A 36 Year Old Massachusetts Cold Case Where the Killer Walked Free Twice

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Marvin Skip McClendon, 74, of Bremen, Alabama, was arrested and charged as a fugitive from justice based on an arrest warrant yesterday for the murder of Melissa and Trembley of Salem, New Hampshire on September 12th, 1988.

[00:00:16]Mr. McClendon is a retired Massachusetts Department of Corrections employee.

[00:00:20]On September 12th, 1988, the body of 11-year-old Melissa Anne Trembley was discovered in the old Boston and Main Railroad yard in Lawrence. She had been stabbed to death postmortem. Her body was run over by a train car, causing her left leg to be amputated. On the evening of September 11th, 1988, an 11-year-old girl named Melissa Anne Tremble was sitting on the stairs outside a social club in Lawrence, Massachusetts, waiting for her mother. The adults were inside.

[00:00:52]Melissa was outside alone. She had done this before. She knew the neighborhood.

[00:00:57]She was a fixture there, the kid who perched on those stairs and wandered down the street to the corner store and came back and waited some more. That Sunday evening, she did not come back. A railroad employee saw her in the late afternoon. A pizza delivery driver saw her, too. After that, nothing. At 9 that evening, her mother filed a missing person's report. The next afternoon, her body was found in the Boston and Maine Railroad yard on Andover Street, a few blocks from where she had last been seen. She had been beaten, stabbed, and positioned on the tracks. A passing freight car had severed her left leg after death. She was 11 years old. The man who did this spent the next 34 years collecting his Massachusetts Department of Corrections pension, retiring, and moving to an 80 acre plot of land in Bremen, Alabama. For 34 years, he was not in a prison cell. He was building a life. And for much of that time, investigators suspected exactly who he was and could not prove it. What happened next involves two trials. a deadlock jury, a not-uilty verdict, and a DNA result that excluded 99.8% of the male population. This is the story of Melissa Anne Tremble, and it does not end the way you want it to.

[00:02:12]Look, I am not going to beg you to subscribe. If this story does not move you, if Melissa and Tremble is just another name you scrolled past today, then this channel is probably not for you, and that is okay. But if you are still here, if something about an 11-year-old girl who was afraid of the dark and never made it home is sitting somewhere in your chest right now, then you already know what kind of person you are. You are the kind of person who believes these stories deserve to be told and these families deserve to be remembered. Hit subscribe. Not for us, for Melissa. Drop one comment before we go any further. Just one. When a killer is arrested after 34 years, do you believe the justice system can still deliver a fair trial? Leave your answer below because by the end of this video, you are going to feel very differently about that question than you do right now. Melissa Anne Trembley was born on March 1st, 1977 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. About a month after she was born, she was adopted by Janet and Robert Trembley. She grew up in Salem, New Hampshire, a small city in the southeast corner of the state that sits right up against the Massachusetts border, 20 minutes from Lawrence.

[00:03:25]Everyone who knew her called her Missy.

[00:03:28]She was 5t tall. A sixth grader at Lancaster Elementary School in Salem.

[00:03:33]The principal of that school, Robert Sh, described her to reporters after her death. She expressed herself freely. He said she was honest and outgoing. She had a lot of friends. She was, by every account of everyone who ever knew her, one of those kids who fills a room.

[00:03:50]Bubbly and loud and present in the way that some children are before the world gets to them. She was an 80s girl in the fullest sense. She loved Madonna. She loved Wham. She loved Fresh Prince of Belair. She talked about the things she loved the way 11-year-olds talk about the things they love with total certainty that everyone else should feel the same way. Andrea Ganley was a second grader at Lancaster Elementary in 1988.

[00:04:16]Melissa was in the sixth grade. The age gap between second grade and sixth grade is enormous in the world of elementary school. Ganley did not care about that.

[00:04:25]Melissa did not care about that. They became friends anyway because Melissa was the kind of kid who made friends with people without calculating whether it made sense. Ganley would spend the next 34 years fighting for her. There is one detail about Melissa that matters more than any other. for understanding what September 11th, 1988 would have felt like for her. She was afraid to be alone. She was afraid of the dark. A girl who made friends with everyone she met and filled every room she walked into was underneath all of that warmth and noise and personality. Genuinely frightened of being by herself after dark. She was 11 years old and she was that kind of brave, the kind that nobody sees. Melissa's home life was not easy.

[00:05:08]Her mother Janet struggled. Janet had been going through a deteriorating marriage and had become a regular at the Lasal Social Club in Lawrence, 9 miles south of Salem across the state line.

[00:05:19]Melissa often came with her. The club sat in a busy part of Lawrence on Andover Street with strip malls and businesses on the main road and dense apartment buildings and parked cars on the side streets. Right around the corner was the old Boston and Maine railroad yard. Melissa had become a fixture at the club. Patrons and neighbors knew her. They recognized the free-spirited girl who sat on the stairs outside waiting for her mother or wandered down to the corner store and came back. Maryanne Campbell, who lived next door to the club, remembered her well. She knew Melissa's face. She knew her habit of going to that store and staying there for a while. That neighborhood knew Melissa Tremble. And whatever happened to her on September 11th, 1988 happened in the streets that neighborhood knew her. September 11th, 1988 was a Sunday, the weekend of Labor Day. Melissa had spent the previous day, Saturday, at a friend's house, though she was sent home that evening due to some misbehavior. That was Melissa, mischievous and impulsive and alive. On Sunday afternoon, Janet Tremble drove from Salem to Lawrence to spend the evening at the Lal Social Club at 397 Andover Street. Janet's boyfriend Ronald came with them. Melissa came too. While the adults went inside, Melissa did what she usually did. She went outside. She played in the adjacent neighborhoods.

[00:06:46]She wandered the streets around the club the way she had done before, the way everyone in that area was used to seeing her do. At some point in the late afternoon, a railroad employee working the yard on Andover Street saw her. A pizza delivery driver also spotted her in the neighborhood. Those were the last confirmed sightings of Melissa and Tremble. The street lights came on.

[00:07:08]Melissa did not come back to the stairs outside the club. Inside the Lasowl Club, time passed. Then Janet came out.

[00:07:16]Melissa was not there. They searched the streets around the club, calling her name, checking the corner store, walking the blocks she usually wandered.

[00:07:24]Nothing. No sign of her anywhere. At 9 that evening, Janet Tremble walked into the Lawrence Police Department and filed a missing person's report. She was frantic, Campbell later recalled. She arrived at Campbell's door early the next morning, 8:00 in the morning. Still nothing. Campbell joined the search. She and Janet passed out flyers with Melissa's photo. They moved through the neighborhoods around the club asking anyone they could find. Maryanne Campbell later said she had considered the possibility that Melissa had run away but dismissed it immediately. It was not in her character. She said she was afraid to be alone. She was afraid of the dark. At 5 in the afternoon on September 12th, 1988, the answer came.

[00:08:08]Police cars were arriving in droves near the Boston and Maine railroad yard on Andover Street. Word spread quickly. Her daughter had been found. Every case on this channel takes weeks of research because these stories deserve to be told right. Melissa Anne Tremble was 11 years old. She was afraid to be alone and afraid of the dark and she was outside by herself on a September evening in a neighborhood that knew her face. If her story is already with you, hit subscribe and tell us in the comments what you are feeling right now. More solved cold cases are waiting in the description below. Now, let us get back to it. A railard worker for the Boston and Maine Railroad had made the discovery. The body of an 11-year-old girl in the freight yard near Andover Street and South Broadway. Investigators arrived and within minutes understood this was not an accident and it was not the train that killed her. Melissa had been beaten. She had been stabbed multiple times in the torso. A slash wound ran across her throat. Her body had been deliberately positioned on the railroad tracks. A passing freight car had run over her after death and severed her left leg. Someone had put her there knowing what a train would do. Someone had tried to make it look like something other than what it was. The Lawrence Police Department and Essex County investigators began working the scene.

[00:09:27]They collected every piece of evidence they could find. Witnesses were interviewed. The neighborhoods around the Lasal Social Club were canvased. And then one investigator made a decision that nobody standing in that railroad yard in September of 1988 could have fully understood the significance of.

[00:09:45]The lead detective ordered that Melissa's hands and feet be wrapped in evidence bags before her body was moved for the autopsy. That is standard procedure when investigators believe a victim may have scratched or grabbed their attacker during a struggle. When a victim fights back, biological material from the attacker can collect under the fingernails. Wrapping the hands preserves that material so it can be collected and analyzed later. In September of 1988, DNA analysis was still in its very earliest stages. The first criminal conviction using DNA evidence in the United States had occurred just one year before in 1987.

[00:10:23]Most law enforcement agencies were still learning what DNA was and what it could do. The detective who ordered those evidence bags in that Lawrence Railroad yard was not thinking about genetic genealogy or family trees built from ancestry databases. He could not have been thinking about those things. They did not exist yet. He was just being thorough. That thoroughess is the only reason this case was ever prosecuted at all. What followed was over three decades of investigation that produced scores of interviews, hundreds of leads, and no arrest. Lawrence and Essex County investigators worked the case intensively in the immediate aftermath.

[00:11:00]Two drug addicts known to frequent the area around the Lasal Social Club were identified as early suspects. Both were investigated thoroughly. Both were eliminated. Other persons of interest emerged over the years. Witnesses were interviewed and reintered as new investigators cycled into the case. Tips were followed up. Every name that surfaced was looked at. Nothing definitively connected any named suspect to what happened in that railroad yard on September 11th, 1988. As the years became decades, the case went cold. Not closed, cold. Melissa's file remained open in the Essex County District Attorney's Office. Her name stayed in the system. Investigators who came and went on other cases always knew the Tremble case was there waiting.

[00:11:46]Meanwhile, public attention had not been entirely kind to Janet Tremble. People in the community questioned her judgment in allowing Melissa to wander a Lawrence neighborhood alone at night. Some of that criticism was direct. Some of it was the kind of quiet disapproval that attaches itself to a grieving mother and never quite lets go. Janet lived with that alongside the grief itself. She died in 2015 at the age of 70, 7 years before the arrest was ever made. She never saw a warrant issued with her daughter's name on it. She never saw a man in handcuffs charged with killing Melissa. She died not knowing. Danielle Root, Melissa's cousin, addressed the criticism of Janet directly in the family statement after the arrest. My aunt Janet may not have used the best judgment in allowing Missy to play around the neighborhood of the social club, she said, but that is between her and God. She loved Missy and never intended any harm to come to her. Then in 2014, the Essex County Cold Case Unit reopened the file with new tools and new purpose. Forensic scientists were able to generate a DNA profile from the evidence preserved under Melissa's fingernails 34 years earlier. The wrapping of those hands and feet in the railroad yard had held. The biological material was still there, still usable, still capable of telling investigators something they could not hear. In 1988, the DNA profile focused on the paternal line of the unknown suspect. When compared against databases, it excluded 99.8% of the male population. That left 0.2%, a small pool. But without a name to compare it against, a number alone is not an arrest warrant. Investigators worked the profile. They identified males in a family with the surname Mlendon. They located them across the country. They requested DNA samples.

[00:13:39]Those samples were compared against the profile from Melissa's fingernails. One came back consistent. His name was Marvin Calvin McClendon Jr. He went by Skip. In 1988, he had been living in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, about 20 minutes from Lawrence. He was working as a carpenter at the time while also serving periodically as a Massachusetts Department of Corrections officer. He had multiple ties to Lawrence. He frequented the city's bars, strip clubs, and the 7th Day Adventist Church. He drove a van. Witnesses had reported a van similar to his being seen in the area near the Lasal Club around the time of Melissa's disappearance and he was left-handed. Prosecutors would later tell the jury that the angle and force of the stab wounds were consistent with a left-handed attacker. He had been considered a person of interest in the case, investigators said publicly for some time. On April 26th, 2022, 33 years and 7 months after Melissa Anne Tremble's body was found in that railroad yard, Massachusetts State Police arrived at a house sitting on an 80 acre plot of land in Bremen, Alabama.

[00:14:46]Marvin McClendon answered the door. He was 74 years old. He was retired. He had collected his Massachusetts Department of Corrections pension for 20 years. He had married a woman named Dorene. He had moved to Alabama on family land about an hour south of Birmingham in a small town with no particular connection to Lawrence, Massachusetts, or the Boston and Maine Railroad yard or an 11-year-old girl who sat on the stairs of the Lasal Social Club waiting for her mother. When the troopers arrested him, McClendon made a statement that prosecutors would repeat in open court.

[00:15:20]At least I got 20 years out of my retirement pension. He was charged as a fugitive from justice. He was extradited to Massachusetts. He was arraigned on a charge of first-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty at every stage of the proceedings. He was held without bail.

[00:15:36]Melissa's cousin, Danielle Root, attended the arraignment. She said afterward that she had been able to face her killer in that courtroom, that it was overwhelming. She had waited 34 years for that moment. Marvin Calvin McClendon Jr. was not a drifter who passed through Lawrence on the wrong night. He was not someone on the margins of society. He was a man whose entire adult professional life had been built inside the justice system. He worked as a Massachusetts Department of Corrections officer for three separate periods spanning from 1970 to 2002, 32 years total. He spent those decades managing incarcerated people, working inside institutions designed to hold accountable those who had hurt others.

[00:16:20]He knew the law. He understood how investigations worked. He understood what evidence meant and what a conviction required. He also knew Lawrence. He had worked there, worshiped there, socialized there. He knew Andover Street. He knew the neighborhoods around the Lasal Social Club. He knew the railroad yard a few blocks away. After retirement, he moved steadily away from Massachusetts. Alabama was not a hasty decision made after the arrest came. It was the life he had built deliberately on 80 acres of family land in a small town where nobody was looking at him and nobody had any reason to. He had been considered a person of interest for some time before 2022. That phrase is worth sitting with for some time. Meaning that before the formal arrest, before the public announcement, the name Marvin McClendon had entered the investigation.

[00:17:16]meaning that investigators have been watching the edges of this case, building what they could, waiting for the science to give them enough to move.

[00:17:23]In 2014, it gave them the profile. In 2022, they had enough to knock on a door in Alabama. He waited 8 years between the DNA profile and that knock. 8 years of pension, 8 years of 80 acres. 8 years of Alabama mornings. At least I got 20 years out of my retirement pension. The first trial began in December of 2023, 35 years after Melissa Anne Tremble was found in a Lawrence Railroad yard.

[00:17:52]Prosecutor Jessica Strasnik told the jury that the DNA found under Melissa's fingernails excluded 99.8% of the male population and was consistent with Marvin McClendon's profile. She told them McClendon was left-handed and the wounds were consistent with a left-handed attacker.

[00:18:09]She told them his van had been seen in the area. She told them he lived 20 minutes away. She told them he frequented Lawrence. She told them his statement at the moment of his arrest showed he knew things about the crime that an innocent man would not have referenced. Defense attorney Henry Facult stood before the jury in his opening statement and delivered a line that would define everything that followed. This crime has not been solved. Not one person sitting in this courtroom knows who killed Melissa Tremble. And by the end of this trial, you will be joining that group. The defense attacked the DNA methodology directly. The Y chromosome profile used to identify McClendon was, according to defense experts, common. Running the profile through a database of 242,000 men returned 155 matches. 24 of those matches had the surname Mlendon, but 86 additional surnames also matched. The defense argued that this was not a rare genetic fingerprint pointing to one man. It was a common profile that pointed to potentially hundreds of men who shared the same paternal line. 9 days of testimony, closing arguments on October 28th. The case went to the jury. They deliberated for 32 hours across multiple days. On December 27th, 2023, a note arrived from the jury room. They were deadlocked. They could not reach a unanimous verdict. The judge declared a mistrial. The family released a statement. They said they were confident the right man had been on trial. They supported the decision to retry McClendon. They said justice needed to be served and they would wait for it.

[00:19:48]The Essex County District Attorney's Office announced they would bring him back to trial. The second trial began in October of 2024. Different jury, same evidence, same two positions facing each other across the same courtroom. The prosecution arguing that the DNA and the circumstances of Mlendon's life pointed to one conclusion. The defense arguing that the science did not meet the standard required to take away a man's freedom. Jurors deliberated for more than a week. On a Monday, they sent a note to Judge Karp. They were deadlocked again. The judge told them to continue.

[00:20:23]On Tuesday, November 5th, 2024, they reached a unanimous verdict, not guilty.

[00:20:30]Essex County District Attorney Paul Tucker released a statement. While disappointed with the verdict, he said, "The efforts of our prosecutors and law enforcement in this case were extraordinary. My thoughts are with the family of Melissa Anne Tremble, who have suffered greatly due to the crime that took her life. Marvin McClendon walked out of that Essex County courtroom a free man. Danielle Root, who had attended both trials and sat through every day of both proceedings with the belief that the right man was in front of that jury, was left with a not-uilty verdict. She expressed her firm belief in McClendon's guilt despite the court's decision. She had waited 34 years for the arrest, two more years for two trials, and she walked away with nothing the law would recognize. Melissa's mother, Janet, had died in 2015. She never saw the warrant. She never saw the arraignment. She never sat in a courtroom. She died 7 years before the police knocked on a door in Bremen, Alabama. The DNA found under her daughter's fingernails excluded 99.8% of the male population. The jury said not guilty. As of today, Melissa Anne Tremble's murder remains legally unsolved. No one has been convicted. No one is in custody. The Essex County District Attorney has not announced any additional investigative steps. The state could continue investigating using the forensic evidence still preserved in their archives. Whether they will remains unknown. Marvin McClendon is free. Melissa Anne Trembley was 11 years old. She was an 80s girl who loved Madonna and Wham and Fresh Prince of Belair. She was 5t tall and bubbly and outgoing. and she made friends across grade levels because she did not see why age should matter. She was afraid to be alone and she was afraid of the dark.

[00:22:21]And on September 11th, 1988, she was outside by herself in a neighborhood she knew, waiting the way she had waited before for her mother to come out of a bar and take her home. She never got to go home. A detective in 1988 wrapped her hands and feet in evidence bags in a railroad yard because he was being thorough. That decision preserved DNA under her fingernails for 34 years. A cold case unit in 2014 extracted a profile from that DNA that excluded 99.8% of the male population. That profile led to a man with a van and a corrections officer badge and 20 years of pension and an 80acre plot in Alabama. Two juries sat with that evidence. Two juries deliberated, one deadlocked, one came back not guilty.

[00:23:07]Andrea Ganley, the second grader who became Missy's friend across the grade school divide, spent 34 years hoping for the day someone would be held accountable. She was starting to feel like it might not happen, she said after the arrest in 2022, but she still had some hope. She had her hope taken twice in two trial verdicts. Melissa's cousin, Danielle Ru, still believes the right man was on trial. She said so publicly after the not-uilty verdict. The family of Melissa Anne Trembley walks away from this with nothing the law will recognize and everything the evidence suggested.

[00:23:43]Now, I want to hear from you in the comments. The DNA found under Melissa's fingernails excluded 99.8% of the male population and was consistent with Marvin McClendon. The defense said the profile also matched 86 other surnames across a database of 242,000 men. Two juries heard all of it. One deadlocked, one said not guilty. Where do you stand?

[00:24:09]Was that verdict the right outcome or did reasonable doubt fail Melissa and Tremble? Janet Tremble died in 2015, 7 years before the arrest was ever made.

[00:24:19]She spent the last years of her life not knowing who killed her daughter and never knowing that an arrest was coming.

[00:24:26]What do you think it would have meant to her to sit in that courtroom and see a man charged with Missy's murder, even knowing the outcome was not guilty? And the last one, a detective in 1988 made one decision to wrap Melissa's hands and feet in evidence bags. Without that single decision, there is no DNA profile, no arrest, no trials, no public answer of any kind. In cold cases, how much does everything come down not to the killer making a mistake, but to one investigator being thorough at the right moment before anyone knows it matters?

[00:24:58]Drop your answers below. Every single one gets