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A 15-year-old girl was found dead in a Plymouth forest in 1986. Her alleged killer is finally standing trial.
Michael Hand is accused of dropping a 73-pound rock on Tracy Gilpin’s head and leaving her body in Myles Standish State Forest.
It took Massachusetts officials more than 30 years to make an arrest in the 1986 murder of 15-year-old Tracy Gilpin, then another eight to bring her alleged killer to trial.
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Michael Hand, 69, is finally standing trial this month, nearly four decades after prosecutors say he dropped a 73-pound rock on Gilpin’s head and left the teen’s partially clothed body in Plymouth’s Myles Standish State Forest.
Hand appeared Monday in Plymouth Superior Court, where jury selection got underway this week. Looking on from the gallery, according to photos from The Patriot Ledger, was Gilpin’s older sister: Former Massachusetts State Police Col. Kerry Gilpin.
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Hand was initially arrested in North Carolina in March 2018, just months after Kerry Gilpin took the reins at the State Police (she stepped down the following year).
Hand has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder; prosecutors previously dropped two other charges against him — kidnapping and assault with intent to rape a child — after concluding the statute of limitations had come and gone. His defense attorney declined to comment Tuesday, citing the ongoing trial.
The background
Tracy Gilpin’s mother reported her missing on Oct. 2, 1986, after she failed to return home. According to prosecutors, the teen had been seen around 11 p.m. the previous night at a Cumberland Farms in Kingston, where the clerk reportedly saw Gilpin speaking with a driver who pulled up to the store around the same time.
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Gilpin “appeared heavily intoxicated and said the man in the car was weird and had asked her to get high and smoke weed with him, which she declined,” prosecutors relayed in court documents. The store clerk offered Gilpin a ride home, but the teen said she’d walk.
Three weeks later, a passerby spotted Gilpin’s leg and foot sticking out of some brush in the state forest. She was found with skull fractures, ligature marks on her neck, and a blood alcohol level of 0.20, according to prosecutors. Her underwear had allegedly been pulled down.
Police quickly ruled out two suspects, including a man who had reportedly been trying to pick up young children nearby, prosecutors explained in court documents. While initial forensic testing did not detect bodily fluids on Gilpin’s underwear, repeat testing in the 1990s revealed sperm cells that helped exclude another potential suspect.
Prosecutors say a break in the case came in December 2017, when State Police learned that Gilpin, Hand, and two others spent some time at Hand’s home in Kingston on Oct. 1, 1986. One of the other attendees purportedly dropped Gilpin off at “the Rock,” a spot in the Rocky Nook neighborhood where she would wait for her mother to leave for work so she wouldn’t be caught coming home late, prosecutors said.
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In March 2018, State Police troopers tracked Hand down in North Carolina, where he was living by then. Hand — who was 29 at the time of the murder — allegedly told troopers he and Gilpin kissed while hanging out at his house, though prosecutors called the claim “unlikely.”
“He was not popular or attractive, and would offer marijuana and alcohol to the younger kids, girls in particular, in an effort to socialize with them,” they alleged in one court filing. However, prosecutors also acknowledged Hand’s DNA did not match the DNA found on Gilpin’s underwear.
What Michael Hand allegedly told police
According to a State Police sergeant’s affidavit, Hand claimed he was walking to the Cumberland Farms on Oct. 1 when he saw Gilpin sitting in a Ford Escort with an older man.
When the Ford drove off, Hand said he hopped on the back of a friend’s motorcycle and asked him to follow. After spotting the car by the side of the road, Hand allegedly sent his friend — who has since died — to “go for help.” Looking into the nearby woods, Hand said he saw the Ford driver holding a tarp and shovel.
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Authorities allege Hand blamed the man, Henry Meinholz Jr., for Gilpin’s death. Meinholz was later convicted of murdering another Kingston girl, 13-year-old Melissa Benoit. But per court documents, he was out-of-state when Gilpin disappeared, and his DNA did not match evidence from the scene.
According to prosecutors, Hand allegedly “launched into an explanation of why his DNA would be at the scene” when asked to provide a DNA sample for the Gilpin investigation. He said Meinholz led him into the woods and instructed him to touch a particular rock, which cut his finger.
Hand allegedly identified the rock as the one found by Gilpin’s head and said he moved it away from her. He said he didn’t go to the police that night “out of fear and because no one would believe him.”
Hand allegedly went silent when a trooper told him, “I think you did it.” According to prosecutors, he denied doing anything to Gilpin in the woods on purpose, though he allegedly told authorities “I killed that girl” before immediately denying it and blaming Meinholz again.
Hand “eventually stated that he moved the rock, picking it up with both hands, and moving it over about a foot, which he said was ‘the biggest mistake [he] ever made,’” prosecutors wrote in one court filing. “Towards the end of the interview, the defendant said that he moved the rock, dropped it, and heard a thump, and that the rock hit Ms. Gilpin’s face, to which his reaction was ‘F***,’ and ‘God, this girl’s dead.’”
Police interrogations called into question
Hand’s defense attorneys have noted the police interrogation turned confrontational at times, with one of the troopers calling Hand a liar and repeatedly telling him, “You disgust me,” and, “You’re f***ing gross.”
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The defense team previously suggested some of Hand’s statements to police were not made voluntarily, also raising concerns about his cognitive abilities following a prior hypoxic episode that deprived his brain of oxygen. In one court filing, the defense alleged Hand has a “low average” IQ of 86.
Hand’s attorneys said they’ll offer up a neuropsychology expert who will testify that he was “susceptible and suggestible” during the lengthy and tense interrogations.
In an accompanying affidavit, Hand said he felt at times that the troopers were trying to trick him and that he had to “play along” if he wanted to go home. Prosecutors, meanwhile, argued that Hand made “sophisticated attempts at self-protection” by trying to clear his name and account for any evidence presented against him.
In a 2020 ruling, Judge Cornelius J. Moriarty II agreed Hand’s “will was gradually overborne by the length of interrogation, the manner of the interrogation, the use of disfavored investigative techniques and the defendant’s cognitive limitations.” However, the now-retired judge ultimately denied the brunt of a defense motion to suppress Hand’s remarks to police.
If convicted, Hand faces life in prison.
Speaking to The Boston Globe in 2017, Kerry Gilpin described her sister as hilarious, genuine, and carefree — meticulous about her appearance, quick to make friends, and idealistic about her future.
“She really believed she was going to have her dream,” Kerry Gilpin added.
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