Re: 5/29/02 - [Serra Murder] NH Register: Jury convicts Grant of murdering Penney Serra; Verdict finally gives sister some closure
GUILTY
Jury convicts Grant of murdering Penney Serra
Christa Lee Rock, Register Staff May 29, 2002
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Rosemary Serra, sister of Penney Serra, leaves New Haven courtroom with senior Assistant State's Attorney James Clark. after the verdict was announced Tuesday. Jeff Holt/Register
NEW HAVEN — A jury convicted Edward R. Grant for the 1973 murder of Concetta "Penney" Serra on Tuesday, bringing a judicial close to a murder mystery that haunted New Haven - and Serra's East Shore family - for nearly 29 years.
The 3:15 p.m. reading of the verdict left Grant, 59, swaying as if he had been hit.
One of his four public defenders, Brian Carlow, steadied him as Grant's wife, Linda, wept in the arms of a friend. Grant could get 25 years to life when he is sentenced Aug. 16. Click for previous Register stories on the Serra case.
Across the aisle, Rosemary Serra, who has kept a lifelong vigil to find the killer of her 21-year-old sister, hugged James Clark, the lead prosecutor in the case. Spectators kept the scene quietly emotional, following requests from Superior Court Judge Jon C. Blue to avoid outbursts at the close of this "long, drawn out, high stakes trial."
Public Defender Thomas J. Ullmann plans to appeal on the grounds Clark used some questionable tactics during closing arguments. Ullmann also took issue with the judge's instructions to the jury, which did not ask the jury to consider that the state had lost pieces of evidence.
"After this many years, my family can finally rest in peace," Rosemary Serra said, evoking the image of her father, John, who hounded police and placed newspaper ads in the New Haven Register for years in hopes of finding the killer. "My father had faith in the system, and now I can, too."
The jury - which included an East Haven firefighter, a Branford teacher and a retired marine biologist - took almost exactly three days to reach its decision, having gone into deliberations at about 3:15 p.m. Thursday.
Asked what convinced the six men and six women to find Grant guilty, juror William Bryant said, "The evidence — all of it. We did what we had to do. There was no way else we could go."
Grant had lived a virtually anonymous life in his Waterbury hometown since July 16, 1973, when Serra was stabbed once in the heart in a 10th-floor stairwell in the Temple Street Garage. An avid fisherman and auto body worker, Grant came under suspicion in 1997 when investigators scanned a fingerprint from a tissue box found in Serra's family Buick into a state police computer.
The left thumbprint matched one Grant had given police during a 1994 domestic violence arrest. Inspectors with the chief state's attorney's office got a warrant to seize his blood. According to testimony, Grant's DNA matched blood on a handkerchief found near Serra's keys to the exclusion of almost anyone else.
Inspector Peter Fearon helped arrest Grant while as he tinkered with a car outside his Atwood Street home in the summer of 1999.
He looked then as bewildered as he did Tuesday as jury foreman Judith Goodrich said the word "guilty."
"I described Ed a long time ago as a deer caught in headlights," said Ullmann, who led a team of three other attorneys through a study of DNA and a hunt for lost evidence.
They all firmly believed in Grant's innocence, Ullmann said, as did Grant's family.
"We may have formal closure here in court, but as far as I'm concerned and as far as the defense team is concerned, the real killer is still out there," Ullmann said, adding that he was still getting anonymous calls and messages from people who knew Serra and believe she had plans to meet someone at the garage that day.
At least three other men had been suspects in the case, and one, Anthony Golino, was arrested and exonerated in the mid-1980s.
Prosecutors never presented a motive for the killing, calling it a "stranger crime" at closing arguments Thursday. Clark said the evidence suggests Grant had been attempting to steal Serra's nearly new Buick, a theory Ullmann called "ludicrous" because the killer drove away in a different car.
Ullmann and co-counselors Carlow, Beth Merkin and Jane Carroll focused on the "lack of motive and lack of any association" between Grant and Serra. Just before beginning their three-day case, they abandoned a theory that Grant was trapped at his Vermont cabin during historic floods.
Ullmann - who like all the prosecutors and public defenders worked nights and weekends for years on this case - said he's still not sure that was the right decision.
"We feel personally that we let him down and his family down," he said.
But Clark said this was a case won on science - that and the investigative instincts of former detectives like Vincent Perricone and Roy Olson, who saw key pieces of evidence like the tissue box fingerprint and the bloody handkerchief and assiduously preserved them.
"Clearly in this case, the science helped a lot. The computerized fingerprint led us to the suspect," Clark said. "The DNA on the handkerchief made it tremendously difficult for the defense to walk away from the evidence."
The challenge the defense presented was the location of the evidence - the tissue box was a moveable object in Serra's car, and the handkerchief was uncovered at the end of a Type-O blood trail that spanned three levels of the massive garage. Several detectives testified they believed the hankie was linked to the crime scene, but they had no color photographs to support their arguments.
The clincher, Clark said, was a photograph of Grant in 1973 that he believes resembles two artists' composites made with the help of two 16-year-old eyewitnesses.
"When Pete Fearon found that photograph taken in 1973 that looked remarkably like what two teen-agers had seen," the case was convincing, he said.
"Nobody knows precisely what happened; nobody knows how they ended up on the 9th floor together - and it doesn't matter," said Clark.
For now, however, Grant is back in state custody, awaiting sentencing.
When Blue sentences Grant, he will be bound not by current sentencing statutes but by the rules of 1973, when the law called for 25 years to life for murder but the judge was free to give less. Currently, a person convicted of murder faces at least 25 years in prison and must serve the sentence day-for-day.
"It's very sad, very sad," said Merkin, one of Grant's public defenders. "We really felt that there was a reasonable doubt, and we're just sorry that the jury didn't feel that way."
But Gary Nicholson, who tried the case with Clark, said the verdict was the product of much agony - by the parties involved and the jurors themselves.
"Everybody worked hard, the jury did as well, and they came up with the right decision," he said. "We're very happy."
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Christa Lee Rock can be reached at crock@nhregister.com , or 789-5737. Register reporters William Kaempffer and Randall Beach contributed to this report.
©New Haven Register 2002
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Verdict finally gives sister some closure
Christa Lee Rock, Register Staff May 29, 2002
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Flowers were placed on the grave of Penney Serra after the verdict was announced Tuesday. Jeff Holt/Register
NEW HAVEN — Just after 3:15 Tuesday afternoon, Rosemary Serra left the courthouse that has consumed her mind for the last month and visited a spot that has held her heart for three decades.
It was a plot in a far corner of St. Lawrence Cemetery in West Haven. That's where she helped bury her 21-year-old sister, Penney, in 1973 after she was stabbed to death in the Temple Street Garage.
For nearly 29 years, Rosemary Serra has laid carnations on the granite headstone and prayed her sister's murder would be solved.
On Tuesday, it was. After a 20-day trial, a Superior Court jury convicted Edward Grant of Waterbury in what prosecutors called a "stranger" murder.
In the courtroom, Rosemary Serra let the tears flow. Then she went to buy flowers - carnations for Penney; roses for her father, John; daisies for the mother who died young and made Penney the family caretaker.
"I think that she is at peace, as well as my father," Rosemary Serra said Tuesday. "Because they know that I'm OK and that I've made it through. This part of my life is over."
Rosemary Serra was just 16 and learning to drive her sister's Mustang when Penney bled to death in the garage's 10th floor stairwell. Penney had made her lunch that morning.
"She was my big sister, and she was like a mother," Rosemary Serra, 45, said Tuesday. "We were just that summer becoming buddies.
But I idolized my sister as a kid."
For weeks after the murder, Rosemary Serra didn't leave the house. For years she stayed under the wing of her father, an auto mechanic,as police probed suspect after suspect, to no avail.
But John Serra never gave up. He was the thorn in the side of policemen and prosecutors and forced officials to transfer the case to the Office of the Chief State's Attorney. He ran annual advertisements in the New Haven Register, reminding readers his daughter's killer was "alive and living in New Haven."
For a young Rosemary Serra, the ads were both emotional and embarrassing. But as her father succumbed to cancer in November 1998, she knew she would have to assume his tenacity.
"I feel so honored and privileged that I had a father who had the strength to pursue this as he did," she said. "I just wish he were here to reap the benefits. It's a great day, but it's hard, it's very hard also."
John Serra's name echoed through the courthouse Tuesday after the jury of 12 delivered the verdict. Asked in an elevator about John Serra's absence, State's Attorney Michael Dearington turned to a friend and said, "He knows."
Serra's lifelong friend, Laurie Trotta, sat through the entire trial and credits Rosemary's "grace and dignity" with helping see the case through to a verdict.
But Rosemary Serra does not call this a victory. Her sister is not coming back to drive the brown Mustang that still sits in her sister's driveway. She can't get back 29 years of waiting and agony.
And another family - Grant's family - will begin the suffering.
"I'm sorry for their loss; they're victims just as I was a victim for the last 29 years, and my heart bleeds," she said. "They had nothing to do with the murder of my sister."
Grant's public defenders described his family as "shaken up" to see their husband and father handcuffed and led away.
Senior Assistant Public Defender Beth Merkin said she spent Friday counseling Grant and his wife, Linda, on what may lay ahead.
Grant spent the long weekend with his daughter, Tara Linn Haigler, and his two grandchildren who were visiting from Florida.
"I told him that each day, at the end of the day, if he went home that was a good day … but I wasn't convinced he would have a lot more of those days," said Merkin.
"It's very sad."
Yet Rosemary Serra, who watched as the state wrongly arrested one man and tried twice to nab another, is convinced Grant is the killer. And she thanks prosecutors James Clark and Gary Nicholson, for whom this trial "was not just a job - and I felt it," she said.
"It was like having this feeling in me for 29 years and in one minute everything was released," she said of the verdict. "Putting a face to the crime was something that I have never been able to do until the first day that I met him at the arraignment."
But the verdict verified what she had held in her heart for years.
"You go through every day and you think about it," she said. "And then one minute, a guilty verdict comes in and it's like, 'Oh my God, they believe it, too.' "
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Christa Lee Rock can be reached at crock@nhregister.com , or 789-5737.
©New Haven Register 2002
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