The 15 jurors in the trial of Michael McCarthy, the Dorchester man accused of killing his girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter and dumping her body in the water, visited key locations associated with the case Thursday.
Jurors went to five sites, including Deer Island, where the body of Bella Bond washed up in June 2015.
Investigators named the girl “Baby Doe’’ after a woman walking her dog found her body on Winthrop Beach. She had been wrapped in a trash bag, a grisly discovery that launched an international search for her identity and the cause of her death. The condition of her body made it impossible for the state medical examiner’s office to determine precisely how she died.
She remained a mystery until September 2015, when a friend of McCarthy’s contacted authorities and identified Baby Doe as Bella Bond. The friend, Michael Sprinsky, took the stand Wednesday and described the final weeks of the child’s life. He also testified about texts he sent McCarthy asking him why he killed the child.
McCarthy’s lawyer, Jonathan Shapiro, said in his opening statements that the real killer is Bella’s mother, Rachelle Bond.
Bond has pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of being an accessory after the fact and is expected to testify against McCarthy.
Prosecutors say that after McCarthy killed Bella Bond, he and Rachelle Bond stored her remains in the refrigerator of their Dorchester apartment. Later, they placed her in a trash bag, stuffed the body in a duffel bag and loaded it with weights taken from a Quincy plumbing business owned by McCarthy’s father. Prosecutors say the couple eventually threw the bag into the water near Boston’s Seaport District.
Jurors visited McCarthy’s father’s plumbing shop in Quincy, the Black Falcon Terminal in the Seaport District, where dive teams eventually found the weights and duffel bag, and another location in South Boston.
They also visited Rachelle Bond’s former apartment on Maxwell Street in Dorchester, where prosecutors said Bella was killed.
Sprinsky is scheduled to return to the stand Friday when McCarthy’s lawyer, Jonathan Shapiro, will resume his cross-examination.
Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @globemcramer.
