Bond ‘ashamed’ in tearful testimony
Cross-exam hits hard, asking ‘Baby Doe’s mom why she didn’t call 911
A cellphone recording captured the man accused of killing Bella Bond a month before her death, teaching the tot how to use love and laser beams to slay the monsters that haunted her nightmares.
“Get away from me you stinky poo-poo monsters! That’s what you do to all the monsters and they have to let you go,” Michael P. McCarthy, 37, coached the happily shrieking child on April 26, 2015, in an audio cellphone recording his attorneys played for his jury yesterday. No video was shown.
McCarthy is on trial for the little girl’s murder. As the 2-year-old was heard mimicking him in excited babble in the recording, McCarthy instructed Bella to think thoughts of love and to use laser beams to “blow the heads off” monsters.
Within weeks, Bella’s body was dumped in Boston Harbor in a trash bag. Her remains, found washed up on Deer Island by a dog walker, went unclaimed for months. Authorities named her “Baby Doe.”
Rachelle Bond, 41, her mother, tilted her head to one side and lowered her eyes as she listened to her daughter’s voice at the conclusion of her second day of testimony against McCarthy.
Bond returns to the witness stand for a third time today for more blistering cross-examination by Jonathan Shapiro, as one of Boston’s top-shelf attorneys endeavors to undercut the prosecution’s star witness. Bond will be released from prison following the disposition of her ex-lover’s first-degree murder case in exchange for her February guilty plea to charges of larceny and accessory after the fact to murder.
She testified yesterday she was buying heroin with her disability checks and shooting up four to seven times a day following Bella’s murder in June 2015. Shapiro suggested she should have reached for a phone instead.
“911 — that’s all you had to do,” Shapiro mocked her. He later added, “It’s kind of hard to get your story straight when you’re making it up, isn’t it?” Bond, who claims she can’t remember the exact day her daughter died, defended keeping silent about the killing for more than three months, whimpering that she was “scared.”
“I didn’t get away with anything,” she assured Shapiro. “My child is dead … I’m ashamed of it, everything that happened after. I made a mistake.”
Bond told jurors that between her drug abuse and cable being canceled for nonpayment, she was completely ignorant of the Baby Doe investigation that splashed across headlines and billboards until Sept. 18, 2015, when she caught a TV news story after she had confessed what happened to Bella’s biological father, Joe Amoroso.
“I dropped to my knees and I said, that’s Bella!” Bond sobbed. “Right at the same time a knock was at the door — the police.”