An abusive husband whose prior conviction for murdering his estranged wife was overturned by the Supreme Judicial Court was convicted of the same crime today and once again faces a life term without the possibility of parole, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley announced.

AGAPITO LAO (D.O.B. 7/10/58) was convicted of first-degree murder today for strangling 40-year-old Alicia Lao to death in her Chelsea apartment on the morning of May 2, 2000. That conviction follows his 2002 conviction on the same charge, which was overturned on appeal after a U.S. Supreme Court case set precedent that would have kept certain witness testimony from the jury at that trial.

“Alicia Lao was a victim of domestic violence perpetrated by a man who had abused her before,” Conley said. “Perhaps he thought he could use a technicality to escape responsibility, but we would not rest until her voice was heard in court and her killer was held to account for silencing it.”

Assistant District Attorney Mark Lee, deputy chief of Conley’s Homicide Unit, presented evidence and testimony during the six-day trial to prove that Agapito and Alicia Lao married in Puerto Rico in 1979 before moving to Massachusetts and settling into a Chelsea triple-decker. During the course of their relationship, they had three children together but their marriage was marred by the defendant’s violent, controlling behavior.

In 1997, when she was a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital, Alicia Lao met and struck up a fast friendship with a custodian who worked in the hospital. The two exchanged phone numbers and began having telephone conversations. The relationship eventually turned romantic. At the time, she was separating from her husband but still legally married to him.

In 2000, the two made the choice to live together. On April 30 of that year, Alicia Lao went to see the defendant to tell him that she would be filing divorce papers with the court and that her boyfriend would be moving into the Bellingham Street home the next day to live with her and the children.

When he dropped her off from that meeting, he tried to hit her with his car.

On May 1, Alicia’s boyfriend packed two suitcases and took a bus from New York City to Boston, arriving at her home that evening. The next morning, her children had gotten up and were leaving for school at about the same time that her boyfriend was getting ready to leave the house. When he left, she was the only one home.

Evidence and testimony proved that Agapito Lao entered the home sometime between 8:50 and 10:15 that morning, when Alicia Lao was discovered motionless on her bed by her boyfriend. He strangled and beat her, causing a noise that neighbors later recalled for investigators.

Another witness who was outside fixing a car, and who knew the defendant well, allegedly saw him coming out of the apartment.

Though Alicia Lao remained physically alive in the aftermath of the attack, her brain was dead. she was taken off life support on May 17.

Lao was represented by attorney Gary Schubert. Judge Charles Spurlock will sentence him to the mandatory penalty for first-degree murder, life in prison, Thursday morning at 9:00 in courtroom 808 of Suffolk Superior Court.