Town note
There were cotton mills, wool mills, textiles, brass and iron foundries, paper making, footwear factories for leather boots and shoes and shipbuilding; the first friction matches were made here.
about 0:06:09The story
At the end of August 2011 Amanda Lynn Plass was twenty years old and living in a third-floor apartment at School Street in Chicopee, Massachusetts. She was five foot one, an artist covered in tattoos with a mass of curly hair and a taste for folk and bluegrass. She worked as a hostess and waitress at the Friendly's on Memorial Drive, where the regulars asked for her by name.
Six days before she died she had started seeing Seth Green, a twenty-seven-year-old construction worker, and he had already moved his belongings into her apartment. On the night of 25 August the two of them sat up smoking marijuana, him making jewellery while she painted. The next morning he left for work early. In the afternoon he telephoned to say he would be late and could not drive her to her five o'clock shift. At 4.20 p.m. Amanda texted her friend and colleague Mercedes Benz asking for a lift.
Somewhere between 4.20 and five o'clock she was killed in her own kitchen. Her assailant beat her about the face, head and shoulders, stabbed her six times in the chest and abdomen and cut her throat twice from chin to collarbone. The medical examiner found that she died of injuries to her heart and liver and bled to death, conscious and in pain, after a violent struggle. Blood was spread across the kitchen and there were smears where her hands had scrabbled at the cabinets. Under her fingernails was a large quantity of DNA that was not hers, and it matched nothing on the database. Bloody shoe prints on the floor were identified as a Nike Air Max, either a men's seven and a half, a women's nine and a half or a youth seven. A palm print was found on a window that had been punched out from the inside, which the police read as a staged break-in.
Mercedes Benz called just before five, got no answer, waited outside for five minutes and drove away, assuming Amanda had found another ride and was annoyed with her. He told detectives that his knife and his marijuana were missing. He passed a polygraph, his boots were the wrong size for the prints, his palm print did not match, and his employer confirmed he had been at work past five. He was cleared.
In September 2011 a former boyfriend told investigators that Amanda believed a small Puerto Rican man, whose name she thought began with D, had broken into the flat, and that she had confronted him about a stolen marijuana pipe. In April 2012 he described the man arriving with a heavy-set girlfriend and a small boy.
He had lived at Cabot Street, four blocks away, with a heavy-set Hispanic woman and a four-year-old son. His number appeared nine times in Amanda's phone records, all on 28 July 2011.
He refused to come to the station, lit a cigarette, admitted he knew Amanda and left; they kept the cigarette end. That night he told his friend Melissa Hoy that he sold Amanda marijuana, then returned to say he had delivered weed on the night of the murder and an unknown white man had snatched it and told him to leave. On 1 November he called Trooper Gibbons and gave a statement and a DNA sample at the Westfield police station. On 5 November, with his girlfriend's child in tow, he was interviewed again. Shown the whiteboard photograph, he admitted writing on it and admitted being inside the flat. Partway through, the DNA result came back: it was his, under her fingernails.
The judge allowed the interview statements but excluded what he said during booking; later statements after a fresh warning were allowed.
Two Chicopee officers, Sergeant Keith Lemay and Officer Terry Deck, had photographed the body with their personal phones and passed the pictures round; Deck sent one to nine fellow officers. They were reprimanded and made to work unpaid shifts, the family's lawsuit settled for $100,000, and Sergeant Jeffrey Gadair was sacked, rehired in February 2020 and demoted to patrolman. Amanda's family campaigned from 2014, and in 2022 Massachusetts passed Amanda's Law, banning first responders from taking unauthorised photographs of crime scenes.