Ex-girlfriend links ‘eddy’ to McCarthy
The cruise ship channel where prosecutors say Michael P. McCarthy tried to sink the 30-pound body of Bella Bond was a favorite haunt of his misspent youth, his longtime girlfriend testified yesterday.
Taryn Devlin, 36, an out-ofwork office manager who fell for McCarthy when she was 15, called the dump site opposite the Black Falcon Terminal in South Boston “the eddy” — accessible many years ago by crawling through a hole in a fence that led to “a dark path.”
Their crowd was drawn to “isolated areas,” Devlin explained. “We didn’t want to be bothered by adults, just being loud and having fun as teens.”
Her vivid memories were powerful in that for the first time since McCarthy’s murder trial began last month, the jury heard eyewitness testimony from someone who could claim he was familiar with that remote corner of Boston Harbor.
Devlin said she was with McCarthy, now 37, until her early 20s, even moving to Oregon at one point with him and his mother, Suzanne McCarthy.
“He was very nice,” she said. “We were young and happy.”
But soon after she began dating McCarthy, Devlin, who grew up in a hardscrabble South Boston housing project, said she began drinking and moved on to marijuana, prescription pills and later, heroin.
“They were around, they were available, so I took them,” Devlin testified of the drugs. She said she has been clean and sober for 12 years.
Devlin was brought to prosecutor David Deakin’s attention after Michael Sprinsky, another state witness and McCarthy’s former best friend, recognized “the eddy” from television coverage of a field trip jurors took there. Sprinsky then notified state police of McCarthy’s connection to the spot.
Devlin acknowledged on cross-examination by attorney Jonathan Shapiro that she had refused months ago to cooperate with an investigator for the defense. She also said it took prosecutors two days to persuade her to speak.
McCarthy is accused of killing his girlfriend Rachelle Bond’s 2-year-old daughter Bella in the spring of 2015. The child’s remains were unidentified for three months after she washed ashore on Deer Island.
Judge Janet L. Sanders has not yet ruled on whether involuntary manslaughter will be included on the verdict slip.