Consecutive Life Sentences In Peabody Double Murder

PEABODY, MA — Salem Superior Court Judge Timothy Feeley accepted a recommendation from prosecutors to sentence Wes Doughty, 42, to two consecutive life sentences Monday. Feeley also sentenced Doughty 20 years probation, 8 to 10 years for kidnapping and 12 to 15 years for armed carjacking to be served concurrently with the first life sentence. A jury returned a guilty verdict in the trial on Friday.

"While it is largely symbolic, it speaks to the separate and distinct acts," Essex Assistant District Attorney Kate MacDougall said at Monday's sentencing. "Mark and Jennifer were deeply loved and deserved a chance to win their war against addiction."

Doughty shot Greenlaw in the head with a shotgun, then raped and stabbed his girlfriend, O'Connor, 20 times inside a house at 19 Farm Avenue in Peabody in February 2017. Doughty's co-defendant, Michael Hebb, pleaded guilty in October 2017 to helping cover up O'Connor's murder and trying to burn down the house. He was sentenced up to seven years in prison.

The home on Farm Avenue in Peabody where the murders occurred in February 2017 was portrayed as a flophouse for drug users in testimony in the trial, which opened last Monday. Defense attorneys did not dispute that Doughty killed the couple in a Peabody home in 2017, but instead tried to convince the jury to convict him of manslaughter.

"The facts of this case were extremely disturbing and is evidence of the destruction that drug abuse and trafficking can wreak of people’s lives," Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said. "I am pleased that Judge Feeley adopted the Commonwealth’s recommendation to impose the mandatory life without parole sentences consecutively rather than concurrently. It provides specific justice for each victim and acknowledges the pain and loss of each family."