Crime & Safety

Twenty Years Later, Justice at Last for Lexington Murder Victim

In Middlesex Superior Court on Tuesday, July 3, Craig Conkey was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to the previously unsolved 1992 murder of Lexington resident Kathleen Dempsey.

 

Her family entered the courtroom and exchanged handshakes and hugs with Lexington Police past and present. “I’m glad we got here,” one of them said.

It was just before noon and just shy of 143 months after the day they lost their daughter, sister and friend. At last, they were here, in Middlesex Superior Court, for a bit of belated justice in the 1992 murder of Kathleen Dempsey.

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Craig Conkey, the man authorities say , on Tuesday pleaded guilty to those acts, committed in the early morning hours of Aug. 23, 1992. with the eligibility of parole after 15 years.

Closure didn't come when Conkey, now a twice-convicted killer, left Courtroom 430 shackled with his second life sentence, Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone said afterwards. A modicum of justice, he said, is what authorities hope was achieved on this day.

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And that much was clear when Evelyn Tobin, the mother of Kathleen Dempsey, took the stand to deliver her victim impact statement. Still obviously livid that she’s already outlived her daughter by two decades, Tobin refused to sit in the same chair Conkey had sat in.

“I struggled with whether or not to make a statement. I didn’t know if I wanted to give this evil murderer the satisfaction of knowing anything about Kathy, or what he did to our family,” said Tobin. “This cowardly psychopath entered her house in the dead of night and took her life for no other reason than the thrill of it.”

Aug. 23, 1992 – July 3, 2012

By all accounts, they were two very different people going in two very different directions, Kathleen Dempsey and Craig Conkey.

She was a popular freelance graphic designer with a promising future and plans of pursuing her Master’s degree at Lesley University and becoming an art teacher and the best aunt she could be. He was an Army veteran who did a stint in Germany and bounced around to various jobs after his honorable discharge.

But both of them, somehow, wound up in Lexington. And on Aug. 23, 1992, their paths crossed in a way that would forever alter dozens of lives.

Suspended from his job flipping burgers at McDonald’s in Bedford, Conkey had taken to burglarizing local homes to scrounge up money to buy food and pay his rent.

Kathleen Dempsey’s basement apartment was not her killer’s first target on the night of her murder. In fact, he told investigators he tried to burgle a different residence prior to arriving at her home, according to evidence presented by Assistant District Attorney Michael Fabbri, the prosecutor for the case.

When he did enter Dempsey’s home, Conkey reportedly was caught off guard when he heard her yell out.  “Don’t hurt me,” she said. “Just go. I can’t see you.”

But that’s not what happened. He didn’t go. He set upon her and brutally stabbed her 17 times in her neck, chest and back.  And then he left her home, taking only her purse, which was found in the woods behind the house in the spring of 1995.

Dempsey didn’t immediately succumb to her wounds, however. She managed to call 911, but dispatch bungled the call and her cries for help went unanswered for hours. At 10:46 a.m., responders found her lying dead on her bedroom floor, covered in blood and still clutching the telephone.

The initial investigation into Dempsey’s death focused on an ex-boyfriend and expanded outward from there. Conkey only came into focus after the 1994 murder of another Lexington woman, 49-year-old Mary Lou Sale. 

As Conkey was in and out of court appealing guilty verdicts in the Sale case, investigators and Dempsey’s family members doggedly pursued justice for the woman with the promising life cut short.

In 2009, Conkey pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and one count of armed burglary in the Sale case was sentenced to life in prison at MCI Cedar Junction. By mid-2010, as investigators mounted more forensic evidence in the Dempsey murder, the convicted killer with the pencil-thin moustache and mousy voice started talking.

New investigative techniques and Conkey’s own words—reportedly compelled by a desire to get out of Cedar Junction and belief the Apocalypse is imminent—led to a December 2011 indictment on a first-degree murder charge in the Dempsey slaying. 

Watch the videos above for reactions to the plea and sentencing from from and .

At his arraignment in January of this year, but later moved to change his plea, prompting his attorney, Bernard Grossberg, to enlist a doctor to evaluate his client, who was .

Twice since March 30 Dr. Prudence Baxter has pronounced . And twice the judge has found the same. In court on Tuesday, Grossberg also said he believed his client competent to plead guilty to his crime.

Although his sentence, which runs concurrent to the life sentence for Sale’s murder, includes the eligibility for parole after 15 years, Conkey said he believes he’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars. 

“In theory, I’ll see the Parole Board,” Conkey told the judge, “But they’ll never parole someone like me.”

Leone, the district attorney, also said he’s “extremely confident” Conkey will never again see the light of day –although it’s unclear which prison’s walls he’ll be behind.

For Evelyn Tobin, however, life in prison is not the only punishment she envisions for Conkey for taking the life of Kathleen Dempsey. During her impact statement, Tobin dressed down her daughter’s murderer, and his fear of the Apocalypse.

“I have news for him,” Tobin, the founder of the Garden of Peace memorial in Boston, said from the stand. “Kathy is in Heaven, and there is no way he’s going to join her there. God is just, and this sinner is going to feel His vengeance.”


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