A Boston man accused of killing two doctors in their penthouse condo—and leaving behind haunting messages on their walls—was found guilty of murder on Tuesday afternoon.
Bampumim Teixeira, 32, was convicted of first-degree murder, armed robbery, and kidnapping for the May 2017 slayings of Dr. Lina Bolanos, 38, and her fiancé, 49-year-old Dr. Richard Field.
Authorities say Teixeira fatally stabbed the couple, then scribbled “he killed my wife” and “payback” on the walls of their 11th floor condo. He was shot by authorities and apprehended in the hallway of the couple’s building.
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As jurors began their second day of deliberations on Tuesday, Teixeira entered the packed Suffolk Superior courtroom and began threatening Suffolk County District Attorney John Pappas, making derogatory remarks about his wife.
“Yo Pappas, you better hope I never get out of jail,” Teixeira said to the main prosecutor in his double-murder case, before he was dragged out by a court officer.
Just before the jurors delivered the verdict, Teixeira had a second outburst inside the courtroom—showing his handcuffed hands to reporters before yelling at the victims’ families in the front row.
“Do you want to know his last words? He said no,” Teixeira told the sobbing Bolanos and Field families, before he was escorted out of the courtroom once again.
The outburst came at the end of the two-week trial, during which prosecutors argued the murders were part of a robbery gone wrong since Teixeira was seen “lurking” outside the building.
“He is a person literally caught in the act,” Suffolk County District Attorney John Pappas said on Monday.
Prosecutors noted Teixeira did not know the couple personally, but was a former concierge in their South Boston building and was familiar with its layout.
In an interview with Boston police revealed in court, the 32-year-old alleged he had a two-month affair with Bolanos when he worked in the building in 2016 and claimed he murdered Field in self-defense after the doctor killed his own fiancée in a jealous rage.
“I'm not sorry,” Teixeira said in the recording played in court. “A jealous man is the worst thing ever... What I saw with my eyes was crazy.”
Teixeira’s defense attorney, Steven Sack, argued on Monday that while his client did sneak into the 11th floor condo, there is no “credible evidence” that indicates he maliciously murdered the doctors.
“Sometimes the hardest thing to believe is the truth,” Sacks said in his closing arguments.
Prosecutors argued that on May 5, 2017, Teixeira entered the building’s garage at around 4 p.m. to wait for the couple to come home. Armed with a backpack filled with a combat-style knife, several fake guns, duct tape, and pliers, he was allegedly waiting inside the condo when Bolanos, a pediatric anesthesiologist, first arrived home.
Field, a pain clinic doctor, arrived home about an hour later, at which point the couple made multiple inaudible 911 calls. In one desperate attempt to get help, Field texted a friend, Matthias Heidenreich, eight times, writing “Call 111,” “Gunman,” and “Serious.”
“I was confused for the first minutes,” Heidenreich, a scientist for Vertex Pharmaceuticals, told jurors. “At some point, I realized what it could mean.”
Heidenreich said he immediately called the building’s front desk, telling them a gunman was inside the condo and to contact authorities.
When officers arrived at about 8:38 p.m., Teixeira approached them in the hallway outside the apartment with what they thought was a gun—prompting them to shoot and injure him, prosecutors said.
“Then he said, ‘You guys are going to die.’ Then he said, ‘They killed my wife.’ Then he mentioned something, and I heard the word ‘sniper,’” Boston Police Department Sgt. Edward Meade testified, adding that investigators also found a bag of Bolanos’ jewelry and another with two fake guns, a knife, and duct tape in the hallway outside the apartment.
After police apprehended Teixeira, he admitted there were two dead bodies inside the penthouse, prosecutors said. When investigators went inside the dark apartment, they found the couple’s bodies in a pool of blood with their hands bound with duct tape. They also discovered cut-up photos of the couple and the words “payback” and “he killed my wife” written on the walls, authorities said.
Dr. Richard Atkinson, the medical examiner, testified that Field’s cause of death was a “stab wound to the neck” and that Bolanos suffered from 24 “sharp-force injuries” around her neck.
“Her cause of death was multiple sharp force injuries,” he said, adding that her underwear had also been “cut in two locations.”
During an interview with Boston police while in the ICU unit at Tufts Medical Center—where he was being treated for gunshot wounds he sustained outside the penthouse—Teixeira said Bolanos “brought” him into the apartment on the day of the incident.
Teixeira claimed he would “make out” with Bolanos when he worked in the building, and that the two were inside her apartment for several hours while the doctor complained that Fields physically abused her.
When Field came home, Teixeira claimed the doctor became “enraged” and accused his fiancée of being unfaithful. He said in the interview recording that Field threatened “he was going to kill us both,” before beating, handcuffing, and ultimately fatally stabbing Bolanos. Out of self-defense, Teixeira said, he handcuffed and bashed Field’s hand against the wall during a struggle before stabbing him in the neck.
“I wanted to do to him what he did to her,” Teixeira told Boston Police Sgt. Det. Michael Devane in the interview, stating he was innocent and only took Bolanos’ jewelry so he could hide it.
Pappas argued on Monday there had been no evidence presented in court to support Teixeira’s “preposterous” and “imagined story” that was created to “ruin” the couple’s reputation.
The prosecutor also denied Bolanos and Teixeira were ever in a relationship and planned to meet up that day—showing jurors surveillance video that showed he was waiting inside the apartment for an hour before Bolanos came home.
“This attack on Lina Bolanos happened immediately... and it had nothing to do with Richard Field,” Pappas said, insisting the story “doesn’t have a ring of truth to it.” “We’ve gone beyond preposterous. We’re now existing in the theater of the absurd.”
