NO BAIL FOR SUSPECT IN YOUNG MAN’S SLAYING Dec. 17, 2008 A Dorchester man was ordered held without bail today following his arraignment on a first-degree murder charge stemming from the Jan. 17 stabbing death of 20-year-old Daniel Yakovleff in the defendant’s apartment, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley announced. Suffolk Superior Court Clerk Magistrate Gary D. Wilson accommodated prosecutors’ requests when he denied STEVEN ODEGARD (D.O.B. 8/5/67) bail. Wilson set a presumptive trial date of Dec. 14, 2009, and ordered the defendant to return to court on Feb. 5. Assistant District Attorney Judith Lyons told the court that evidence developed in the course of an 11-month investigation by Boston Police homicide detectives and Suffolk County homicide prosecutors established that Yakovleff was out with friends on the night of Jan. 16 when he separated with those friends and met up with the defendant, who had been frequenting several bars on Tremont Street. “The two men went to the defendant’s home,” Lyons said. “DNA and fingerprint evidence place the two men in the apartment and only the two men in the apartment.” Early on the morning of Jan. 17, Lyons said, Odegard made an unusual phone call. “At approximately 2:45 a.m., the defendant phoned his employer on his employer’s cell phone,” she told the court. Odegard allegedly told the employer, who was expected to pick him up later that morning, “Don’t pick me up.” Odegard called 911 about four hours later to report finding the victim’s body. When Boston Police arrived at the Tuttle Street apartment in which he lived alone, they found Yakovleff in Odegard’s bed with a knife from Odegard’s kitchen “protruding from his chest,” Lyons said. The knife had come from Odegard’s kitchen. “The victim had been stabbed ten times,” she told the court. “He was on his back in a pool of his own blood with his arms bent and clenched toward his face.” Investigators retrieved abundant physical, forensic, and biological evidence from the scene. They canvassed the neighborhoods in which Odegard lived and in which Yakovleff had last been seen, interviewing and taking statements from dozens of witnesses. At the same time, Suffolk prosecutors undertook an extensive grand jury investigation, eliciting sworn testimony from 16 separate individuals. “We in Suffolk County have pioneered the use of the grand jury as an investigative tool,” Conley said. “By testing the evidence and testimony under oath and behind closed doors, we complement the investigation on the street to build strong, ethical, fully-informed cases for trial.” Following the return of an indictment charging Odegard with first-degree murder, Boston Police sought to execute a warrant for his arrest at his Dorchester Avenue apartment. The defendant was not home; instead, they found a Christmas card and a note asking unnamed recipients to pay his bills in his absence. Odegard’s whereabouts remained unknown until he surrendered himself to the warrant late last night, apparently on his attorney’s advice. At the conclusion of today’s proceedings, Lyons presented that attorney with a packet of evidentiary findings several inches thick. Landing with an audible thud on the defense table, it represented the first of prosecutors’ mandatory discovery notices, which provide defendants with the evidence assembled against them. Return to the Press Releases page.