Amy Lord and Kayleigh Ballantyne

Amy Lord

Amy Beth Lord was born on December 21, 1988, to Dennis and Cynthia in Springfield, Massachusetts.  The family moved to Wilbraham where she was raised.  Amy had two sisters, Kimberly and Carly, who were all very close.  She lived in Wilbraham most of her life and was a member of the Dance Company since the age of two.  Amy was also a member of St. Cecelia’s Church and of the NHS.  She graduated in 2007 from Minnechaug Regional High School where she was the captain of the Falcons Cheerleading Championship team.  She went to college at Bentley University and graduated in 2011 with a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing & Liberal Studies.  

After graduation, Amy moved to Boston for her job at Genuine Interactive where she worked for two years as an Online Marketing Specialist.  Amy had many friends and they would go by “The Gypsies” or “The Bentley Girls.”  Amy had a boyfriend named Mike Cassell who also worked at Genuine Interactive but on a separate floor.  

What Happened?

At 4:23 am on Tuesday, July 23, 2013, Edwin Alemany hit Alexandra Cruz in the jaw while she was walking to work at a Dunkin Donuts in South Boston.  She briefly went unconscious and he dragged her into a parking lot.  He then choked her and said that if she screamed, he was going to kill her.  Alexandra pleaded with Alemany to stop and he told her, “Bitch, just know that you’re going to die today.”  Alemany turned away from Alexandra and she ran across the street.  He told her, “I fucked up,” and that he had been looking for someone else.  He threw her belongings at her and told her not to call the police because he knew where she worked.  Alexandra ran to work and about an hour later, an officer arrived.

Shortly after the attack on Alexandra, Alemany attacked Amy Lord in the vestibule of her apartment building at 5:38 am.  Amy was supposed to meet her friend and coworker, Christina Kelleher, to go to the gym before work that morning, but Amy never showed up.  They were supposed to meet on the bus just before six that morning.  It had never happened before, but Christina wasn’t worried and just assumed that Amy had slept in and she would see her at work. 

When Christina arrived at Genuine Interactive that morning, she began to grow worried when she didn’t see Amy at her desk, which was in the same area as hers.  No one else in the office knew where Amy was, either.  Amy’s boyfriend, Mike Cassell, had asked Christina to have Amy message him, but she told him that Amy wasn’t there.  Mike thought it was weird that she wasn’t there and both Christina and Mike could not get in touch with Amy when trying to reach her.  

It was 10:00 am and Amy still hadn’t made it to the office and everyone was concerned because Amy was never late.  After trying to reach Amy several times, Christina and Mike decided to call Amy’s parents who lived about an hour and a half away.  But they hadn’t heard from Amy either.  At 11:30 am, Amy’s manager called the police.

After learning about Amy and that she was happy with her life and didn’t have a reason to leave on her own, a missing persons report was filed right away.  The police asked her parents to meet them at her apartment in South Boston at 124 Dorchester Street.  The police searched Amy’s apartment for any signs of a struggle, but they found nothing there that they could go on.  Amy’s parents confirmed with the police that she drove a black Jeep Cherokee and upon hearing this, the police were reminded of a call they received earlier that morning about a car fire. 

At about 8:37 that morning, a car fire was reported in South Boston.  The car had been fully engulfed in flames when the fire department arrived.  They put out the fire and had it towed for further investigation.  At this time, Amy had not yet been reported missing so they knew nothing about her disappearance and the likely connection.  However, the police confirmed shortly after that the license plate on the burnt vehicle belonged to Amy Lord. 

The police went back to the station and began checking Amy’s bank records and found five different ATM transactions from that morning starting at 6:03.  In total, just under $1,000 was taken out of her account.  The first transaction was at Mount Washington Bank, just down the road from her apartment on Dorchester Street.  It was followed by Metro Credit Union, Bank of America, Sovereign Bank, and Citizen’s Bank.  

Investigators contacted each bank and found that all five had surveillance cameras at the ATMs.  While the police are working with the banks for the footage, they received a call around 4:00 pm from a cyclist who had found a body at the Stoney Brook Reservation in Hyde Park.  The body was of a young woman who had been stabbed and strangled to death.  She was found wearing no clothes and had been stabbed over forty times.  She was found on an isolated path in a wooded area.  They were sure it was Amy based on the photos they had of her, but there was no ID on the body.  Once confirmed that it was Amy, detectives delivered the news to Amy’s family that she had been murdered. 

The Investigation Continues

Amy’s case was no longer a missing person but a homicide and the police were hoping that the surveillance videos from the banks would get them some leads.  The first footage to arrive was from the Bank of America from 6:35 am.  Amy appears at the ATM alone in workout clothes and appears to be unhurt.  She uses her ATM card and then leaves.  

Next, they receive the Citizen’s Bank footage from 6:47 am.  The ATM is located in a vestibule and the police see her car outside.  Amy walks in and does a normal withdrawal, and again, she is alone and appears as if she is not hurt.  However, when the police rewind the video and watch it again, they see that she got back in her vehicle on the passenger side and are now wondering who was driving the car.

The third video they received is from Sovereign Bank at 6:40 am.  They see Amy and see that she has an injury to her face on her eyes and nose and it was clear that she had been assaulted.  They see that she looks terrified, but she doesn’t try to run and gets back in her vehicle.  At this point, the police ask Amy’s family if they knew of anyone that had a problem with Amy, but there was no one that anyone could think of. 

Then they review the footage from Metro Credit Union from 6:10 am, half an hour prior to being at Sovereign Bank.  This time, the footage is on the driver’s side of the vehicle.  They see Amy lean over the driver to use the ATM and they see the driver in the front seat, but they stay out of the camera’s view.  Again they see that Amy’s left eye is swollen.  Then they see a flash and can see that the driver is a male, however, they can’t make out any more than that as he had his face covered.

Investigators are starting to put a timeline together when they get the footage from the first ATM stop at Mount Washington Bank.  This bank was about a mile from Amy’s apartment and they arrived at 6:03.  The car pulls up, but the driver sees that there is a camera so he backed up, covered his face, and then pulled back up to the ATM.  When Amy leans over to use the ATM, the police can see that Amy had already been beaten.  They see the driver had a t-shirt over his face and had his hat brim down.  At one point, he adjusted his hat and they saw that he had a shaved head.  When she is finished with the transaction, the driver backs out and heads east. 

Now that the police had established a timeline, they knew that Amy had been abducted prior to 6:03 am and began looking for cameras near her apartment.  There were no cameras on her building, but there was one across the street to the right facing the parking lot on a building across the street.  They retrieve this footage and see a person walk by the door of Amy’s apartment, stop and when the door opens, they push through and enter the building pushing Amy back inside.  The door closes and there’s about fifteen minutes where the person is in the hallway and the police have no way of knowing what happened inside.  Then two people come out and head in the opposite direction and out of view to where Amy’s car was parked at about 5:52 am.  

The police now know that Amy was abducted, her car was burned, and her body was found at Hyde Park.  They know that the suspect had to drive five miles to Hyde Park and then back to Southie where her car was found burning.  They began looking for gas stations where he could have bought gas to start the fire.  They checked all intersections along the route, but there were hundreds.  They knew that Amy had a black SUV, but again, there were a lot of black SUVs.  As they were looking through intersection footage, though, they remembered that Amy had a sticker on her rear window.  They began focusing on Hyde Park and Logan Way and saw Amy’s Jeep on Washington Street.  

A police officer went to the gas station at that intersection to get the surveillance video but found that the system was broken.  The officer saw that there was a liquor store across the street that had cameras so he went over and asked to see any footage they had from that day.  The officer watched the footage and saw Amy’s Jeep pull up at 8:00 am.  He knew it was Amy’s because of the Shamrock sticker located on the back window.  He sees the driver get out of the vehicle, but it was too far away for him to make out who it could be.  The driver then walks away from the car and walks across the street where he greets someone that he knows.  Eventually, they were able to speak with the man he met with, and the man driving the car was identified as Edwin Alemany.  

As this officer was reviewing the liquor store footage, police received a call just after midnight.  It was a call about a stabbing at 57 Gate Street in South Boston, just a short distance from Amy’s apartment.  The police were immediately worried that it was the same person.  

Detectives Paul McLaughlin and Bobby Flynn were in the entryway of Amy’s apartment processing the scene at her front door area.  Earlier that day, Detective McLaughlin had pulled a photo from arrest records based on the description that Alexandra had given them early that morning.  He showed it to Detective Flynn to let him know that it could potentially be their guy.  As they were looking at the photo, they received a call that there was a stabbing at 57 Gate Street, just 500 yards away.  The victim of this attack was 21-year-old, Kayleigh Ballantyne.

Kayleigh Ballantyne

Kayleigh Ballantyne grew up in Gorham, Maine, with her parents and two older brothers.  Being the youngest and the only girl, she was always the easy target for her brothers and because of this, she learned how to stick up for herself.  Her mom, Kim, said that as a child, Kayleigh always had that spirit and there wasn’t anybody who was going to take advantage of her.  Kayleigh and both of her brothers grew up playing sports.  

In 2003, when Kayleigh was eleven, she had her first near-death experience.  She had been lowering a basketball backboard when it hit her in the head and she was in a coma for three weeks.  Kayleigh persevered through this experience and went on to play Division 1 field hockey at Bryant University in Rhode Island.

The summer before her senior year of college, Kayleigh took an unpaid internship in Boston.  She moved into an apartment in Southie with her friends from college that had graduated from Bryant before her.  Because the internship was unpaid, she got a hostessing job on the other side of Boston from where she lived.  She would take the T to and from work and she typically worked the night shift from around 5:00 pm until sometime between eleven and midnight.  The night of July 23, 2013, was just like any other night for Kayleigh.  She took the T home from the restaurant and got off in Southie at a station that was about a mile walk from her apartment.  Kayleigh explained that Southie is a young, vibrant area of Boston and is well-lit with people typically out and about.  She had her headphones in, like anyone should be able to do, and was making her way to her apartment. 

As she was getting near her apartment, she noticed a man walking on the opposite side of the street as she was.  The side the man was on was the side her apartment was on where she would eventually need to be.  He was walking in the opposite direction she was and they got to the crosswalk at the same time.  Kayleigh crossed the street to her apartment and then saw the man start to cross the street, but then he stepped back.  She remembers him watching her for about five seconds then continued to cross the street.  She got to her apartment and went to type in the code to get in and she initially mistyped it, but got it right on the second try.  When speaking with Kayleigh, she said that she believes that she subconsciously knew something was wrong and that’s why she had punched the code in incorrectly. 

Once Kayleigh opened the door, the man was right behind her.  He put his hand on her left shoulder and pushed her through the door and in his right hand, had a knife up to her head.  Kayleigh says that she remembers thinking that this was not happening, she was not going to die and she was “going to fuck this guy up.”  He pushed her to the ground in the foyer and her back was on the first few steps leading upstairs and her apartment was straight ahead of them on the first floor.  He was straddling her and she had been wearing a crossbody purse and she told him that he could take her money, her phone, whatever he wanted and said, “Just don’t kill me.”  He didn’t look up, he didn’t say anything, he just began stabbing her. 

Kayleigh crossed her left arm over her chest to protect her organs.  She immediately started to fight back.  She was kicking him and trying to hit him with her right arm, and she says that she was in the best shape of her life at the time and was able to fight hard.  While she was kicking him, she ended up kicking the hand that he had the knife in and he stabbed himself.   She says that it wasn’t a conscious thought or thing to do, she was just kicking and fighting as hard as she could and at the time, didn’t know that he had stabbed himself.  

Her attacker then fell back and simply…left.  When he left, Kayleigh slammed the door behind him so he couldn’t get back in.  She recalls that she didn’t know how many times she had been stabbed and that she really didn’t feel it while it was happening.  She tried to stand up, but she collapsed and her chest was tight.  She was thinking, was it her adrenaline, was she dying, and knew she needed to get into her apartment.  

Kayleigh said that for some reason the key to her apartment was in her pocket, which made it much easier for her, so she crawled to her apartment door, unlocked it, and went inside.  Once inside, she crawled to her first roommate’s room and told her that she had just gotten stabbed and that she needed her to get towels, paper towels, or anything to suture the wounds and then to call 911.  Kayleigh recalls telling her roommate that she wanted her to call her other roommate and her dad to let them know what happened, but her roommate told her, we need to get you an ambulance.  

Kayleigh described that she had her back up against one wall and her feet up against the other, pushing her feet into the wall because she was starting to feel like she was going to die.  Her chest was really heavy, she couldn’t breathe fast or breathe deeply.  Her attacker had stabbed her in her left torso, which caused her left lung to collapse.  She had also been stabbed below her left breast about half an inch from her heart.  She had also been stabbed twice in her face and been slashed on her neck.  In total, Kayleigh had been stabbed nine times.  

Because Kayleigh’s apartment was only about a block away from Amy’s apartment, the officers that were there at the time of the call made it to Kayleigh very quickly.  The ambulance also arrived within five minutes of the call.  Before being taken to the hospital, she was asked to give a description of her attacker.  She told the officers that the man had shorts on, a t-shirt, a flat-brim hat low on his face, had a buzzcut, and looked Hispanic.  

As the detectives were at Kayleigh’s apartment and she was on her way to Tufts, they noticed a blood trail leading away from her apartment.  They followed the trail, a bit confused, because Kayleigh hadn’t left her apartment building so it couldn’t have been from her, and believed this was their suspect’s blood.  As they followed the trail, they were also looking for any surveillance cameras that they could use to identify their suspect.  Then the trail of blood ended pretty abruptly.  They took samples of blood to be tested, but they also found that there was a camera on the building where the trail had ended.  

Luckily, the camera worked and it recorded a man with something, that was later identified as his shirt, wrapped around his hand on Telegraph Street.  The police enlisted the help of John Green, a Forensic Video Expert, to look at the man’s exposed tattoos after having removed his shirt.  Green was able to identify praying hands with rosary beads and a Boston Red Sox ‘B’ with the area code 617 below it.

Detective Flynn called Kim, Kayleigh’s mother, to inform her that her daughter had been stabbed.  Kim was at her parent’s summer home and her husband, Mike, had gotten up to go to the bathroom when her phone rang.  Kim missed the call, but when she saw the 617 number, she knew it was about Kayleigh and had a terrible feeling.  She was thinking, “Something bad has happened.  I know something bad has happened.”  She called the number back and heard, “Your daughter’s been stabbed.” 

Kim was immediately hysterical and was told by Detective Flynn that someone would call her back with more details.  Kim and Mike got in the car and drove the three hours to Boston immediately.  Kim kept thinking that she didn’t know how badly Kayleigh was hurt and wondered if her daughter was going to live through this.  Kim said that she had so many strange thoughts going through her head – wondering if the man was a stalker and was worried that if he knew that she hadn’t died, would he come after her in the hospital? 

While Kayleigh was being worked on, Detective Flynn got a call saying that they believed her attacker was also at the same hospital seeking treatment for the stab wound in his hand.  One of the EMTs that had been with Kayleigh when she gave the description to the police had seen him and thought he looked like the description she had given.  The EMT told the detectives and once he had been brought into his own room, detectives went to question him.  

When Detective Flynn found this out, he went into Kayleigh’s room and introduced himself.  Kayleigh grabbed his arm and he said, “I’m telling you, if I didn’t know it was Kayleigh Ballantyne, I would’ve said it was Haystack Calhoun that grabbed me because she had a death grip on me.”  (Haystack Calhoun is a professional American arm wrestler.) Kayleigh asked Detective Flynn if her attacker was there because she had overheard someone say that they needed to call the cops because the guy who had done this to her was there.  

When interviewing the man, who was identified as Edwin Alemany, he initially denied any involvement in Kayleigh’s attack claiming memory loss during the time of the attack.  But had no problems remembering things prior to… BOLD MOVE, COTTON, LET’S SEE IF IT PAYS OFF.  However, the detectives were able to use his tattoos to positively ID him as the man in the surveillance footage.  At this point, Edwin Alemany was arrested for Kayleigh’s attack but did not yet have enough evidence to link him to Amy’s murder.  

Shortly after his arrest, they were able to forensically match his blood to both Amy and Kayleigh.  He had gone home and changed his clothes after murdering Amy, however, he hadn’t changed his shoes.  His shoes had blood from both Amy and Kayleigh on them, finally linking him to both attacks.  His blood was also on Kayleigh’s clothes from when she had kicked his hand and he in turn stabbed himself.  

Kayleigh’s mom got to the hospital at about 5:00 am and immediately hugged her daughter and told her that it was going to be okay.  Kim said in an interview on Impact of Murder, “You don’t understand why or how somebody could do this to your child.” 

The detectives decided not to tell Kayleigh about Amy for 3-4 days.  Kayleigh saw a few things on the news, though, and finally asked Detective Flynn about Amy.  When she was told about what had happened she said, “I went from feeling strong and grateful and lucky that I had fought back to, you know, feeling like I didn’t deserve any feeling because she doesn’t get that opportunity.” 

Additional surveillance videos found of Alemany showed that he used Amy’s money to buy a cell phone and beer.  They also saw him hanging out with friends at a restaurant.  All of this was between the time he had murdered Amy and stabbed Kayleigh.  Before taking a taxi to the hospital, there is also footage of him in a gas station where he told the attendant that someone had stabbed him.  

The Arraignment/Trial

Alemany was charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping, armed carjacking, two counts of armed robbery, two counts of armed robbery while being masked, stealing by confining, arson of a motor vehicle, and other assault-related offenses.  It was then found that he had been indicted for three attacks on other young women in Boston in September 2012 and July 2013.  After a review of the September 2012 case, Detective Jerome Hall-Brewster was demoted to a patrolman because they had found that he had failed to move forward in a sexual assault case where Edwin Alemany had been the prime suspect.  There had been probable cause to arrest him after the woman who had been attacked had identified him by giving the police a wallet with his ID inside.  Hall-Brewster had been investigated by internal affairs several times and has had at least ten complaints filed against him. 

Kim said that at Alemany’s arraignment, they hadn’t yet met the Lord family, but they had kept turning around to look at Kayleigh and she said that she felt just sick about them being there and what they were living through.  She has said many times, “I could be in Cindy Lord’s shoes very easily.  She said that Kayleigh lived through this and she feels incredibly sad that their daughter didn’t.  

Edwin Alemany’s trial didn’t take place until 2015, one year and ten months after the attacks.  The trial lasted fourteen days and Kayleigh was required to testify.  Kayleigh said that at the trial she felt really confident and excited about telling her story.  She also felt really angry.  While she was on the stand, she wanted Alemany to look at her and she kept staring at him the whole time that she was testifying.  He kept his head down the whole time, though, and never looked at her.  Kayleigh was one of the last witnesses to testify and the defense only cross-examined her for about five minutes. 

Edwin Alemany was found guilty on the charges of first-degree murder, armed robbery, aggravated assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon, and attempted murder of both Kayleigh Ballantyne and Alexandra Cruz.  

On June 9, 2015, Edwin Alemany was sentenced to life without parole for the murder of Amy Lord plus 35 years for his attacks on Kayleigh and Alexandra.  At the sentencing hearing, Kayleigh was able to make an impact statement and instead of reading what she had written down, she simply spoke from her heart.  She spoke about having to learn how to walk again and overcoming her injuries.  She told the court that Amy’s mom had given her a necklace that Amy also had and said that she would carry Amy with her for the rest of her life.  She said, “She’s my guardian angel and she helped me fight and do what I did, and I’m still here today because she wanted me to be here today.  And I speak not only for myself and what’s coming out of my heart right now, but I speak for her, too.”  

Amy’s mother also gave an impact statement at the sentencing.  She said, “The reality for us is there will never truly be closure.  There are not words to describe what we lost and how our lives have forever changed, there will always be an unimaginable, unrelenting pain.”  

In October of 2022, Edwin Alemany asked a federal judge to free him on the claim that his trial attorneys were “ineffective” by going with the insanity defense.  He says that he was innocent, not insane.  In 2021, the state Supreme Judicial Court upheld his conviction ruling that he had gotten a fair trial.  The state’s highest court concluded that he was able to tell right from wrong, or if he wasn’t, it was because he was drunk at the time, which is not enough for an insanity defense. 

Alemany petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, which is a request for a federal judge to order him released immediately, vacate his conviction and dismiss his indictment.  He had claimed that his attorneys pursued a criminal responsibility defense acknowledging his guilt after he repeatedly informed them that he did not want them to do so.  He claims that his failure to follow his wishes violated his Sixth Amendment rights.  

His current attorney, Andrew S. Crouch, also argued that the error was compounded when a judge refused to hold an evidentiary hearing on the request for a new trial and that a prosecutor made impermissibly, inflammatory comments in their opening statement to the jury.  The Supreme Judicial Court concluded that while the prosecutor may have gone too far, it wasn’t enough to collectively change the minds of the jury and there was plenty to convict him. 

Kayleigh Ballantyne – Where She Is Now

After recovering from her injuries, Kayleigh went back to college life and graduated from Bryant University.  She lived in Providence until the trial ended in 2015 and then she moved out to California.  She said that she lived in a treehouse to connect with the earth again.  She began having dreams about sitting across from Edwin in prison and asking him what happened for him to be in a space where he was capable of doing something like that.  She was wondering if she was beginning to feel forgiveness because she was feeling bad about the situation and did have pity for him.  At the same time, though, she hated him for taking an innocent person’s life.  She did decide to write a forgiveness letter to Edwin, but it sat in a drawer for about two years. 

She reached out to the woman’s advocate that she had through the court system in regard to sending the letter to Edwin, but she never heard back.  She had remained close with the detectives from her case and reached out to Bobby Flynn.  Detective Flynn had a hard time understanding why she would want to do that but told her that it was her decision.  

While visiting her parents back in Maine, Kayleigh went to church with her mom and the sermon that day happened to be about forgiveness.  The pastor went up to Kayleigh after and let her know that if she ever wanted to talk, his door was open.  She did end up speaking with him with encouragement from her mom and it turned out that he did prayers at the prison where Alemany was housed.  The pastor helped her locate the case worker and get her letter to Edwin.  

Two weeks later, Kayleigh was back in California, and her mom called her to let her know that she had received a letter and it was from Edwin Alemany.  She still has the letter and she said that it was super remorseful and told her about his troubled childhood.  He was born in Puerto Rico and moved to the States not knowing any English.  He had been picked on as a kid and was in and out of juvie and jail throughout his life.  However, it was just a few weeks later that she found out he had appealed and wondered if his letter back was to make himself look good or if it was genuine.  Kayleigh hopes that he is doing okay and is going to classes and trying to better himself.  

Kayleigh says that he didn’t ruin her life, he enhanced it.  She chose to take this situation and turn it into something positive.  She says that she is the happiest she’s ever been.  Despite this, she does struggle day-to-day with anxiety and has challenges with daily life, but goes to therapy and does the work to stay happy and positive.  

After living in California for a while, she moved back to Maine where she still lives today.  She was a public speaker working to tell her story in order to help other people who have experienced traumatic events.  About a year ago, she stepped away from public speaking and is looking for her next step in telling her story.  Kayleigh says that telling her story is her passion because it could resonate with someone to help make positive changes in their life.  Kayleigh now works in marketing, is in a committed relationship with the love of her life, and has recently purchased her first home.