As police continue to unravel the killings of two beloved Boston doctors, investigators are trying to answer a pivotal question: Did Bampumim Teixeira — the 30-year-old man accused of carrying out the crime — know his victims personally?
An email sent by the complex’s management and obtained by People this week confirms that Teixeira briefly held a concierge position at the building sometime before 2016, deepening suspicion that he may have known his alleged victims.
Establishing a link between the suspect and the couple would help authorities uncover a potential motive for the killings, which took place Friday.
“If someone would come here and go up to the 11th floor of a penthouse, we gotta believe there was some type of knowledge of each other,” Boston Police Commissioner William Evans told reporters this weekend, according to People.
And yet, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley told reporters Monday that “there is no evidence whatsoever at this point” that proves Teixiera knew Field and Bolanos, People reported.
In its email to residents cited by People, the building’s management told residents that it was “severely restricted” from offering more information about the crime because of the police investigation but was trying hard to “strike the appropriate balance.”
“This is an incredibly difficult time for our entire community,” the email added, according to People. “We are all doing the best we can to help our fellow residents and staff through this, while giving the authorities the space they need to do their jobs.”
When Boston police entered an 11th-floor penthouse apartment Friday night, they found a gruesome scene: the bodies of a man and a woman bound at the hands, their throats slit and blood on the walls of the luxury condominium. The killer had left cut-up photos of the couple and a message of retribution.
That message has fueled speculation that the two doctors, who were engaged to be married, knew their attacker.
Teixeira has been charged with two counts of murder and pleaded not guilty to each count. He was arraigned on two counts of murder at Tufts Medical Center in Boston on Monday afternoon as he lay in a hospital bed with his eyes mostly closed.
A judge standing beside Teixeira — a 30-year-old from Chelsea, Mass. — entered two not-guilty pleas for the deaths of Field and Bolanos.
During the arraignment, NBC News reported, Teixeira nodded “only slightly in response to questions.”
He was ordered to be held without bail, authorities said. If convicted, the maximum sentence Teixeira would face is life in prison without the possibility of parole.
On Monday morning, a spokesman for the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, Jake Wark, told The Washington Post that Teixeira would be charged with two counts of murder but noted that investigators are still probing whether there was a relationship between the accused and the victims, both of whom were anesthesiologists.
The discovery of the bodies with “traumatic injuries” followed a call to police about an armed person in the building, an apartment complex on Dorchester Avenue in South Boston, police said. When officers arrived at the building about 8:40 p.m. Friday, a man immediately started shooting at them, prompting police to return fire.
Officers struck the man and, after a violent struggle, placed him in custody and took him to a hospital for treatment of injuries that were not life-threatening, according to a police statement. No officers were hit by gunfire, but several were treated at hospitals for injuries that were not life-threatening.
“I mean, you have a guy here who just killed two people,” Boston Police Commissioner William Evans told reporters. “And he had nothing to lose.”
Teixeira’s ex-girlfriend told the Boston Globe that he was a former security guard who had just finished a nine-month sentence for robbing two banks. In June, Teixeira demanded money at a Boston bank by passing a note. Two years earlier, he had committed the same crime, according to the Suffolk County district attorney’s office.
It was unclear whether Teixeira had obtained a lawyer.
Evans told reporters that authorities think the victims and their killer knew one another.
“That’s what we’re going on, that they were targeted,” Evans told Boston’s CBS affiliate.
For “someone to come here, go up to the 11th floor, to the penthouse,” Evans told WCVB, “we got to believe that somehow there was some type of knowledge of each other.”
A key question in the investigation is how the killer gained access to the couple’s apartment, which is in a well-secured, upscale building.
“You can’t get up there without a key,” building resident Jack Fu told WCVB. “The elevators wouldn’t even open the door for you without a key. So there’s no access unless someone lets you in.”
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