BOSTON - The state’s highest court has upheld the first-degree murder conviction of a Stoughton native who brutally killed and sexually mutilated schoolteacher Ruth Masters in Myles Standish State Forest in Plymouth in 1977.
The murder went unsolved for 26 years.
Eric H. Anderson Jr., 79, wanted the Supreme Judicial Court to reduce the verdict to second-degree murder. He asserted that the trial judge made mistakes in allowing the jury to hear certain evidence in the case.
Anderson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after a Plymouth Superior Court jury found him guilty of murder in November 2003.
The high court ruled yesterday that Anderson arguing he was drunk when he murdered Masters and sexually mutilated her body in the Myles Standish State Forest in Plymouth lacked credibility to reduce the conviction or give him a new trial.
In declining to reduce the conviction or order a new trial, the high court yesterday dismissed Anderson’s assertion that he was drunk when he murdered Masters.
‘‘Anderson’s claim that he was debilitated by intoxicants when he committed the murder is inconsistent with the suspicious, threatening and stalking behavior observed by the witnesses who saw him in the state forest on several occasions during the day of the murder,’’ Judge Robert J. Cordy wrote. ‘‘The verdict was not unjust, and we decline to reduce it.’’
Anderson had also argued that Judge Patrick F. Brady should not have allowed testimony about Anderson’s skill with a knife, about his defacing of a woman’s photograph 10 years after the murder, or about statements he made to police without a lawyer following his indictment.
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