Martha Brailsford Murder: Maimoni’s Trial, Appeal, and Death in Prison

The Martha Brailsford murder was the July 12, 1991, killing of a 37-year-old Salem, Massachusetts, interior designer aboard her neighbor Thomas Maimoni’s sailboat off the North Shore. Maimoni was convicted of second-degree murder in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison. He was denied parole three times and died behind bars in 2017 without ever admitting he killed her.¹

Who Martha Brailsford Was

Martha Conant Brailsford grew up in Ohio and moved east because she loved the ocean. She met her husband, Brian Brailsford, at 17, when she was a freshman at Endicott College. The couple settled in a renovated beach cottage in the Willows, a peninsular neighborhood of Salem, and shared a life built around sailing, windsurfing, and skiing. Martha worked from home as an interior decorator and artist, and her work drew on sea life and nature.²

Her fraternal twin, Muriel Conant Garvey, later described her as “one of the kindest-hearted people ever” and “a beautiful person with her reverence for nature and all life.”³

How the Murder Happened

Thomas Maimoni lived in the same Willows neighborhood. He and Martha had become acquainted walking their dogs near Juniper Point. He owned a 28-foot sailboat called Counterpoint, docked at the Palmers Cove Yacht Club, and had recently been laid off from an engineering job at Parker Brothers. By his own later admission, he was “half unemployed” that summer.⁴

Maimoni gained Martha’s trust in part by telling her his wife had recently died of cancer. It was a lie. He was married to Patricia Stochl, his fourth wife, who herself believed she was only his second. The pattern of fabricated credentials and personal history would later be described by prosecutors and the state parole board as pathological lying.⁴

On Friday, July 12, 1991, Martha boarded Counterpoint at the Willows pier around 1:00 p.m. Maimoni had invited her aboard under the pretext of discussing her resume. She never came home.⁵

No one saw what happened on the water. Forensic evidence later showed Martha suffered five points of impact to her head, including a chipped molar and loosened front teeth, injuries not consistent with any accidental fall. Prosecutors argued Maimoni attacked her after she rejected his sexual advances. The autopsy identified drowning as the cause of death, with the head trauma documented in police reports.²⁴

How Maimoni Was Caught

Brian Brailsford came home Friday evening to find Martha gone. After searching the neighborhood overnight, he called Salem police at 1:00 a.m. Saturday. Later that morning he went to Maimoni’s apartment. Maimoni told Brian he would “say a prayer” for Martha and denied having sailed with her, claiming he last saw her at 7:00 a.m. Friday.⁴

Salem Detective Lt. Conrad Prosniewski took the lead. He later said his “cop bells” went off during their first face-to-face meeting: “I returned to the station and said I had just met a murderer.” Within roughly two hours of retracing Martha’s last known movements, Prosniewski had identified Maimoni as the prime suspect.²

Witnesses had seen Martha board Counterpoint Friday afternoon. Confronted with that on Monday, July 15, Maimoni changed his story. Now Martha had jumped aboard uninvited to talk about her resume, and he had dropped her off at Winter Island. Prosniewski checked with a local dentist, Dr. Ronald Plotka, who had been at the Winter Island landing that afternoon and never saw Martha. That was another hole. Pressed again, Maimoni offered a third version: a “rogue wave” near Gloucester had knocked Martha into the mast and overboard, he had tried CPR, and, in a panic, he had disposed of her body. Over the investigation he gave at least four conflicting accounts.⁴

On Thursday, July 18, lobsterman William Hooper Goodwin was pulling traps near the southeast end of Children’s Island off Marblehead when he snagged Martha’s remains. Her body was naked and nearly skeletal after six days in the water. A buckled diver’s weight belt was secured around her torso, and a 12-foot rope tied her ankle to an anchor.⁵⁴

The weights turned a possible accident into a murder case. Police obtained an arrest warrant within hours, but Maimoni had already fled. Two days later, on Saturday, July 20, officers arrested him in northern Maine near the Canadian border after he broke into a cabin. A backpack in his vehicle contained camping gear, maps, and a compass. An Essex County grand jury indicted him for first-degree murder on July 31, 1991.⁴

The Trial and Verdict

The case went to trial in Essex County Superior Court in Newburyport on February 1, 1993, before Judge Patti B. Saris. It lasted about two weeks. Media coverage across New England was, in the appeals court’s later words, “copious.”⁴

Prosecutors built their case on three things: the physical evidence of how Martha’s body was found, Maimoni’s shifting lies to police, and testimony from two women about his behavior on the same boat in the days before the killing.

Rosemary Farmer testified that Maimoni lured her aboard Counterpoint on July 9 or 10, 1991, saying he wanted to buy her house. Once at sea he repeatedly touched her, tried to pull her into the sleeping cabin, and stripped naked. Farmer said she finally threatened to jump overboard if he touched her again, and only then did he sail back to shore. Roxcy Platte, a licensed psychotherapist who had sailed with Maimoni several times, testified about a July 8 trip on which he suddenly became intensely sexual, stripped naked, and told graphic stories about encounters with other women on the boat.⁴²

Judge Saris admitted that testimony after a pretrial hearing, finding it relevant to Maimoni’s mental state and credibility and as evidence of a “plan or pattern of conduct to bring women aboard for sexual adventure.” It also undercut his claim that he would never sail alone with a woman who was not his wife. To rebut the rogue-wave defense, prosecutors called a dentist, a meteorologist, and a wave specialist.²

Defense attorney Jeffrey A. Denner argued the death was a sailing accident. Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Harold J. Bursztajn testified that Maimoni suffered from “schizotypal personality disorder” and was incapable of violence or acting with malice. The defense chose not to pursue an insanity defense, instead arguing that Maimoni’s personality made premeditation impossible. Maimoni personally agreed to the approach.⁴

On February 12, 1993, the jury found Maimoni guilty of second-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison. Prosniewski later said the absence of an eyewitness to the killing itself likely prevented a first-degree conviction.²⁴

The Appeal

Maimoni challenged the conviction on several grounds: that Farmer’s and Platte’s testimony unfairly prejudiced the jury, that pretrial publicity warranted a change of venue, that the judge should have instructed the jury on involuntary manslaughter, and that his lawyer had a conflict of interest tied to a fee agreement involving potential movie rights. The Massachusetts Appeals Court rejected each argument on September 19, 1996, in Commonwealth v. Maimoni, 41 Mass. App. Ct. 321. The court held that the prior-acts evidence was properly admitted, that an impartial jury could be seated despite the publicity, that the evidence did not support an involuntary manslaughter instruction, and that no conflict existed because the media-rights agreement had been canceled and the attorney ultimately worked pro bono.⁴

Parole Denials and Death in Prison

Under Massachusetts law, Maimoni became eligible for parole after serving 15 years. He sought release three times and was denied each time.

At his first hearing in October 2006, Maimoni still maintained that Martha’s death was an accident caused by a rogue wave. He expressed remorse only for the “disposal of Martha’s remains at sea” and described his actions as “panicking” rather than murder. Brian Brailsford attended with Martha’s mother-in-law, sisters-in-law, and other family members to oppose release. Brian told the board, “After listening to the testimony we heard here today, I don’t think there’s all that much I need to say.”⁶

The board denied him again in 2011. At his third hearing, in October 2016, Maimoni claimed to suffer from “survivor’s guilt” and said he had “blacked out” while disposing of the body and was trying to “figure out what his state of mind was at the time.” Board members were openly frustrated with his evasive answers. In its written decision on March 7, 2017, the board called him a “pathological liar” and wrote: “Mr. Maimoni has no chance of success on parole in his current state of pathologically lying.” The board also noted he had only recently begun a sex offender treatment program. Brian Brailsford told the board Maimoni “should definitely be in prison for the rest of his life.”⁷¹

Thomas Maimoni died on October 18, 2017, at age 72, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, after a chronic illness. He never admitted to killing Martha Brailsford.¹

1
Gloucester Times. Man Convicted of Killing Artist on Sailboat Dies
2
Wicked Local. Surviving Maimoni
3
Boston Herald. Man Who Killed Woman and Dumped Body Overboard in 1991 Seeks Release
4
Justia Law. Commonwealth v. Maimoni, 41 Mass. App. Ct. 321
5
UPI Archives. Sailor Sought for Killing Woman, Dumping Her Body Overboard
6
Cape Cod Times. Killer Seeks Parole in Murder
7
Patch. Salem Man’s Parole Denied, 1991 Death