A Newton man charged with beating his wife to death with a baseball bat two days after she obtained a restraining order against him pleaded not guilty to her murder. He was ordered held without bail.
Richard Hanson, 64, appeared Thursday morning behind glass in Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn wearing a clean white t-shirt as his eyes darted between his appointed attorney, the clerk magistrate and the members of the media watching from the gallery. A grand jury on Aug. 17 indicted him for the murder of his wife, Nancy Hanson, on Aug. 15.
Almost exactly a month before, on the evening of July 15, prosecutor Megan McGovern said at the hearing, Newton Police arrived at 66 Brookline St. and found Hanson standing in his driveway and spattered with blood. McGovern alleged that Hanson told the officers he was “sorry” and that he had “caught her cheating.”
Nancy Hanson had obtained a restraining order against her husband two days before, which the Newton Police had been attempting to serve, according to the Middlesex DA’s office.
Police had rushed to the home after receiving two phone calls, both at roughly 8:21 p.m. The first was from one of the couple’s children, who said that his father was hitting his mother with a baseball bat in the master bedroom.
Another call, this time an unidentified friend of Nancy Hanson’s, who said that she had been speaking with Nancy Hanson on the phone when she heard the words “Rich, no,” and then the sound of the phone dropping to the floor, according to the prosecution’s statement of the case.
Then, she told police, she heard the children scream, “Dad, stop! You’re killing her!”
Police rushed to the second-floor master bedroom, the prosecutor said, and found Nancy Hanson lying on the floor, her head resting in a widening pool of her own blood. A baseball bat lay nearby, covered in blood.
Nancy Hanson was pronounced dead at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital at 9:38 that night. The medical examiner, according to the prosecution, said her death was homicide caused by blunt-force trauma, with multiple injuries to her skull, multiple rib fractures, bruising to her upper torso, fractures to her forearms and defensive wounds to her fingers.
The couple’s three children are in the custody of the Department of Children and Families, according to McGovern. Clerk Magistrate Lucy Pasquale forbade Richard Hanson from having any contact with them, as they were witnesses to the alleged murder.
“I understand that they are percipient witnesses to this case but they are his children,” defense attorney Arthur Kelly argued on behalf of his client, though he made no argument for bail during the hearing.
The case is scheduled to return to court for a scheduling conference on Sept. 21.
