Bruce Blackwood: Disappearance, Trial, and Conviction Without a Body

The Bruce Blackwood murder was a Brooklyn cold case solved almost entirely by secret audio recordings. Blackwood, a 55-year-old landlord and Off-Track Betting supervisor, vanished on March 6, 2006, after confronting his handyman, Luis Perez, over thousands of dollars in forged checks. His body was never found. Nine years later, Perez was convicted of second-degree murder after his own daughter recorded him describing how he killed and dismembered his boss. He is serving 25 years to life.¹

The Landlord and His Handyman

Blackwood owned several properties in Brooklyn and Queens and managed an OTB parlor.² He had hired Luis Perez to renovate apartments, and Perez lived in one of Blackwood’s buildings at 983 Hancock Street in Bushwick.¹

In early 2006, Blackwood discovered that Perez had stolen his checkbook and forged $7,700 in checks. Investigators later counted 13 forgeries, at least one made out to an accomplice named Martin Rodriguez.³ A week before he disappeared, Blackwood told a friend he planned to confront Perez. The two had already had an argument over renovation payments heated enough that police were called.²

The Day He Vanished

On March 6, 2006, Blackwood called out of work, saying he had fallen in the shower. It was the last time anyone outside Hancock Street heard from him. His Cadillac SRX was found parked in front of the Bushwick building. He never contacted his family again. A neighbor placed Perez among two men seen arguing with Blackwood shortly before he vanished.³

Perez and Rodriguez were arrested in June 2006 for the check forgeries and convicted a year later. Perez got 25 months; Rodriguez got six.³ Without a body or physical evidence of a killing, the disappearance case went nowhere for years.

How the Case Was Reopened

Blackwood’s brother, Edward, refused to let it stay cold. Working with retired detective Steve Pelan, he lobbied Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to have the case reclassified. In March 2011, after a New York Daily News story on the family’s push, Kelly directed the NYPD to treat the disappearance as a homicide.⁴

Detective Wendell Stradford of the Cold Case Homicide Squad picked up the file. He tracked down Martin Rodriguez in a Florida trailer park. Rodriguez told him Perez had planned to torture Blackwood for his ATM PIN and said flatly, “I knew Perez was going to kill Mr. Blackwood.”³

The Daughter’s Recordings

The decisive evidence came from Perez’s own daughter, Irene Perez. According to Detective Stradford’s trial testimony, Irene came forward voluntarily in July 2011 with a recording of her father confessing to the murder. Police then gave her recording equipment and asked her to capture more if the subject came up again. She brought back two further tapes, on August 1 and August 3, 2011.⁵

Investigators ended up with roughly three and a half hours of audio. On it, Perez described choking Blackwood, snapping his neck, and dismembering the body with a machete inside the Hancock Street apartment, which he had lined with plastic. He said he bagged the remains in construction-grade plastic, dumped them in trash receptacles, and scrubbed the apartment with hospital-grade bleach and heavy-duty carpet cleaner. At one point he said, “It’s not about committing the perfect crime, it’s just about how well you clean it up.”¹ Perez was arrested and charged with murder in 2011.

The Trial

Perez stood trial in Brooklyn Supreme Court in September 2015. Assistant District Attorney Melissa Carvajal of the Homicide Bureau led the prosecution under Bureau Chief Kenneth Taub.⁶ With no body and no recovered physical evidence, the state’s case rested on what Perez had said about himself on tape.

Irene Perez was the most difficult witness. Brought in on a material witness order, she initially invoked the Fifth. Prosecutors granted her immunity to compel her testimony.⁷ On the stand she said police had pressured her, telling her she could lose her children and go to jail if she refused to help.

Defense attorney Alan Stutman argued there was nothing tying his client to Blackwood’s death or disappearance.⁷ Prosecutors answered with a recorded jailhouse call from Rikers Island in which Perez coached his daughter in Spanish on how to behave on the witness stand. “There’s a way you and I can get out of this, okay, you say that they threatened you, start crying and all that,” he told her. ADA Carvajal translated the call for the jury.⁵

On September 29, 2015, the jury convicted Perez of second-degree murder.⁶

Sentence and Appeal

On October 15, 2015, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun imposed the maximum, 25 years to life. District Attorney Ken Thompson said, “Even though we didn’t have a body, we were determined to get justice for Bruce Blackwood and his family. And that’s exactly what we did by using the defendant’s own words to convict him.”¹ Edward Blackwood, present for the verdict and sentencing, told reporters, “Justice was finally served for my brother, thank God.”⁸

On October 31, 2018, the Appellate Division, Second Department, affirmed. The panel found Perez had not properly preserved his challenge to the admission of the audio and that the tapes were clear enough for the jury to understand without speculation. On a separate hearsay claim, the court held that any error was harmless given what it called “overwhelming evidence of the defendant’s guilt.”⁹

Convicting a Killer Without a Body

Blackwood’s case belongs to a small category of homicide prosecutions brought without recovered remains. A body is not legally required to prove a murder. The term “corpus delicti” refers to proof that a crime occurred, not literally to a corpse, and courts have long accepted that this proof can be built from testimony and other evidence when a body is never found.¹⁰ For the Blackwood jury, the proof was the defendant describing the killing in his own voice.

Bruce Blackwood’s remains have never been located. The case was featured in Season 3, Episode 2 of Oxygen’s New York Homicide.¹¹

1
Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. Brooklyn Handyman Sentenced to 25 Years to Life in Prison for Murdering His Boss
2
Charley Project. Bruce Blackwood
3
Oxygen. Luis Perez Killed Boss Landlord Bruce Blackwood in Brooklyn
4
New York Daily News. Ex-Cop, Family Get Case of Missing Landlord Reopened in Hunt to Catch Likely Killer
5
New York Daily News. Brooklyn Handyman Accused of Boss Murder Coached His Daughter on Her Testimony in Phone Call From Rikers Island
6
Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. Brooklyn Handyman Convicted of Murder for Killing His Boss
7
New York Post. Alleged Landlord Killer Brags About Grisly Murder in Recording
8
New York Daily News. Brooklyn Handyman Who Admitted to Butchering His Boss Is Convicted of Murder
9
New York Courts. People v. Perez, 165 AD3d 1294
10
NYU School of Law. Corpus Delicti
11
Oxygen. Was There a Motive Behind the Killing of a New York City Landlord