Being high on crack when he blasted a man in the face with a shotgun and stabbed a woman more than 20 times is not an acceptable excuse for a new trial, the state’s highest court ruled.
“The jury convicted the defendant of murder in the first degree on the theory of premeditation as to both victims, and on the theory of extreme atrocity or cruelty,” SJC Associate Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt wrote in the ruling released Tuesday.
The state Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Wes Doughty’s guilty verdict for the 2017 murder of Mark Greenlaw and Jennifer O’Connor inside a Peabody home used as a crack cocaine distribution hub stands.
“We affirm the convictions and discern no reason to grant relief,” the SJC wrote.
Doughty, Wendlandt stated, was a daily visitor to the house to both smoke cocaine and also take part in caring for the home’s disabled proprietor, David Moise, who required assistance both “eating and toileting.” Doughty was so close, she added, that he was known to call Moise “Dad.”
Not long before the brutal murders took place, Greenlaw moved into the home and a bunch of interpersonal drama unfolded itself in this fiefdom of crack cocaine.
Two other residents on the day of the killing expressed how they didn’t like how they saw Greenlaw “moving in” on Moise’s empire, with Michael Hebb — who used to command the position Greenlaw now did — saying he “wasn’t letting it happen.” Apparently, Doughty agreed.
“When you see me standing in this spot,” Doughty told Hebb, according to the SJC write-up, referring to a known area on the property between two lion figures at the front of the house, “you know (expletive) is about to happen.”
And so it did.
Doughty, armed, came to the spot later and Hebb and another who knew “(expletive) is about to happen” went into hiding and Doughty shot Greenlaw in the face and then turned his attention to O’Connor, who screamed “Oh, my God. What did you do?”
The extent of the stabbing of O’Connor cannot be printed in this newspaper, but it was recognized by jurors, as Wendlandt wrote, as a killing of “extreme atrocity or cruelty.”
