Harvey A. Marcelin was born in Harlem on May 21, 1938. Court records show allegations of violence against him going back to 1952, when he was fourteen. He has identified as both male and female over the years, came out as transgender in prison in 1993 and for a period used the name Marceline Harvey; at his 2026 trial he asked to be addressed as Mr. Harvey, and this entry follows the court.
In 1963 he shot and killed Jacqueline Bonds, his girlfriend, in a Manhattan apartment. He was also facing an attempted rape charge involving another woman at the time. A jury convicted him of murder and could not agree on death, and the judge sentenced him to life. Sentencing law changed while he was inside, and after telling a three-member parole board that it would never happen again, he was released on lifetime parole in 1984.
In October 1985, about a year after his release, police found the remains of a woman he had been living with in Central Park. He pleaded guilty in 1986 to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to six to twelve years. He served far longer than the maximum: parole was refused repeatedly, and he was not released until 2019, at eighty-one, after telling a board on June 25, 2019 that he gave his word he would never re-offend and would be an exemplary parolee. He moved into an LGBTQ shelter in the Bronx, where he met Susan Leyden.
Leyden was sixty-eight. They had known each other about two years, and prosecutors could not establish exactly what the relationship was. On February 27, 2022 surveillance video recorded her entering his building on Pennsylvania Avenue in East New York, Brooklyn. On March 1 he and another woman went to a Home Depot in Manhattan and bought a saw, rubbish bags and cleaning fluid. On March 2 he was recorded leaving a shopping cart on the street near Atlantic and Pennsylvania Avenues; six hours later a passer-by on an e-bike opened the rolling bag inside it and found a torso without head or limbs, and called 911. A dollar store camera in Queens caught him riding an electric scooter through the aisles with one of her legs in a black plastic bag on the seat.
He was arrested within the week on a charge of concealing a corpse. Detectives searching his apartment found black rubbish bags containing Leyden’s head, an arm, a hand and her thighs, and more remains in bags blocks away. A grand jury indicted him for murder in April 2022. The woman who had gone to Home Depot with him cooperated with detectives. At the news briefing the NYPD Chief of Detectives, James Essig, said the arrest took a serial killer off the streets.
The trial before Justice Danny Chun in Brooklyn Supreme Court ran two weeks in May 2026. A witness, 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, gave evidence in his own defence, said he had been framed, named Lindahl as the killer and accused the prosecutor of manipulating her. On May 7, 2026 the jury deliberated for one hour and convicted him of first-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence and concealment of a human corpse. District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said the defendant had desecrated the remains in a manner that truly shocked the conscience and would never walk free again.
On June 10, 2026 he was sentenced to life without parole. He said he had adored Leyden and was being railroaded through a kangaroo court. Justice Chun told him that regardless of his age, if he were ever paroled again there was no doubt he would kill again.
Three women, three convictions, two of them for murder and one for manslaughter, over fifty-nine years. Each of the first two releases was followed by a killing, and he was on lifetime parole for the first when he committed the third. The question New York asked afterwards was why he had been free, and the parole transcripts obtained by the press show that each time, he had promised.