The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
'NOBODY WILL FORGET PENNEY'
Slaying haunted city; investigators never gave up
NEW HAVEN — This was your urban horror nightmare come true: A young woman using a parking garage in downtown New Haven in the middle of a summer’s day is chased down in that garage and stabbed to death in a 10thfloor stairwell.
The murder of Concetta “Penney” Serra in the early afternoon of July 16, 1973, in the Temple Street Garage shocked the city’s residents and suburbanites, who for years afterward wondered whether it was safe to venture into New Haven to shop or dine.
The fear lingered for so long because the notorious crime went unsolved for nearly 30 years. Before the real killer was arrested and convicted, several other suspects were publicly identified, and one was almost put on trial.
John Serra, the victim’s grieving father, made sure the New Haven Police Department and the public did not stop thinking about the case. Every year, on the anniversary of the slaying, he bought an ad in the New Haven Register showing a photo of his pretty, smiling, 21-year-old daughter.
The ad carried this chilling message under her name: “Murdered in Temple Street Garage, downtown New Haven on July 16, 1973 (DAYTIME). To date KILLER STILL IN NEW HAVEN AREA!”
Nobody could forget
Henry C. Lee, the nationally known forensic science investigator who along with many others helped to
finally solve the murder, recalled during a recent interview: “John Serra came to me a couple of times. He said, ‘Dr. Lee, you are our last hope.’”
Lee also recalled his final conversation with Serra in 1998 when he was terminally ill in the hospital. “He called me from the hospital and said: ‘Please don’t forget my daughter.’ I told him, ‘We’re working very hard on the case. Nobody will forget Penney.’”
Lee had decided it wouldn’t be right to tell Serra that they were closing in on a new suspect: Edward R. Grant, a car mechanic from Waterbury. Serra died seven months before Grant was arrested and charged with murder.
“I couldn’t tell him the case was solved because Mr. Grant might have had an explanation for how his fingerprint got on the tissue box in her car,” Lee said as he sat in his office in the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science at the University of New Haven. Lee is officially retired from the state Department of Public Safety but is distinguished chairman professor of forensic science at University of New Haven.
Evidence
That tissue box was a key element in convincing a New Haven Superior Court jury that Grant was guilty.
Lee wrote in his 2004 book, “Cracking More Cases: The Forensic Science of Solving Crimes” (co-written by Thomas W. O’Neil): “In 1997 a Connecticut/ Rhode Island fingerprint data base scored a hit on Edward Grant’s left thumbprint: it matched the bloody partial print on the tissue box that lay on the floor behind the driver’s seat of the car driven by Penney Serra.”
Grant’s fingerprints did not enter the data system until after he was arrested in summer 1994 on a charge of beating his thenfiancee. “If his fingerprint was not in the system,” Lee said during the interview, “we still wouldn’t know” who killed Serra.
There was a second important piece of evidence: a handkerchief that had been found on the ground near Serra’s car.
“We had Penney Serra’s blood on the handkerchief,” Lee said. “And we got DNA there. We tested the handkerchief vs. Grant’s blood and it was consistent with being his blood.”
Lee emphasized he was not the man who “cracked” the Serra case. “I helped. A lot of people worked on this case. I was just one of them.”
James Clark, who then was a senior assistant state’s attorney, worked with co-prosecutor Gary Nicholson in prosecuting Grant. During an interview at his North Haven home, Clark, now retired, recalled the case while sitting in his office. On the top level of his bookshelf is a framed New Haven Register photo showing him arm-in-arm outside the New Haven courthouse with Penney Serra’s sister, Rosemary Serra, after Grant was convicted in May 2002. (Rosemary Serra declined to be interviewed for this retrospective story.)
“This was probably the most difficult and in many ways the most rewarding case I ever did,” said Clark, who noted he prosecuted 35 defendants accused of murder.
Clark pointed out the Serra homicide had gone unsolved for more than 25 years at the time he began preparing for Grant’s trial.
“This was a big deal and it was a big deal for the New Haven Police Department,” Clark said. “If you lived in New Haven then, you knew about this case and followed it for years.”
Although Clark conceded Lee’s testimony during the trial was important and “tied together the evidence for the jury,” Clark said, “The real heroes were the Bureau of Identification (New Haven police detectives and other investigators) who worked on the evidence.”
Clark specifically credits Vincent Perricone and Robert Fonteyn, both now retired and living in Florida.
“They went in and seized evidence in such an organized fashion. They took photos and preserved a picture of the crime A 1973 photograph of Ed Grant and his dog
scene at a time when forensics was not such a big deal. It was all about fingerprints and not much else. Then they maintained the evidence in such a way that they could later testify: ‘This is what I seized on that day.’ That was a big deal because that evidence was what ultimately made the case.”
That summer day in New Haven
Clark, who still remembers many of the details, said that on the day she was murdered, Serra was driving her father’s car, a blue 1971 Buick Electra. She parked it on the ninth level of the garage just after 12:42 p.m..
“It was very new, very desirable,” Clark said of that Buick. “It’s clear this person (the perpetrator) intended to steal that car. Penney Serra had used the car to go to Florida just two weeks before this. She had a knife with her in the car, which she had used to cut up cheese and bread. It’s quite possible she was stabbed with her own knife. No knives were left at the scene. But we established she had a knife in the car and she would have done anything to protect her father’s car.”
“It’s pretty clear that she stabbed him,” Clark said. “My guess is that he lost his temper because she stabbed him once. We know that he chased her because two teenagers saw the chase; they thought she had escaped. What he (Grant) should have done was just taken her car and let her run away. She went up a stairway that went nowhere and was stabbed on the fourth or fifth step. She was stabbed just once, in her heart.”
Clark still has the crime scene photos on his computer and as he flashed through them, up came a shot of Serra’s body lying crumpled in a fetal position on that stairway.
After Grant stabbed Serra, Clark said, “He got into her car and drove around. But he got confused about how to get out of the garage, as many people do there. So he abandoned the car on the seventh floor but left behind a bunch of evidence. Then he picked up his own car again. He drove down to the exit and handed a bloody ticket to the guy at the gate.”
Clark still looked incredulous all these years later as he described what happened next: “The attendant wipes the blood off the ticket to see how much he should charge the guy! And he didn’t get the license plate.”
But still there was a blood trail through the levels of the garage, the tissue box and the handkerchief. Clark credits Christopher Grice, a police fingerprint expert, for his tireless, detailed work on the tissue box fingerprint search. Clark said when Grice compared the bloody print on the box to Grant’s print, it was a “eureka!” moment.
“Adding the DNA made it a slam dunk,” Clark said. He paused and added, “That’s an overstatement. But it was a very strong case. There’s no doubt on the proof beyond a reasonable doubt level, that Edward Grant Evidence used to tie Edward Grant to Penney Serra’s murder through blood samples taken from a bloody handkerchief.
did it. I would have been shocked if they hadn’t convicted him. I wasn’t surprised when they did. But you always have butterflies when a jury comes out.”
The trial
The jurors took nearly three days to reach their decision. According to the New Haven Register’s account of the jury’s announcement on the afternoon of May 28, 2002, Grant, then 59, “swayed, as if he had been hit” when he heard the word “guilty.”
But a few feet behind him in the courtroom, Rosemary Serra wept as she absorbed the news. Soon afterward she got out of her seat and when court adjourned hugged Clark.
Superior Court Judge Jon C. Blue, who had presided over the 20-day trial, had asked spectators to refrain from making any outbursts at the end of what he called a “long, drawn-out, high stakes trial.”
Outside the courthouse, Serra said: “After this many years, my family can finally rest in peace. My father had faith in the system and now I can, too.”
But the verdict was a bitter outcome for Grant’s defense team, who, like Clark’s team, had put in years of hard work on the case.
Beth A. Merkin, who now heads the Office of New Haven Public Defender, defended Grant with her predecessor, the now late Thomas Ullmann and Brian Carlow, another public defender. On the day the verdict was announced, Merkin said, “It’s very sad. We really felt that there was a reasonable doubt, and we’re just sorry the jury didn’t feel that way.”
The defense team had focused on the “lack of a motive” for the murder and the lack of any proven association between Grant and Serra. However, the state is not required to show a motive for a murder conviction.
Ullmann said on the day of the verdict: “As far as I’m concerned and as far as the defense team is concerned, the real killer is still out there.”
Ullmann died earlier this year in a hiking accident. When Merkin and Carlow were interviewed recently about the case, one of the first questions they fielded was: Do they still believe Grant didn’t kill Serra?
“I can speak for Tom,” Merkin
replied. “Tom absolutely believed in Ed Grant’s innocence.”
Merkin and Carlow declined to say how they feel on that subject. They said they didn’t want to violate attorney-client privilege.
But Carlow, who is now retired, said, “There are pieces of this case that made absolutely no sense.” He raised the issue of there being no proven motive.
Carlow also noted forensic experts are not able to say when DNA material or fingerprints are deposited on evidence.
Both Merkin and Carlow emphasized, as they did during the trial, that there were questions about whether the evidence had been degraded or contaminated because it was stored in hot storage conditions, according to testimony. (Lee continues to maintain, as he testified during the trial, that the conditions did not damage the evidence.)
Carlow cited the pressure authorities felt to make an arrest and get a conviction. “This was a case that changed New Haven and changed who was coming to New Haven. So it was a case police wanted to resolve.”
Carlow said there are other factors that contributed to fewer people coming to downtown besides the Serra murder. “But this case actually put a face on that concern.”
Carlow recalls Grant as being “very respectful, a very kind person, as was all his family.” Merkin said the case “seemed to be a misfit, with this nice person and nice family” involved in a murder case.
But in his “Cracking More Cases” book, Lee wrote that in the summer of 1994 Grant had beaten his then-fiancee “so fiercely that she was hospitalized.”
Lee also noted that in 1971, while in the Connecticut National Guard, Grant was riding in a Jeep when it rolled over. The injuries he sustained required that a steel plate be placed in his head. “The long-term effects of this injury were that he suffered from memory loss and severe mood swings.”
This contrasts with Lee’s description of Serra in his book. He noted that under her yearbook photo for Wilbur Cross High School, Class of 1971, she had chosen to say this about herself: “a laughing heart and merry spirit.”
Lee said Serra was mature for her age. “It was not at all surprising then that Penney became engaged for a time to Philip DeLieto, an attractive man seven years older than she who was distantly related to New Haven’s chief of police, Biagio ‘Ben’ DiLieto.” But Lee said they frequently quarreled and she broke off the engagement.
This relationship put DeLieto under police scrutiny as a suspect in her murder. But after he provided a strong alibi and his DNA and fingerprints didn’t match the evidence on the scene, he was cleared. DeLieto died in 2008.
Anthony Golino wasn’t so easily exonerated. In 1984 he was charged with Serra’s murder. Unfortunately for Golino, he had twice met Serra. In addition, his wife told police that he allegedly told her: “I will do to you what I did to Penney Serra.” Golino denied saying this.
Police began questioning and following Golino in 1981. And on July 3, 1984, they pulled him over on Columbus Avenue, handcuffed him and charged him with the murder of Penney Serra.
But they failed to test his blood. And Golino mistakenly told police he had type O blood, the same as the killer.
But when Golino’s trial was about to begin, in May 1987, the blood test finally was administered and the result was a shock to police and prosecutors: Golino had type A blood.
Attorney Hugh Keefe, who represented Golino throughout the long years of the pre-trial process, recalled in a recent interview seeing then-Chief Assistant State’s Attorney Mary Galvin stand up in the courtroom and announce: “Anthony Golino could not have committed this crime.”
Superior Court Judge Samuel Freedman promptly dismissed the charge. Golino was a free man.
Keefe acknowledged he had opposed the blood test for a long period. Asked about this, he said, “When you’re involved in something like this, you have a list of things to do. Mary Galvin got to it (the blood test) quicker than I did.”
Keefe said, “This is a good example for people who favor the death penalty. Tony Golino was charged with capital murder; the death penalty was a possibility. And this was a totally innocent man.”
Keefe added: “They ruined his life.”
Keefe recalled a conversation with John Serra while Golino was awaiting trial. “He never believed for a second that Golino did it. He told me he thought Mary was barking up the wrong tree.”
When this reporter interviewed Golino in 1987 for the New Haven Advocate, Golino said: “The scar will always remain, the pain will always remain, to the day that I die.”
Golino died in 2008 from cancer. He was 57.
Grant, now 75, remains in prison, serving the sentence of 20 years to life imposed by Blue in September 2002. Grant did not respond to a written request from the New Haven Register several months ago to talk about the case.
When Blue sentenced Grant, he told him: “Someone left that beautiful young woman dead or dying in a dirty stairwell in a parking garage. No one can deny what the evidence shows beyond any doubt: that someone was you.”
But minutes before he was sentenced, Grant stood up in court and said as he fought back tears: “I’m sorry for the pain, sorrow and loss of the Serra family. I can’t begin to imagine it. I had no part in this tragic event. However, the jury has convicted me and I ask for leniency. I lived my entire life trying to make life better for my family.”
Rosemay Serra delivered her own tearful statement during that sentencing hearing. She said her family had spent many hours at her father’s grave, trying to understand her sister’s murder.
“No prison sentence can quantify the living nightmare I have lived,” she said. “How could someone leave my sister alone to die?”