The murder trial for a man accused of killing a New Hampshire girl back in 1988 began Thursday in a Massachusetts courtroom.
Marvin "Skip" McClendon Jr., a former Massachusetts corrections officer from Alabama, was arrested last year after investigators identified him as the man who killed Melissa Ann Tremblay in a Lawrence, Massachusetts, railyard. He's pleaded not guilty.
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Melissa Ann's body was found Sept. 12, 1988, a day after the girl from Salem, New Hampshire, was reported missing.
She had accompanied her mother and her mother’s boyfriend to the LaSalle Social Club in Lawrence, not far from the railyard, and went outside to play while the adults stayed inside, authorities have said. She was last seen by a railroad employee and a pizza delivery driver during the late afternoon hours.
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McClendon was arrested at his home in Bremen, Alabama, and was returned to Massachusetts to face the murder charge after waiving his right to a local court appearance.
McClendon is a retired Massachusetts Department of Corrections employee, who worked for the department on three separate occasions from 1970 to 2002. Officials weren't previously sure if he was working for the agency at the time of the killing. He lived in Chelmsford and was doing carpentry work at the time of the killing. He had multiple ties to Lawrence, which is close to Salem, New Hampshire. He worked in the city and frequented numerous establishments there, including the Seventh Day Adventist Church on Salem Street.
Prosecutors have said that DNA evidence found in 2014 on Melissa Ann led investigators to McClendon's family, and they obtained DNA samples from some, including Marvin. He was the only left-handed family member, and the wound that killed the girl was found to have been delivered by a left-handed person. He also had ties to Lawrence and a van that looked like one that witnesses saw Melissa Ann near on the day she disappeared, according to prosecutors.
In opening statements Thursday, the prosecutor talked about the process of connecting McClendon to the crime using DNA evidence collected from Melissa Ann's fingernails. She mentioned that a speeding ticket received a few years ago by McClendon's brother prompted investigators to look at the men in his family.
She also said that when questioned by police, McClendon knew details about the crime that were never made public.
The prosecutor told jurors they won't hear from a witness who can point to McClendon and say they saw him do it, but prosecutors will prove "indirectly or circumstantially" that he was in the rail yard and he killed the girl.
In his opening statement, the defense attorney argued that McClendon did not kill Melissa Ann, and that his statements were misinterpreted by Massachusetts State Police, who wanted to solve this case. He said the prosecutor’s case is based on the false assumption that the DNA under the girl's fingernails belongs to the person who killed her. And that the “Y profile” identified by DNA testing belongs to more than one family, but they only looked into McClendon.
After the conclusion of opening statements, the prosecution began calling witnesses, including a retired railyard worker who said he saw Melissa Ann playing at the railyard before she died, an employee at the LaSalle Social Club who knew Melissa Ann and her mother, and Jessica Keyza, a childhood friend of Melissa Ann, along with Keyza's mother and father.
"We would play outside, a few times we went up on the train tracks right across the street from my house, she would help my mother with my younger sisters. We would play dress up and sing in my bedroom," Jessica Keyza, that childhood friend, recalled.
The afternoon before she died, Melissa Ann went to their house, asking to play.
"I had told her she couldn’t come in that day because my kids were grounded," Lisa Quinto, Keyza's mother said.
Melissa Ann's body was found the next day.
