A voice for the silenced

You don't go out for a celebratory drink after the week Adrienne Lynch just had.

If you are the veteran Middlesex prosecutor you go, instead, to the post office to mail all the overdue bills that piled up while you were trying a convicted sex offender for the murders of a Woburn mother and her 12-year-old daughter.

The two first-degree murder convictions returned last week against Michael Bizanowicz for the fatal stabbings of Joanne Presti, 34, and Alyssa, 12, close out a three-week trial and a three-year ordeal that began for Lynch when she was called to the Presti home, where Joanne had been bound and raped before her daughter interrupted the attack. Bizanowicz then killed them both.

"It does take a toll," said Lynch, who has worked as a criminal prosecutor under five district attorneys in the last 27 years. She has watched other colleagues leave for private practice, elected office, or the bench but she has chosen to remain at a job that offers in personal and professional satisfaction what it lacks in financial reward.

"Every single case lives with me and always will," she said, "but in the midst of the horror it is inspiring to see the resilience of victims like the Prestis who have worked so hard to make sure this does not happen to another family." The Presti family lobbied the Legislature to tighten supervision of sex offenders after their release from prison.

What is harder to accept is the anonymity of so many other homicide victims, whose lives and violent deaths are known only to investigators and the loved ones they left behind. Lynch carries a mental catalog of unsolved murders, determined that one day those victims, too, will get justice.

"I have a couple of cases that break my heart because we haven't been able to solve them," she said, thinking specifically of Latasha Cannon, a teenage runaway whose body was found six years ago on the grounds of a Raytheon plant in Bedford. "She had a tough life. The one and only picture we have of her is a booking photo that was taken four days before she went missing. People have no idea that for every Presti case there are 100 other cases that don't get any attention. There is a whole population of runaways that is invisible to society. Sometimes they turn up dead. Do their lives count less?"

Not to Lynch, who still has a note from Scott Harshbarger that the former Middlesex district attorney and Massachusetts attorney general wrote to her 20 years ago when she lost a case. Losing is hard, he told her, but what matters most is having been an impassioned advocate for someone who has been harmed. "I read that letter whenever I need a boost to keep going."

She almost quit six months into the job but her father, a former prosecutor himself and the man she calls "Big Ed," told her that no one benefits from leaving a job so soon. If staying initially was a burden, remaining was a choice. In some ways, she has turned into her dad, who used to pile the kids into the car in her hometown in New Jersey and take them on "mystery tours" of local crime scenes. "No one wants to drive with me through Middlesex County," she said. "Every other street is a crime scene."

By Friday afternoon, Lynch had paid her bills, gone to the dry cleaners, and run the vacuum across her living room floor for the first time in three weeks. Tomorrow, she will be back at her desk, preparing for her next trial. Kendra Bryson was only 21 three years ago when her killer paid her for sex and then strangled her and dumped her body on the side of a road in New Hampshire.

In a few weeks, in Middlesex Superior Court, Adrienne Lynch will stand before a jury and she will speak for Kendra Bryson.

Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.