Man convicted in murder of former cheerleader

July 3, 2008 04:18 PM Email| Comments (0)| Text size – +

(Video by John Ellement, Globe Staff)

By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff

A jury convicted Rodrick J. Taylor this morning of second-degree murder in the death of 19-year-old Dominique Samuels, whose body was found strangled and badly burned in Franklin Park in April 2006.

The Suffolk Superior Court jury deliberated for six consecutive days before convicting Taylor, 37. The verdict was announced after a six-week trial that included testimony from more than 30 witnesses. Taylor will be sentenced on Monday.

Samuels was a 2004 graduate of Milton High School, where she had been the captain of the cheerleading squad. In the spring of 2006, she was living in a rooming house on Woodbine Street in Roxbury.

Taylor was distantly related to one of Samuels's friends, and was in a second-floor apartment alone with the woman when he attacked and choked her, prosecutor said at trial.

"He sets upon her for reasons we may never fully understand," Edmond Zabin, chief Suffolk County homicide prosecutor, said in his opening statement in May. "She fought, she screamed, she cried out. She scratched and clawed with every single ounce of her strength, but she lost."

Zabin said a woman who was in the apartment later reported hearing noise, but turned up the television.

Taylor moved Samuels's body to her third-floor apartment and left it there until early Sunday, when he took the body to Franklin Park, off Morton Street, and set it on fire, hoping to eliminate any forensic link to him, Zabin said.

At the time of Samuels's death, Boston police had dozens of uniformed officers in Roxbury as part of Operation Home Safe, a high-visibility anticrime effort. In court papers, prosecutors alleged that Taylor left Samuels's body in her apartment until police left the neighborhood. When they did on April 30, Taylor allegedly took the woman's body to the woods.

Scratch marks were found on Taylor's arms days after the slaying. "Her bloody signature is on the arms of her killer," Zabin said.