Commonwealth v. LeBeau

884 N.E.2d 956, 451 Mass. 244, 2008 Mass. LEXIS 230
CourtMassachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
DecidedApril 22, 2008
StatusPublished
Cited by28 cases

This text of 884 N.E.2d 956 (Commonwealth v. LeBeau) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Commonwealth v. LeBeau, 884 N.E.2d 956, 451 Mass. 244, 2008 Mass. LEXIS 230 (Mass. 2008).

Opinion

Greaney, J.

A jury in the Superior Court convicted the defendant of murder in the first degree on theories of deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty, three charges of larceny over $250, and one charge of larceny under $250. Represented by new counsel on appeal, the defendant claims error in the denial of his motion to suppress his statements (including his confession to the murder of the victim, Robert Vincent) given to Pittsfield police officers and in the admission of certain evidence (including the contents of his wallet) at trial. The defendant also asserts that the totality of the evidence, including evidence of the defendant’s intoxication on the night of the killing, requires that we use our authority under G. L. c. 278, § 33E, to reduce his murder conviction to murder in the second degree or manslaughter. We decline to do so. We agree with the defendant, however, that, in the circumstances of this case, his convictions of four separate charges of larceny, for conduct which was, in actuality, one single criminal scheme, cannot stand. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of conviction of murder and one judgment of conviction of larceny over $250, but vacate the other three judgments of conviction of larceny. We remand the case to the Superior Court for dismissal of three indictments charging larceny, and for reconsideration of the sentence imposed (and resentencing, if appropriate) on the remaining larceny conviction.

1. The jury could have found the following facts. At the time of his death, the victim lived in a one-room apartment on Tyler Street in Pittsfield. He was sixty-two years old. He had been employed by Tyler Home Supply since he was a young man and, for years, had been the store manager. One of his job responsibilities was to open the store for business in the morning, a task he performed, on time, every day. A man of habit, at the end of each work day, the victim would walk a short distance up Tyler Street to the Tyler Café (a local bar also known as Charlie’s) to have a few beers and play the game Keno, before walking home for the evening. Although he generally was regarded as a private person, the victim had many good friends at the bar.

[246]*246On Friday, August 16, 2002, as was his custom, the victim opened Tyler Home Supply at 8 a.m., and, following his day of work, walked to the bar and played Keno for the rest of the afternoon. He always played the same numbers: 4, 9, 19, 39, 62; or 1, 10, 22, 80. That afternoon, the victim’s numbers came up on the Keno board and he won $473. He bought a round of drinks for everyone present, tipped the bartender ten dollars and tipped the Keno operator forty-eight dollars. After this show of generosity, the victim was left with $400. Prior to leaving the bar for home at approximately 4:30 p.m., the victim purchased three more Keno tickets. Customers at the bar continued to speak about the victim’s winning that afternoon and into the evening.

The defendant frequented the Tyler Café regularly after moving to Pittsfield from Great Barrington in the summer of 2002. He was living in August in a two-bedroom apartment on Maple-wood Avenue with a friend, Beverly Besanceney. The defendant was unemployed and in need of money.

On August 16, the defendant arrived at the bar a few hours after the victim had left. He drank several rum and coke cocktails throughout the evening, leaving the bar for about thirty minutes sometime between the hours of 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. Portions of a videotape recording taken in the bar between 1 a.m. and 2:45 a.m. on August 17, show the defendant, one of only two customers remaining, helping a female bartender clean off tables at closing time.

Sometime during the early hours of August 17, the defendant entered the victim’s apartment and bludgeoned him to death with a foam-covered steel exercise bar. The defendant then rolled the body off the couch (where, a jury could find, the victim had been sleeping), rummaged behind the sofa cushions (possibly looking for items of value), and replaced the cushions (reversing the order in which he had found them) before fleeing the scene. The defendant took from the apartment three Keno playing cards, two rings,1 and approximately $400 in cash.

When the victim failed to open Tyler Home Supply the fol[247]*247lowing morning, store employees were immediately alarmed, because he had never before not shown up for work without a reason. Two employees went to knock on the victim’s apartment door, and hearing no response, they notified the Pittsfield police department. The two employees then entered the one-room apartment through the back door (which, they knew, had a cardboard square taped over one window pane that was missing its glass) and, once inside the darkened apartment, discovered the victim’s body on the floor wrapped in a comforter. They immediately left the apartment, and police officers arrived at the scene minutes thereafter.

The medical examiner testified at trial that the victim’s skull had been shattered by multiple blows of a blunt object delivered with “a great deal of force.” A pillow on the couch was saturated with blood and bits of human tissue. A chemist for the State police testified that the pattern of blood stains and blood spatter in the room indicated that the victim’s head was on the right hand seat cushion of the sofa when the “bloodshed began.” There were no defensive wounds on the victim, and the soles of his feet were clean.

During the days that followed, Pittsfield police officers attempted to interview everyone known to have been present at the bar on August 16. Their investigation disclosed that the defendant had been in the bar on Friday night and into Saturday morning. Further investigation revealed that the defendant had returned to Besanceney’s apartment in the early hours of Saturday morning, shirtless and sockless; had acted strangely throughout the day; and had left Pittsfield, with most of his belongings, on Saturday evening.2 Police later learned that the defendant [248]*248(who owned no car) got a ride out of town with a friend, Mark Shar, who drove the defendant to Shar’s home in Agawam. The next day, Shar drove the defendant to the home of another friend, Kevin Bradley, at 21 Little Alum Road in Brimfield.

On the night of Tuesday, August 20, Officer Glen Decker and Detective Thomas Bowler, of the Pittsfield police department, accompanied by Lieutenant Richard M. Smith of the State police, proceeded to Brimfield to interview the defendant. They were in plain clothes and their police cruiser was unmarked. They wore visible badges and each was armed. At approximately 11:20 p.m. that evening, the officers were traveling down Little Alum Road when they encountered a lone male, standing by the roadside. The man had a beer in one hand and, with the other, appeared to be speaking on a cellular telephone. Detective Decker said, “That’s our man.” Lieutenant Smith stopped the cruiser and, through the open window, said to the defendant, “Hi, Frank LeBeau, could I talk with you for a minute?”

Over the next ten hours (the details of which will be set forth in connection with our discussion of the suppression issues), the defendant gave two widely differing statements to the officers at the Sturbridge State police barracks. In the first, the defendant gave a detailed account of his whereabouts on August 16-17, but denied knowing the victim, denied being at the Tyler Café on Friday evening, and denied ever having been in the victim’s apartment.

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Bluebook (online)
884 N.E.2d 956, 451 Mass. 244, 2008 Mass. LEXIS 230, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/commonwealth-v-lebeau-mass-2008.