NEW YORK — Brooklyn serial killer Harvey Marcelin won’t get a chance to slay a fourth woman, after a judge sentenced the 88-year-old murderer to life without parole Wednesday.
A jury found Marcelin guilty last month of first-degree murder for beating a Brooklyn woman to death, dismembering her with a saw and then ditching her remains in and around his apartment.
“The cold fact is that every time you were released, you killed someone else, which leads this court to believe that, regardless of your age, if you are ever paroled again, I have no doubt that you would kill again,” Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun said Wednesday.
Marcelin, of East New York, Brooklyn, made Susan Leyden, 68, his third victim on Feb. 27, 2022, bludgeoning her head and using a reciprocal saw from Home Depot to cut apart her body. An e-bike rider found her headless and limbless torso in a a gray and black rolling bag left on a Brooklyn street days later.
“Every single time the defendant has been released from prison, he has shortly thereafter killed a woman,” said Assistant District Attorney Leila Rosini. “There is no hope for rehabilitation…. I believe that the defendant is still a danger to society, that his impulses, his urges, his rage, whatever makes him harm these women, has not gone away.”
Marcelin, who has identified as both male and female over the years, identified as male for the trial, telling the judge to call him Harvey, then clarified, “Mr. Harvey.”
On Wednesday, Marcelin, who wore a brown knit cap and used a wheelchair, maintained his innocence and said he was framed by the star witness against him, Lisa Lindhal.
Lindhal, who was homeless and had a heroin and crack habit, took the stand to describe how she visited Marcelin to do drugs in his squalid apartment, and saw Leyden’s dead body.
“I sincerely wish I could reassemble the embodiment of my Susan Carol Leyden, whom I was crazy over,” Marcelin said, “and whom I witnessed murdered by an evil crackhead, that the prosecutor Rosini unlawfully manipulated, and framed me and railroaded me through a kangaroo court using terrorist tactics against the jury.”
Rosini tightly pursed her lips and shook her head in a clear show of disgust and disbelief as Marcelin spoke, while her co-counsel, Assistant D.A. Viviane Dussek, rolled her eyes.
Marcelin was initially sentenced to life without parole for the 1963 shooting of girlfriend Jacqueline Bonds, after the jury couldn’t agree on imposing the death penalty.
Marcelin shot Bonds in the hallway of an Harlem apartment, then chased her into a bedroom and shot her again, according to court filings.
After a change in state law, Marcelin was released on lifetime parole in 1984.
A year later, he stabbed to death another girlfriend, Anna Laura Serrera Miranda, dumping her remains by Central Park in October 1985. Marcelin pleaded guilty to manslaughter in that case.
When a judge asked, “You kept stabbing her so she would stop screaming?” Marcelin responded, “It was just — I was doing it, you know.”
At a June 25, 2019, parole hearing, Marcelin vowed, “I give you my word, I will never re-offend.”
He broke that vow less than three years later after he became infatuated with Leyden. He created multiple Facebook accounts, all with her photo as his profile picture. Leyden was down on her luck. She lost her jewelry business, became estranged from her daughter, and wound up in a homeless shelter. But she was getting her life back together, prosecutors said.
All that ended on Feb. 27, 2022, when Leyden walked into Marcelin’s apartment on Pennsylvania Ave. to visit him and never came out.
After the e-bike rider found her torso days later on March 3, police discovered black plastic garbage bags in Marcelin’s apartment with Leyden’s thighs, hand, arm and head inside. Marcelin also stuffed part of the victim’s left leg into his electric wheelchair and went shopping before disposing of the limb, prosecutors allege.
The victim’s right leg, left arm and left hand were never recovered.
“The brutality of this shocking crime is almost beyond words,” Brooklyn D.A. Eric Gonzalez said Wednesday. “This defendant committed a horrific murder that took Susan Leyden’s life and inflicted unimaginable pain on her family and loved ones.”
