Alexis Aldamir, mom to babies found in South Boston freezer, concealed 5 pregnancies, authorities say - The Boston Globe (2024)

On Tuesday, prosecutors revealed a secret Aldamir had managed to keep for decades: five pregnancies that ended with the deaths of all but one baby, the remains of the four discovered in her kitchen freezer in 2022. She gave the surviving child, a girl, up for adoption after the baby was born in 1982.

Aldamir’s secret first came to light after her family relocated her to a long-term care facility following a precipitous cognitive decline in 2022. About one month after Aldamir, then 67, moved out of her condo, her brother and sister-in-law discovered two of the babies — “fully frozen,” according to authorities — inside shoe boxes that were wrapped in tinfoil while cleaning her kitchen freezer on Nov. 17, 2022. They called Boston police, who found the frozen remains of two more babies, two boys and two girls all together.

No criminal charges will be brought in the case, said Suffolk District Attorney Kevin R. Hayden last week, citing unanswered questions about whether the babies were born alive and how they died. Meanwhile, Aldamir seems unable to tell her story, because of the collapse of her cognitive functioning. She would likely be deemed unfit to stand trial, according to prosecutors.

Attorney Michael Giarrusso, who was appointed to represent Aldamir, 69, in guardianship proceedings in Essex Probate and Family Court, said Wednesday that he last spoke with her a few months back and the conversation was strained by her cognitive limitations.

“I can’t comment on her state of mind right now,” he said.

In a twist, the investigation into Aldamir also led to new evidence in an unrelated homicide case that has already gone to trial, a prosecutor wrote last November in court papers, though Hayden’s office declined to comment on the matter. No other records made public in Aldamir’s case address the unrelated prosecution.

The Boston Globe interviewed Aldamir’s former neighbors and reviewed legal proceedings and city records in search of answers about the mother whose four deceased babies were inexplicably stored in a kitchen freezer. What happened to the babies remains unknown. What is clear is that many who knew Aldamir didn’t know her secret — not her colleagues, her brother and sister-in-law, or others who lived in her building.

“There are many elements of this case that will likely never be answered,” Hayden said. “We will never know how Alexis Aldamir concealed her pregnancies, or why she chose to do so.”

All the babies shared the same father. Officials did not identify him, but said he died in 2011.

The former neighbor who discussed Aldamir with her landlord said Aldamir talked in passing about a man who had recently died, referring to him as “my sweetheart” and “my sweetie.” The former neighbor moved into the building in 2011 and asked not to be named because she doesn’t want to be associated with the case.

Aldamir was born three days before Christmas in 1954 at a military hospital at what is now known as Fort Moore in Georgia. Her father, Joseph S. Harrelson Jr., was a retired Army colonel who fought in World War II and the Korean War, and her mother, Ginette Harrelson, had grown up in France. Aldamir was the couple’s second child, and they named her Debbie Joyce Harrelson. Their firstborn, a son, died in infancy a year earlier and was buried in a cemetery on the military installation near Columbus, Ga., records show.

As a child, Aldamir claimed she could speak to the deceased baby as well as to ghosts, her other brother, John M. Harrelson, told Boston police on the day he discovered the baby remains, court records show. Reached by phone in 2022, Aldamir’s brother and sister, who live in Maryland, declined to comment and didn’t respond last week to messages from the Globe.

Aldamir’s childhood in a military family brought her to Paris, to Arlington, Va., and to the Western Massachusetts college town of Amherst, where she graduated from high school in 1973, according to news accounts in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

When she was 19 in the early 1970s, Aldamir discussed having tubal ligation surgery, which would have left her unable to become pregnant, her brother told investigators, according to an affidavit filed in South Boston Municipal Court. The affidavit didn’t disclose further details about Aldamir’s surgery claims and made no mention of the infant girl she gave up for adoption in 1982.

Aldamir’s brother “stated that he never knew her to be pregnant,” wrote Boston police Detective David A. Chaves, who prepared the affidavit. “She never spoke of being pregnant or having children.”

In a separate interview with investigators, Aldamir’s sister-in-law recalled a conversation from about 2016 when Aldamir became upset and “crying that she never had children,” Chaves wrote.

In 1977, Aldamir changed her birth name, Debbie Joyce Harrelson, and became Alexis Aldamir, court records show. In documents filed in Hampshire Probate and Family Court, Aldamir devoted two words to explaining why she wished for the change: “professional reasons.”

With her new identity, Aldamir moved from Amherst to Boston two years later, Hayden’s office said. In April 1982, she gave birth to a baby girl, listed herself as the infant’s mother on a birth certificate, and gave her up for adoption. The man who fathered the four other babies with Aldamir also agreed to surrender his parental rights to the infant, officials said.

The girl was the only child shared by Aldamir and the man for whom investigators found any birth record, prosecutors said. While DNA testing confirmed Aldamir and the man parented the four other babies, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said there was no way of determining how long they had been frozen.

And without any birth records, the existence of the four babies may have remained a secret that Aldamir would carry to her grave, but for what court records describe as “likely neurodegenerative process of Alzheimer’s Dementia” that took hold of her brain and transformed her life in 2022.

The three-story building at the corner of East Broadway and N Street is known as the Marquette Condominium, and prosecutors said Aldamir may have been living there as early as April 1982, the month she gave birth to the baby girl she gave up for adoption. The other residents included young professionals who spent long days at work. Among them were nurses and lawyers, teachers, a ballerina, and a Boston police detective, city records show.

Aldamir bought her unit, with three rooms and a bay window facing Medal of Honor Park, in 1983 and her mother bought an apartment upstairs. Aldamir’s parents had divorced in 1971, and her father died in 2003, according to his obituary. Aldamir’s mother is now 99 years old and living in a skilled nursing facility, records show. Aldamir’s unit has been listed for sale.

The bond between Aldamir and her mother made an impression on several of the people who once lived in the building.

“They seemed very intertwined,” said Mariclaire Buckley, who lived there during the 1990s.

When residents gathered in a first-floor hallway for meetings, Buckley said Aldamir was protective of her mother, a condo trustee who sometimes clashed with other unit owners.

Aldamir called her “mimsy” and tried to be a soothing presence as her mother repeatedly threatened to resign as trustee over internal disputes about condo affairs, she said.

“Mimsy, don’t say that. No one wants you to step down,” Buckley remembers Aldamir telling her mother.

Another former resident, Joan Feeney, lived upstairs from Aldamir during the early 1980s.

On many weekday mornings, they rode together on the route 7 bus, making small talk as they traveled into downtown Boston where Feeney said she worked as a lawyer and Aldamir had a job at an accounting firm on Federal Street.

They were the same age, lived in the same building, and took the same bus to work. Feeney said they were friendly but never became close. Still, Aldamir was hard to forget, she said.

“She gave off this air of mystery,” Feeney said.

At her job, colleagues described Aldamir as a hard worker, who rarely took vacations, and remained at the same firm for 41 years, prosecutors said. In city records, Aldamir said she was a supervisor at the company.

Signs that Aldamir was losing her cognitive function first began in the summer of 2022.

During that time, Aldamir lost house keys and left doors unlocked, her brother told police, according to Chaves’s affidavit. She was the main caretaker for her mother, but once that July, she left her unattended. A neighbor once heard the mother, then 97, yell for help from her second-floor apartment. When help arrived, Aldamir’s mother said she hadn’t eaten in days and couldn’t get up, the affidavit said. She was taken to a nursing home, where she still resides.

Aldamir was hospitalized a month later when the gas was left running on her kitchen stove and a neighbor called 911, Chaves said. In the emergency department at Tufts Medical Center, Aldamir didn’t seem to know who she was or why her gas stove was on, according to records filed in Suffolk Probate and Family Court.

In October 2022, Aldamir moved into a long-term care facility, where she remains, court records show. A month later, her brother and sister-in-law made the grisly discovery in her freezer.

Hayden’s office said autopsies of the infants revealed no signs of internal or external trauma or evidence of “obvious injuries.” There was no indication that the babies were ever fed or nursed, Hayden’s office said.

It’s not clear what became of the babies’ remains after their autopsies. A spokesperson for the medical examiner’s office declined to say if they have been given a final resting place.

Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her @lauracrimaldi.