Julie Corey during her murder trial in 2014. On March 18, 2024, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reinstated the murder conviction of Corey, who was convicted of killing Darlene Haynes and stealing her baby. (AP Photo/Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Rick Cinclair, Pool)
Massachusetts‘ highest court reinstated the first-degree murder conviction of a woman who in 2009 killed her former neighbor and cut her open to steal her baby.
A jury in 2014 convicted Julie Corey of first-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping of 23-year-old Darlene Haynes. But five years later her felony murder conviction was tossed, with a judge saying that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove she committed aggravated kidnapping during the killing. Corey also appealed for a new trial on the grounds that she had ineffective counsel, but that was denied.
On Monday, the Supreme Judicial Court reversed the lower court’s decision and reinstated the first-degree murder conviction.
Haynes’ landlord entered the Worchester apartment on July 27, 2009, over concerns about her pets. The landlord was met with a “very foul” smell when he entered the apartment. He walked into a bedroom closet and pulled on a blanket when a “leg fell out.” Haynes, who was 8 months pregnant at the time of her death, had an electrical cord around her neck along with a nine-inch incision on her abdomen. The baby was gone.
An autopsy revealed she died of blunt force trauma and strangulation.
The investigation led to Corey, who was pregnant but had recently had a miscarriage although she told her boyfriend and others the baby was still on the way. Corey and Haynes had briefly been neighbors the year before.
Prosecutors presented Corey as a deranged woman desperate to have a baby because her boyfriend would break up with her and she would lose her benefits if she didn’t become a new mother. They say Corey concocted a scheme to offer Haynes help, but instead killed her, cut her open and stole her baby girl, who survived the ordeal.
Corey pretended as if she had given birth to the girl by showing her to the boyfriend and taking her to doctors appointments. Investigators found a falsified birth certificate in her boyfriend’s car.
Her defense at trial was that the police did not complete a thorough investigation and believed Haynes’ boyfriend could be the killer because he had been violent with her and another woman in the past. After killing the victim, Haynes’ boyfriend handed over the baby to Corey, her defense argued.
The jury sided with prosecutors and convicted Corey on the first-degree murder charge. She was sentenced to life in prison.
In throwing out her first-degree murder conviction, the lower court judge said the prosecution did not prove that the baby was injured during the kidnapping, which enhances the crime to aggravated and allows for a felony murder charge. The Commonwealth needed to provide expert testimony to show the jury how the baby would be injured or at risk of death, but did not do so. But the Supreme Judicial Court disagreed.
“The victim, who was the mother of the baby, was killed, and the baby was removed from the victim’s womb, along with all of the victim’s reproductive organs, by someone without medical training. This was done at the crime scene itself, and obviously not in a sterile environment,” the opinion said. “The jury were also told that the longer this loss continues, the more harm and danger there would be to the baby. We conclude that the loss of blood and oxygen, caused by the killing of the mother, presents a bodily injury to the fetus.”
The SJC also denied Corey’s request for a new trial based on ineffective counsel which she claimed was because her lawyer did not call a cellphone location expert to detail her whereabouts the night of the murder. Even if the lawyer had done so, it likely would not have swayed the jury toward her innocence, the justices ruled.
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