Letter to the Editor: County Lawmaker Shares Note to State Parole Board

To: The New York State Parole Board re Prisoner Richard LaBarbera’s Appeal for Parole from his prison Sentence for murdering Pearl River’s Paula Bohovesky in 1980 [Attn: Betty]

From: Rockland County Legislator John Murphy of Pearl River

To put my remarks into the proper perspective, I offer you this about me.

I am the Father of a classmate of Paula’s and a fellow artistic childhood friend of Paula’s. They are Jennifer and Christopher, ages 50 and 48.

I always reflect upon very milestone of Jennifer’s life through the prism of Paula’s fate, Jennifer’s graduation from college, her career, her marriage, her motherhood, all stolen from Paula and her Mother and replaced with a lifetime of aguish and sorrow, heightened every anniversary, every birthday, every holiday, every day.

Even at the age of 80, which should have given me some understanding of human existence, I cannot process the almost surreal horror.

I am also a resident of the hamlet of Pearl River and its Representative on the Rockland County Legislature since 1971, 43 years.

Ergo, I know this community very well. It is a community of children and families who live here because it is thought to be a safe place to raise children. These are its DNA and ethos. And after all these years, the horror still haunts all who remember and who visit the library and walk the streets Paula traveled to her home just 3 short blocks away to die cruelly behind a home at the hands of two people who wish to be freed from prison.

I cannot passed the above or the scene of the heinous crime that I visited just hours after the inhumanely brutalization in every evil manner of a beautiful child of 16 who embodied in every way, the sweetness, purity, love and promise that childhood is without being overcome with sorrow.

And yet, to this day, her killers are unrepentant, arrogant, despicable and want to be free to walk those same streets among the people whose lives and joys were crushed forever by their acts.

It would be, in my mind, an almost sadistic act to free her murderers who could cause more unbearable pain by their freedom, words and acts. Every minute Paula’s killers live beyond her death have been gifts undeserved, their freedom must never be another gift.

I most humbly beseech you to keep them away from all of us, especially Paula’s Mother.

You can join our petition by visiting www.parole.ny.gov/letters.html