Mass. woman convicted of murdering Boston firefighter husband

A Plymouth County jury handed down a guilty verdict Friday for Christine Ricci, convicting the Marshfield woman of fatally stabbing her husband Michael, a longtime Boston firefighter, in 2021.

Ricci, 49, was convicted of second-degree murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office said in a press release. The verdict followed five days of evidence and two-and-a-half hours of jury deliberation.

Prosecutors alleged Christine Ricci was fueled by jealousy and rage over her husband’s extramarital affair when she stabbed him in the heart and back on Jan. 28, 2021. In a closing argument captured by Court TV, Assistant District Attorney Jeremy Beth Kusmin said Ricci was unable to move on from the six-week affair, which happened in 2018, and repeatedly pressed her husband for details.

The couple’s final years together were allegedly marked by frequent altercations, and witnesses testified during the trial that they had seen Michael Ricci with scratches, black eyes, and a fat lip, according to video from Court TV. 

“The only way to put an end to Christine Ricci’s pain, anger, jealousy, and rage that consumed her was to put an end to the very person who caused that pain,” Kusmin said. “She did so by stabbing Michael Ricci intentionally in his heart, and then stabbed him again in his back.” 

Christine Ricci told investigators she and her husband were arguing the day he died, that he was having a manic episode, and that she grabbed a steak knife “to scare the victim off, as she had done before,” per a statement of facts filed in court. According to the court document, Christine Ricci also told investigators her husband lunged at her and claimed she wasn’t aware the knife had penetrated his chest until he fell to the ground.

The couple’s then-16-year-old daughter was home at the time and called 911, prosecutors said. 

Marshfield police and emergency personnel responded to the couple’s Moraine Street home and rushed 51-year-old Michael Ricci to South Shore Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, the DA’s office said in its press release Friday. Michael Ricci was a Gulf War veteran and worked for the Boston Fire Department for 23 years. 

In his own closing argument, defense attorney Joshua Wood asserted that prosecutors didn’t prove Christine Ricci intended to kill her husband. He presented an alternative theory: That Michael Ricci was trying to stop a “suicidal” Christine Ricci from hurting herself on Jan. 28, 2021, but was fatally wounded in the ensuing struggle over the knife. 

“Christine Ricci never intended to kill Michael. She never intended to stab Michael,” Wood said, per Court TV video. “What happened was an incredible tragedy that was the result of everything that was going on in the home for the previous two years but was very specific to the few minutes around that call to 911.”

Kusmin, meanwhile, asserted that the stabbing fit into a “pattern of conduct and a level of hostility” that she said Christine Ricci had for her husband.  

“Michael Ricci became Christine Ricci’s human punching bag,” Kusmin said. 

Christine Ricci is scheduled for sentencing at 3 p.m. on Aug. 22 in Plymouth Superior Court.