Just before noon on December 14, 1973, a man assaulted 81-year-old Lillian Fitzgerald in her apartment at 3 Worcester Square in the South End of Boston, Massachusetts.
Fitzgerald told officers that she had let a man into her apartment after he claimed to be a social worker. She said the man beat her about the face but did not mention anything being stolen. She described her assailant as a Black man, 6 feet tall, with dark skin and short hair. She said he wore a brown leather jacket and brown pants. Fitzgerald initially refused treatment but later was admitted to Boston City Hospital, where she died on December 22, 1973.
Dr. George Katsas performed the autopsy. He said Fitzgerald had multiple fractures to her face and jaw. While in the hospital, Katsas said, Fitzgerald developed blood clots in her brain and became paralyzed. She also developed pneumonia and heart failure. “I classify this death a homicide because this thing started with the assault and there’s no question in my mind that the assault was the cause of death,” he wrote.
On December 24, officers interviewed 61-year-old Arthur Redgate, the building’s custodian and one of Fitzgerald’s neighbors. (According to police reports examined in 2009, officers didn’t interview anyone other than Fitzgerald on the day of the attack.)
Redgate said that a resident named George Cross had called him just before noon and said that a man at the front door wanted to interview senior citizens in the building. “So, I went to the door and let him in, and he showed me some identification with the picture on it, but I didn’t look at it too closely at this time,” Redgate said in his statement. “I figured he was all right.”
Redgate said he brought the man to Fitzgerald’s door, explained what the man wanted, and then returned to his own apartment, which was on the same floor. Redgate said he heard a scream, saw Fitzgerald crawling on the hallway floor, and called the police.
Redgate described the man as Black, about 30 years old, 6 feet tall, medium build, with a brown leather jacket and brown pants. He also said he had never seen this man before.
At the time, according to the Boston Globe , there had been a series of assaults and robberies on the elderly in the South End, with the assailant or assailants posing as case workers or other government officials. A composite drawing of a possible suspect distributed on November 15, 1973, showed a Black man with short hair wearing a shirt and tie. He was described as “38-45 years old, 6’0”- 6’2”, dark brown complexion, medium build, wearing a [three-quarters] length black leather jacket with a belt, plaid slacks, new-looking tan shoes with elevated heels.”
On December 24, Boston police arrested 28-year-old Leonard Lacy on charges of attempted larceny. According to a police report, Lacy had posed as an agent with the Boston Housing Authority and attempted to collect rent money from 71-year-old Marion Horgan.
The arrest report described Lacy as having a “medium complexion” with a mustache and “long sideburns.” In addition, his booking photo showed him with a long Afro, a knee-length leather or vinyl dark coat, plaid pants and tan-colored boots with large heels. At the time of Lacy’s arrest, he was also in possession of a housing authority notebook and other documents, along with a Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) identification card that had Lacy’s photo affixed over the actual owner’s picture.
Based on the similarities between the two incidents, police considered Lacy to be a suspect in the Fitzgerald murder, and they placed Lacy in a lineup that Redgate viewed on the afternoon of December 24.
Redgate did not identify anyone in the lineup, although he would later select Lacy from a photo array.
Cross had been away over the Christmas holiday. He returned December 28, gave a statement to the police, and then viewed a photo array of 10 men. Cross selected Lacy as the man he saw at the apartment building on the morning of the attack. Lacy was charged on December 28 with first-degree murder.
Lacy’s trial in Suffolk County Superior Court began in early December 1974, with Judge Robert Sullivan presiding.
At the time, Boston was rife with racial tension. On June 21, 1974, U.S. District Court Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr. had ordered busing to desegregate the city’s public schools, leading to riots and other disturbances.
Fitzgerald was white. Lacy was tried before an all-white jury and also required to sit in the prisoner’s dock, apart from his attorney, Stephen Hrones.
At the time, Hrones had been an attorney in Massachusetts for a year and had tried about five jury trials, none murder. Three judges, including Judge Sullivan, had found him unqualified under existing court rules to represent a defendant at a murder trial. The day before the trial began, Judge Sullivan told Lacy that it would be to his “distinct advantage” to have an experienced attorney named John White represent him or assist Hrones. White had tried 20-30 murder cases. Lacy told the court that he did not want White’s help.
Horgan testified about Lacy’s visits to her apartment and about the transit card she said he presented to her.
Redgate testified that Lacy had presented an MBTA ID card to him. He identified Lacy in the courtroom as the man he took to Fitzgerald’s apartment. He also testified that the police had continued to show him Lacy’s photo prior to court hearings.
Hrones had learned of Redgate’s failure to select Lacy during the initial lineup. Redgate testified during cross-examination that the failure occurred because he was drunk at the time. (Officer William Keough also testified that Redgate was drunk at the viewing.)
Separately, Redgate had been unable to identify Lacy at a pretrial hearing in January 1974, because he collapsed and became unconscious. Redgate’s medical records indicated he was an alcoholic, but Judge Sullivan ruled that Hrones could not introduce that evidence.
Cross also identified Lacy as the man he had seen at the apartment building on December 14. During cross-examination, Hrones asked Cross about comments he had made to a defense investigator.
Hrones asked: “Do you remember me asking you, if you thought all Black people look alike? Do you remember giving this answer, ‘Only one person can tell one n----- from another, and that is another n-----?’”
Cross said, “I don’t remember putting it quite that way, but it is well put.”
Hrones also asked Cross if he thought, “All Black people look alike,” and he answered, “Unless you know a person, yes, I could have answered that.” (A defense investigator would later testify that Cross told him, “When you see one piece of coal, you have seen them all, they all look alike.”)
A third man, John Frost, also identified Lacy at trial. There was no mention of him in any police reports or whether he participated in any pre-trial identifications.
Several witnesses who had interacted with Fitzgerald after the attack testified about statements Fitzgerald made to them. For instance, a police officer said that Fitzgerald told him the intruder wore a long leather coat and demanded money. The initial police report did not mention the assailant asking for money or give the length of the leather coat, although this description matched up with the jacket worn by Lacy at the time of his arrest.
One of the issues at trial was Lacy’s appearance at the time of the attack. Hrones had introduced into evidence a jail card with a photo that showed Lacy with an Afro and a beard. The card contained the line “No. of jail commitments.”
The state introduced two different custody cards that appeared to show Lacy clean shaven with short hair. One of the cards contained the line, “No. of Former Commitments 3-4” It also contained four notations referencing court dates and two state prisons. Judge Sullivan ordered the notations to be masked with tape. He placed similar restrictions on another state exhibit that showed a photo of Lacy, hiding numbers on Lacy’s chest from the jury.
Detective Davis Driscoll testified that he interviewed Lacy after his arrest. He said that he drew a map of Worcester Square and that Lacy was able to identify Fitzgerald’s apartment. Lacy said that he had been on Worcester Square four to six weeks earlier. Driscoll testified that when he told Lacy that the woman at Worcester Square had died two days ago Lacy “made no reply to that … he just stopped answering questions.”
Katsas, who had performed the autopsy, testified about Fitzgerald’s death. He said that she contracted pneumonia by inhaling blood and other substances after the beating.
Dr. Cyril Wecht, the coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, testified for the defense that there was "some" evidence that Fitzgerald had the beginnings of pneumonia and congestive heart failure when she entered the hospital. On cross-examination, Wecht, a former prosecutor, acknowledged that he was unaware that Fitzgerald’s head had swollen to twice its normal size and that he did not examine X-rays of her head. During cross-examination, Wecht was asked what advice he would have given the prosecutor in Fitzgerald's case. He said that based on the evidence, “there would be reason to proceed in that case as a homicide.”
During closing arguments, the prosecutor said: “There are rights of old women and old people not to be beaten, mugged and battered and killed, and specifically I refer to Lillian Fitzgerald. When you are thinking of rights, think back how she looked on December 13th. She had no greater right on that day than the right to her own life. He also said, incorrectly, that Lacy “just happened to have a diagram of the exact scene” on him when he was arrested.
The jury convicted Lacy of first-degree murder on December 11, 1974. Judge Sullivan sentenced him to life in prison without parole.
Lacy appealed his conviction, claiming that Judge Sullivan should have barred Redgate from making an in-court identification because he had failed to select Lacy in the initial lineup. The appeal also said Judge Sullivan erred in allowing Horgan to testify, because that hinted at the commission of other crimes. Similarly, he also said that the judge should have not allowed the state to introduce the jail ID card, because it, too, referenced other crimes.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the conviction on November 22, 1976.
In April 1980, Lacy moved for a new trial after a juror came forward and said that during deliberations, he had examined the concealed information on the exhibits.
At an evidentiary hearing, juror William Wolbach testified that he had been the lone holdout, and he removed the tape from the state’s exhibits as “a desperation move.”
Wolbach said he had heard bits and pieces about Lacy’s record during the trial, and he had listened to Judge Sullivan’s instructions to disregard this information.
Wolbach said the information under the tape had a “significant amount” to do with him changing his vote to guilty. It wasn’t just that the masked information referenced Lacy’s prison record; it was also that there was no information that encouraged him to hold out for acquittal.
“I felt pretty desperate, and I was trying to get—if I could get one person, I felt I could maybe hold off, but I couldn’t get anybody else,” he said.
Judge Rudolf Pierce of Suffolk Superior Court denied Lacy’s motion. He said that the information Wolbach found beneath the tape on the state’s exhibits was already before the jury in other forms.
The state’s Supreme Judicial Court declined to hear Lacy’s appeal, and he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, claiming that the juror’s actions violated his right to due process.
After a federal magistrate judge recommended granting the petition, Judge Garrity then weighed in. He shifted the debate from one of due process to a Sixth Amendment issue about whether Lacy was denied his rights to confront witnesses and the evidence against him.
On July 27, 1988, Garrity denied Lacy’s petition. He said that Wolbach’s conduct had violated Lacy’s constitutional rights, but the error was harmless, based on the “objective evidence that eleven of the twelve jurors were convinced of defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before the extraneous information was revealed.”
Lacy appealed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed Judge Garrity’s ruling on April 11, 1984. But the appellate court said that Judge Garrity erred in incorporating the Sixth Amendment issues in his decision.
Lacy then filed a motion for a new trial to address that issue. After the state courts denied that motion, he returned to federal court, where his second habeas petition was again denied by Judge Garrity and later, on May 27, 1986, by the First Circuit.
On May 8, 2009, Lacy filed another motion, his fourth, for a new trial. The 102-page motion was more expansive than previous attempts. His attorneys, Max Stern, Patricia Garin, and Sharon Rose, said that Lacy’s wrongful conviction was the result of racism, mistaken identification, prosecutorial misconduct, judicial errors, and ineffective assistance of counsel.
The motion said that Lacy was a scam artist, “one of several persons in the Boston area who [were] posing as some sort of government official in order to gain access to the homes of elderly persons to swindle them,” but he wasn’t a murderer. Lacy’s appearance didn’t match the brief description provided by Fitzgerald, nor did his actions at Horgan’s apartment, which involved returning to get the rent money, match the violent interaction that led to Fitzgerald’s death. “The crimes are fundamentally different, suggesting that the perpetrators were different,” the motion said.
The motion said that many of the other victims of these crimes viewed Lacy when he was in jail, but none identified him as the perpetrator. “The only feature common to all the descriptions was that the intruders were all Black males,” the motion said.
The motion said that Hrones had provided ineffective representation. He had not moved with speed or depth to suppress the eyewitness identifications or their testimony about the ID cards, or to exclude the testimony of witnesses who told the jury about Fitzgerald’s statements, which the motion said was impermissible hearsay evidence. (But, the Supreme Judicial Court had already said the statements met the hearsay exceptions as “dying declarations.”)
In addition, Hrones had failed to properly impeach Driscoll’s testimony about Lacy’s knowledge of Worcester Square. At the time of his arrest, Lacy lived a block away from Fitzgerald’s apartment, and he had previously lived at 19 Worcester Square, just a few buildings down the street. This information was available to Hrones, the motion said, and his failure to raise it during his cross-examinations left “the jury with the very damaging implication that Mr. Lacy knew the street only because he recently committed a crime there.”
The motion also said that the prosecutor had incorrectly told the jury that Lacy had a diagram of the Fitzgerald crime scene at the time of his arrest. He also improperly commented on Lacy’s silence during his police interview and made an improper appeal to the jury’s sympathy when he evoked Fitzgerald’s right to live.
Separately, the motion also said that Judge Sullivan had given an incorrect instruction on whether Lacy acted with malice and knew that his actions would lead to Fitzgerald’s death.) He had said “intent to kill may be inferred from the act of killing.)
Prior to and after the motion was filed, Lacy’s attorneys entered into discovery and negotiations with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office and then reached a deal. Lacy would withdraw his motion, and the state would ask the court to change his conviction from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter, which carried a maximum sentence of 20 years.
During a court hearing on February 2, 2010, an assistant district attorney told Judge Patrick Brady that the state agreed that Judge Sullivan had erred in his instructions. The prosecutor said that the state still believed Lacy was guilty, based on the testimony and other evidence, but it didn’t want to risk Lacy receiving a new trial.
Garin said at the hearing that Lacy maintained his innocence, but he also wanted his freedom. “He’s been imprisoned 36 years now. He’s 65 years old. He has an unbelievably outstanding institutional record. He has the respect of all of the [correctional officers] and the superintendent. He’s known as a peacemaker in prison … I’ve never seen one like it in 25 years of doing prison work. And he's got a family and a re-entry plan that’s ready to go to make him into a really productive and law-abiding and terrific citizen and family person and family member when he gets out.”
Judge Brady approved the conviction change, and Lacy was released from prison that day.
In 2021, Lacy applied to the Integrity Review Bureau (IRB) of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office. In his application, Lacy asserted errors in his trial related to racism and new science that highlighted the problems with eyewitness identification. The IRB opened an investigation into his case. (The state would later note that Lacy’s agreement to withdraw his motion for a new trial in 2010 only addressed the flawed jury instruction.)
Based on the IRB investigation as well as documents obtained in 2009 as part of the earlier motion, Lacy moved for a new trial on February 25, 2025.
The motion said: “In 1974, the racial tension and animosity in Boston came to a climax around the forced integration of Boston Public Schools through busing. Innumerable violent incidents erupted at Boston’s public high schools, and the violence fell along racial lines.” Cross’s testimony, the motion said, provided a “chilling example of the depth of the racial animosity in Boston and its effect on this trial.”
But it was more than racism that led to a wrongful conviction, the motion said. The motion asserted that the police used flawed procedures to secure tainted identifications. The motion said that police didn’t interview any eyewitnesses until after Lacy was arrested, and that his arrest photo bore little resemblance to the composite picture created a month earlier by a police sketch artist.
The motion said that each of the eyewitnesses testified that they viewed Lacy’s photo before testifying either at trial or in earlier hearings. A police investigator testified that he “possibly” showed Lacy’s photo to the eyewitnesses.
“Considering the totality of the circumstances of the eyewitness identification procedures and the bias of the witnesses, there can be no confidence that the eyewitness identifications of Mr. Lacy as Ms. Fitzgerald’s assailant were in any way accurate or reliable,” the motion said.
The motion said Lacy did not have the benefit of more recent jury instructions regarding eyewitness testimony, which have been required in the state’s courtrooms since 2015. They say in part:
“Research and experience have shown that people sometimes make mistakes in identification. The mind does not work like a video recorder. A person cannot just replay a mental recording to remember what happened. Memory and perception are much more complicated.”
Lacy’s attorneys had also received several pieces of evidence that they said prosecutors had failed to turn over to Lacy’s trial attorney.
These included:
Copies of statements by Cross and Redgate created by the Boston police that appeared to be inconsistent with the witnesses’ trial testimony. In these statements, both men had told police they didn’t look closely at the identification card flashed by the assailant, and neither described it as a MBTA card in these statements, although a later, typed version of Cross’s statement included this detail.
A police report detailing Redgate’s actions at the live lineup. It said that Redgate kept his head down at the viewing, then said, “I NEVER SAW ANYONE OF THEM BEFORE,” and walked away. The officer who wrote the report said Redgate appeared frightened, and it made no mention of Redgate being unable to make an identification because he was intoxicated, as Redgate and Keough testified. The report also appeared to contradict Keough’s testimony, when he denied that Redgate said he didn’t recognize anyone.
At trial, the state had introduced photos of Fitzgerald’s apartment and its disarray. The police records said that the photos were taken 10 days after the attack, and that numerous other people had been in the apartment during the interim period. That made the photos unreliable as a record of the assault. In addition, the police had dusted Fitzgerald’s apartment for fingerprints. Hrones had requested a report but never received one.
In a response filed March 24, 2025, the Suffolk County IRB agreed that Lacy should be granted a new trial. It said that advances in the science of eyewitness identification qualified as newly discovered evidence.
“There are significant problems with these identifications and the Commonwealth agrees that these problems entitle the defendant to a new trial under current case law,” the response said. It said: Redgate was an alcoholic who failed to select Lacy at the initial lineup; the circumstances of Frost’s identification were murky; and Cross’s identification was “clearly tainted with racism.”
The state’s response hedged on whether Hrones had received the reports that Lacy’s new attorneys said prosecutors had failed to disclose.
“Due to the passage of time, it is impossible to ascertain whether these materials or the information contained therein were turned over prior to trial,” the response said. “A review of the cross-examination of these witnesses provides little insight,” the response said, noting that Lacy declined to have a court-appointed attorney and hired Hrones, who at the time was not certified to take murder cases.
“The mere possibility that these materials were not turned over coupled with the flaws in the eyewitness identifications of the defendant creates the appearance that justice may not have been done,” the response said.
Judge Sarah Weyland granted the motion for a new trial on May 19, 2025, and the state dismissed the charge on August 4, 2025, exonerating Lacy at the age of 80 years old.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 09-23-2025
