Reggie Sheffield, Standard-Times staff writer| Standard-Times
NEW BEDFORD -- Eight years after police found the body of his estranged wife in the rear hallway of her South End apartment, David A. Vieira yesterday admitted killing her.
Mr. Vieira pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and will spend at least the next 15 years in prison.
Standing only feet from him in Superior Court, the slain woman's sister, Fatima Cardoso, angrily told Mr. Vieira his actions destroyed the tight-knit family.
"My sister was nothing to you but a good wife and a good mother to her kids," she told him.
"It has destroyed all of us, the whole family. I'm going to have to see if we can do some healing," she said minutes later on the courtroom steps after Mr. Vieira was lead out of the courtroom.
"I would rather have seen first-degree murder," she said. "Let him spend some time in jail. It's better than him having no time. This helps."
The 39-year-old Mr. Vieira, dressed in a dark grey pin-striped suit, said nothing except to acknowledge questions from Judge Walter E. Steele.
Assistant District Attorney Kevan J. Cunningham described the events that lead to the stabbing death of 31-year-old Alice Arruda Vieira on July 25, 1988.
Mrs. Vieira was at home with a new boyfriend, Antonio Rezendes, when her daughter Matilda, then 12, came to the house. The two soon began arguing, which lead to Matilda breaking a window. The girl then left the building to join her father -- Mr. Vieira -- who was waiting outside in a car.
Shortly afterwards there was a loud noise outside the apartment. According to Mr. Rezendes, Mrs. Vieira came out of the bathroom holding a blue nightgown.
"As she approached the rear door, it suddenly sprang open inward and Rezendes observed David Vieira ... who was also known to Mr. Rezendes, coming in with a large metal object raised above his head and he saw Mr. Vieira strike Alice Vieira twice with this metal object," Mr. Cunningham said.
As Mrs. Vieira staggered towards the rear hallway Mr. Rezendes ran out of the apartment to a landing a floor above.
"While he was standing there he heard Alice Vieira scream loudly three times and then it went completely quiet," Mr. Cunningham said.
A bloody knife and a dismantled car jack were found near her body. An autopsy found she was repeatedly stabbed after having been beaten with a blunt object.
Mr. Rezendes, who has since moved to the Azores, later identified a carjack as the metal object he saw raised above David Vieira's head. A detective later noticed a similarity between the knife found at the murder scene and other knives at the home where Mr. Vieira was staying.
Police later learned that a friend of Mr. Vieira, Ernestina Amaral helped Mr. Vieira get a bus ticket to Canada and gave investigators a letter he had written that day. She also told police of a conversation she had with Mr. Vieira before he left for Canada.
"He told Ernestina he took a knife and stabbed her and didn't know how many times," Mr. Cunningham said.
The letter contained a written apology to Alice's mother, he said.
"I'm sorry for having killed your daughter. There's nothing else I could do," he wrote.
After authorities found his car abandoned on Route 24 in Fall River, police began a six-year manhunt. He later was placed on the state's most wanted list.
Mr. Vieira's attorney, Alan Zwirblis of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, said his client welcomed the end of the case brought about by his guilty plea.
"David Vieira is grateful that this didn't go to trial because he didn't want to subject his children and family to any more public trauma over an already extremely traumatic incident," he said.
He was arrested at his home on St. Urbain Street in Montreal April 15, 1994, two days after authorities there were tipped to his whereabouts following a segment of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries" that told of his disappearance.
He was brought back to Massachusetts in October 1994 following lengthy extradition proceedings.
Mr. Vieira was separated from his wife of 14 years for two weeks before he killed her. They had one son and two daughters. At the time of the murder, Mrs. Vieira's cousin said she was trying to get a restraining order against her husband.
The cousin had taken the couple's three children to a Purchase Street daycare center the afternoon of the murder and became worried when Ms. Vieira failed to pick up her children.
Mrs. Cardoso said the Vieiras' joining was a "fixed marriage" from a old-world Portuguese family arranged so Mr. Vieira would not have to serve in the Army.
