‘I NEED A LAWYER,’ KILLER SAYS
Trans woman led away without wig by cops after her latest dismemberment-slay hearing
The 83-year-old serial killer accused of dismembering a Brooklyn woman and dumping her body parts on the street stated the obvious as she was led out of an NYPD stationhouse in handcuffs Monday afternoon.
“I need a lawyer! I need a lawyer,” Harvey Marcelin, a transgender woman also known as Marcelina Harvey, said as she walked past a phalanx of media, her signature wig gone, after being processed at the 75th Precinct stationhouse on murder charges.
Marcelin is accused of killing Susan Leyden, 68, in the Pennsylvania Ave. apartment where the suspect had been living since February.
Police believe Leyden, who met the suspect on social media more than two years ago, met her gruesome fate shortly after showing up at Marcelin’s apartment on Feb. 27.
Two days later, on March 1, police said,
Marcelin bought a buzz saw at a Manhattan Home Depot and returned home.
The next night, she allegedly left Leyden’s headless, limbless torso at Atlantic and Pennsylvania Aves. stuffed in a shopping cart. Leyden’s leg was found nearby four days later.
In a macabre video from a 99 cents store after the slaying, Marcelin is seen getting up out of a wheelchair, a human leg visible on the seat, police said.
Marcelin, who did more than 50 years in prison for killing two girlfriends when he identified as a man, said nothing to police when first arrested for Leyden’s death. She was initially charged with concealment of a human corpse and tampering with physical evidence. She was charged with Leyden’s murder on Friday.
Chief of Detectives James Essig said “blood splatter and several trash bags” were found inside Marcelin’s apartment. A woman who went with the suspect to Home Deport to buy the bags, saw and cleaning materials is cooperating with police and was not charged.
Marcelin’s criminal record dates to 1957, when she was arrested for assault. She
was later busted for gambling and, in 1963, for attempted rape. But that case was dropped when the victim didn’t show up in court in March of that year.
The following month, Marcelin shot her girlfriend dead in the hallway of their Harlem building. Marcelin, diagnosed as having a “schizoid personality with sociopathic features” was found not criminally insane and was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison, according to court records and documents
Released on lifetime parole in 1984, the convicted killer was busted less than a year later for fatally stabbing another girlfriend, then cutting up her body and dumping her remains in plastic bags near Central Park, according to court documents and police.
Marcelin plead guilty to manslaughter and was paroled in 2019.
At a funeral on Sunday, Leyden was remembered as a devoted single mom and talented jewelry saleswoman whose final years were derailed by untreated mental illness.
“The last 12 years were a struggle for her. She had untreated mental illness that presented strongly in her 50s and it contributed to so much pain and suffering,” Leyden’s daughter, Nicole Haymo, said at her New Jersey funeral.
“I want to be open about it because maybe if there was less shame around it people would get the help they need. And if there was more education around it we could be better equipped to help those who need it.”