An 88-year-old transgender Big Apple serial killer will rot behind bars for the rest of their days after savagely hacking up a gal pal and later cruising around with her severed arm in an electric wheelchair.
Harvey Marcelin, who identifies as a transgender woman, was sentenced to life without parole on Wednesday after being convicted of first-degree murder and other charges in the gruesome March 2022 slaying of 68-year-old Susan Leyden, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.
“The brutality of this shocking crime is almost beyond words,” District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said.
“This defendant committed a horrific murder that took Susan Leyden’s life and inflicted unimaginable pain on her family and loved ones. He must be locked away, and today’s sentence ensures that he will never be able to hurt anyone else again.”
Prosecutors said the twisted octogenarian bludgeoned Leyden, a down-on-her-luck jeweler, to death and used a reciprocating saw to dismember her body at Marcelin’s Cypress Hills apartment.
She was last seen on surveillance footage entering Marcelin’s Pennsylvania Avenue apartment on Feb. 27, 2022, wheeling a “multi-colored bag with a flower decal on it,” according to the criminal complaint.
Marcelin stuffed the hacked-up remains into a black garbage bag and dumped Leyden’s torso on a street corner inside her floral shopping cart three days later. The twice-convicted killer then rolled over to a 99-cent store – with part of the victim’s severed leg stashed inside an electric wheelchair.
An e-bike rider found the torso near the corner of Pennsylvania and Atlantic Avenues on March 3 and alerted police, who found the victim’s thighs, hand, arm and head in the garbage bag inside Marcelin’s apartment, prosecutors said.
One of the victim’s legs was later found near a garbage can about three blocks away, while her right leg, left arm and left hand were never recovered.
Officials said the pair lived in the same Bronx homeless shelter in 2019 but their relationship was unclear.
In addition to the murder charge, a jury also found Marcelin guilty of tampering with physical evidence and concealment of a human corpse last month.
The convicted octogenarian has spent more than 50 years in state prison on murder and manslaughter convictions tied to two separate killings of ex-girlfriends dating back to 1963, state prison records show.
Marcelin was released on parole in late 2019 after vowing to stay out of trouble.