A man convicted of raping and killing four women in a case that spread fear through the city and set off one of its largest manhunts ever has lost his bid for a new trial.
The state's Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday denied an appeal by Alfred Gaynor, who is serving four consecutive life sentences for sodomizing and strangling the women over a 3-month period in 1997 and 1998.
Gaynor, 37, of Springfield, was convicted of aggravated rape and murder. His lawyers appealed on several grounds, including Superior Court Judge Daniel Ford's denial of defense motions to suppress evidence, and the decision to hold a single trial for all four murders.
The defense also appealed the decision to try Gaynor, who is black, before an all-white jury in Berkshire County. The defense had sought to have the case moved to Boston, which has a larger minority population. All of Gaynor's victims were also black.
However, Justice Francis X. Spina wrote in the decision that “when a defendant moves for a change of venue, he waives his right to be tried by a jury drawn from a pool that is representative of the venue where the crime was committed.”
He also pointed out that Ford had considered racial issues and found “no allegation that race was a motivating factor in any of these crimes and no reason to suppose the case is racially charged.”
The justices also found that the similarities among the killings and DNA evidence indicating the victims had died shortly after having intercourse with Gaynor warranted a single trial.
They also rejected arguments by Gaynor's lawyer, Kenneth King, that Gaynor had been tricked into providing police with blood samples for DNA tests. Gaynor said detectives had led him to believe his DNA would only be compared to that found at the scene of one of the killings.
Police are under no obligation to inform a defendant of all purposes for which his blood tests might be used,'' Spina said.
King did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Hampden District Attorney William Bennett, who prosecuted Gaynor, also did not return a call for comment.
The victims were Loretta Daniels, JoAnn Thomas, Joyce Dickerson, and Rosemary Downs.
The first to be killed was Thomas, 38, who was found strangled on her living room couch on Nov. 1, 1997.
The partially clad body of Daniels, 38, was found in an alley beside a post office on Feb. 2, 1998. Downs, 42, was found naked and dead in the bedroom of her downtown Springfield apartment on Feb. 11, 1998, and Dickerson's frozen body was found March 11, 1998, near a vacant restaurant in downtown Springfield, three weeks after the 37-year-old mother of two disappeared from her home.
The state's highest court yesterday upheld the conviction of a serial killer in Springfield, dismissing key defense arguments that police used trickery in obtaining evidence and that it was wrong to join the cases at trial.
In a 42-page decision written by Associate Justice Francis X. Spina, the state Supreme Judicial Court refused to order a new trial for Alfred J. Gaynor, who is serving four consecutive life sentences. Gaynor, 37, was convicted in 2000 of raping and killing four Springfield women in 1997 and 1998 in the city.
The court also rejected Gaynor's request to reduce the verdicts.
Hampden District Attorney William M. Bennett yesterday praised the work of Springfield police and Assistant District Attorney Marcia B. Julian, who argued the case in front of the high court on Oct. 7.
"DNA was a key," Bennett said yesterday. "We did every DNA test available … The results all came up the same way: Gaynor … Once we got his sample, we couldn't exclude him."
Gaynor was found guilty of killing JoAnn Thomas, Loretta Daniels, Rosemary Downs and Joyce Dickerson-Peay between Nov. 1, 1997 and early 1998.
Gaynor's lawyer argued that Springfield Sgt. Mark Rolland and Detective Eugene Dean fooled Gaynor into voluntarily giving a blood sample that provided the DNA. The sample was later used to build a genetic profile that connected Gaynor to all four murders.
Gaynor said he provided the sample on Feb. 27, 1998 without a search warrant because police misled him into believing that the test results would be used only to compare with blood found inside the fourth murder victim's car. Police later told Gaynor that his blood did not match the blood in the car.
But Spina ruled that police never stated that Gaynor's blood would be used solely for comparison to the blood in the car. Police do not have to tell a defendant all the purposes for extracting blood, Spina wrote.
Gaynor's lawyer on appeal, Kenneth J. King of Boston, said yesterday he was disappointed by the decision, but couldn't comment in detail. King said he needed more time to read the ruling.
On appeal, King said the trial judge, Daniel A. Ford, erred in joining the four murder and rape charges at a single trial. King said the cases shared common features, but did not constitute parts of a single scheme or plan.
Bennett said it was the first and only time serial murders were joined for a single trial in a state court. Bennett was the trial lawyer for the cases and moved for the lone trial.
Spina said the circumstances of the cases don't need to be identical for one trial.
"Here, powerful DNA and other evidence linked the defendant to the victims at the times of death," Spina wrote. "The judge correctly concluded that the circumstances of the cases were sufficiently similar to show that the defendant was acting pursuant to a common scheme and were relevant to questions of his intent and motive."
During the Oct. 7 hearing in front of the high court, Julian said DNA evidence connected Gaynor to all four murders.
Julian also cited some factual similarities in the murders. Each victim was black, in her 30s and connected to Gaynor through the use of crack cocaine. Three of the victims were strangled to death, she said. A fourth victim was found with a sock in her mouth and was ruled to have choked to death, though evidence indicated she was also strangled, Julian said.
Spina also rejected Gaynor's claim that the trial judge made a mistake in failing to select jurors from a "fair cross section" of the community where the crimes occurred.
Gaynor, who is black, was convicted by an all-white jury in Berkshire County after the judge refused his request to move the trial to Boston to help obtain a racially diverse jury.
The trial judge said it would be more convenient for witnesses and lawyers to keep the trial in Western Massachusetts. The judge granted Gaynor's request to move the trial from Hampden County because of widespread publicity about the murders.
"When a defendant moves for a change of venue, he waives his right to be tried by a jury drawn from a pool that is representative of the venue where the crime occurred," Spina wrote. "He has no state constitutional right to have his case transferred to a county having a minority population at least as great as the county where the crime took place."
