Just before midnight on December 6, 1985, Charles Ferguson walked his girlfriend, 18-year-old Gwendolyn Taylor, to her home on Talbot Avenue in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. They had a brief argument, and Ferguson left Taylor about 150 feet away from her three-story apartment building.
At 12:15 a.m., Ferguson began calling Taylor’s apartment to check on her. He made four calls. The first two times, Taylor’s roommate, Charita Offley, told Ferguson that Taylor wasn’t home. The third time, Offley looked out the window and saw Taylor walking hand-in-hand with a man. She told Ferguson that Taylor was in the area but not home.
Ferguson called again. Offley looked out the window and saw Taylor sitting on the steps of the apartment, with the man standing in front of her. Offley told Taylor that Ferguson was on the telephone. “Tell him I’ll call him back,” Taylor replied to Offley.
A few minutes later, the doorbell from the lobby rang. Offley went downstairs. She saw Taylor in the vestibule, which was unlit, with a man behind her. He appeared to be holding a shiny object against Taylor’s shoulder. Taylor and Offley spoke for about 10 seconds, and Taylor asked Offley for $100, which Offley said she didn’t have.
Offley turned to go upstairs to see if the other people at her apartment—her sister Tami and Tami’s boyfriend, Kevin Neal—had any money. The man told her, “Yo, don’t call the police.” Taylor chimed in, “He’s not kidding.”
Offley went upstairs and asked Tammy and Kevin about money. They couldn’t help. Neal looked out the window. Taylor yelled up for some money. Neal said he only had a few dollars. The Offley sisters and Neal then watched Taylor and the man walk across the street to a park and eventually down an alley that separated the park from an elementary school. Charita Offley said the man was wearing black pants and a knee-length tannish brown coat.
Offley called the police, who searched the area but did not find Taylor. That morning, at 9:40 a.m. Taylor’s body was found inside a car at an autobody shop about three-quarters of a mile away from her apartment. Taylor was naked, with her clothes beneath her. An autopsy would later report that she had been strangled to death with her own sweater, which tested positive for blood.
Offley went to the police station that day to look at photos. A detective handed her a book containing mugshots of recently arrested Hispanic men. Offley chose one man whom she said looked like the man she saw with Taylor. The detective told her to keep looking. He then handed her a second book, also containing mugshots of Hispanic men. From that book, she chose a photo of 24-year-old Thomas Rosa Jr. Rosa lived about a half mile from Offley, and she would later say that she thought she might have seen him on the bus or at the train station near their homes.
In her statement to the police, Offley had given a vague description of the man with Taylor, which included that he was either missing a tooth or had a space between his teeth on the upper right side. Rosa’s teeth did not have these characteristics. She also said the man had fine, straight hair and used his right hand to hold the shiny object against Taylor’s shoulder. Rosa was left-handed and had very curly hair.
On December 9, Sharon Areh, a downstairs neighbor, viewed mugshots at the police station. Areh had been returning from a date on the night of December 6 and saw Taylor with the man. Areh started with the second book of mugshots and selected Rosa. She would later testify that she recognized Rosa because he lived in the same apartment building as her cousin.
Areh’s description of the man with Taylor differed from Offley’s limited description. She did not mention any problem with his teeth and also said he was wearing a gray hat.
Police located Rosa that day, and he agreed to come in for questioning.
Rosa told Detective Charles Horsley that he had been home from 11 p.m. on December 6, which was a Friday, until the morning of December 9. He also said that on December 6 he had been wearing a grey, full-length men’s overcoat and grey, pinstriped pants. Rosa also consented to give the police samples of his blood, saliva, and head and pubic hair.
On the afternoon of December 9, Horsley went to Rosa’s apartment and spoke with Olga Gomez, Rosa’s wife. Horsley wrote in his report that Gomez said Rosa left the apartment at around 11:30 p.m. on December 6 and returned sometime “before daybreak.”
Rosa was arrested that day and eventually charged with first-degree murder, rape, and kidnapping.
On December 10, police executed a search warrant at Rosa’s apartment, seizing a tannish-brown jacket from a hallway closet.
Rosa’s trial in Suffolk County Superior Court began in early October 1986. Prosecutors sought to call Gomez as a witness, and a judge issued a warrant ordering her to appear in court. Initially, Gomez said she would testify, but then said she would assert her spousal privilege against testifying. Prosecutors threatened to charge her with fraud, based on an allegation that Gomez had told welfare officials she was unmarried.
At the time, Gomez’s and Rosa’s older son, 3-year-old Jonathan, was receiving treatment for brain cancer at a local hospital, and the state asked the trial judge to order that Gomez be held overnight and separated from Jonathan and her other son, Emmanuel. Later, at the urging of Rosa, who said he was worried about his wife being away from Jonathan, Gomez agreed to waive her spousal privilege.
At the trial, Gomez said she didn’t remember making the statements about Rosa’s whereabouts found in Horsley’s report. Gomez, testifying with the assistance of an interpreter, said Horsley asked her a lot of yes-or-no questions, which she didn’t understand. Horsley, who had interviewed Gomez without the assistance of an interpreter, testified about the statements in his report and said that Gomez had no difficulty speaking English or understanding his questions.
The first trial ended with a hung jury and a mistrial on October 9, 1986.
Rosa’s retrial began the next month. This time, Gomez asserted her spousal privilege. The state moved to introduce a transcript of her testimony from the first trial. Rosa’s attorney objected, arguing that Gomez’s waiver of her spousal privilege had been involuntary. Judge Harry Elam allowed the transcript to be read to the jury. Horsley then testified about what he said Gomez told him.
During his closing argument, the prosecutor said Gomez’s statements to Horsley established a window for Rosa to commit the crime and bolstered the testimony of Offley and Areh. “You’ve got the geographical opportunity all within three-tenths of a mile with each other and you’ve got the missing [period] of time, from twelve-thirty [a.m.] to daybreak, both geography and time, the opportunity which supports the identification,” he said.
The jury convicted Rosa of first-degree murder, rape, and kidnapping on November 25, 1986. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Rosa appealed, arguing that the state made improper statements during its closing argument, because it used Horsley’s testimony—which impeached Gomez—as substantive evidence of Rosa’s guilt.
On March 9, 1992, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ordered a new trial. It agreed with Rosa’s appellate attorneys that the state had misused the impeachment evidence in its summation. The ruling also questioned whether Gomez had voluntarily waived her spousal privilege, writing that her “treatment at the first trial raises a serious question of fairness.”
Rosa was released from prison on bail. His third trial began in February 1993.
At the first two trials, the state had introduced into evidence several articles of clothing found with Taylor. This included her pants and undergarments, as well as the sweater that had been used to strangle her. At the third trial, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office said it had lost this evidence.
Because of this absence, the brown coat seized from Rosa’s apartment became the critical piece of physical evidence. The coat had several stains, which tested negative for blood but positive for other bodily fluids, including mucous or saliva.
Stanley Bogdan, a criminalist with the Boston Police Laboratory, testified that he had tested the coat and identified a substance consistent with a Group O secretor. He said Taylor was a Group O secretor, but Rosa was not. (About 80 percent of people are secretors, meaning their blood type can be determined from non-blood bodily fluids, such as saliva or mucous.) Bogden also testified that Rosa’s blood type was consistent with a sample taken from a vaginal swab as part of Taylor’s rape kit.
As at the first two trials, Charita Offley and Areh again identified Rosa as the man they each saw with Taylor before her death. Charita and Tammy Offley also identified Rosa’s coat as the coat worn by the assailant. Areh said Rosa wasn’t wearing a brown coat.
Offley identified Rosa as the man she saw at night with Taylor. She also testified that at the time she saw the man, she had been awake for 20 hours, was not wearing her glasses, and had been drinking wine to celebrate her birthday.
Areh testified that she saw Taylor and the man as she returned to her apartment after a date and was getting out of her car. She testified the man wore a gray hat, that it was dark outside, and she saw him from six to eight feet away for 10 seconds.
In July 1986, Gordon Oppenheim, Rosa’s attorney for the first two trials, had been at the Charles Street Jail on other business and thought he saw Rosa. He struck up a conversation with this person, then realized it wasn’t Rosa, but rather a person who looked remarkably like him. This man, D.B., had an extensive criminal record involving violent acts and lived in the general area. He also had a missing tooth that seemed to fit Offley’s description. Because D.B. was Black, his photo was not in the mugshot book viewed by Offley and Areh. Oppenheim had moved to introduce evidence of D.B. as an alternate suspect at Rosa’s first two trials.
Stephanie Page was now representing Rosa at his third trial, and she made a similar motion. Judge Robert Banks denied the motion. He said, “As I analyze this situation, this is really an identification case; to a large extent, it’s an identification case. I make the further observation that the two identifying witnesses show no hesitation at all in their competence in their identifications, as a matter of fact, both of whom are sure that they have identified the right person. ”
Rosa did not testify. Neither did Gomez. David Aponte, a firefighter in Chelsea, testified that he had known Rosa for many years and that Rosa had a reputation for peaceful behavior and was “basically a homebody.” A cousin testified and provided Rosa with an alibi for the time of the crime. In addition, Rosa’s brother testified about blood types in the family and said that several family members had the same blood type as found on the coat. Separately, the state and defense stipulated that 40 percent of the population had the same blood type as that found on the coat.
In his closing argument, the prosecutor said the traumatic nature of Taylor’s death created an “indelible imprint” on the witnesses that assisted in their identification of Rosa. He also said their confidence in their identification equated to reliability.
“You don’t come into court and raise your hand and take that oath and positively identify somebody as the kidnapper and the murderer and the rapist of your roommate unless you’re 100 percent sure time and time again,” the prosecutor said.
On March 4, 1993, the jury convicted Rosa of first-degree murder and kidnapping but acquitted him of aggravated rape. Rosa received a sentence of life without parole for the murder conviction and a concurrent sentence of 9-10 years in prison for the kidnapping conviction.
Rosa again appealed his conviction, arguing that Judge Banks had erred in excluding the evidence about a potential alternate suspect. The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the conviction on February 8, 1996.
In 2002, Rosa moved for a new trial after DNA testing on the jacket excluded Taylor as a contributor to genetic material on the garment. He said the results undercut the state’s theory that the stain on the jacket linked him to the crime. A judge denied his motion, and the Supreme Judicial Court denied his request to appeal.
Associate Justice Martha Sosman said in her ruling that the state’s evidence about the jacket stain was of little significance and paled next to the eyewitness identifications, which she called “extremely strong.” She said the prosecutor mentioned the jacket just once in his closing argument. Rosa also had said his trial was unfair because of the lost evidence. Justice Sosman said Page hadn’t raised this issue at trial, and it was “mere speculation” that blood stains on the missing clothing would produce exculpatory evidence.
Rosa moved his case to federal court, raising these same issues in a petition for a writ of habeas corpus filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on January 25, 2004. Judge Nancy Gertner denied the petition on October 17, 2005.
On June 29, 2020, Rosa, now represented by attorneys with the New England Innocence Project (NEIP) and the Boston College Innocence Program, moved for a new trial. The motion said that a new analysis of the DNA evidence in the case pointed to Rosa’s innocence and that advances in the science of witness identification weakened the reliability of the women who identified Rosa with Taylor prior to her death.
The new trial motion came during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Rosa’s legal team later petitioned the court to release Rosa while his case was under review. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office supported the motion to stay Rosa’s sentence, and Supreme Judicial Court Justice Frank Gaziano ordered Rosa’s release on October 14, 2020. He was released five days later.
Rosa was now 59 years old and, excluding pre-trial detention, had spent nearly 33 years in prison. He was greeted by his younger son, Emmanuel, and other family members. Rosa’s son Jonathan had died while he was incarcerated.
Before the second and third trials, the state had offered Rosa plea deals that would have limited his time in prison. Rosa rejected the deals, adamant that he would not admit to a crime that he had not done.
After Rosa’s release, on February 26, 2021, his attorneys filed an amended motion for a new trial.
According to the motion, Orchid Cellmark, a DNA laboratory, had analyzed the DNA found on the vaginal swab in 2001. Orchid’s report said Rosa couldn’t be excluded as a contributor to the genetic material. In 2017, Bode Cellmark conducted more testing on the samples. Rosa’s attorneys then hired Dr. Steven Laken, a genetics expert, to re-examine the Orchid report.
Laken said in his report that the vaginal swab contained DNA from at least two men. The major profile contributed four times as much genetic material as the minor profile. Rosa was excluded as the major contributor, Laken said, and he was unable to determine whether Rosa could be included in the minor profile.
“The Commonwealth’s theory at trial was that the most recent sexual encounter that the victim had before she was killed was with her assailant,” the new trial motion said. “If the jurors had heard that Mr. Rosa was excluded as the major contributor to the vaginal swabs, rather than hearing that the vaginal swabs were inculpatory because he was the only one in the case who matched the blood grouping contained on them, it would have certainly been a real factor for them.”
The motion also included a report by Dr. Brian Cutler, an expert in eyewitness identification, that said that neither Offley nor Areh viewed the man with Taylor under conditions that would lead to reliable identifications. In addition, Offley and Areh just leafed through mugbooks, rather than photo arrays containing fillers and a single suspect, and the officers gave them no cautionary instructions on the identification process. In Areh’s case, Cutler said, her faint familiarity with Rosa might have contributed to her initial identification.
“Impoverished viewing conditions (e.g., short exposure time, stress, weapon focus, and disguise) can lead an eyewitness to mistakenly identify a stranger for someone with whom he or she is familiar,” Cutler wrote, later adding, “When an eyewitness identifies a familiar person as a perpetrator, it is possible that the eyewitness has mistaken the familiar other as the perpetrator, a phenomenon known in the research as ‘transference’ or ‘source-monitoring error.’”
Cutler also noted that Offley and Areh were Black, and Rosa was Hispanic. “Research shows that people are more accurate at recognizing members of their own races and make more mistakes when trying to identify people of other races,” he said
Cutler said that the prosecutor’s closing argument, where he said that the stress of the event made an indelible impression that would have strengthened the memory of the eyewitnesses, was contradicted by science. Stress impairs the encoding of memory, he said. (Since 2015, Massachusetts trial courts have mandated jury instructions that highlight the role stress can play in reducing eyewitness accuracy. The instructions also tell juries that an eyewitness’s confidence in an identification may not be a reliable indicator of the accuracy of the identification and that jurors should also consider that people often have difficulty in accurately identifying a person of a different race.)
The motion for a new trial said that Judge Banks had erroneously equated confidence with reliability when he denied Oppenheim’s motion to introduce evidence of a possible alternate suspect.
“The newly discovered DNA evidence, establishing that Mr. Rosa is in fact excluded as being the major male contributor to the vaginal swab taken from the victim, supports Mr. Rosa’s position that he should have been permitted to advance a third-party culprit defense,” the motion said.
The motion also said that the lost evidence took on greater weight based on the new DNA evidence, because there was a “reasonable possibility” that Taylor’s clothing, including the sweater used to strangle her, contained the DNA of her assailant. The motion did not suggest the state had acted in bad faith, but it said the loss of these items nonetheless hampered Rosa’s efforts to prove his innocence.
“Had DNA profiles from the murder weapon been developed instead or in addition to those from the coat, it would have clearly been sufficient for a new trial,” the motion said. “In other words, the prejudice to Mr. Rosa from the lost evidence is not simply theoretical: It has cost him the last 19 years of his life.”
The Integrity Review Bureau (IRB) of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office conducted its own review of the case. In its response to Rosa’s motion, filed on January 7, 2022, the IRB agreed that Rosa should be granted a new trial.
The prosecution had hired its own DNA expert, Dr. Karl Reich, to evaluate the DNA results reported from Bode Technology in testing from 2017-2019. Reich reported that Rosa was excluded from Taylor’s cervical scrapings, which contained male DNA, but could not be excluded from the vaginal swabs.
The state’s response said that although the DNA testing didn’t exclude Rosa as a contributor to the genetic material found on the vaginal swab, the partial profile was not rare; it would have appeared in about 1 out of every 200 Hispanic men, or about 450 men in Suffolk County. These results, along with the DNA testing that excluded Taylor’s DNA from the coat and cervical scrapings, would have bolstered Rosa’s defense and undermined the eyewitness testimony, the response said.
“In the end, this Administration cannot stand behind a conviction based on erroneous and incomplete facts,” the response said. Taylor could no longer be linked to Rosa’s coat through the bloodstains on the garment, and the DNA evidence that didn’t exclude Rosa was “too common to support a first-degree murder conviction in conjunction with the remaining evidence.”
The response also said that because Olga Gomez had been “traumatized by her separation from their cancer-ridden toddler at the hands of law enforcement agents at the first trial and did not testify at Mr. Rosa’s subsequent trials,” that was another factor that entitled Rosa to a new trial.
Later, after District Attorney Rachael Rollins was replaced by Kevin Hayden, the district attorney’s office disavowed Reich’s report and said it was unreliable.
Separately, Rosa’s attorneys learned in 2022 that there had been a court order issued in 1985—10 days after Rosa’s arrest—requiring the state to preserve the physical evidence in the case. In a filing, Rosa’s attorneys said the state’s failure to preserve the evidence was “not merely negligent” and “demonstrates that Mr. Rosa did everything within his power to preserve evidence in the hope that it would ultimately help him prove his innocence.”
On September 6, 2023, Judge Michael Ricciuti granted Rosa a new trial. His ruling said the post-conviction DNA testing had eliminated evidence connecting Rosa to the crime and undermined the testimony of witnesses, who testified they saw Rosa wearing the brown coat. He found Reich’s report to be reliable and admissible. In addition, Ricciuti said the new forensic evidence about the vulnerability of the eyewitness identifications undermined the state’s argument that Offley and Areh were reliable witnesses because of their confidence in their identifications of Rosa and the stress and trauma of the event.
“It’s so hard to get the criminal legal system to admit when a mistake has been made and to take corrective action,” said Radha Natarajan, one of Rosa’s attorneys and NEIP’s executive director. “So, it’s incredibly moving that it happened in this case, and yet, we’re still not done fighting.”
After Rosa was granted a new trial, he was represented by NEIP and attorneys with the law firm Loevy & Loevy. Initially, the district attorney’s office suggested it might try Rosa for a fourth time in Taylor’s murder.
On January 7, 2025, Rosa’s attorneys moved to exclude the eyewitness identifications made by Offley and Areh. The motion included an affidavit by Dr. Nancy Franklin, an emeritus professor at Stony Brook University in New York and an expert on memory and identification. She said neither woman looked at the man with Taylor under conditions that would produce a reliable identification.
On March 18, 2026, the state dismissed the charges. It said in a filing:
“The Commonwealth has concluded that it no longer can move forward with this prosecution. In the over forty years since the victim was murdered, evidence has been lost, additional forensic testing has been conducted, and case law and jury instructions have changed. These factors, taken together, call into question the Commonwealth’s ability to prove the charges against the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt.”
On May 11, 2026, Rosa filed a lawsuit in Suffolk County Superior Court seeking compensation from the state of Massachusetts for his wrongful conviction.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 03-30-2026
Last Update Date: 05-15-2026
