EX-WIFE STANDS BY LAPOINTE’S ALIBI
07/19/2007
Karen Martin testified Wednesday
that she was home with her then-husband Richard A. Lapointe in Manchester during
the time prosecutors claim he raped and murdered her grandmother in March 1987.
It was testimony the jury at Lapointe's 1992 trial never heard, because Lapointe's former public defenders, Patrick Culligan and Christopher Cosgrove, never called her to testify at the trial.
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That jury convicted Lapointe of the
rape and murder of Martin's grandmother, Bernice Martin, 88. Lapointe is serving
a life sentence for the crime.
Karen Martin testified in Vernon Superior Court as a witness in Lapointe's
second bid for a new trial in the case. Lapointe and his defense team claim that
Culligan and Cosgrove, along with Henry T. Vogt, the lawyer who represented
Lapointe during his first bid for a new trial in 2000, were ineffective.
They also claim that important exculpatory evidence was never presented to the
jury in the 1992 trial.
On Wednesday Karen Martin and Lapointe faced each other in court for the first
time since she testified at a pre-trial hearing in his 1992 murder case, a
hearing where Lapointe's then-public defenders argued unsuccessfully to suppress
his police confession in the case. A jury was not present during that hearing.
Karen Martin and Lapointe had divorced shortly after Lapointe's 1989 arrest in
the murder case.
In the courtroom on Wednesday, Karen Martin wept quietly while listening to a
tape recording of her July 4, 1989, interview at her home with Manchester
Detective Michael Morrissey, in which she was asked repeatedly about her
then-husband's whereabouts between 4 and 8 p.m. on the day of the murder.
In the taped interview, Morrissey is heard claiming that "the case has come to a
conclusion," police had DNA proof and evidence from witnesses, and Lapointe had
confessed to the slaying.
But the so-called evidence did not exist, and Lapointe, simultaneously in the
midst of a 9˝-hour interrogation at Manchester police headquarters, was
cyclically admitting and recanting responsibility for the crime between bathroom
breaks.
He would eventually sign a confession, claiming he raped and stabbed Bernice
Martin.
That confession, which became the centerpiece in the case against Lapointe, was
later assailed by his defense team as a false, coerced statement.
Lapointe, his lawyers have argued, suffers cognitive deficits stemming from a
brain condition, and was intimidated by detectives. They argued he couldn't have
committed the crime because he was home with his wife.
On the tape, Morrissey is heard asking Karen Martin to "help" her husband by
telling what she knows, and threatens her that if she does not, she might be
arrested for hindering prosecution. Her arrest, he said, would prevent her from
caring for her young son.
Throughout the interview, in which Morrissey's tone shifted at times from gentle
to accusatory, Karen Martin calmly maintained that the only time Lapointe was
out of the house that afternoon and evening was when he took the dog for a
20-minute walk, as he did every day.
Between 7 and 8 p.m., she told Morrissey, she and her husband received a phone
call from her aunt, concerned that Bernice Martin wasn't answering her phone.
Lapointe then walked to Bernice Martin's Mayfair Gardens apartment on North Main
Street and found the door locked and smoke coming from the eves, according to
police reports. He called 911, bringing emergency crews to the scene.
During the taped interview, Morrissey repeatedly charged that Karen Martin was
withholding information, and Martin, sounding increasingly distressed, denied
doing so.
She said she was trying to help as best she could, and even offered to go to
police headquarters to tell her husband to tell the police everything - even as
she steadfastly reiterated a timetable that made it all but impossible for him
to be the killer.
In court Wednesday, Martin was asked by Lapointe's lawyer how she felt during
the interrogation by Morrissey.
"I was starting to get very nervous and upset, and he just kept going," she
recalled.
She said she told him the truth, and she stands by her account.
"What I told him was the truth as I knew it, and as I know it," she said.
She said the family watched a television show together that afternoon, had
dinner, and she was getting their son ready for bed around the time her aunt
called, and Lapointe left to check on her grandmother.
In another development, Lapointe's lawyers asked Fuger on Wednesday to allow
them to amend Lapointe's petition for a new trial so they can enter newly
obtained DNA evidence favorable to Lapointe.
They revealed that tests had identified DNA traces on a pair of men's gloves
found at the crime scene that didn't match their Lapointe's.
Fuger denied the motion, saying it's too late into the hearing to introduce
evidence that could support an innocence claim. As it stands, Lapointe's lawyers
are only asking for a new trial, not a finding of innocence from the judge.
Fuger suggested they file a new petition that includes the new evidence.
The gloves are said to contain the DNA of at least two people, mixed together.
Investigators have not claimed that the killer wore the gloves, and the gloves
may have been handled by third parties, contaminating the evidence.
Nevertheless, Lapointe's lawyers maintain the finding is significant, and say
they are continuing to seek other DNA evidence.
©Journal Inquirer 2007