September 20, 2024
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Prosecutor re-enacts bondage session during death trial

DEDHAM, Mass. – A prosecutor, wearing a leather mask while re-enacting an allegedly fatal bondage session, told jurors Friday that a dominatrix on trial for manslaughter “did nothing” to help her client when he suffered a heart attack.

During closing arguments, prosecutor Robert Nelson said Quincy dominatrix Barbara Asher was indifferent to the suffering and death of Michael Lord, of North Hampton, N.H., who disappeared in July 2000. His body has never been found.

Halfway through his animated closing, in which he pointed and hollered at Asher, Nelson donned a leather mask and spoke through the mask’s zippered mouth.

With both hands, he reached back and clutched the top of a blackboard to simulate Lord being strapped to a replica of a medieval torture device in Asher’s condominium.

“After a gasp, his head went forward and she did nothing, nothing for five minutes,” Nelson said, his voice muffled through the mask.

He paused as his head hung forward as if to simulate Lord’s alleged death.

Defense attorney Stephanie Page objected. Norfolk Superior Court Judge Charles Grabau agreed.

“That’s enough Mr. Nelson,” the judge said. “Thank you for your demonstration.”

Nelson at one point dumped a box full of hoods, collars, and paddles onto a table, and proclaimed that Asher was trying to protect her business.

“That’s why she didn’t call the police,” he said.

Page told jurors that prosecutors and police failed to produce any incriminating evidence.

“No body. No blood. No DNA. No evidence,” Page said in her closing argument. “That’s how I started this case and I suggest to you nothing has changed.”

The jury deliberated for about four hours on Friday before being sent home until Monday morning.

Asher, 56, is accused of failing to call paramedics. Police say Asher confessed that she and her boyfriend chopped up Lord’s body in the bathtub and dumped it behind a restaurant in Augusta, Maine.

But the alleged confession was not taped, and detectives testified during the trial that they discarded their notes from the interrogation after filing the police reports.

Page, who addressed the jury before Nelson did, warned prosecutors might try to “inflame your passions because there’s no evidence in this case.”


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