“It was her time to die”
She told him that Michael McCarthy had killed her daughter.
Sprinsky went online and looked up Baby Doe. He found the police photo of the blanket. He recognized it.
He sent McCarthy a text. She had told him everything, he wrote. She said you killed Bella. McCarthy texted back that he was listening to a “cracked out hooker” and that child services had taken the girl. Sprinsky phoned him. “How could you do that to a child?” he asked. “Why are you even talking about this on the phone?” McCarthy said, and hung up. When Sprinsky tried again, the phone was off.
The next day, September 17, Sprinsky told a probation officer that Baby Doe was Bella Bond.
Police were at the Dorchester apartment within hours. Rachelle Bond ran. She and McCarthy were both in custody by the next day. On September 18, after 12 weeks and millions of shares, Baby Doe had a name.
The word
There was only one surviving witness to what happened to Bella, and she had hidden it for months. She made a deal. In February 2017, Rachelle Bond pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder and to larceny for the benefits. In exchange she took the stand against McCarthy.
For five days that June, she told the jury her story.
It happened one night in May or June 2015, she said. Bella wouldn’t go to sleep. McCarthy went into her room to calm her down. When Rachelle went in, she saw him striking the little girl in the stomach, and Bella’s skin had changed color.
She said he grabbed her around the neck and threatened to kill her if she told anyone. She said Bella’s body was hidden in the refrigerator, and that days later he made her go with him to South Boston, where he dropped it in the water in a weighted duffel bag.
“You killed my kid,” she said she told him.
Then she gave the jury his answer.
“It was her time to die. She was a demon.”
Police divers found the duffel bag and weights in the harbor, about five feet from a wharf at City Point, right where she said. One weight was the same brand as a set in the plumbing shop owned by McCarthy’s father.
“The monster was her mother”
McCarthy’s lawyer, Jonathan Shapiro, told the jury a very different story. There was no physical evidence linking his client to the killing, he said. The medical examiner could not fix a clear cause of death. The story had come from a drug addict with every reason to lie, who had hidden her daughter’s death for months and written strange things in her diary about abducted children and reptilian leaders.
“In the end, the monster came for that little girl, and it was her mother,” he said.
The prosecutor, David Deakin, did not pretend his star witness had behaved well. He called her conduct inexcusable. But the weights, he said, pointed straight at McCarthy. “There’s absolutely no question the defendant dumped Bella Bond’s body, and there’s absolutely no question, therefore, that he murdered the child.”
The jury deliberated for about 23 hours. On June 26, 2017, it found Michael McCarthy guilty of second-degree murder. Two days later he was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
“The verdict was a travesty of justice,” Shapiro said.
The mother walks
On July 12, 2017, Rachelle Bond was given credit for the time she had already served and two years of probation, with a stay in a substance abuse program. She would serve no more time in jail. Bella’s godmother was relieved by the verdict, and bitter about the deal. “She let me down, she let Bella down,” she said.
McCarthy has always said he is innocent. “I never harmed a hair on her head,” he told WBZ from prison. On June 7, 2021, the Massachusetts Appeals Court affirmed his conviction.
Bella’s death forced a reckoning at the state’s child welfare agency. An investigation found that a social worker had copied old information into reports about her mother, and the case prompted reform at the department.
On November 28, 2015, she was buried in Winthrop, the same town where she was found. Strangers had already built a memorial on the Deer Island shore, and they kept coming back to it with flowers and toys.
In the end the little girl had two faces: the one the world shared, made in four hours on a computer, and her real one, which almost nobody had ever seen. The billboards could only ask who she was. Her headstone says it.
