incredible
McGOVERN: BELLA BOND’S MOM A TOUGH SELL AS STAR WITNESS
Bella Bond’s mother doesn’t remember the day her baby girl was murdered, but she has vivid memories of the moment she met her former boyfriend, Michael McCarthy, the toddler’s alleged killer.
He was lurking outside a CVS and didn’t look well. He asked her if she had any prescription meds. She gave him some Klonopin.
Suffolk County prosecutors are hoping the jury believes this woman and sends McCarthy to jail for life, based almost solely on her word.
Rachelle Bond took the stand yesterday as the sole eyewitness in a case with no DNA evidence, surveillance footage, or even a real motive.
What jurors beheld was a woman who said she had no problem taking care of her little girl even though she admitted she, McCarthy and his brother would take turns getting high on heroin. Jurors took notes as Bond said she didn’t remember the day McCarthy allegedly punched Bella so hard she bounced off a bed, turned gray and died in front of her.
“What was the date that she died?” Suffolk prosecutor David Deakin asked.
“It was in June,” she said. “I’m not really sure. … I was a stay-at-home mom, unless I had an appointment and I wrote it down, every day was the same. … I wasn’t aware of the date.”
On June 25, 2015, the unidentified child who became known as “Baby Doe” was found stuffed in a garbage bag on a Deer Island beach. Two years later — sitting comfortably on a plea deal that will free her after the trial ends — the little girl’s mother couldn’t remember when her child died.
In courtroom 906 at Suffolk Superior, a room that typically houses heinous murder trials, Rachelle Bond’s two hours of testimony yesterday was particularly gruesome and at times unbelievable.
As if checking off items on a grocery list, she admitted to a series of crimes on her rap sheet — prostitution, drug-dealing, larceny — before explaining how she met Joseph Amoroso, Bella’s biological father, while homeless in Boston.
“I thought he was cute,” she said. “So I asked him for spare change or something.”
Jurors learned that Rachelle Bond grew up without a father, and from her teenage years on she descended into a bleak world of drugs, homelessness and dead-end relationships that led to five children. Two of them were taken by the state, two died after birth and the fifth, Bella, was killed and discarded like trash.
They heard how McCarthy came looking for drugs and then stuck around for eight months. She liked him because he knew all about astrology and reiki — an alternative medicine where McCarthy would supposedly use energy from his hands to heal her pain.
Bond lost track of time after her daughter died — “I was very sick and very out of it” — but remembers seeing Bella’s little legs in a green duffel bag alongside weights that helped sink her tiny body.
The testimony was too much to hear at times. One juror stopped taking notes and rubbed the bridge of his nose as far-off sirens filled in moments of welcome silence.
Twenty people who have followed me on Twitter through other murder trials bailed on me. One sent a message apologizing, saying this one was “too much.”
When the day ended, a reporter asked me: “How can anyone believe her?”
Rachelle Bond will be back on the stand Monday, and soon after the prosecutor finishes with her, McCarthy’s attorneys will have their shot to break down her already spotty story.
The best hope for the state’s case is that jurors will discard the testimony and render a judgment based on the fact that someone needs to pay for Bella Bond’s murder.
It won’t be the mother who failed her or the biological father who abandoned her.
All that’s left is Michael McCarthy, the broken man who shook his head as his ex-girlfriend called him a killer.