Witness begins trial with gruesome details of discovery
The murder trial of Michael P. McCarthy, the man accused of killing Bella Bond, began yesterday with the heart-wrenching testimony of the dog walker who found the toddler’s body in a trash bag on a Winthrop beach.
Bonnie Flynn said she “got a suspicious feeling about the bag” that had washed up on the pebbly beach because it had been knotted so carefully and because the dog she was walking “circled the bag four times.” Flynn, 48, the first witness called by assistant Suffolk DA David Deakin, choked up while recalling tearing the bag open with a sea shell.
“I took a deep breath and I continued to cut, maybe five inches,” she said. “I seen black material with white polka dots. It sort of reminded me of a skirt.”
Then, as she dug deeper into the bag, Flynn said she saw “two legs unfolding.”
“They just came out like that. They looked like human legs — a child,” she said. “I looked away, thinking that it wasn’t real.”
It was then that Flynn said she ran to a passing couple and begged for help.
McCarthy, 37, a heroin addict like the child’s mother, Rachelle Bond, moved into her Maxwell Street apartment in Dorchester in February 2015. Months later, “on a date uncertain,” Deakin said Bond walked in on McCarthy punching her daughter so hard she bounced off the mattress she was lying on.
“‘If you tell anyone what happened, I will kill you ... She was a demon,’ ” the prosecutor said McCarthy warned Bond, before strangling her unconscious and jamming a syringe of heroin into her neck.
Sometime later the pair drove to the South Boston Reserve Channel and dumped Bella in the water in the knotted trash bag, Deakin said.
Bond pleaded guilty earlier this year to being an accessory after the fact to murder as part of a “cooperation agreement” with the state that will spring her from prison later this year in exchange for her testimony. Defense attorney Jonathan Shapiro told jurors prosecutors have no DNA or trace evidence or even surveillance video to convict McCarthy, who he said “had a loving relationship with Bella.”
Witnesses expected to be called today include McCarthy’s lifelong friend, Michael Sprinsky, who Rachelle Bond told about her daughter’s death in September 2015 — three months after pleas for help identifying “Baby Doe” had been plastered on billboards across the city.