What you should know
- An 83-year-old man previously convicted of two other murders has been arrested in connection with the grisly discovery of a woman’s decapitated, limbless body found in a garbage bag in a shopping cart on a Brooklyn street last week. according to police and prison records.
- Harvey Marcelin, who has spent more than 50 years in prison for the two previous convictions in the deaths of other women, is accused of concealing a human corpse in connection with the torso, according to police sources.
- The torso belonged to a 68-year-old woman who was living in an LGBTQ Shelter in the Clinton Hill area at the time of her death.
—
NEW YORK — An 83-year-old man previously convicted of two other murders has been arrested in connection with the grisly discovery of a woman’s headless, limbless corpse that was found in a trash bag in a shopping cart on a Brooklyn street last week, according to police and prison records.
Harvey Marcelin, who has spent more than 50 years in prison for the two previous convictions for the deaths of other women, is accused of concealing a human corpse in connection with the torso that police sources say belonged to a 68-year-old woman who he lived in an LGBTQ Shelter in the Clinton Hill area at the time of his death.
Additional charges may apply. Information from Marcelin’s attorney was not immediately available.
The body was found a week ago at the corner of Atlantic and Pennsylvania avenues, just outside a construction safety equipment store next to a carpet store, by a passerby who noticed the bag on his way to a friend’s house in Greenpoint and decided to open it while it was still there on his way home. He was the one who called 911.
The bag was not tied. He just put her down, a senior NYPD official said. He reached inside. First, he felt a roll of toilet paper. Then came the torso.
The medical examiner will perform an autopsy to determine how the woman died. It is not yet clear if a human leg found a few blocks from the torso a few days later is definitively related to the same victim.
NYPD investigates if there is a relationship in both cases.
According to prison records cited by the New York Post, Marcelin has been convicted of murders twice before. Marcelin spent more than 50 years in state prison with convictions for murder and manslaughter dating back to 1963.
The murder charge stemmed from the shooting death of a woman. Marcelin was paroled for life in May 1984, the Post reported, and put in handcuffs again for allegedly stabbing another woman less than a year later. Marcelin was released from prison at the end of 2019.
Police stress that their investigation in the latest case is ongoing. Marcelin is due back in court on Thursday. Marcelin is being represented by Legal Aid, which did not immediately return an email request for comment early Thursday from our sister network NBC 4 New York.
The body of a woman, missing her head, arms and legs, was found in a trash bag in a shopping cart at a Brooklyn intersection Thursday morning, a law enforcement source with knowledge of the case says. .
–
