Murder Victim’s Parents Bitter After Man’s Retrial Is Ordered

Every year on her daughter’s birthday, Joanne Arruda calls the man convicted of murdering her child and leaves the same message of reminder: Mary Lou is urgently trying to reach him.

Now that James M. Kater has won the right to a third trial on charges of murdering the girl, Arruda is bitter.

“She still stays in St. Joseph’s Cemetery,” she said. “Nobody overturns that verdict.”

Kater was twice convicted of the 1978 kidnaping and killing of Mary Lou, a 15-year-old high school cheerleader.

But earlier this month, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court granted him a new trial, deciding that hypnotically aided testimony was wrongly admitted in the second trial.

“I was shocked that they overturned it,” said Arruda, 45. “These are five intelligent, so-called judges sitting up there and now they come back with an awful, stupid decision.”

Mary Lou was last seen alive riding her bicycle near her home on Sept. 8, 1978.

Her body was found a month later, tied to a tree in Freetown State Forest. Police said she choked to death on a rope tied around her neck.

Arruda said her husband, Adrian, 46, a truck driver, was too upset to discuss the case, but she affirmed that they were both as determined now as they were 12 years ago to fight for Kater’s conviction.

“I spent seven years in and out of court. I could have been a lawyer already,” she said.

Kater, 44, who was working a Brockton doughnut shop before his arrest, has been serving life imprisonment without parole in a federal prison at Lompoc, Calif., where he was moved for his safety because inmates often turn on fellow prisoners convicted of harming children.

Witnesses interviewed after the girl’s disappearance remembered a green car and driver in the area where Mary Lou disappeared. Police then hypnotized several witnesses and questioned them further.

In Kater’s first successful appeal, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 1983 that hypnotically aided testimony could not be used to convict Kater. But it said the witnesses could testify at a second trial about anything they remembered before hypnosis.

Kater was then tried again and convicted a second time of first-degree murder and kidnaping. But the high court said the prosecutor failed to show that the witness identifications were not tainted by the hypnosis and ruled the trial judge erred in admitting the evidence.

The high court left some doors open for prosecutors, saying there was evidence apart from the eyewitness identifications of the defendant that the state could introduce.