'Trial 4': Who is Rosa Sanchez? Key witness who helped put Sean Ellis in jail was related to corrupt officer
In Netflix's latest docuseries, we meet Sean Ellis who was just 19 years old in 1993 when he was convicted of the murder of Boston Police Department's Detective John Mulligan who had been with BPD for 17 years. The eight-part docuseries will feature Sean Ellis as he faces his fourth trial — 25 years after he was first tried in 1995 — as he may end up going back to prison. Ellis had been previously sentenced to life and was released when new evidence came to light.
Ellis was put on trial three times within the space of a year, and now faces his fourth trial – which could see him back in prison for life. After his first three trials for armed robbery and first-degree murder, Ellis, aged 19 at the time, was found guilty in 1995 and sentenced to life. His first two trials resulted in a hung jury. In 2015, Ellis was freed from jail on bail, after a judge ordered a new trial saying evidence about how the case had been handled had been withheld from the defense.
For Sean Ellis's defense team, it was clear from the start that the Boston Police Department's 65-member team in charge of Mulligan's murder was only looking for a scapegoat. Ellis's defense attorney, Rosemary Scapicchio, believed that Mulligan's girlfriend at the time, Mary Shopov, could have been that scapegoat had Ellis not come into the picture. Even with Ellis in their sights, the officers resorted to questionable measures to pin their suspicions on the young Black man.
For instance, there was no concrete physical evidence supporting the claim that Ellis was involved in Mulligan's murder. The prosecution's case rested on the testimony of a key witness: a 19-year-old Hispanic woman called Rosa Sanchez. Sanchez had visited the Walgreens (outside of which Mulligan was killed) on the night of the murder to buy soap — there was a receipt to prove this. Sanchez claimed she saw a Black man crouched outside Mulligan's car when she went in, and that she saw two Black men on the phone nearby when she came out. Sanchez was then called into to identify who the Black man she saw could have been — this was after Ellis was arrested. But here's the problem: Rosa Sanchez was related to Detective Kenneth Acerra, one of Mulligan's colleagues who was exposed in by The Boston Globe's investigative report a few years after Mulligan's murder. Acerra was then indicted and he pled guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Back to Rosa Sanchez being asked to identify the suspect: when she was called in by the homicide detective, she was also accompanied by Acerra — who was dating her aunt, Lucy DelValle, with whom he lived and had a child — and another cop (later outed as being corrupt), Walter Robinson. When she was first presented with an array of photos of Black men, she first pointed out to a man saying he had been stalking her. Rather than presenting her with another array, the officer just covered the alleged stalker's face and pressured her to pick someone from the panel. Scapicchio believes that this would have led Sanchez to be sure that the suspect was definitely in the array, therefore, biasing her decision. Even so, Sanchez still picked out the wrong man. Later, the homicide detective left Sanchez alone with Acerra and Robinson — who, being in the narcotics division had no business being involved with the murder investigation — for a few minutes, after which she immediately picked Ellis out of the panel. Sanchez's testimony would then lead to Ellis's conviction.
'Trial 4' is now streaming on Netflix.