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Harvey Marcelin, 87, Is Convicted of Murdering Susan Leyden, His Third Killing of a Woman

A Brooklyn jury found the twice-paroled killer guilty of murdering and dismembering the 68-year-old in his East New York apartment in 2022.

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Illustration: sealed brown paper evidence bags and envelopes on a table

The jury needed about an hour. After a trial in Brooklyn, it found Harvey Marcelin, 87, guilty of first-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence and concealment of a human corpse in the 2022 killing and dismemberment of Susan Leyden, 68, of Clinton Hill. It was the third time Marcelin had been convicted of killing a woman, across nearly six decades.

The first-degree murder charge rested on that history. Under New York law it was available because of his conviction, on October 16, 1963, for murder in Manhattan. A jury found then that he had shot to death Jacqueline Bonds, a girlfriend, inside a Manhattan apartment. He was given life in prison. Paroled in 1984, he was arrested the next year for stabbing another girlfriend to death and leaving her body in a trash bag on the street, and was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six to twelve years. Parole boards turned him down through the 1990s; at one hearing in 1997 he admitted to having "problems" with women. He was released in 2019.

Three years later, on February 27, 2022, surveillance cameras recorded Leyden entering Marcelin's apartment on Pennsylvania Avenue in East New York. She was never seen leaving it alive. On March 2, cameras caught Marcelin wheeling a shopping cart with a black plastic bag in it, and early the next morning Leyden's torso was found inside that bag at the corner of Atlantic and Pennsylvania Avenues. In the apartment, police found her head and limbs, blood, cleaning supplies, a hammer and the box from an electric saw. On March 7, one of her legs turned up near a garbage can about three blocks away. Prosecutors showed the jury video of Marcelin buying a saw and cleaning supplies at a Home Depot in Manhattan around the time Leyden disappeared. The medical examiner found that she died of blunt force trauma to the head and other injuries.

The two had lived in the same shelter in the Bronx in 2019, the district attorney's office said, but the nature of their relationship is unclear. A woman named Lisa Lindahl, who was in the apartment during parts of the aftermath, testified that she went with Marcelin to buy the supplies and later helped clean up blood after finding Leyden's body. The defense attacked her credibility and suggested she had been more involved than she admitted.

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez called the killing "cruel and reprehensible" and said the way Leyden's remains were treated "shocks the conscience." "I hope Ms. Leyden's family finds a measure of solace in this guilty verdict," he said.

Sentencing before Justice Danny Chun was set for June 10, with a maximum of life without parole.

Marcelin's 1963 murder conviction is confirmed by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office. The account of the 1985 killing and manslaughter conviction comes from court records as reported by the Associated Press and CBS News in 2022; that woman is not named here because no source read for this story named her. Marcelin identified as a woman for many years; this story follows the district attorney's office and the court record of the 2026 trial.

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