Convicted killer charged with two more cold-case homicides in Lowell and Cambridge

A convicted killer and former Lowell resident was indicted Tuesday for allegedly killing two more people in Massachusetts in 2010 and 2012. 

Kevin Lino, 38, stands accused of beating 54-year-old Gary Melanson to death with an aluminum baseball bat and of intentionally giving a fatal heroin dose to 30-year-old Douglas Leon Clarke, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan announced at a press conference Tuesday. 

Lino is already serving a life sentence in Suffolk County for beating a man to death in Boston. Concurrently, he is serving a 40-year sentence for the torture and murder of a homeless man in Montana, Ryan said. 

Melanson’s body was found sprawled over a collapsed tent under the Rogers Street Bridge in Lowell in November 2010. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner found that he died of blunt impact injuries and that the manner of his death was “undetermined,” Ryan said. 

According to prosecutors, Melanson and Lino were living in a homeless encampment under the bridge at the time. Lino allegedly grew angry with Melanson for lighting fires to keep warm, concerned that the fires would attract unwanted attention from police and firefighters. When Melanson ignored Lino’s requests to stop lighting fires, Lino allegedly rushed him with a metal baseball bat and struck him repeatedly. 

Clarke’s body was found in Cambridge on the banks of the Charles River in August 2012 near the area of 975 Memorial Drive. Investigators found that his blood contained a substantial concentration of morphine, codeine, ethanol, and the anticonvulsant medication gabapentin, Ryan said. His death was determined to be an accidental overdose at the time. 

Lino and Clarke were both living with a group of homeless people near Harvard Square in 2012. Lino decided to “drive out heroin-using members of the group, including by assaulting many of them throughout the day,” prosecutors said. Lino and Clarke had a confrontation, leading Lino to “punish” Clarke by allegedly giving him an intentionally fatal dose of heroin, sometimes referred to as a “hot shot.”

Authorities learned about Lino’s alleged involvement in the deaths of Melanson and Clarke in 2018 on an unrelated investigation, Ryan said. That year, Lino was charged with murder for killing Normand Varieur, a homeless man, in Charlestown’s Paul Revere Park. He was convicted of beating Varieur to death. 

Lino’s sentence out of Montana is related to the 2014 death of Gilbert Berry, a homeless man who was living in a camp under the Reserve Street Bridge in Missoula. Prosecutors alleged that Lino carved gang symbols into Berry’s body, stuffed lit cigarettes up his nose, shot him in the head, and then left his body in the Clark Fork River, according to the Missoulian, a local newspaper. He was wanted by the FBI for his involvement in the incident. 

Lino will be arraigned in Middlesex Superior Court on the two new counts of first-degree murder in the coming weeks. 

“These allegations demonstrate a violent pattern of behavior in which the defendant is alleged to have targeted and victimized some of the most vulnerable members of our communities. These cases, not initially ruled by the Medical Examiner to be homicides, left the families and friends of Mr. Melanson and Mr. Clarke with little or incorrect information about what had happened to them,” Ryan said in a statement. 

“When I created the Cold Case Unit, I made a commitment to re-examining existing evidence and to exhausting every possible option to bring answers to families. In this case, through painstaking investigation and the development of new evidence, we were able to uncover the truth behind the deaths of Gary Melanson and Douglas Leon Clarke,” she said. 

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