A Wayland man who was convicted of butchering his ex-girlfriend shortly after they had graduated from high school in 2011 has had his latest attempt at a new trial denied by Massachusetts’ highest court.

Nathaniel Fujita was convicted in March 2013 of the first-degree murder of Lauren Astley on July 3, 2011. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

“At trial, the defendant did not dispute that he killed the victim,” Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Justice Serge Georges Jr. wrote. “Instead, he asserted a lack of criminal responsibility defense, arguing that, due to mental disease or defect, he lacked the substantial capacity both to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct and to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.”

After his conviction, Fujita filed an appeal based on a diagnosis of schizophrenia based on his condition in 2015 and 2016, years after the murder took place.

He had in May 2015 been sent from a correctional facility to a Secure Psychiatric Unit where he displayed abnormal behavior, “including hissing, public masturbation, possible smearing of feces and urine, odd posturing, and intermittent reporting of hearing voices,” according to the SJC. But he also had inconsistent presentation and would be mute with some staff but speak “to staff he viewed as uninvolved with his clinical assessment,” which made his faking the schizophrenia a “strong possibility.”

While he had two experts at a hearing on that appeal attest that he may have been in the early stages of schizophrenia when the murder took place, the judge did not believe their testimony and credited the state expert’s analysis that to retroactively diagnose the disorder would be “cherry-picking” the evidence, since in all other respects he appeared to be functioning normally at the time of the murder.

The SJC agreed with that decision.

“We affirm the order denying the defendant’s motion for a new trial. We also affirm his conviction of murder in the first degree on the theories of deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty,” the SJC concluded.

The court did order the case back to Superior Court for a new sentence however, as since Fujita was less than 21 years old at the time the murder took place, making him an “emerging adult” at the time who must be given the possibility of parole after 15 years.

The couple

Fujita and Astley had begun dating as sophomores until Astley ended things for the first time on April 1 of that year, according to the SJC summary of the case. Astley had taken him back briefly after he sent her messages saying that the end of their relationship was the “biggest mistake of [his] life,” and that they would “really regret” not repairing the relationship, but she ended things again in late May.

Fujita clearly didn’t take the breakup well. They saw each other two weeks after that second breakup, on June 4, 2011, at a graduation party where Fujita was disruptive in his attempts to speak to her and was “ultimately forced to leave the party.” They saw each other twice more, at their graduation the next day and another party on June 11.

While there were no apparent issues during those later meetings, his family says that he was very depressed and that continued through June. At his 14-day trial, he brought in forensic psychologist Dr. Wade Myers, who opined that the defendant was not able to understand the wrongness of his act due to “a major depressive episode, a brief psychotic disorder, possible chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and daily mairjuana use.”

The prosecution’s rebuttal expert, Dr. Alison Fife, rejected much of Myers’ conclusions: “She concluded that the defendant ‘[a]bsolutely [did] not’ kill the victim because of mental illness; instead, he was primarily motivated by ‘rage.’”

The murder

The SJC summary of the evidence presented at trial shows that while Fujita may have been depressed, he appeared to be able to interact with the world normally even up to hours before he murdered Astley.

After purchasing protein powder at a nearby mall, during which “he spoke with a sales associate and manager and showed no difficulty walking, talking, or completing the transaction,” he called Astley and she said she would come over to his house in Wayland. Phone records show that before she arrived he called his mom to make sure she wasn’t on her way home.

Astley arrived and walked into the Fujita home garage where her ex-boyfriend strangled her with a bungee cord and chopped at her neck with a serrated knife until she was dead.

Afterward the murder he parked her car at a beach parking lot, dropped her keys down a storm drain, and then drove her body and some of the evidence in his own car to a nearby marsh where he waded at least 35 feet out, “pressed her head deeply into the mud” and discarded bloody evidence, according to the SJC decision. Back at home he had time to clean up the blood in the garage and dispose of further evidence in a crawlspace accessible from his bedroom.