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SJC overturns murder verdict in 1980 killing

E-mail|Link|Comments () August 14, 2009 02:35 PM

By David Abel, Globe Staff

Four years after a Barnstable Superior Court jury convicted Stephen Stewart of stabbing to death a woman in a bathroom of her Buzzards Bay home in 1980, the state’s highest court today issued a decision overturning the verdict.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled that prosecutors should not have been allowed to question a witness who had refused to take the oath and repeatedly answered "no comment" to leading questions.

"The leading questions essentially permitted the Commonwealth to place its entire case before the jury in the form of an impermissible interrogation without competent testimony by the witness," Justice Judith A. Cowin wrote in her ruling overturning the verdict.

Cowin said the witness, Robert Hoeg, a friend of Stewart's who was serving a life sentence for an unrelated murder, should not have been allowed to testify for two reasons. "First, he refused to take an oath or affirm the truthfulness of his testimony," she wrote. "Second, the entire procedure denied the defendant due process. The leading questions by the prosecutor were effectively transformed into evidence, and the ambiguous 'no comment' responses cannot be reasonably construed as denials of the propositions contained in the questions."

Cowin also said the Superior Court judge erred in not instructing the jury to ignore Hoeg's responses to prosecutors' questions.

In 2005, Stewart was convicted of first-degree murder with extreme cruelty and atrocity for killing Frances Carriere on Jan. 3, 1980. The Brockton resident received a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

Prosecutors argued that Stewart was a hit man indirectly hired by Carriere's estranged husband, Edmond Carriere. He was going through a messy divorce from his wife when police found the 44-year-old mother of four dead on the second floor of her home.

Investigators have not been able to directly link Edmond Carriere to the murder, Dearnley and prosecutors said. Carriere, who two years ago was living on Head of the Bay Road in Buzzards Bay, could not be reached for comment today.

Prosecutors charged Stewart with Carriere's killing in 2003, after a three-year grand jury investigation. They argued in court then that Edmond Carriere had hired Richard Grebauski, 57, of Wareham, to kill his wife. Grebauski, who died in April after a motorbike accident in Florida, allegedly hired Stewart to do the killing. Prosecutors said Carriere paid the men $10,000.

The two had first become suspects in the early 1980s. Grebauski was indicted for the crime in 1982, but the charges were dropped a year later, because prosecutors lacked evidence.

Prosecutors linked Stewart to the killing by showing jurors evidence that he told his employer in 1980 that Grebauski had hired him to "do someone's wife," O'Keefe said. Years later, Stewart also told his son, O'Keefe said, that killing Carriere was "the easiest $10,000 I made." Prosecutors also had presented evidence showing that Stewart bought new furniture shortly after the murder.