30 years after Harkins' murder, ex-lieutenant, family seek tips to body's location

WORCESTER — It was 30 years ago Thursday that Kevin Harkins walked out of the former Suney’s Pub on Chandler Street, leaving his jacket, keys and an unfinished beer behind, never to be seen again.

While prosecutors and police managed to secure three murder convictions in his death a decade ago, his body has never been found.

His family, and a former police lieutenant who worked the case for years, would like that to change.

“It would mean the world to me to finally lay him to rest,” Mary Jane Simone, Harkins’ girlfriend, said Friday when contacted by the Telegram & Gazette.

Simone and Harkins’ cousin, Alan Thorpe, both spoke to the T&G Friday after talking to retired Worcester Lt. Timothy O’Connor, who said he can’t shake a promise he made to Harkins’ mother decades ago.

“I told her I’d never stop looking for Kevin,” said O’Connor, who believes somebody besides the three men convicted in Harkins’ death must know the location of his remains.

“There’s somebody out there that knows something,” said Thorpe, who hopes such a person will come forward with a tip.

In a case that made headlines for years, Harkins, 36, went missing Feb. 15, 1994, after witnesses saw him get in a 1985 Chevrolet Impala with several men after being called outside Suney's.

Prosecutors alleged, and jurors ultimately agreed, that Harkins was shot to death inside that car, pieces of which, witnesses testified, were ultimately scattered around the city.

With Harkins’ body never recovered, the case hinged largely on testimony of witnesses who said Harkins was killed after he failed to provide false testimony in a 1994 drug trial of one of his murderers.

Jessica L. Simone, who was 7 when her father disappeared, attended all three trials in 2014, and gave moving impact statements upon the convictions.

“This is just the beginning of our journey to getting closure,” Simone said when one of the men, Matteo Trotto, was sentenced. “That journey will not end until my father’s remains are recovered and laid to rest and we are allowed to properly mourn him.”

Jessica Simone was killed at 35 in a 2021 car crash near the Worcester Police station. Two men, allegedly racing, face vehicular homicide charges in her death.

Her mother, Mary Jane Simone, spends much of her time, with the support of family and friends, keeping her daughter’s memory alive through a foundation that makes philanthropic donations.

“Jessica’s wishes were to bring her father home,” Simone said. If somebody were to help do that, she said, their remains could be placed together.

“I believe somebody, somewhere, knows something,” she said. “I would like to lay him to rest with his daughter.”

A cop looks back

O’Connor invited the T&G Thursday to attend a class he teaches at Clark University in which he reflected on the case at length.

The former lieutenant recalled for students the “old-fashioned police work” he said that helped overcome the challenge of prosecuting three men with little in the way of physical evidence.

“We didn’t have any blood evidence, we didn’t have the body, but we were able to get the conviction,” he said, describing the many hours he and other officers poured into the case.

O’Connor discussed how police ran wiretaps — a first for the department — worked with state and federal authorities, the Worcester Fire dive team and many others to pursue evidence.

O’Connor described sifting through thousands of discarded license plates at the RMV in the search for those exchanged by one of the men eventually convicted — the same plate that belonged to the Chevy whose door he said divers pulled from a city pond in 2005.

The three defendants — Matteo Trotto, John Fredette and Elias Samia — all took their cases to trial and were all convicted of first-degree murder, the first such convictions, O’Connor said, in state history in which no body was recovered.

While Trotto and Fredette’s sentences were later reduced to second-degree murder following appeals, Samia’s first-degree conviction stands. Samia is facing life in prison without the possibility of parole, while Trotto and Fredette will each be parole-eligible.

O’Connor said, given the health condition of at least one of the defendants, he doesn’t believe any of the three men will ever be released.

As he looked back on the case, O’Connor shared his personal thoughts behind its twists and turns, which included a failed police bribery plot he was witness to before Harkins’ murder.

Harkins was killed, prosecutors said, after the trio gave him cocaine to falsely testify, in a separate drug trial Fredette was facing, that he’d given false information to O’Connor.

O’Connor, who said Harkins never gave him information, told students Harkins had, at Trotto and Fredette’s request, relayed to O’Connor before that scheme developed a separate idea: to bribe O’Connor with $50,000 and a truck to “screw up” paperwork that would lead to a lighter sentence.

O’Connor told students he proposed to superiors that police try and implicate the men in the bribery plot — including, in one scenario, by trying to get them to donate the cash to the T&G Santa Fund — but they elected against it.

O’Connor described Harkins as one of the toughest guys he’s seen, especially when the two boxed, albeit in different weight classes, at the Boys & Girls Club growing up.

“He was a tough guy, and a great boxer,” said O’Connor. While Harkins struggled with cocaine and, O’Connor said, “ran in different circles” than the longtime former Vice Squad detective, the two spoke often at Suney’s, where Harkins bounced and O’Connor worked a paid detail.

A great athlete and huge Celtics fan, Harkins, whom friends nicknamed “Cooz,” loved basketball and, O’Connor said, would come to a league he'd set up for kids with the police.

“He would come and help out the kids. He was great,” O’Connor said.

O’Connor recalled telling Harkins’ mother, who died before her son’s killers were tried, that he would never stop looking for him.

“She would ask me every week: Is Kevin coming back?” he said.

As he spoke to his students on Zoom from his Rhode Island home, O’Connor motioned to the other side of the room, where, he said, boxes of information relative to the case remain.

Every police officer has a case they can’t shake, he said. This is his.

Thorpe, who planted a small tree in his cousin’s memory at Elm Park decades ago that has grown tall, said he appreciates O’Connor's passion.

“He’s poured his heart into this,” said the retired 37-year Worcester Parks Department employee, adding that he’d also like to thank District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr. and former county prosecutor Daniel J. Bennett, who secured the murder convictions.

Thorpe, 72 recalled his cousin as an extremely popular West Side kid who never backed down from a fight, despite being anything but tall, and knocking down men much taller than himself.

“He was a tough cookie: one shot, boom-boom,” he said.

None of the three men charged in Harkins’ murder has admitted to their roles; all three have pursued appeals. In the course of the trials, two witnesses connected to Fredette and Trotto said they were told Harkins was shot in the car, but in conflicting versions of events.

Thorpe said he believes the most likely scenario is that Harkins was murdered standing up for himself.

“I think they fought that night in the back of the car,” he said. “And they shot him.”

Fredette and Samia were pulled over for speeding in Millbury at 2 a.m. on Feb. 16, 1994, hours after Harkins was last seen, and officers observed blood on Fredette and in the vehicle.

At that time, Harkins had not been reported missing, and Millbury police ultimately let them go, determining their suspect story of having been in a bar fight was not enough to legally justify further action. 

O’Connor told his students that while some in law enforcement criticized the way the stop was handled, hindsight is 20/20, and if they hadn’t done what they did do, in his estimation, the convictions wouldn’t have been possible.

Anonymous tips welcome

O’Connor’s trial testimony helped admit crucial witness testimony in Trotto’s case: that of an associate of Trotto who told authorities Trotto had told him about his role in the murder.

The man, Anthony J. Carlo Jr., relayed a conversation in which Trotto allegedly told him about the gun going off in his hand, and that the three men “dumped” Harkins’ body in a location he was not told.

At Fredette’s trial, Fredette’s son testified Samia had said he shot Harkins and that he’d been buried in a shallow grave “so the pigs would get whatever the lime would not dissolve.”

O’Connor told his students Thursday that police went multiple places with cadaver dogs searching for Harkins, including at a pig farm in Oxford.

O’Connor said he believes someone other than the three men convicted of Harkins’ murder know where his body was dumped, and hopes that person will come forward.

He noted that even if a person didn’t want to reach out to police with their name, anyone can send a tip to the department anonymously.

Anonymous tips can be sent to the Worcester Police Department by text to 274637 TIPWPD + your message or at worcesterma.gov/police.

Thorpe said his family deserves the truth, no matter how hard it might be. He recalled staying in trial along with Simone and Harkins' sister, Karen Ramirez, who died in 2019, despite being warned of upcoming testimony, such as that regarding the pigs.

“We want to know the truth,” said Thorpe, adding that, after 30 years, maybe someone who knows something will listen to their conscience.

“Maybe they’ll press a button and drop a dime,” he said, noting how much that would mean to himself and to Mary Jane Simone.

Simone told the T&G it’s been difficult to not have a place to mourn Harkins. She, her daughter and others used to go to Elm Park to visit the tree Thorpe planted, she said, because it seemed like the natural place to go.

Simone runs the Jessica Simone Memorial Fund, which she established to honor her daughter’s memory.

The fund has made donations to a host of charitable causes, she said, from a women’s clinic in Africa, the unhoused in Worcester to a scholarship at Quinsigamond Community College, where Jessica had been pursuing a career as a radiology technician.

Simone said family and friends marched last October in the Italian Heritage Parade, giving out bracelets preaching kindness in Jessica’s memory.

Simone said Harkins was also very kind, describing him as the kind of man who would do "anything for anybody.

“Kevin was a good man — he had his flaws, we all do — he was a good man, he was loved by many people,” she said. “He had a big heart. He was a great dad. A great athlete. And he was funny.

“Those are the qualities we want to remember him by."

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Family of Worcester murder victim Kevin Harkins seek tips on body