Boston man sentenced for killing young woman in 1988, leaving her body in a basement well

BOSTON (TCN) -- A 61-year-old man will spend the rest of his life in prison for strangling a 21-year-old woman to death and leaving her body in a basement over 35 years ago.

The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office announced Tuesday, July 23, that a judge sentenced Carl Richard Vega, who also goes by the alias Ricardo Mazzarino, to life without parole after he was found guilty last month of the first-degree murder of Judy Chamberlain.

According to the district attorney’s office, on July 28, 1988, a maintenance worker discovered Chamberlain’s body inside a well in the basement of a building. The autopsy showed she was sexually assaulted not long before her death. Detectives submitted a DNA sample to the Combined DNA Indexing System (CODIS) for assistance in identifying a suspect, but there was no match.

In 2011, the DNA sample returned a match to Vega. He was ordered to send in DNA samples because he was convicted of raping a 72-year-old woman in 1987. A judge sentenced him in 1990 to 19.5 to 20 years in prison, but as his sentence drew closer to the end, prosecutors fought to keep Vega behind bars as part of the state’s sexually dangerous person statute.

Prosecutors, however, did not have enough proof to link Vega to Chamberlain’s killing, so the case remained open for another 10 years as detectives continued to investigate.

New evidence came forward during the investigation that Vega previously worked as a flooring subcontractor in the same building where Chamberlain’s body was found. A grand jury returned an indictment against Vega on Aug. 30, 2021.

Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden said after the sentencing, "Anyone in the courtroom today could feel the anguish and desolation expressed by Judy’s loved ones after so many years of questions without answers. Today they finally had the opportunity to see someone held accountable for the loss of the person they so clearly love and so clearly miss."

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