After more than five days of deliberations, a Suffolk Superior Court jury on Monday convicted 31-year-old Andrew MacCormack of first-degree murder for the 2017 slaying of his wife, a beloved Lynn elementary school teacher, in the couple’s Revere home.
“My daughter can rest in peace now,” said a tearful Karen Masucci, the mother of the victim, whom prosecutors identified Monday as 30-year-old Vanessa Masucci. “Justice was served.”
Prosecutors initially identified the victim as Vanessa MacCormack, her married name, but on Monday they asked media outlets to use her birth name. She’s survived by a daughter who was only 1 at the time of the murder.
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Outside the courtroom, Vincent Masucci, Vanessa’s father, called his former son-in-law an “animal.”
“It’s been so tough,” he said, “and I’m so happy that the jury got it together and did the right thing.”
Jurors last week informed the presiding judge at one point that they were deadlocked. They began deliberating on the afternoon of Nov. 6 and continued deliberations for five more full days before rendering their verdict Monday around 11:40 a.m., legal filings show.
MacCormack faces an automatic life term without parole when he’s sentenced Dec. 2. His lawyer declined to comment on the verdict.
After it came down, Maria Masucci, Vanessa’s aunt, read a statement outside the courtroom thanking law enforcement officials for their dedication to the case.
“What this verdict does is give us peace of mind knowing that Andrew MacCormack can never do this to anyone else again,” Masucci said. “It gives us peace of mind knowing that he will be permanently out of [daughter] Adrianna’s life so he can’t ruin it anymore than he already has. He will now have to pay for what he did to Vanessa.”
Maria Masucci lamented that “this evil animal is alive and breathing while Vanessa is not.”
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Vanessa Masucci was killed on Sept. 23, 2017. She suffered blunt force trauma to her face and head, stab and slash wounds to her neck — including some that may have been delivered after she died — and strangulation with “pretty extreme force” that broke cartilage at the top of her windpipe, Assistant Suffolk DA Ian Polumbaum told jurors during his opening statement on Oct. 22.
In the months leading up to the murder, MacCormack was blowing cash on drugs, Polumbaum said, and his wife’s engagement ring and a replacement band mysteriously disappeared. Thousands of dollars also went missing from a bank account, and MacCormack blamed a hacker, the prosecutor said.
He said MacCormack had “an awful lot to hide” before the murder, and his wife texted him in late August 2017 that she was planning to list their house for sale and wanted a divorce. Andrew MacCormack replied that she was “crazy” and said he was “not signing anything,” Polumbaum said.
On the day of the killing, he said, MacCormack drove to the lot of a nearby liquor store, where he took two brief calls from his wife just after 8:30 a.m. He then headed back home “toward a confrontation, toward a world that was closing in on him,” Polumbaum said.
Later, Polumbaum said, investigators noted there was “not even a speck” of Masucci’s DNA on her husband, even though he claimed to have checked her body when he purportedly discovered her around 3:30 p.m. that day.
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He “used copious amounts of bleach” to clean up the crime scene in the morning and also poured bleach over his wife’s back, Polumbaum said.
John Hayes, MacCormack’s public defender, told jurors during opening statements that while his client was “alleged to have brutally beaten, strangled [and] mutilated” his wife, he had no cuts, scratches, or bruising “consistent with a brutal assault against a healthy woman” who worked out daily and “was able to fight back.”
Hayes, referring to the bleach evidence, also said no one who interacted with MacCormack in the hours after the murder smelled bleach on him, and a rash that he had, which investigators attributed to bleach, had actually been present days before the slaying.
After Monday’s verdict, Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins described the horrific attack that claimed Vanessa’s life. “Vanessa Masucci’s future was violently ripped away from her by the person who took an oath, promising to love and care for her,” Rollins said in a statement Monday. “I will not refer to Vanessa by her married name because the man who took her life will not also take her identity. Vanessa’s loved ones — her parents, her siblings, and her daughter — have been left with a void in their hearts and questions that can never be answered.”
Rollins also praised her team and Revere and State Police for working “to hold Vanessa’s murderer accountable and to bring a small amount of comfort to her loved ones.”
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Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @TAGlobe.