A man currently serving a life sentence for beating a man to death has been charged with two more first degree murders. Prosecutors accuse Kevin Lino of beating a man to death and forcing another to overdose. He was indicted on August 5, 2025, for the senseless murders of 54-year-old Gary Melanson and 30-year-old Douglas Leon Clarke.

Cold Case Murders

According to a statement made by Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan during a press conference on Tuesday, two men lost their lives in Massachusetts in 2010 and 2012, and their cases went cold until now. Melanson was beaten to death with an aluminum baseball bat, and Clarke was intentionally given a fatal dose of heroin.

In November 2010, authorities found Melanson’s body sprawled over a collapsed tent underneath the Rogers Street Bridge in Lowell, Massachusetts. His death was “undetermined” by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner after they discovered he died of blunt impact injuries. 

In August 2012, Clarke’s body was found in Cambridge along the Charles River. Authorities discovered his blood contained a high level of morphine, codeine, ethanol, and gabapentin. At the time, they ruled his death an accidental overdose.

Connecting the Murders

At the time of Melanson’s murder, he and Lino were living in a homeless encampment under the bridge. Prosecutors allege Lino became angry with Melanson for starting fires to keep warm, claiming it would bring unwanted attention. He was concerned that police and firefighters would come poking around. Melanson ignored his concerns, and Lino allegedly charged at him with a bat and began beating him until he stopped moving. 

At the time of Clarke’s death in 2012, he and Lino were living with a group of homeless people near Harvard Square. According to prosecutors, Lino wanted to “drive out heroin-using members of the group, including by assaulting many of them throughout the day.” A confrontation broke out between the two, so, in Lino’s instincts, he gave Clarke a “hot shot”, or a fatal dose of heroin. 

During the press conference, Ryan said, “Authorities learned about Lino’s alleged involvement in the deaths of Melanson and Clarke in 2018 on an unrelated investigation.” The unrelated investigation she referred to is the death of a homeless man, Normand Varieur. In 2018, Lino was found guilty of beating Varieur to death in Charlestown’s Paul Revere Park.

First-Degree Murder Charges

Lino is incarcerated at a Suffolk County prison for the murder of a man in Boston. He is also serving a 40-year sentence concurrently for torturing and murdering a homeless man in Montana in 2014, where he was placed on the FBI’s wanted list. Gilbert Berry was living underneath the Reserve Street Bridge in Missoula at the time of his death. Prosecutors alleged Lino carved gang symbols on Berry’s body and stuffed lit cigarettes up his nose before shooting him in the head and throwing his body in the Clark Fork River. 

Lino is scheduled to be arraigned soon in Middlesex Superior Court for two counts of first-degree murder. “These allegations demonstrate a violent pattern of behavior in which the defendant is alleged to have targeted and victimized some of the most vulnerable members of our communities. These cases, not initially ruled by the Medical Examiner to be homicides, left the families and friends of Mr. Melanson and Mr. Clarke with little or incorrect information about what had happened to them,” Ryan said.

In the same statement, she added, “When I created the Cold Case Unit, I made a commitment to re-examining existing evidence and to exhausting every possible option to bring answers to families. In this case, through painstaking investigation and the development of new evidence, we were able to uncover the truth behind the deaths of Gary Melanson and Douglas Leon Clarke.”