On the afternoon of November 29, 2010, an anonymous caller told Lowell police there was a body under the Rogers Street Bridge. Officers found Gary A. Melanson, 54, lying over a collapsed tent. He had broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a fractured left arm and blunt injuries to his head and torso. The medical examiner could not say how those injuries had come about, and the manner of his death was ruled undetermined. No one was charged.
Twenty months later, on August 2, 2012, Cambridge police were called to the bank of the Charles River near 975 Memorial Drive, where a man appeared to be unconscious. He was Douglas Leon Clarke, 30, a homeless man who spent his days around Harvard Square. His blood held morphine, codeine, alcohol and gabapentin, and his death was recorded as an accidental overdose.
Neither death was treated as a homicide for years. On August 5, 2025, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan announced that a grand jury had indicted Kevin J. Lino, 38, on two counts of first-degree murder, one for each man. By then Lino was already serving prison terms for the deaths of two other homeless men: Normand Varieur in Boston in 2012, and Gilbert "Jack" Berry in Missoula, Montana, in 2014. "Obviously, these allegations demonstrate a very violent pattern of behavior," Ryan said, alleging "a targeting of some of the most vulnerable members in the community."
Lino has pleaded not guilty to the Lowell and Cambridge charges, and they have not been tried. That leaves four cases of two different kinds: two convictions entered on pleas, and two charges that remain allegations.
Little about Lino's early life has been published. A Missoula radio report in 2014 called him a Massachusetts native, and Massachusetts prosecutors in 2025 described him as a former Lowell resident. His ages in the court reports put his birth in 1986 or 1987: he was 23 at the time of the Lowell killing, according to prosecutors, 27 when Montana charged him in 2014 and 38 when he was indicted in 2025.
When the FBI sought him as a fugitive in August 2014, it described him as a convicted felon whose last known residence was Lowell, a known drug user, 6 feet 1 to 6 feet 4 inches tall and about 155 pounds, with a tattoo on his left hand. The bureau listed his aliases as Phoenix, Shaggy, Nick Fish and Kevin Fisk, and said he enjoyed boar hunting, fur trapping and trading, and training pit bulls. The Suffolk County District Attorney's office later said he was sometimes known as "Phoenix." The FBI notice did not describe the earlier felony, and what it was has not been reported. By 2025, WHDH-TV reported, tattoos covered most of his face.
Every case in which Lino has been convicted or charged took place among homeless people, and in each he was living in the same camp or group as the man who died. Universal Hub, the Boston news site, described him in 2018 as homeless and often on the move, but in the Boston area long enough to become a regular at "the Pit" in Harvard Square.
In 2019 a lawyer for Lino asked a Suffolk County court for funds for a psychological evaluation. The filing, reported by the Boston Globe in 2025, said Lino had dealt with "previous psychological issues" and that he was "suspected of having committed at least one other uncharged murder." It did not name the case, and the lawyer did not elaborate.
Gary A. Melanson was 54 in the fall of 2010 and living in a homeless encampment by the Rogers Street Bridge in Lowell. Published reports say almost nothing else about him: no hometown, occupation or surviving relatives have been named in the coverage of the case. District Attorney Ryan said his family and friends had been left "with little or incorrect information about what had happened" to him for nearly fifteen years.
According to prosecutors, Lino, then 23, was staying in the same encampment. Melanson lit fires to keep warm as the weather turned cold. Lino objected, prosecutors said, because he believed the fires drew police and firefighters to the camp, and he told Melanson to stop. Melanson did not.
"The allegation is that Mr. Lino rushed Mr. Melanson, who was much smaller and much older than he was, beating him and striking him repeatedly with a metal baseball bat," Ryan said at the August 2025 news conference. "After he had inflicted some serious injuries, Mr. Lino then finished that attack by urinating on Mr. Melanson." Some reports describe the bat as aluminum.
The anonymous call came on November 29, 2010. The autopsy recorded blunt impact injuries to the head, torso and limbs, including fractured ribs, a collapsed lung and a broken left arm. Even so, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the manner of death undetermined, and the case went cold.
Lino was in the Boston area in 2012. On the night of May 20, 2012, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney's office, he and Normand Varieur, 45, argued near Paul Revere Park in Charlestown, where a number of homeless people often slept. Prosecutors said Lino then beat Varieur over a period of several hours.
Varieur came from Maine and, like Lino, was homeless and moved from place to place, Universal Hub reported. On May 21, 2012, police found him badly injured and unresponsive near a dock at the park, by the Charles River dam. He had a head injury and other trauma. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he died four days later. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death blunt force trauma and the manner homicide. Unlike the Lowell and Cambridge deaths, the Varieur case was investigated as a killing from the start.
Douglas Leon Clarke was 30 in the summer of 2012. Police knew him as homeless and living around Harvard Square, and he often went by the name "Rage," Cambridge Day reported. Like Melanson, he is described in the coverage only through the circumstances of his death; no family members have been quoted or named. When the charges were announced in 2025, Cambridge Police Commissioner Christine Elow said, "We really hope for the Clarke family that this arrest brings a measure of peace and closure."
According to prosecutors, Lino and Clarke were both part of a group of homeless people who gathered by the Harvard Square MBTA station. Lino, then 25, allegedly "took it upon himself" to drive the group's heroin users out, assaulting many of them throughout the day, again out of concern, prosecutors said, that their behavior would draw the police. After a confrontation with Clarke, Ryan said, Lino resolved "to punish" him for his insolence and "made clear that he intended to poison him using an amount that he knew would cause an overdose." Prosecutors allege he then gave Clarke a quantity of heroin strong enough to kill him, a dose sometimes called a "hot shot."
Clarke was found on August 2, 2012, on the riverbank near 975 Memorial Drive, after a call about an unconscious man. Toxicology found a "substantial concentration" of morphine, along with codeine, ethanol and gabapentin, an anticonvulsant. The medical examiner recorded the death as an accident, the result of "acute and chronic substance use and overdose of substances." At the time nothing suggested that anyone had intended it.
Prosecutors have not said in public what evidence links Lino to Clarke's death. The Boston Globe reported in August 2025 that neither the district attorney's statement nor the court records then available detailed it.
By the summer of 2014 Lino was in Montana. On about July 30, 2014, according to an FBI release and court documents, he and others got into a verbal argument with Gilbert George Berry at a homeless camp under the Reserve Street Bridge in Missoula. Berry, 36, known as "Jack," was originally from Pennsylvania and had recently arrived in the Missoula area, NBC Montana reported. Court papers garbled his name as "Berry Jack Gilbert," and several news reports followed them.
Prosecutors alleged that Lino and Kenneth Hickman, 21, beat Berry, that he was kicked, punched and stomped, that gang symbols were cut into his skin with a knife and lit cigarettes forced into his nose, and that Lino urinated on him, shot him in the head with a 9 mm pistol and put his body in the Clark Fork River. Universal Hub, summarizing the Montana case, added that his hair was cut and that Berry's girlfriend saw most of what happened; those details did not appear in other reports of the case. The reports do not say what the gang symbols were or whether Lino belonged to any gang. The FBI described the cause only as a verbal altercation at the camp.
On Tuesday, August 5, 2014, a fisherman found a badly decomposed body on rocks in an area of rapids in the Clark Fork, about three-quarters of a mile below the Reserve Street Bridge. The Missoula County Sheriff's Office said it appeared to have been there for some time. The state medical examiner found that the injuries were not consistent with drowning, and detectives determined that the man had been assaulted and shot before he went into the river. He was identified as Berry. (One Associated Press report gave the date the body was found as August 6.)
Within days the sheriff's office had arrested Hickman on an aggravated assault charge and Mechailiah Tembreull on a charge of accountability for aggravated assault; the spelling of Tembreull's name varies across reports. On August 7 the Missoula County Attorney's Office obtained a warrant charging Lino with deliberate homicide. Deputies also sought his girlfriend, Angela Marchese, 27, as a witness. The pair were believed to be traveling in a white 2014 Ford Focus with temporary West Virginia plates, possibly with a litter of pit bull puppies.
On August 14 a federal warrant charged Lino with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, and the FBI asked the public for help. The car had last been seen on August 11 in Monument, Colorado, the bureau said, and the couple had ties to West Virginia, Massachusetts and Louisiana, including the Shreveport area. "He is considered armed and dangerous," the notice said.
Shreveport police caught Lino just after 6 p.m. on August 30, 2014, in woods near the railroad tracks below the Mansfield Road viaduct, after a two-day manhunt in which he twice got away from pursuers. Tips from confidential sources led officers to him, and the arrest itself was made without incident, KEEL radio reported. He was held in the Caddo Parish jail as a fugitive from Missoula.
Lino refused to waive extradition. The Missoula County Attorney's Office obtained a governor's warrant to compel his return, and he arrived in Missoula after a long ride in a prisoner van from Shreveport. On October 23, 2014, he appeared in Missoula Justice Court, where Judge Amy Blixt kept his bail at $250,000 and set a preliminary hearing. On November 25, 2014, he pleaded not guilty to deliberate homicide in Missoula District Court. Deputy County Attorney Jason Marks told KGVO radio that Lino faced up to life in prison if convicted, and that co-defendants, "Kenneth Hickman in particular," were charged in various aspects of the case.
In 2015 Hickman pleaded guilty to aggravated assault before District Judge John Larson. He admitted hitting Berry but denied burning him or cutting the symbols into his skin, the Associated Press reported. He was later sentenced to 20 years in prison.
In April 2015 Lino pleaded no contest to deliberate homicide. A no-contest plea concedes that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict without admitting guilt. The Missoulian reported, as the AP summarized it, that his plea rested on his inability to remember what happened. Marks said later that Lino took the plea agreement because several co-defendants had agreed to testify against him.
On Wednesday, July 22, 2015, District Judge Karen Townsend sentenced Lino to 40 years in Montana State Prison. "He shot a man by the Clark Fork River last August and then dumped his body in the river," Marks, by then chief deputy county attorney, told KGVO. "It took quite some time to solve this case given that all the witnesses were transients, but Lino was eventually identified as the suspect." Lino was taken from the courthouse to the state prison at Deer Lodge.
In Boston, Massachusetts State Police detectives had spent years on the Varieur case. They looked for witnesses among the homeless community around the park and among people who fished and walked their dogs there, and that work led them to Lino, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office said. By then he was in prison in Montana. Late in 2017 detectives traveled there to interview him, "at which time he allegedly made admissions regarding Varieur's homicide corroborated by independent evidence," the office said.
On August 14, 2018, a Suffolk County grand jury indicted Lino, then 31, for first-degree murder in Varieur's death. Assistant District Attorney Julie Higgins of the Homicide Unit led the grand jury investigation. "If Mr. Varieur's killer believed no one would care about a homeless man's murder, then he was badly mistaken," District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said. "Some homicides can be solved in days and others may take years, but we never, ever abandon them."
Lino was brought to Massachusetts, and on October 29, 2018, he was arraigned in Suffolk Superior Court. At the request of prosecutors, Clerk Magistrate Edward Curley ordered him held without bail. He was represented by attorney C. Henry Fasoldt. The district attorney's office, then led by John P. Pappas, said the evidence included witness statements, the defendant's own statements and medical evidence.
In 2019 Lino pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole after 15 years, according to court records reported by the Boston Globe. That sentence runs alongside the Montana term.
The same period produced the evidence in the Lowell case. In 2018, prosecutors said in 2025, Massachusetts State Police working an investigation involving Lino that was unrelated to the Lowell and Cambridge deaths learned that he might have been involved in both. The district attorney's statement did not name that investigation; the 2018 timing matches the Varieur prosecution, but no report has connected the two directly.
According to court records reported by the Boston Globe, Lino wrote a letter to the Massachusetts State Police in 2018 describing the Lowell attack: "I beat him with a baseball bat, put out his fire, [and threw] him half inside his tent... and broke the tent to make it seem like he fell just in case he died." In a letter to his father, according to the same records, he wrote that he had beaten the man "for 20 mins at least or at least it felt like 20 mins and left him to die in the cold winter night." Prosecutors described the urination as "an act of ritual humiliation."
No comparable statement about Clarke has been made public. The Globe reported that the 2018 investigation that produced the Melanson confessions also led investigators to conclude Lino had killed Clarke. Ryan said the case against him was "really not a forensics case." "It is the result of investigation and development of leads, interviews, all of those pieces," she said. "People have been helpful throughout the process over the years."
Ryan's Cold Case Unit, working with the State Police and the Lowell and Cambridge police, established probable cause. On Tuesday, August 5, 2025, a Middlesex County grand jury indicted Lino on two counts of first-degree murder. Ryan announced the charges at a news conference in Woburn with Lowell Police Commissioner Gregory Hudon and Cambridge Police Commissioner Elow.
"This was not the typical, we knew someone had been the victim of a homicide and we were looking for answers," Ryan told reporters. "No one thought they were the victims of homicide, and yet gathering this information over the years and putting it together and really determination and doggedness got us to this place to learn there was a much different story."
"When I created the Cold Case Unit, I made a commitment to re-examining existing evidence and to exhausting every possible option to bring answers to families," she said in a statement. "In this case, through painstaking investigation and the development of new evidence, we were able to uncover the truth behind the deaths of Gary Melanson and Douglas Leon Clarke." She called the details of the Montana case "strikingly similar," NBC Boston reported. A Fox News report on the case in November 2025 quoted her as saying, "Mr. Lino is a serial killer." His lawyer declined to comment to the Globe.
On Wednesday, August 27, 2025, Lino was taken from Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, the maximum-security state prison in Lancaster where he was serving his Massachusetts sentence, to Middlesex Superior Court. He pleaded not guilty to both counts and was ordered held without bail. "We recognize the pain and uncertainty endured by the families and friends of Mr. Melanson and Mr. Clarke, who have long awaited answers about what happened to their loved ones," Ryan said. "It is our hope that today's arraignments will bring them a measure of peace."
Cambridge Day reported that the next date was an October 3 scheduling hearing. The Globe's report on the arraignment called the October 3 date a sentencing, which does not fit a case that had just been arraigned on not-guilty pleas.
When Fox News Digital reported on the case on November 20, 2025, Lino was charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Melanson and Clarke and was held in Massachusetts awaiting trial. No trial date, plea or verdict in the Middlesex case had been reported, and nothing newer surfaced in 2026. He remains convicted of second-degree murder in Massachusetts and deliberate homicide in Montana, serving life with parole eligibility after 15 years and a 40-year term. The same Fox report noted that he had not been linked to a separate series of bodies found in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Maine earlier in 2025.
Until a jury or a plea decides the Middlesex charges, Lino is accused, not convicted, in the deaths of Gary Melanson and Douglas Clarke.
Proven by plea: Lino pleaded guilty in 2019 to the second-degree murder of Normand Varieur. In Montana he pleaded no contest in 2015 to the deliberate homicide of Gilbert Berry, which carries a conviction although it is not an admission. The details of how Berry died, including the torture, come from charging documents and the FBI notice; Lino said he could not remember what happened, and there was no trial at which witnesses testified to them.
Charged: the deaths of Melanson and Clarke. The prosecution's account of the Lowell killing rests in part on letters that court records attribute to Lino, one to the State Police and one to his father. Those letters have not been tested at a trial. For Clarke, prosecutors have alleged a motive and an intent to poison, but the evidence has not been described in public, and the medical examiner's original finding was an accidental overdose.
Suspected: a 2019 defense filing said Lino was suspected of at least one other uncharged killing. It did not say which, and it may refer to one of the two later charged in Middlesex County.
Motive: in each Massachusetts case, prosecutors describe a man who set himself up as an enforcer of the camps where he lived, punishing other homeless men whose behavior he thought would bring the police. That is the prosecution's theory, not a finding. The Montana case began, according to the FBI, with a verbal argument. The gang symbols cut into Berry's skin have been reported without explanation, and no report has said that any of the killings was connected to a gang or to drug dealing.
Prosecutors and reporters have called him a serial killer. He has been convicted in two deaths; whether there are four depends on the Middlesex case.
All four men were homeless, and in two of the four cases the deaths were not recorded as homicides at all. Melanson's family lived for almost fifteen years with an undetermined finding, and Clarke's with a ruling of accidental overdose. Ryan said those findings had left the families "with little or incorrect information." The Varieur case took six years to charge, and Conley framed it as a warning to anyone who thought a homeless man's death would go uninvestigated. In Montana, the prosecutor said the case took time to solve because every witness was transient.
No changes to law or medical examiner practice tied to these cases have been reported.
1986 or 1987: Kevin Joseph Lino born (year inferred from ages in court reports).
November 2010: Gary A. Melanson, 54, beaten at a homeless encampment by the Rogers Street Bridge, Lowell (alleged).
November 29, 2010: Melanson's body found after an anonymous call; manner of death ruled undetermined.
May 20, 2012: Normand Varieur, 45, beaten near Paul Revere Park, Charlestown, Boston; found May 21 and died four days later at Massachusetts General Hospital.
August 2, 2012: Douglas Leon Clarke, 30, found on the Charles River bank near 975 Memorial Drive, Cambridge; death ruled an accidental overdose.
About July 30, 2014: Gilbert George "Jack" Berry, 36, beaten and shot at a camp under the Reserve Street Bridge, Missoula, Montana.
August 5, 2014: A fisherman finds Berry's body in the Clark Fork River.
August 7, 2014: Montana warrant charges Lino with deliberate homicide.
August 14, 2014: Federal warrant for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
August 30, 2014: Lino arrested in Shreveport, Louisiana.
October 23, 2014: First appearance in Missoula Justice Court after extradition on a governor's warrant.
November 25, 2014: Pleads not guilty in Missoula District Court.
April 2015: Pleads no contest to deliberate homicide.
July 22, 2015: Sentenced to 40 years in Montana State Prison.
Late 2017: Massachusetts State Police interview Lino in Montana; he allegedly makes admissions about Varieur.
2018: Letters attributed to Lino describe the Lowell attack, according to court records; State Police learn of his possible role in the Melanson and Clarke deaths.
August 14, 2018: Suffolk County grand jury indicts him for first-degree murder of Varieur.
October 29, 2018: Arraigned in Suffolk Superior Court; held without bail.
2019: Pleads guilty to second-degree murder of Varieur; life with parole eligibility after 15 years.
August 5, 2025: Middlesex County grand jury indicts him on two counts of first-degree murder (Melanson and Clarke).
August 27, 2025: Pleads not guilty in Middlesex Superior Court; held without bail.
November 20, 2025: Fox News Digital reports him awaiting trial on the Middlesex charges.