McCarthy, her former boyfriend, cover up her daughter’s death in the late spring of 2015. The charge of accessory after the fact to murder is punishable by up to seven years in state prison; however, Bond will not be sentenced until after she testifies.
McCarthy, who turned 37 yesterday, is accused of punching Bella to death in their Dorchester apartment because he thought she was a “demon,” stuffing her corpse in the refrigerator and later dumping it in Boston Harbor. The child’s body was discovered by a dog walker on a beach at Deer Island in June 2015, and she languished unclaimed for three months, the subject of a national campaign to identify her, until a tipster notified police of her death.
Amoroso has said Bond told him about the death days before she was arrested, but both parents had long criminal records and neither went to police.
Bella’s autopsy listed her as a victim of undetermined homicidal violence.
Only two of the 16 jurors seated to hear the case have children, according to McCarthy’s defense team.
Amoroso, 34, who never met his daughter during her short life, brushed aside dust and leaves yesterday that had collected at the headstone Bella shares with her late maternal great-grandmother, then blew bubbles from a toy bottle someone had left at the site.
“I thought it would be very important to visit and feel the serene peace that I felt,” Amoroso said. “I was able to just sit there and reflect on the upcoming weeks, getting the justice that she deserves. I have no idea what kind of twists and turns this trial will take.”