The convicted killer who sexually assaulted a Bronx nurse and killed her with sticks about 40 years ago is on parole in September, but the victim’s family is fighting for his possible release, saying “it would be a sin.” .
“Is it like that [been] 39 years and every day is a nightmare, ”Phyllis Meliota, 87, said of the 1982 murder of her daughter Barbara Meliota at the hands of maintenance worker Anthony Doyle.
“You can never forgive someone who does something bad like this.”
One spring morning that May, 24-year-old Barbara had arrived early at Montefiore Hospital to take her seven-morning shift so she could bring coffee to her father while she waited for surgery. a disc slipped into the same infirmary.
Except Barbara never got to know her father or start her shift because Doyle first found her in the garage of the hospital where she worked as a maintenance worker.
“What he did to my daughter should not happen to anyone. It’s horrible, it’s horrible, “Barbara’s mother, Phyllis, told The Post by telephone.
Doyle, a 22-year-old Bronx man, had already been convicted of a past robbery charge and was on parole or parole when he decided to attack Barbara on the sixth-floor staircase of the hospital garage. New York. Informed time then.
The convict hit her with the metal nozzle of a fire hose that was a foot long, dragged her to a damp, windowless storage area, one floor below, to sexually assault her. a dirty mattress and then pushed the battered body onto a pneumatic shaft, according to investigators. .
Later that day, detectives found Barbara’s body partially submerged in dirty rainwater that had been collected at the bottom of the shaft. Her nurse’s uniform, once clean, was disheveled and her face wrapped in a plastic bag: stockings, underwear, and shoes stuffed in a nearby container.
A preliminary autopsy revealed that Barbara died from a head injury and a spinal fracture she suffered during her fall down the shaft.
Doyle quickly made a “full confession on videotape,” The Times reported in 1982, citing prosecutors.
“He was only 24, he would have met the right guy, he would have married and he would have a family,” Phyllis said. “She was beautiful inside and out … Her dream was to be a nurse and she got it, she worked in Montefiore and she was a good nurse and that animal came into her life. It took her life.”
Doyle has been locked up in the upper part of the state since April 1983 and was recently at the Great Meadows Correctional Facility in Comstock, according to records.
The convicted killer, now 61, has been eligible for parole since July 2012, but has not yet been released.
Barbara’s family has been fighting his possible release since then, and now Phyllis is worried that the parole board is about to release him at its next hearing in September.
“You never know how the justice system is going now and that makes me very nervous and upset, not only about the loss of my daughter, but about other parents and people who have children. There is no worse loss than losing a child, ”said Phyllis.
“If this man is released, he will do it again with another girl, another woman. No woman would be safe on the streets. Not only did he kill my daughter, he killed his whole family … My husband was not the same again. ”
Phyllis said she has spent “years” traveling to Albany to fight for Doyle to stay in prison, but in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been forced to make her requests over the phone and doesn’t want them to be heard. deaf.
If it belonged to her, the octogenarian said she would take matters into her own hands.
“It would kill him,” he said.
“I would kill him for what he did to my daughter and for what he is able to do with someone else.
“And he’s able to do it again.”