On Tuesday, Amy Lord’s mother took the stand in the trial of Edwin Alemany, the man accused of killing her daughter. The testimony was the first time Cindy Lord has spoken publicly about her daughter’s murder.
Cindy Lord was working at MassMutual the morning of July 23, 2013, when her daughter’s boss called her.
Amy Lord, a 24-year-old online marketing specialist, had not shown up to the office that day. She was not answering her phone or responding to e-mails.
Cindy and her husband of 29 years, Dennis, immediately got in their car and drove an hour and a half from Wilbraham, their hometown, to the South Boston apartment where Amy had been living for the past year.
Hours later, they were sitting on their daughter’s bed, staring up at two grave-looking Boston police homicide detectives.
“They had found Amy,” Cindy Lord testified Tuesday in the trial of the man accused of killing her daughter, her voice breaking as she wept on the witness stand in a Suffolk Superior courtroom.
Alemany, 30, is accused of murdering Lord during a July 2013 spree of violence in which he allegedly attacked two other women, both of whom lived. The 20-hour spree ended when his alleged final victim’s screams got the attention of her neighbors, according to the Globe story.
Before he was arrested, prosecutors say Alemany kidnapped Lord, forced her to withdraw nearly $1,000 from several ATM machines, and then stabbed her repeatedly, dumping her body in a Boston park and lighting fire to her Jeep.
During her testimony, Cindy Lord saw pictures of her daughter taken by surveillance cameras as Alemany sat in Amy Lord’s Jeep, according to the Globe.
In addition to Cindy Lord’s testimony, jurors were shown a 43-minute video depicting Lord’s unclad and murdered body. Before the video started, Lord’s family left except for her mother, who stayed until the camera focused on her daughter’s corpse, face up in a pile of wet leaves in Hyde Park’s Stony Brook Reservation, according to the Globe. At that point, Cindy Lord left in tears.
The day after Lord’s mother testified, the judge postponed Alemany’s trial for one day due to the defendant’s physical illness, the Globe reported.
Alemany’s lawyer, Jeffrey Denner, has signaled he’ll invoke an insanity defense. After court on the trial’s opening day, he said, “The issue here is not so much what happened, but why it happened.”
An August 2013 Boston Globe Magazine story detailed Alemany’s troubled past, including untreated mental illness since childhood:
By the time Edwin Alemany was 18, he already had a long, well-documented history of serious mental health issues that included hallucinations, severe depression, and a psychological disorder characterized by hostility and defiant behavior.
For more background, including a list of recommended links, read Homicide Watch Boston’s May 22 write-up of the case.
