At about 4 p.m., on December 10, 1974, 15-year-old Paul Sulfaro was working at the counter of his father’s shoe repair business located inside Blair’s Market on Palmer Street in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts when three men entered. One man asked about a pair of shoes he said he had left for repair. When the shoes could not be found, the man asked for change for $1 so he could call home and get the ticket number.
When Paul opened the cash register, the man reached in and grabbed the money. When Paul tried to shut the drawer, the other two men pulled out handguns. As the trio started to back out of the shop, Paul’s 54-year-old father, Peter Sulfaro, emerged from a back room. The men with guns fired, and Peter was shot in the head.
The men fled. A witness said the men ran up Palmer Street and across Harrison Avenue to the nearby Orchard Park public housing development. A woman told a police officer who arrived at 4:10 p.m. that the robbers were on the second floor of 8 Bean Court in the housing project, the home of David and Lorene Bass. The woman said, “The ones you’re looking for are there.”
In the apartment, David Bass operated a “shooting gallery,” a place where people would come to buy needles and syringes to inject themselves with drugs. When police arrived, they saw the couple’s teenaged son, Antonio Daniels, in the outside hallway. When police were allowed inside, they chatted briefly with Alfred Hamilton, a family friend and future brother-in-law of Bass and his wife. When David Bass emerged from the rear, he asked the police to leave. And so then did.
The following day, as Peter Sulfaro clung to life, Boston police Detective Lewis McConkey met with Paul and showed him about five dozen photographs that he and his partner, Detective Peter O’Malley, had accumulated over the years of people that frequented the Orchard Park project. The photographs included those of Daniels and Hamilton. Paul picked both of them out of the collection and said that one was the man who grabbed the $120 in cash from the register and the other was one of the men with guns.
Meanwhile, Beverly Adie, who had been walking on the street when the three men burst out of the market, identified Hamilton as one of the men she saw running away.
On December 12, 1975, Peter Sulfaro died.
On December 13, Daniels and Hamilton were arrested on charges of murder and armed robbery.
That night, David and Lorene Bass came to the police station and said that on the afternoon of the crime, 20-year-old Raymond Gaines had arrived at the apartment, panting and out of breath. He was accompanied by Jerry Funderberg and Robert Anderson. According to David Bass, Anderson said they had robbed Blair’s. They had cash which they used to buy drugs, Bass said.
He told police that he had overheard Funderberg tell Gaines that “the next time he get [sic] in the line of fire, he’d get shot.”
Based on Bass’s statement, Daniels and Hamilton were released, and the charges were dismissed.
On February 17, 1975, about two months later, a police officer called the Sulfaro home and arranged to conduct another identification procedure. Paul would later testify that the officer identified himself as “Murphy” and told him that he had been mistaken in his identification of Daniels and Hamilton.
Detectives O’Malley and McConkey, accompanied by Detective Gerald Cotter, came to the Sulfaro home and showed him the same selection of photographs he had viewed the day after the shooting. This time, the assemblage included photographs of Gaines, Funderberg, and Anderson.
The officers did not document in writing what happened, but would later testify during a pretrial hearing and at trial that Paul identified Gaines and Funderberg as two of the three robbers.
On March 2, 1975, Detectives O’Malley, McConkey, and Cotter arrested Anderson. The following day, the officers reported that Anderson had confessed to committing the crime with Gaines and Funderberg. Two weeks later, on March 17, Lorene Bass gave a statement to police which largely tracked the statement of her husband, David, except she said the conversation about the “line of fire” occurred in the living room, while David said it was in a bedroom. That same month, Alfred Hamilton married into the Bass family, becoming David and Lorene’s brother-in-law.
On May 16, 1975, Detectives O’Malley and McConkey and fellow detective Steven DeLosh arrested Gaines in Des Moines, Iowa, where Gaines was visiting his birth mother. According to O’Malley, while on the flight to Boston, Gaines said, “I can tell you what went down because you didn’t give me my rights.” Gaines then said that “the kid would never be able to recognize him” because “I had my hat pulled down on my forehead and my teeth out.”
No written report was made of the alleged statement.
Later that day, Gaines, Funderberg, who also had been arrested, and Anderson were indicted by a Suffolk County grand jury on charges of murder and armed robbery.
In December 1975, Anderson went to trial in Suffolk County Superior Court. A pretrial motion to suppress his confession had been denied. He had claimed that he was coerced by the detectives and fed details until he made a confession, which he said was false.
At the trial, Paul Sulfaro testified about participating in at least three identification procedures. He said there was one the day after the crime, another in the police station, and the one at his home. He said he “didn’t know” how many times police showed him photographs, but said it was “several times.” He also said that in the procedure the day after the crime, he only selected one photograph, not two, and that during a subsequent procedure, he selected Anderson’s photograph. The police testified that he had selected two photographs in the first procedure and never selected Anderson.
At the time Anderson was arrested, he was carrying a .32-caliber revolver. Testimony showed that Peter Sulfaro was shot with a .22-caliber bullet.
Wilbur Billings testified for the prosecution that he had loaned the gun to Anderson for “the job” during a meeting in the Patio Lounge in Roxbury shortly before the crime. Billings, who was awaiting trial on an unrelated robbery charge, testified that when Anderson returned the gun the same day, he said, “The dude was coming at me and I had to cap him.”
On December 10, 1975, the one-year anniversary of the shooting, a jury convicted Anderson of first-degree murder and armed robbery, as well as a charge of illegal possession of a firearm. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Funderberg and Gaines went to trial in June 1976. Prior to the selection of a jury, a hearing was held on a motion by Gaines to suppress the identification by Paul Sulfaro as well as a motion to preclude introduction of the alleged statement that detectives said he made on the plane. The motions were denied.
The trial began June 10 in Suffolk County Superior Court. The detectives testified that there was no officer named Murphy on the case. The detectives also contradicted Paul regarding who he had picked and had not picked during the identification procedures. They also maintained there were only two, not several procedures.
Detective O’Malley identified Gaines and Funderberg as the men that he said Paul Sulfaro had picked during the second identification procedure.
O’Malley testified to the statement he asserted Gaines had made on the plane. Detective DeLosh testified that he overheard Gaines make the statement.
Paul Sulfaro testified and said that he could only be sure of his identification of Funderberg.
Detective Cotter testified specifically that he was the officer who had called Paul Sulfaro to set up the second identification procedure. Cotter said there was no such “Murphy” assigned to the case, and he denied telling Paul that he had made a mistake by identifying Daniels and Hamilton.
David Bass testified consistently with his initial statement that Gaines, Anderson, and Funderberg had arrived at his apartment shortly after the shooting, breathless, with cash they used to buy drugs. And he quoted Funderberg as telling Gaines that if he didn’t stay out of the line of fire, he would get shot.
Bass said that the men were in the back apartment when police arrived on the day of the shooting. He said that after the police left, he went into the back room, and Gaines was not there, apparently because he had jumped from the second floor window.
By the time of the trial, Daniels was dead. Hamilton testified that he was at the apartment when Gaines, Funderberg, and Anderson arrived out of breath. He said Anderson threw cash on a table, and Gaines picked it up.
Beverly Adie testified that she saw three men run from the scene and told the jury that she identified Hamilton as one of them.
Gaines testified and denied involvement in the crime. He said he could not have run away from the robbery because he was in Iowa on the day of the crime and because he had been shot in the leg during an altercation on December 1, 1974 at a Marvin Gaye concert at Boston Garden. Gaines said he had been released from the hospital on December 3 with crutches. He said that by the time he boarded a bus on December 8 to visit his birth mother in Iowa, he was using a cane.
Bonnie Green testified that she had raised Gaines, who was the biological son of her niece, who lived in Waterloo, Iowa. She testified that she visited him in the hospital after he was shot and that she brought him home from the hospital. She recalled him taking the bus to Iowa and said he had called her to let her know that he had arrived safely.
Gaines testified that he did not return to Boston until mid-April 1975.
Gaines’s attorney asked for a continuance to allow him to bring in Gaines’s birth mother to testify because she had not complied with a subpoena to testify. The judge denied the request.
On June 18, 1976, the jury convicted Gaines and Funderberg of first-degree murder and armed robbery. Both men were sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Gaines’s conviction was upheld in 1978 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
In 1992, Funderberg filed a motion seeking to vacate his conviction based on a 1990 statement from David Bass in which he recanted his trial testimony. He said that none of the three men came to his apartment that day and that his testimony about their conversation was false.
The motion was denied by the trial judge who ruled that Bass, who had shown up for the hearing smelling of alcohol, was drunk and unreliable. By that time, Anderson, who had changed his name to Marlo Dondegable, had signed an affidavit saying his confession was false and that he, Funderberg, and Gaines had not been involved.
Meanwhile, Gaines sought to overturn his conviction without success, both in Superior Court and in a failed petition for a federal writ of habeas corpus.
In 2018, Gaines filed a public records request seeking documents in his case. He learned for the first time that Bass had recanted in 1990. By that time, Bass was no longer available; he had died in 1993. Daniels and Hamilton also were dead, as were many of the others involved in the case. Lorene Bass had died in 2006. McConkey had died in 2013, and O’Malley had died in 2017. Funderberg had died in prison in the mid-2000’s.
Gaines wrote to Lisa Kavanaugh, the director of the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services Innocence Program, seeking help. Kavanaugh referred the case to attorney Merritt Schnipper, who spent the next seven years on the case.
In December 2020, Schnipper filed a motion for a new trial based on the recantation affidavits of Bass and Anderson as well as evidence that Detective O’Malley had committed misconduct “both prior to and years after” Gaines’s trial. Two years before the trial, O’Malley had been disciplined by the police department for failing to file a report after a patrol officer punched O’Malley’s partner.
In 1989, O’Malley had led the Boston police investigation of the shooting deaths of Carol Stuart and her unborn child. That investigation ultimately fell apart amid allegations of witness tampering, intimidation, and presentation of false testimony after evidence showed that Stuart’s husband had staged the shooting as part of an insurance fraud scheme. The U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts and the FBI conducted an inquiry and concluded that O’Malley and other officers had “[f]orc[ed] witnesses to give false statements,” “[p]ressur[ed] witnesses to give false testimony…before the Suffolk County grand jury,” and “[p]ressur[ed] witnesses to give false information that was…utilized by Peter O’Malley and others to obtain search warrants” in pursuit of an indictment of then-suspect Willie Bennett.
O’Malley was found to have "engaged in coercive, threatening conduct directed at several civilian witnesses" to elicit false incriminating statements.
In April 2021, Suffolk County Superior Court Justice Debra Squires-Lee ruled that Schnipper had raised enough questions about the case that Gaines could be released on bond. On April 28, 2021, Gaines was released with GPS monitoring and a nightly curfew. By that time, Gaines had spent 44 years, 10 months, and 10 days in prison since the day of his conviction.
On November 21, 2021, Schnipper filed an expanded motion for a new trial. The motion cited an analysis of the case by Dr. Deah Quinlivan, an assistant professor at Florida Southern College and an expert on eyewitness identification. Dr. Quinlivan, after reviewing the case, concluded that Gaines’s identification was the result of a suggestive procedure marred by multiple flaws and that Paul Sulfaro was affected by the stress of the shooting and the loss of his father. She concluded that the “police-administered February 1975 procedure was highly suggestive [and] did, in fact, direct the witness’s attention to the new suspects’ photographs.”
Dr. Quinlivan said that there was little research available at the time of Gaines’s trial about the frailty of eyewitness identification and the various factors that could result in mistaken identifications.
The motion also cited other new evidence that had not been disclosed to the defense at the time of Gaines’s trial:
An investigative note in the police file that Gaines was shot in the leg “probably about 2 months ago, was on crutches and then a cane.”
A note in the police files regarding an arrest warrant for Funderberg that was signed by police officer “Frank Murphy.”
A police report showing that O’Malley had arrested David Bass on April 8, 1976, prior to Gaines’s trial, on charges of illegal possession of needles and syringes. Those charges had been resolved with no time served after Gaines was convicted.
The motion argued that the evidence could have been used to impeach Paul Sulfaro as well as the detectives and David Bass.
“This astounding confluence of new evidence undermining all aspects of the case against Mr. Gaines is now before the Court despite the Commonwealth's decades-long nondisclosure of the Bass Affidavit and the severe consequences of that delay in the form of the deaths of important civilian and officer witnesses and the destruction of relevant court , prosecution, and private entity files,” the motion declared. “ It establishes beyond question that justice was not done when Mr . Gaines was convicted of first-degree murder and armed robbery and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.”
Justice Squires-Lee held an evidentiary hearing In July 2022. On November 30, 2022, she granted the motion and vacated Gaines’s convictions. “I conclude that Gaines did not receive a fair trial, justice may not have been done, and I ALLOW the motion for new trial,” the ruling said.
Justice Squires-Lee credited the testimony of Dr. Quinlivan as well as testimony from Gaines’s trial defense attorney that he would have used the undisclosed evidence to attack the credibility of the detectives and the identification, as well as David Bass.
“I conclude that, informed by the new scientific evidence regarding the suggestiveness inherent in Paul' s identification of Gaines in the second photographic array, the procedure was the product of an unnecessarily suggestive police procedure performed without good cause and, as a result, Gaines was deprived of his due process rights,” the judge ruled.
Regarding O’Malley, the judge said, “In the context of the evidence before me, O'Malley’s misconduct both prior to and years after the trial is highly probative of how he conducted police investigations. Indeed, the repetitive nature alone indicates strong propensity.”
The prosecution appealed the ruling. In August 2024, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the new trial order in a 40-page ruling.
“Given the newly discovered research findings that shed light on the flaws in the eyewitness identification procedure, as well as the Commonwealth’s failure to provide exculpatory evidence, we agree with [Justice Squires-Lee] that ‘justice may not have been done’ in this case,” the court concluded.
On October 16, 2025, the prosecution dismissed the charges against Gaines.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 10-24-2025
Last Update Date: 10-24-2025
