In the dark hours before dawn on February 3, 1983, gunfire tore through the Hotel Belleclaire on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a ten-story building at Broadway and West 77th Street that in that era housed long-term residents alongside transient guests. Desiree Winfield, 12, a girl, was among the four people who would not survive the morning.
Police accounts described a burst of violence beginning around 4:30 a.m. inside a three-room, seventh-floor apartment, where the hotel’s porter/handyman, Alban Leacock, was identified as the gunman. In that apartment, the shooting left Desiree dead alongside Leacock’s wife, Christine, and another man whom contemporaneous reporting described as being in his 20s. The chaos did not stay confined to the apartment: a woman was shot and left in guarded condition at Roosevelt Hospital, and an elderly clerk later realized a bullet had struck him only after he pulled out his wallet and the spent round dropped free—its impact blunted by the leather and bills in his breast pocket.
As residents and staff tried to make sense of the noise—doors locking, footsteps pounding in corridors, people peering out and then recoiling—another fatal shot was reported elsewhere in the building, with the hotel’s owner/manager counted among the dead. Early dispatches emphasized the immediacy of the uncertainty: investigators said the porter was believed to be responsible even as they worked to piece together why the spree had happened at all.
The case did not end with the sirens. Trevor Alban Leacock was prosecuted in New York County and, after a non-jury trial, convicted on November 30, 1983 of second-degree murder, three counts of first-degree manslaughter, two counts of second-degree attempted murder, and second-degree assault as an armed felony. He received an initial sentence that included 20 years to life on the murder count, 10 to 20 years on each attempted-murder count, and 2⅓ to 7 years on the assault count, with additional manslaughter terms of 12½ to 25 years imposed to run consecutively to the other sentences.
On appeal, the Appellate Division left the convictions standing but ruled that the specific sentences imposed on the manslaughter and attempted-murder counts were illegal under New York’s violent-felony sentencing rules, vacated those parts of the sentence, and sent the case back for resentencing on those convictions—an administrative correction that did nothing to soften the underlying horror of what happened at the Belleclaire, but clarified how the punishment would be structured under the law.
