Vengeance sparked killings—police

Press, 22 June 1984, Page 6

Vengeance sparked killings —police

NZPA-Reuter New York It was a crime that most New Yorkers assumed would never be solved — the slaughter of two young mothers and eight children as they sat watching midday television in a Brooklyn house.

But the New York police have now arraigned a man that they said had murdered the 10 by methodically shooting each in the back of the head. They said that his motive had been vengeance on a family that had befriended the wife he beat so badly that she had to seek refuge in a shelter for battered women. The police said that a

small-time cocaine dealer, Christopher Thomas, aged 34, believed that his wife was having an affair with Enrique Bermudez, the common-law husband of one of the dead women. There had been no such affair and Thomas had once shot a girl-friend he suspected of being unfaithful, and had been tried for mudering a former girlfriend, Carol Epps, they said.

Thomas was kept under heavy police guard until his arraignment. Before his arrest be had been in a Bronx jail awaiting trial on charges of sodomising and attempting to rape his mother, police sources said.

The Police Commissioner, Mr Benjamin Ward, in announcing Thomas’s arrest, said that he believed Thomas had acted alone and used two guns to kill his victims. When asked how he could have killed so many people, Mr Ward answered, “There were only two adults, the rest were children.”

The women killed were Virginia Lopez, aged 24, Mr Bermudez’s common-law wife who was sLx months pregnant, and her cousin, Carmen Perez, aged 20. Also killed were eight children aged from three to 14.

Only an 11-month-old child survived the killing rampage and that was be-

cause she was hidden under a blanket. Mr Ward said that the police had been led to Thomas by physical evidence at the scene, but would not elaborate. Because Mr Bermudez was a convicted drug dealer, the police at first through! the crime was drug-related. He was questioned for days. Walter Arsenault, the New Jersey prosecutor who had tried and failed to convict Thomas of the murder of Carol Epps, said that the New York police suspected Thomas about two weeks after the killings. Ms Epps was murdered in a New Jersey motel just across the Hudson River from New York City, on

November 1, 1981. Her boyfriend, Joseph Green, was found murdered on the New York side, in the Bronx, on the same day.

Mr Arsenault said that Thomas’s fingerprint had been found on the motel registration card and that he had been identified by the room clerk as being with Ms Epps. But Thomas’s lawyer argued that the clerk, in originally describing his client, had neglected to mention his goatee beard and that hairs found in Ms Epps’s hand did not match Thomas’s.

No charges were brought against Thomas in the murder of Ms Epps’s boy-friend,

although the police said that there was a six-year-old witness. Mr Arsenault said that Thomas’s wife, Charmain, had testified for her husband at his trial. “They looked like a loving couple,” he said.

At his arraignment Thomas was ordered held without bail after prosecu-tors-said that they had two witnesses who would testify they saw him at the scene of the crime on the day of the killings. His lawyer, Peter Mirto, told the Court, “I have been instructed by the defendant to make this statement: he is innocent and had nothing to do with the incident that occurred on April 15.”