Toilet seat helps doom killer Clues galore clinch guilty plea in retired nun's 2012 killing 
 
 Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Image 1 of 1 Michael Briggs (Albany County Sheriff's Department) Michael Briggs (Albany County Sheriff's Department) Toilet seat helps doom killer 1 / 1 Back to Gallery 
 
 Schenectady 
 
 When Sgt. Darryl Mallard arrived at the scene of Mary Greco's murder, he saw a blanket that her killer had draped over the retired nun's body. He noticed coffee mugs and glassware in the kitchen of her Stanford Street home. The veteran cop spotted something in the bathroom. 
 
 The toilet seat was up. 
 
 The 82-year-old woman lived alone. Perhaps, Mallard hypothesized, the killer was a man who also used her bathroom. 
 
 Fingerprints lifted from the toilet's handle matched those of Michael Briggs, a 38-year-old robber on parole. Those prints would become part of a ream of evidence, large and small, that connected Briggs to Greco's murder in 2012, a crime he confessed to Monday, a week before his trial was to start. He will be sentenced in June to 30 years to life. 
 
 Greco was a deeply spiritual, soft-spoken woman. The longtime parishioner at St. Luke's Roman Catholic Church on State Street volunteered as a teacher on international mission trips. 
 
 Briggs lived a short walk from Greco's home near Vale Cemetery. The two crossed paths on Dec 27, 2012, when Briggs offered to shovel Greco's car out after a snowstorm. She paid him in cash and cookies, prosecutors said. 
 
 More Information 
 
 Three days later, on the morning of Dec. 30, Briggs returned after nearly half a foot of snow blanketed the city. As he again cleared off Greco's car, she called her neighbor and asked if she wanted Briggs to shovel her car out as well. The neighbor declined. That, said District Attorney Robert Carney, was last time Greco spoke with anyone but her killer. 
 
 After strangling and stabbing her, Briggs stole Greco's car. It was later found in a nearby church parking lot. A rosary with Swarovski amethyst beads and a 2-inch sterling silver crucifix, a gift to her just days before, was never found. 
 
 Greco's call to her neighbor helped authorities put Briggs at the scene. So did the fingerprints from the toilet and others lifted from a coffee mug on the kitchen counter and a glass in the sink. Briggs' fingerprints were in Greco's car as well. His DNA turned up on the blanket that covered her body. 
 
 The most crucial piece of evidence, however, was video surveillance footage that showed Briggs leaving his home, snow shovel in hand, and walking toward Greco's just before she was killed. 
 
 "There was everything a jury could sink their teeth into," said Michael Mansion, Briggs' attorney, who struck a plea deal after seeing the video for the first time Friday 
 
 "As I got myself deeper and deeper into trial preparation, it became pretty apparent there was more than sufficient evidence for a jury to find a guilty verdict on all counts," said Mansion, who took over as assigned counsel for Briggs last fall. 
 
 Briggs was released from prison in 2007 after serving 10 years of a 15-year sentence for a robbery in Nassau County. In that crime, Carney said, Briggs tied up a 12-year-old boy and sexually assaulted him. 
 
 At the time of Greco's killing, Briggs had violated parole and was being sought by authorities, Carney said. That factored into Carney's decision to agree to a plea to second-degree murder and burglary rather than take the case to trial. Given Briggs' violent history and the fact he was had violated parole just before the murder, Carney said he can't envision any parole board ever letting Briggs out of prison. 
 
 bfitzgerald@timesunion.com • 518-454-5414 • @BFitzgeraldTU ||||| Man admits to killing retired nun in 2012 Posted: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 1:45 PM EDT 
 
 SCHENECTADY, N.Y. – A man has pleaded guilty to killing a former nun in December 2012. 
 
 Schenectady County officials have confirmed that Michael Briggs, 38, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted burglary on Monday in county court. 
 
 Briggs admitted to strangling Mary Greco, 82, in her apartment in 2012. She was found on New Year's Day 2013. Briggs had shoveled snow for Greco around the time she was killed, said officials. 
 
 At the time of the murder, Briggs was on parole in Long Island for a burglary and robbery. ||||| PORTLAND, Maine — Twenty-five years after Anthony Sanborn Jr. was found guilty of murdering another teenager, he has been granted release on bail. 
 
 A Cumberland County Court judge decided Thursday to allow Sanborn to be released on a $25,000 cash or surety bond after a key witness at Sanborn’s 1992 trial recanted her earlier testimony in a packed courtroom. 
 
 Upon hearing that he could go home after decades in prison, Sanborn buried his face in his hands and cried briefly at the defense table in the courtroom. Later, leaving the courthouse in shackles he was greeted with cheers from a gathered group of supporters. 
 
 “Finally,” Sanborn said, stepping into a sheriff’s van. He was being held at Cumberland County Jail for the hearing and is expected to be released later Thursday. 
 
 On Thursday, Hope Cady told the court that, contrary to her original testimony, she did not witness the killing of 16-year old Jessica Briggs, that she had been forced into testifying by Portland police detectives and a state prosecutor, and that Sanborn deserves to go free. 
 
 Following the brutal murder on the Portland waterfront in 1989, Cady testified that Sanborn killed Briggs, whom he had dated. Cady was 13 at the time, living partially on the streets and under the supervision of a state social worker at the time. As the sole eyewitness, her testimony was key to the conviction that put Sanborn behind bars for most of the last three decades. 
 
 The fact that the state relied on the testimony of an unstable teenager appeared to deeply concern Justice Joyce Wheeler. 
 
 “This is only a bail hearing so I cannot apologize to you now,” Wheeler told Sanborn before granting bail. 
 
 Sanborn was sentenced to serve 70 years in prison for killing Briggs. During his time behind bars, Sanborn has maintained that he is innocent. And Thursday’s bail hearing is the first step in a new push to have the court vacate his indictment and conviction or get him a new trial. 
 
 The conviction, Sanborn’s lawyer Amy Fairfield claims, was a miscarriage of justice based on deeply flawed evidence. Fairfield requested Cady’s testimony, but the state Attorney General’s Office made the unusual move of requesting the bail hearing in the decades old case. 
 
 Cady told the judge on Thursday that she could barely see at the time of the 1989 murder and had been coerced into testifying by Portland police detectives James Daniels and Daniel Young. 
 
 “They basically told me what to say,” Cady said to gasps from the packed courtroom. “They were hounding me and stalking me and basically tried to put me in the middle of it … of the investigation.” 
 
 Cady said that the detectives interviewed her for hours in a small room in the Portland police station. They shouted, called her names, threatened to send her to prison, she said. 
 
 Sanborn’s claim of innocence appeared to be supported Thursday by the more than 50 people packed into the Portland courtroom for the hearing. When he entered, the crowd greeted him with applause that immediately drew a stream of tears from the 44-year-old. 
 
 The Innocence Project, a group that works to exonerate people wrongfully convicted, had a role in bringing the case back to court, Fairfield said. 
 
 During her explosive testimony, Cady said that she was legally blind at the time of the murder and could barely see the lawyer standing about seven feet from her in the Portland courtroom. 
 
 Assistant Attorney General Donald Macomber cross examined Cady for less than five minutes, and said that they had spoken at the time of Sanborn’s trial. 
 
 Macomber submitted sworn affidavits from the two detectives denying the accusations against them, which were presented in early court filings by Sanborn’s lawyer. But he was not prepared to call witnesses on Thursday. 
 
 Macomber also told the judge that he would need to recuse himself from the case, because he may need to be called as a witness to testify about Cady’s recanted testimony. The hearing is scheduled to continue on April 25 and 26. 
 
 When Macomber asked the judge to send Sanborn back to prison while the state readies its witnesses, Fairfield forcefully objected, saying that her client has already served far too much time for a crime he didn’t commit. 
 
 “To keep this man in prison for one second longer just perpetuates the gross miscarriage of justice that has been done to this tremendous human being,” she said. “This stops now.” 
 
 The court also heard testimony from Margaret Bragdon, a former caseworker for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services who serves a Cady’s guardian in the lead up to Sanborn’s trial. Bragdon kept extensive notes on her professional interactions with Cady, who she said lived a scattered and inconsistent life as a troubled youth in Portland. 
 
 The notes recount Cady giving inconsistent accounts of what happened when Briggs was murdered and saying that the detectives and prosecutor intimidated her and told her what to say in testimony, according to Bragdon. The retired caseworker testified that she has come to believe that Cady didn’t witness the murder, but claimed to in part to have a “war story” that she could tell other kids living on the streets. 
 
 In addition to the $25,000 bond, Sanborn was granted bail on the condition that he not have any contact with Briggs’ family, stay in Maine, and check in weekly with police in Westbrook, where he will be living. 
 
 Following the news that her husband would be able to come home, Michelle Sanborn wept outside the Portland courthouse. 
 
 “I just want to thank Justice Wheeler for being a woman of compassion and for doing the right thing, and giving me faith in our system again,” she said. “I just want all our lives back.” 
 
 Michelle Sanborn said that she has forgiven the detectives who investigated Briggs’ murder, but wants the Portland Police Department to admit wrongdoing and apologize. 
 
 Macomber, of the Attorney General’s Office, advised judge Wheeler that the full story had not been presented Thursday. He said that the detectives and former Assistant Attorney General Pamela Ames, who originally prosecuted Sanborn’s case, may testify later in the month. 
 
 Wheeler, however, seemed to take Cady’s recitation as a potentially devastating blow to the state’s case against Sanborn. 
 
 “Hope Cady is that state’s case,” the judge said.
– A Schenectady man confessed this week to the horrendous crime of murdering a retired nun in her own home, reports News10. And the Albany Times Union notes that police caught 38-year-old Michael Briggs thanks in part to a dumb move on his part at the crime scene: He used the toilet and left the seat up. It caught the attention of a detective who wondered why an 82-year-old woman who lived alone would have the seat in that position, and, sure enough, Briggs' fingerprints turned up on the toilet handle. Police had other evidence, including surveillance video that showed him leaving his house with a snow shovel and heading toward the victim's house shortly before she was killed. But the prints (he left some elsewhere, too) put him inside the house, and defense lawyers opted to have him plead guilty. Briggs will get 30 years to life, and the DA doesn't expect he'll ever be a free man again.