It took less than an hour this week for a jury to convict Harvey Marcelin of murder — in 2022, he killed a woman and dismembered her body.
Investigators found her torso in a shopping cart, her head and limbs in his apartment and one of her legs near a garbage can blocks away.
The murder and dismemberment of Susan Leyden, 68, horrified prosecutors, but even more shocking was the criminal history of Mr. Marcelin, 87.
This marked the third time in 63 years that Mr. Marcelin was convicted of killing a woman. In 1963, he killed his girlfriend. In 1984, he killed the woman he was living with.
It was unclear how Ms. Leyden and Mr. Marcelin knew one another, though investigators found that they had lived in the same shelter in the Bronx about seven years ago.
Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, called the killing of Ms. Leyden “cruel and reprehensible.”
“Following the senseless murder, the defendant desecrated the victim’s remains in a manner that truly shocks the conscience,” he said in a statement on Friday, following the trial in State Supreme Court.
Ms. Leyden was “getting her life back on track” when she was killed, according to a prosecutor. Brooklyn Defender Services, which represented Mr. Marcelin, declined to comment on Friday.
Mr. Marcelin, who was listed as male in earlier court records, identified as a woman at the time of his 2022 arrest. But at the start of his trial last month, Mr. Marcelin told the court that he identifies as a man.
The 2022 case against Mr. Marcelin broke into the news shortly after a man came across a shopping cart while on his way home to Brooklyn from a night out. The cart had been sitting at Atlantic and Pennsylvania Avenues for hours, the man recalled, so he decided to take it with him.
He pulled his electric bicycle onto the sidewalk and peeked into the bag.
“I found a body,” the man, Ramon Lopez, told jurors during his testimony.
A video played in court showed him riding his e-bike down the street in jeans, a brown jacket and a black backpack. After stopping and opening the bag, Mr. Lopez is seen jumping back. He gets off his bike, moves it across the sidewalk and pulls out his phone. He slowly walks back to the bag, his phone’s flashlight on, and appears to check again.
He said he called 911 immediately.
In the bag, according to prosecutors, were some of Ms. Leyden’s remains. Surveillance footage showed Mr. Marcelin pushing the shopping cart the day before it was discovered, prosecutors said.
Over the following days, investigators ended up at Mr. Marcelin’s apartment. There, investigators found the victim’s head and limbs, as well cleaning supplies, a hammer and the box from an electric saw. They also recovered more bags containing Ms. Leyden’s remains blocks from the building.
Surveillance footage taken on Feb. 27, 2022, showed Ms. Leyden entering Mr. Marcelin’s apartment building on Pennsylvania Avenue in East New York. Ms. Leyden was never seen leaving the apartment, prosecutors said.
A lawyer for Mr. Marcelin, Alison Stocking, told the jury during the opening statements that prosecutors could not prove that it was her client who killed Ms. Leyden. The prosecution’s case “will not resolve the question of how Susan Leyden died and when,” she said.
Ms. Stocking said that a woman who was a witness for the prosecution could have been the one who killed Ms. Leyden.
“The question of who was in contact with Susan Leyden is completely separate from who killed her,” Ms. Stocking said.
Mr. Marcelin has served decades of his life in prison.
In 1963, he was convicted of first-degree murder for fatally shooting his girlfriend in a Harlem apartment building. He was given a life sentence, and the jury at the time was unable to decide whether to impose the death penalty, according to court records.
He was released in 1984 on lifetime parole, but was arrested less than a year later after a body was found in a bag near Central Park. Prosecutors in Manhattan charged Mr. Marcelin with stabbing to death another woman he had been living with. In 1986, he pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to six to 12 years in prison for that woman’s death, according to state records.
After several attempts to be released on parole, Mr. Marcelin was let out of prison in 2019.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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