LAWRENCE, Mass. (WHNT) — 74-year-old Marvin C. “Skip” McClendon, Jr. entered a plea of “not responsible” to a homicide cost on Friday at his arraignment in a Massachusetts court docket.

DNA proof linked McClendon, who had been residing in Cullman County in Alabama, to the 1988 homicide of 11-year-old Melissa Ann Tremblay, in response to a prosecutor at McClendon’s listening to final week.

McClendon was held with out bail after the plea was entered on his behalf within the Lawrence District Court docket.

“Missy,” her household referred to as her, disappeared from the streets of Lawrence on a late September night in 1988 whereas enjoying across the neighborhood of the LaSalle Social Membership. She was reported lacking by her mom round 9 p.m. after she and her boyfriend had frantically looked for her.

Her physique can be discovered the following day, only one block away from the social membership, authorities mentioned.

Her lifeless physique was left on the practice tracks of the outdated Boston & Maine Railway Yard. She had been stabbed a number of instances. In response to Essex County District Lawyer Johnathan Blodgett, her left leg had been amputated by a practice automobile after she died.

Proof from Missy’s physique was “instrumental,” officers say, in main them to McClendon. The DA’s workplace says what that proof was received’t be launched simply but.

A van that had been seen within the space was much like a van that the suspect drove on the time, prosecutors mentioned. No motive for the killing was disclosed.

Carrie Kimball with the Essex County DA’s workplace says the case, although by no means absolutely closed, was reopened “with intention” in 2014. Investigators, Kimball mentioned, had been digging by way of the case once more “in earnest.”

A former Massachusetts Division of Corrections officer, McClendon “has been an individual of curiosity for a time period,” DA Blodgett mentioned in a press convention shortly after his arrest. “We imagine we have now the correct particular person,” Blodgett mentioned.

McClendon was arrested at his house in Bremen, Alabama, on April 26, 2022, on a fugitive-from-justice warrant.

Missy’s household launched an announcement shortly after his arrest, and had this to say following McClendon’s plea of not responsible:

“We want to thank the Essex District Lawyer’s workplace for serving to us be ‘current’ within the courtroom yesterday remotely.  We by no means thought that after 33 1/2 years we might lastly see somebody arrested and dealing with a decide.  Whereas we all know there are various extra steps we’re very assured that the District Lawyer’s workplace might be simply as vigilant in prosecuting this case because the detectives have been for all these years find Marvin McClendon. 

There have been so many feelings because the finish of April once we had been contacted concerning the arrest. They’ve gone from pleasure to disappointment to frustration and actually far and wide. We’re excited to see him in jail however very unhappy my aunt [Missy’s mother], grandfather and different members of the family are not alive to see him dealing with justice.

Whereas we’re annoyed that it has taken so lengthy we’re completely satisfied that the police have by no means given up on the case and by no means blame them for the size of time it has taken.

The know-how has superior and so they had been in a position to observe DNA proof to search out this man has introduced us nice pleasure.

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Our household seems to be ahead to seeing this case go ahead to the grand jury for indictment after which onto the Superior Court docket to see justice lastly served.” 

RESPECTFULLY, DANIELLE ROOT, ON BEHALF OF MY PARENTS PAUL AND BARBARA ROOT AND MY SISTER CHERYL GRAHAM (MISSY’S AUNT, UNCLE AND COUSINS).

Although there isn’t any demise penalty in Massachusetts, Kimball says the very best penalty McClendon faces, if convicted of first-degree homicide, is a compulsory sentence of life in jail with out the potential of parole.