New York paroled Harvey Marcelin twice, and each time a woman was dead within three years. The second release came in 2019, when he was eighty-one. In March 2022 a passer-by in East New York, Brooklyn, opened a rolling bag left in a shopping cart near the corner of Atlantic and Pennsylvania Avenues and found a woman's torso, without head or limbs. The woman was Susan Leyden, sixty-eight, and the trail from the cart led to the apartment of a man who had spent most of the previous six decades in prison for killing women.
The first was Jacqueline Bonds. Marcelin, then married to a woman named Florence Jackson, met Bonds, twenty-four, in early 1962 and began an affair with her. By the account in the court record, she ended it and accused him of aggression; he followed her, harassed her and threatened in front of her mother to get her. In March 1963 he and a new girlfriend, Clementine Benifield, were arrested in Brooklyn on charges of attempted rape, assault and burglary. He told police Bonds had been with them. Prosecutors, satisfied her part was small, offered her immunity to testify against him. Free on bail his mother had paid, he went on April 18, 1963 to her building at 2216 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, argued with her in the hallway and shot her with a .32 revolver, then shot her twice more as she ran for the bedroom.
Psychiatrists at Bellevue found a schizoid personality with sociopathic traits but judged him fit for trial. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder on November 18, 1963 and deadlocked on death, and he was sentenced to life. He later said he had killed her out of jealousy. He was at Attica during the 1971 uprising and spoke to reporters afterward about the treatment of transferred inmates. Sentencing law changed while he was inside, and in 1984, after more than twenty-one years, he told a three-member parole board that it would never happen again. He was released that May on lifetime parole.
He took a room at the Cambridge Residence Hotel in Harlem and made money by renting it out. In early 1985 his lodger and roommate was Anna Laura Serrera Miranda, twenty-nine, who was using heroin and working as a prostitute. On October 29, 1985, during an argument, he stabbed her; the autopsy counted thirty-three wounds. He cut up her body, put the parts in black garbage bags and left them in Central Park, where they were found. A neighbor had seen him carrying blood-soaked bags the day after the killing. He admitted it and called it self-defense, saying she had stopped paying rent and had stolen a flute and cufflinks. In 1986 he pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter. Accounts of that sentence differ: some give six to twelve years, others twelve years served on top of the life term to which his parole revocation returned him.
Over the next three decades he applied for parole fifteen times and was refused each time, once calling an all-female board sexist. At Auburn Correctional Facility in 1993 he began hormone treatment and came to live as a woman, taking the name Marceline Harvey. At a hearing on June 25, 2019 he told the board he gave his word he would never reoffend and would be an exemplary parolee. The board weighed his age, the programs he had completed, a graduate degree in computer science and letters from organizations offering him housing and work, and in August 2019 he walked out on lifetime parole.
Susan Leyden had once owned a jewelry store in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Her daughter said untreated mental illness had cut her off from the people who loved her, and by 2019 she was living in a shelter for LGBTQ adults. Prosecutors said she and Marcelin had lived in the same Bronx shelter that year; other accounts place their meeting in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village and her shelter in Fort Greene. What the two were to each other was never established. Through 2020 and 2021 Marcelin used her photographs as his own social media profile picture, and months before she died he answered one of her comments with the words love personified. Police suggested she had come to fear him, which remained their theory and was never proved.
Surveillance video recorded her walking into his building on Pennsylvania Avenue in East New York on February 27, 2022. She was not seen leaving. On March 1 he and another woman went to a Home Depot in Manhattan and bought a saw, trash bags and cleaning fluid. A store camera in Queens caught him riding a mobility scooter through the aisles with one of her legs in a black plastic bag on the seat. Another camera recorded him pushing the shopping cart with the torso inside; accounts date its discovery to March 2 or March 3. The medical examiner gave the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head and other injuries, although some early accounts said she had been stabbed.
He was arrested within days on a charge of concealing a corpse. In his apartment detectives found her head, an arm, a hand and her thighs in black trash bags, along with blood, cleaning supplies, a hammer and packaging for an electric saw; more remains turned up in bags a few blocks away. The NYPD's chief of detectives, James Essig, said the arrest had taken a serial killer off the streets. A grand jury indicted him for murder, raised to the first degree because of the 1963 conviction. From Rikers Island he told a New York Post reporter that he had killed Bonds and Miranda but not Leyden, blamed a woman who used to come to the apartment, and described two identities in himself, a gentle Marceline and a violent Harvey.
The trial opened before Justice Danny Chun of Brooklyn Supreme Court on April 20, 2026. By then he had gone back to living as a man and asked the court to call him Mr. Harvey. Lisa Lindahl testified that she had gone to the apartment to use drugs and seen Leyden's body. Marcelin, eighty-seven and in a wheelchair, took the stand, said he had been framed, named Lindahl as the killer and accused the prosecutor of manipulating her. On May 7, after about an hour of deliberation, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence and concealment of a human corpse.
At sentencing on June 10, 2026 he said he had adored Leyden and was being railroaded through a kangaroo court. Justice Chun answered with the record: "The cold fact is, every time you were released, you killed someone else." He said he had no doubt that, whatever Marcelin's age, he would kill again if paroled, and sentenced him to life without parole. District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said the brutality of the crime was almost beyond words.