Killer seeks release for third time
A former Salem engineer convicted of beating a woman unconscious on his boat and throwing her weighted body overboard in 1991 will go before the Parole Board for the third time tomorrow.
Thomas Maimoni, 71, and incarcerated at the medium-security Massachusetts Treatment Center in Bridgewater, is due to appear before a panel featuring two of the seven members who rejected him five years ago, at that time calling him a “pathological liar.” Brian Brailsford, the widower of Maimoni’s victim, Martha Conant Brailsford, as well as Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett’s Office, will speak out against his release.
Muriel Conant Garvey, Brailsford’s fraternal twin sister, who has asked her brother-in-law to speak for her, told the Herald yesterday, “There is still not a day that goes by — not one day — that I don’t think about my sister. Twenty-five years on, I still think about all these things. It’s just an ongoing sorrow. If Maimoni thinks I’ve forgotten or forgiven him, I better make sure he knows otherwise.
“He just keeps reasserting his innocence. He will not confess to the crime and ask for forgiveness. As long as that continues, his maintaining of just blatant untruths, I believe that he should probably stay in prison,” Garvey said.
Martha Brailsford, an interior designer and animal rights activist, was 37 when she was murdered in July 1991. Her remains were recovered by a lobsterman pulling up his traps.
Garvey said her sister had told her that she met Maimoni while they were walking their dogs around Juniper Point in Salem. She said Maimoni told her married sister he had recently lost his wife to cancer, when in fact he had a wife at home, and that her sister felt badly for him.
“Martha was one of the kindest-hearted people ever,” Garvey said. “She was such a beautiful person with her reverence for nature and all life. She would have continued to do such good.”
Maimoni later told parole officials Martha Brailsford was swept out to sea by a “rogue wave” and “forces of nature.”
He was convicted in 1993 of second-degree murder, making him eligible for parole after 15 years; however, the board turned him down flat following hearings in 2006 and 2011. The board believed Maimoni killed Martha Brailsford for spurning his sexual advances.
In its last unanimous rejection of Maimoni, the board called him “a pathological liar,” adding, “He has never revealed any credible details about the homicide; he refuses to say how or why he murdered the victim.”
Garvey said her 91-year-old mother “still remembers who Martha was. For a parent to lose a child, that’s got to be the cruelest thing of all. And she was just destroyed by it.”