The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a former Chelsea man’s first-degree murder conviction for strangling his estranged wife, 40-year-old Alicia Lao, to death more than a decade ago – the second time the state’s highest court has done so, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

Today’s decision ensures that AGAPITO LAO (D.O.B. 7/10/58) will continue to serve out his sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole for Alicia Lao’s May 2, 2000, death at his hands inside her Bellingham Street home. The defendant was first convicted in 2002, with that verdict affirmed by the SJC in 2005.

Two years later, however, the high court reversed itself despite prosecutors’ arguments, determining that the trial jury should not have heard certain testimony from a Chelsea Police officer and a relative of the victim, and that a 2006 motion for new trial should have been allowed in light of a recent US Supreme Court decision.

The case went to trial again in 2009 and jurors again found him guilty of first-degree murder after about six days of testimony.

“This case reminds us of the deadly form domestic violence takes too often in Massachusetts and across the country,” Conley said. “We’re pleased that his conviction will stand, but make no mistake: We would try this case a third, fourth, or fifth time if that’s what it took to find justice for Alicia Lao and her family.”

Conley urged anyone living in an abusive relationship to call the state’s 24-hour SafeLink hotline at 877-785-2020.

On appeal, Lao’s attorney argued that the prosecutor’s closing argument at that second trial was improper, based in part upon the prosecutor’s use of a chart and his call for jurors to use “common sense” in their deliberations. The high court was not swayed.

“The time-line chart … served as a useful, nonprejudicial aid to jurors understanding the prosecutor’s closing argument, which referred to numerous approximations of times of day,” Justice Francis X. Spina wrote in a seven-page decision for the unanimous court. “There has been no showing that it was an inaccurate reflection of that closing argument.”

With regard to the spoken argument, Spina wrote, “The prosecutor did not ask the jury to apply a ‘common sense’ burden of proof rather than ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt. His request that the jury apply their common sense was proper and did not diminish the reasonable doubt standard.”

The evidence at both trials proved 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 was still legally married to him.

In 2000, Alicia Lao and her boyfriend made the choice to live together. On April 30, she went to tell her husband 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.

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. Lao had strangled and beaten her, creating noises that neighbors later recalled for Chelsea Police and State Police detectives assigned to Conley’s office.

Another witness who was outside fixing a car, and who knew the defendant well, testified that he 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.
Assistant District Attorney Paul Linn, deputy chief of Conley’s Appeals Division, argued in support of the conviction. Assistant District Attorney Mark Lee, deputy chief of the DA’s Homicide Unit, tried the 2009 case. Catherine Rodriguez was the DA’s assigned victim-witness advocate. The defendant was represented on appeal by attorney Stewart Graham, Jr.