A jury convicted 87-year-old serial killer parolee Harvey Marcelin of first-degree murder for beating a Brooklyn woman to death, dismembering her with a saw and then ditching her remains in and around his apartment, prosecutors announced Friday.
Marcelin of East New York, Brooklyn, will face a maximum sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole for the February 2022 killing of 68-year-old victim Susan Leyden at his sentencing on June 10.
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, in a statement, called the slaying “cruel and reprehensible,” adding that Marcelin desecrated Leyden’s remains “in a manner that truly shocks the conscience.”
“I hope Ms. Leyden’s family finds a measure of solace in this guilty verdict, which ensures this defendant will never walk free again,” Gonzalez added.
Leyden, who was down on her luck after losing her jewelry business and had become estranged from her family, wound up in a homeless shelter. But prosecutors said she had just “started getting back on her feet,” when Marcelin cut her life short.
Surveillance footage from February 22, 2022, showed Leyden entering the octogenarian’s apartment on Pennsylvania Ave., after which she was never seen leaving it alive again.
Leyden died of “homicidal violence including blunt force trauma to the head,” the New York City Medical Examiner determined at the time.
With a reciprocal saw he bought from a Manhattan Home Depot, Marcelin dismembered Leyden, before packing her body parts into plastic bags, prosecutors said.
Eight days after Leyden arrived at the apartment, Marcelin was captured on surveillance footage rolling a wheeled shopping bag containing a black plastic bag out of his apartment.
Murder Suspect Harvey Marcelin
Early the next morning, a passing e-bike rider spotted the rolling bag near the corner of Pennsylvania Ave. and Atlantic Ave. in East New York, not far from Marcelin’s home.
“I saw kind of like the shoulder and one of the breasts and the neck. Chopped off, no head,” Ramon told jurors. “I jumped back, scared, shocked, and called 911. When they got there, they were also surprised.”
Police reviewed video from the scene and determined Marcelin left the bag. When they checked his apartment, he answered the door wearing the same tan pants and brown boots from the video, prosecutors previously said.
March 11, 2022: Sicko serial slayer
Cops searched his home, and found tied-up black plastic garbage bags with Leyden’s thighs, hand, arm and head inside. Marcelin also stuffed part of the victim’s left leg into his electric wheelchair and went shopping before disposing of the limb.
A passerby discovered Leyden’s leg in a plastic bag sticking out of a tire across the street from an auto repair shop on Jamaica Ave. near New Jersey Ave., near Marcelin’s apartment.
In 2019 Leyden lived in the same Bronx shelter as Marcelin, but the nature of their relationship is unclear, prosecutors said.
“She was really a good person,” Nesrin Oncu, a close friend of the victim, who was once married to Leyden’s ex-husband, told the News in 2022. “Tragically, she lost her family members at such a young age. Her brothers and then her sister and her father and her mother. She was a survivor.”
Marcelin, who has identified as both male and female over the years, has already served time for fatally shooting one girlfriend in early 1963, then fatally stabbing another girlfriend on Oct. 30, 1985.
The killer’s 1963 murder conviction formed the basis for the first-degree murder charge in Leyden’s case.
At a June 25, 2019, parole hearing, Marcelin vowed, “I give you my word, I will never re-offend.”
