On October 16, 1994, the body of 26-year-old Pernell Kimplin was discovered by his mother and a co-worker in his apartment in Greenfield, Massachusetts, after he didn’t show up for his job as a horse groomer at a private school.
Kimplin had been stabbed, gagged, and hog-tied with a cord from his TV. A knife believed to be the murder weapon was found in a milk can outside Kimplin’s front door.
Investigators obtained samples of blood found near Kimplin, on the front door, on socks, and the T-shirt used to gag him.
Dr. Loren Mednick performed an autopsy on October 17 at 1:30 p.m. He wrote that the “condition of the body indicated he had died about two days previously.”
Members of the Greenfield Police Department and the Massachusetts State Police investigated the murder and quickly connected the crime to the use and sale of drugs in Greenfield, which is about 100 miles east of Boston. Kimplin used cocaine and was frequently in debt to several dealers, including David Lucas and Charles Johnson.
Matt Gould, the co-worker who had discovered Kimplin’s body, told police that Lucas drove a car matching the description of a vehicle seen outside Kimplin’s apartment. Gould also mentioned another area drug dealer, whom he knew as “Ralphie,” and said this man had a reputation for violence. Ralphie was the nickname for 33-year-old Elvio Marrero, who lived in nearby Chicopee, and police discovered an arrest warrant for Marrero, based on an alleged attack against Glenn Otto that involved drugs. (That case was later dismissed.)
The police could not locate Marrero, but several witnesses said they had either seen Marrero with Kimplin on the night of October 13 or seen him on the morning of October 14.
Police issued an arrest warrant for Marrero on November 2, 1994. He was arrested on February 12, 1995, at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) as he re-entered the United States from his native Dominican Republic and later charged with first-degree murder in Kimplin’s death.
During an interview, Marrero denied being a drug dealer, and he falsely said he did not know Kimplin and had never been to Greenfield. The police asked Marrero if he had been in Greenfield around October 13-14, and he said no, that he had been in the Dominican Republic. Asked when he flew there, Marrero said it was “around October 9th.”
At the time of his arrest, Marrero was wearing a leather jacket, which matched the description of the jacket that witnesses said Marrero was wearing when they said they last saw him. Trace amounts of blood were found on the jacket’s interior sleeves and back panel.
Marrero’s trial in Franklin County Superior Court began on October 29, 1996. Leonard Cohen and Lori Levinson represented Marrero. Assistant District Attorney Renee Steese led the prosecution, and Judge John Murphy Jr. presided.
Mednick, the medical examiner, testified that he could not give an exact time of death. “Once 12 hours has passed, we do not have anything accurate or precise to determine [the time of death],” he said. During the grand jury proceedings, Mednick had testified that, based on the level of decomposition-related alcohol in Kimplin’s body, he estimated Kimplin was killed “up to two days” before he was found.
David Prest testified that he saw Marrero sleeping on a mattress at Kimplin’s apartment just before midnight on October 13. Prest testified that he was heavily intoxicated that night and that he had not seen Marrero before that day.
Lucas testified that Marrero came to the house where he and Johnson were sleeping at around 6 a.m. on October 14 and asked for a ride. According to Lucas, Marrero said the police were looking for him, and he and Johnson walked Marrero down to the home of Jerry Desbiens and asked Desbiens to give Marrero a ride.
Lucas said he and Johnson had sold drugs to Kimplin and, in the weeks before Kimplin’s death, visited Kimplin’s apartment to collect a drug debt. Lucas said the two men had confronted Kimplin about the debt just days before his death, but he denied assaulting him.
Johnson testified that he never sold drugs to Kimplin; he said he had shared drugs with Kimplin and that the money he was trying to collect was based on that arrangement. He testified inconsistently about what he saw on the morning of October 14, first saying that he remembered Marrero coming over. On cross-examination, Johnson said he had no memory of Marrero coming over, accompanying him to Desbien’s house, or asking Desbiens to give Marrero a ride. Several people had told the police that Johnson had a key to Kimplin’s apartment, but Johnson denied this.
Desbiens testified that earlier on October 13, he had seen Marrero and Kimplin together and watched Kimplin give Marrero a key. Later, Desbiens testified, he drove Marrero to Kimplin’s apartment. He said Lucas and Johnson came to his house at about 10:30 a.m. on October 14 and asked him to drive Marrero to Chicopee. According to Desbiens, Marrero said he had been hit on the head, and the police were “chasing” him.
Isidro Herrera testified that he had run into Marrero in Holyoke in mid-October. He said that Marrero told him he needed money to leave the country because he had killed someone with a knife. According to Herrera, Marrero said a man had attacked him while he was sleeping. Herrera said he drove Marrero to Chicopee and then back to Holyoke.
Police had interviewed Herrera on October 28, and he said in that interview and at trial that the encounter with Marrero happened about “two-and-a-half weeks” before the interview.
Lynn Morehouse, who lived next door to Desbiens, testified that Marrero climbed through her bathroom window at 2 a.m. on October 14 and asked her to go ask Desbiens to give him a ride. She said that Marrero, who was wearing his leather jacket, was upset and that she saw dried blood on his arms and hands. Marrero had given shifting statements to the police, and she testified that she was not initially forthcoming because she feared Marrero and did not want to get involved. Morehouse also said that her roommate had stolen about $1,000 of crack cocaine from Marrero in August or September 1994.
Otto testified that he often bought cocaine from Marrero and let him sell cocaine from his house in exchange for drugs. Otto said that Kimplin was a frequent customer of Marrero and at times in debt to him.
Otto testified that a month before the murder he stole $3,000 worth of cocaine from Marrero. He said that Marrero confronted him about the theft, which Otto denied. Later, Otto testified, Marrero hit him in the head and body with a piece of wood.
A criminalist with the Massachusetts State Police crime laboratory testified about the blood trail found in Kimplin’s apartment. The criminalist also said traces of blood were found on the inside but not the outside of Marrero’s leather jacket.
The criminalist testified that Desbiens’s car tested positive for blood in several places, including the brake and gas pedals, but no effort was made to identify the source of the blood. The police also searched Lucas’s car and found no evidence of blood in the vehicle.
The state had performed blood-grouping tests on 20 pieces of evidence, comparing blood samples from the crime scene against samples from Marrero and Kimplin, although not against other potential suspects, such as Lucas or Johnson. In 10 instances, Marrero was excluded as a contributor. In six instances, the results were inconclusive. In four instances, Marrero could not be excluded. The chemist said, “I cannot determine which of the two men” was the source of the blood.
The state had also received the results of DNA testing on several items, including the knife found in the milk can and blood samples from Morehouse’s apartment. In one sample from Morehouse’s apartment, the results were inconclusive. In the other three, both Kimplin and Marrero were excluded as contributors. The DNA testing reported that a tissue sample on the murder weapon was consistent with Kimplin’s DNA.
During a search of Kimplin’s apartment, investigators had recovered two fingerprints. They said Marrero was the source of the print found on a folding chair and that Johnson was the source of a print found on the back of Kimplin’s overturned television, which was the source of the cord used in the murder.
On the third day of the trial, while the state was still presenting its case, Marrero’s attorneys told Judge Murphy that they had received flight records from American Airlines. The documents showed an “E. Marrero” checking in at JFK at 5:19 a.m. on October 14, for a flight to Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. The document, known as a Passenger Name Record, or PNR, gave a telephone number in western Massachusetts and a code for the travel agent who bought the ticket. It also said that the ticket holder paid $50 to check a bag for the flight, which left at 7 a.m. and arrived in Santo Domingo at 10:36 a.m.
Steese told Judge Murphy, “[A]s a result of getting that information last night, I tried to set things into motion . . . It does indicate a 7 a.m. departure time. So obviously there’s a discrepancy.”
She assigned Trooper Leonard Von Flatern of the state police to investigate further.
Marrero’s travel habits were well-documented. He frequently used SunRay Travel, an agency with offices in Holyoke and Hartford, Connecticut, to book flights to the Dominican Republic. Ilia Brito, a former employee of the agency, testified for the state. Brito said she had worked in SunRay’s Holyoke office, knew Marrero, and had flown to the Dominican Republic with him in the past. She testified that she had left the agency on October 10 and that she had seen Marrero on October 12 and did not know about his October 14 trip.
Brito said that it took about 3 hours to get to JFK from the Holyoke area. Starting from Greenfield would add about 30 minutes to the trip.
Two days after the travel records were located, Trooper Francis Hart testified about Von Flatern’s research into the PNR. On cross-examination, he said he was unfamiliar with the telephone number listed on the travel document and that he had not spoken with anybody at American Airlines about the flight.
Mary Finn, an employee at American, testified for the defense about the PNR. She told the jury that a travel agent from Western Massachusetts, with the code name ADA, booked the ticket on October 13, 1994. She did not know the name of the agent. Finn also said that if the “E. Marrero” was not an American citizen, he would need to show a passport and immigration documents with the same name to board the flight.
Marrero also introduced his Dominican Republic passport, which showed an arrival stamp of October 14, 1994.
In rebuttal, Luis Porras, the owner of SunRay Travel, testified that Brito was the only employee in the Holyoke office and that SunRay did not keep records of flight reservations.
In addition, an employee of the telephone company in New York City testified that the telephone directory for the borough of Queens listed 10 persons named “E. Marrero” and the directory for the Bronx listed 16 entries with that name.
Marrero did not testify.
In her closing argument, Steese dismissed the relevance of the travel records and told the jury that it could rely on the witnesses who said they saw Marrero in Greenfield on October 14. She said the records “mean[t] nothing to this case” and that some other person named E. Marrero took the flight. She speculated that Marrero made the reservation and had someone else take the flight on his behalf. She also said Marrero’s false statements to the police at the airport were evidence of his guilt.
Steese also said: “[The forensic expert] talked about that test resulting in a positive for the presence of blood, and the presence of blood in the front of that jacket was in each and every quadrant, top and bottom … And isn’t that consistent with a person who had bloody hands and then put that jacket on, and the contact would be to the interior areas of that jacket? And that corroborates ... Morehouse’s testimony.”
Marrero’s attorneys acknowledged that Marrero had lied to the officers who interviewed him at the airport but said returning to the United States under his real name supported his claim of innocence. They acknowledged that Marrero dealt drugs and had been inside Kimplin’s apartment but said that the airline records showed Marrero couldn’t have been in Greenfield when the state’s witnesses said they saw him.
On November 7, 1996, the jury convicted Marrero of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Marrero appealed, arguing that Judge Murphy had erred in allowing testimony from Desbiens, Otto, and Morehouse about the extent of his drug dealing and his purported use of violence to handle disputes. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts affirmed the conviction on March 12, 1998, ruling that the witness testimony was necessary to show motive and intent, not just prior bad acts.
In 2002, Marrero filed a pro se motion for a new trial, claiming Cohen and Levinson had been ineffective because they didn’t permit him to testify or explain to him his right to testify. A judge denied the motion in January 2004.
In 2011, Marrero filed a motion for DNA testing on several items from the crime scene. After an initial denial, a judge approved testing for 13 items in 2017. The state appealed part of the order pertaining to four of the items. In 2018, a single justice of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court denied the appeal, and the four remaining items were also tested.
Bode Cellmark tested this evidence in 2017 and 2018.
At trial, the state’s witnesses had said that the DNA testing did not exclude Marrero as a contributor to the blood stains found at Kimplin’s apartment. The new, more sophisticated testing conducted by Bode Cellmark excluded Marrero as a contributor in four of these instances; in the fifth, a DNA profile could not be obtained. For items that the state didn’t test prior to trial, Bode’s DNA testing either excluded Marrero or the results were inconclusive. In addition, Kimplin was excluded as a contributor to the blood found on the inside of Marrero’s jacket.
On April 14, 2020, Marrero moved for a new trial based on the DNA results. He was now represented by CPCS Innocence Program attorney Ira Gant, Lauren Jacobs (formerly Lauren Rossman) who was then a legal fellow with the CPCS Innocence Program and became a Staff Attorney with the Boston College Innocence Program, and BCIP Attorneys Charlotte Whitmore and Sharon Beckman.
“Post-conviction DNA testing on these same items now shows that Mr. Marrero is not the source of blood or any DNA on these items, and thus there is no physical evidence tying him to the gag, to the trail of blood left behind by the killer, or to the crime scene at all,” the motion said. “These new DNA results directly and significantly contradict the forensic evidence the Commonwealth used to convict Mr. Marrero, and, alone or in conjunction with the totality of the evidence, cast real doubt on the justice of Mr. Marrero’s conviction.”
After Marrero filed his motion, the state provided his attorneys with the investigative files of the state police. On August 28, 2020, Marrero supplemented his new trial motion, asserting that the state had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence to his trial attorneys.
This evidence included:
Notes prepared by Von Flatern that indicated that he had connected the telephone number in the PNR to SunRay Travel and that there was an employee of the agency named Ada Quiles. The notes also indicated that, contrary to Hart’s testimony, the state police had talked with American Airlines.
Notes and reports related to Porras being under federal investigation for drug trafficking and money laundering. His travel agency was also under investigation for drug trafficking.
An investigator for Marrero’s defense team located Quiles, now living in Florida. She said she had worked at SunRay Travel in the Holyoke office but could not remember making a reservation for an E. Marrero 30 years earlier. She also said she used ADA as her agent code.
The supplemental motion said this evidence would have allowed the defense to impeach Hart about the telephone number. It also said the defense could have used this evidence to locate Quiles to determine if she could bolster Marrero’s alibi.
Regarding Porras, the supplemental motion said that he had testified falsely that Brito was the only Holyoke employee. It also said the defense could have used the information about the FBI investigation to undermine Porras’s credibility.
Judge Michael Callan of Franklin Superior Court held a three-day evidentiary hearing on the disclosure claims in December 2021 and February 2022.
Von Flatern testified that he and Hart investigated the PNR and shared the information with each other.
Steese testified that the flight records had been a “gut punch” that “flew in the face” of the state’s theory of the crime. Steese said that she told the troopers to “try to determine how … the passenger name record could have been falsified” and that she “washed her hands” of the investigation and only wanted to hear from the troopers if they found inculpatory evidence.
Steese also testified that she had an unwritten agreement with Cohen regarding Marrero’s relationship with SunRay Travel. According to Steese, both the state and defense had information that Marrero and other area drug dealers were pooling their money at SunRay Travel and buying cocaine. She said that she agreed not to explore that issue during the presentation of the state’s case provided Marrero’s attorneys didn’t open the door during cross-examination.
Cohen, because of illness, didn’t testify at the hearing. (He died in 2025). Levinson testified that no such agreement existed. She said it was “impossible” that Cohen would enter into such an agreement without telling her, because of the risk that she would accidentally breach the terms of the deal. She also said Marrero’s drug dealing couldn’t be avoided. “It was an integral part of the case,” she said. Levinson said the trial strategy was to accept that fact and argue that it didn’t prove Marrero killed Kimplin.
On June 1, 2022, Judge Callan denied Marrero’s motion for a new trial.
He said that Marrero had not been harmed by the state’s failure to turn over the exculpatory evidence from Von Flatern’s research, which included information on the travel records and an FBI investigation into Porras and SunRay Travel.
“Marrero was the person in the best position to know where he made the reservation, when and with whom,” Callan said. “The failure to turn over known information cannot as a matter of logic and common sense be prejudicial to Marrero’s defense.”
Judge Callan testified that Steese had testified credibly about an unwritten agreement with Cohen, and he didn’t accept Levinson’s denial of the purported agreement. “The record amply demonstrates the peril to the defense of exposing SunRay Travel’s allegedly criminal dealings with and connection to Marrero,” the court said.
Judge Callan also rejected Marrero’s claims based on the new DNA evidence. He said there was “little merit” that this evidence contradicted the “strong incriminating evidence” and that Marrero had not shown that this new testing would lead to a different outcome.
Marrero appealed, arguing that Judge Callan had misapplied case law in evaluating his post-conviction claims, particularly with regards to the DNA evidence.
“Here, the DNA evidence would have likewise eliminated the only physical evidence that the Commonwealth argued showed Marrero was present at the killing and that he had blood on his hands,” the appeal said.
The appeal also said the failure to turn over the investigative records harmed Marrero’s defense by preventing his attorneys from effectively cross-examining Hart and Porras.
On January 12, 2024, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court granted Marrero a new trial. The ruling centered on the DNA testing that excluded Kimplin as a contributor to blood found on Marrero’s jacket. The court said that the state had used the bloodstained jacket to support Morehouse’s testimony, which it called the “the most inculpatory eyewitness testimony at trial.”
“Where the evidence offered to connect the defendant to the crime, and where the prosecutor further used the jacket to corroborate the most important testimonial evidence given by a witness with credibility issues—we conclude that the bloodstains likely were a real factor in the jury’s deliberations,” the court said. The ruling did not address Marrero’s claim that the state failed to disclose exculpatory evidence.
Marrero was released from prison on April 30, 2024.
At Marrero’s retrial, which began in early June 2026, he was represented by Steven Van Dyke, a law professor at Boston College, and Michael Hussey. Van Dyke said in his closing argument that the travel records supported Marrero’s innocence. “People lie,” he told the jury, according to the Greenfield Recorder, “but fortunately, travel records don’t.”
The state’s case was hampered by time and witness challenges. Hart, the state trooper, testified, but he was now retired and serving a prison sentence for possession of child pornography.
On June 17, 2026, the jury acquitted Marrero of murder.
According to the Recorder, Marrero, assisted by an interpreter, said in Spanish that he had been unjustly imprisoned and he thanked everyone who helped set him free.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 07-06-2026
