‘Can never forgive’
Mom’s push to keep ’82 killer caged
The convicted murderer who sexually assaulted a Bronx nurse and bludgeoned her to death nearly 40 years ago is up for parole in September — but the victim’s family is fighting his potential release, saying it “would be a sin.”
“It’s [been] 39 years and every day is a nightmare,” Phyllis Meliota, 87, said of her daughter Barbara’s murder at the hands of maintenance worker Anthony Doyle in 1982.
“You can never forgive somebody that does an evil thing like that.”
On a spring morning that May, Barbara Meliota, 24, had arrived for her 7 a.m. shift at Montefiore Hospital early so she could bring her dad a coffee as he awaited surgery for a slipped disk in the same infirmary.
Except Barbara never met her dad or started her shift. Doyle had found her first in the hospital’s garage, where he worked doing maintenance.
“What he did to my daughter shouldn’t happen to anybody. It’s horrible, just a horrible thing,” Phyllis Meliota told The Post by phone.
Doyle, a then a 22-year-old from The Bronx, had already been convicted on a past robbery charge and was either free on parole or probation when he attacked Barbara on the sixth-floor stairwell of the garage, The New York Times reported at the time.
He bludgeoned her with the footlong metal nozzle of a fire hose, dragged her to a dank, windowless storage area one floor and sexually assaulted her on a soiled mattress before shoving her battered body down an airshaft, investigators previously said.
Later that day, detectives found Barbara’s body partially submerged in dirty rainwater at the bottom of the shaft. Her nurse’s uniform was disheveled. Her face was shrouded in a plastic bag. Her stockings, undergarments and shoes were stuffed in a nearby dumpster.
A preliminary autopsy revealed Barbara died from head trauma and a fractured spine she suffered in her tumble down the airshaft. Doyle made a “full confession on videotape,” the Times reported in 1982, citing prosecutors.
“She was only 24 years old, she would have met the right guy, got married and had a family,” Phyllis said. “She was beautiful inside and outside . . . Her dream was to be a nurse and she made it, and she worked at Montefiore and she was a good nurse, and then this animal came into her life. He took her life.” Doyle has been locked away upstate since April 1983, most recently serving time at the Great Meadows Correctional Facility in Comstock, records show.
Now 61, he has been eligible for parole since July 2012 but has yet to be sprung.
Barbara’s family has fought his potential release since, and now Phyllis fears the parole board is poised to cut him loose at his next hearing in September.
“You never know what the way the justice system is going now, and that makes me very nervous and very upset, not only for the loss of my daughter, but for other parents and people that have children. There’s no worse loss than losing a child,” Phyllis said.
“If this man is released, he will do it again to another girl, another woman. No woman would be safe on the streets. Not only did he kill my daughter, but he killed her whole family . . . My husband never was the same again.”
Phyllis said she has spent “years” traveling to Albany to fight for Doyle to stay in prison but during the COVID-19 pandemic, she has had to make her pleas by phone.
If it were up to her, she said, she would take matters into her own hands.
“I would kill him,” she said. “I would kill him for what he did to my daughter and what he’s capable of doing to somebody else. And he is capable of doing it again.”