Woman's body lay behind padlocked door upstairs while police detective was downstairs on a routine license check

A Boston Police detective said today he was doing a license check on a "safe" house in South Boston on June 25, even as Melissa Hardy's badly beaten body was behind a padlocked door just above him.

Hardy's body was discovered the next day and her former boyfriend, Martin Jimenez, who lived at 752 E. 4 St., was charged with her murder, allegedly while she paid him one last visit to pick up some of her belongings.

The building's certificate of occupancy and lodging-house license both expired in 2011. That the building remained occupied for more than two years illustrates some of the loopholes of Boston's housing laws. The property remained occupied even though both of its required licenses had expired more than two years earlier. Rather than board the place up, however, city officials let it stay open as the landlord, a Missouri-based investment company, said it was attempting to fix the violations that had led ISD to refuse to renew the certificate of occupancy.

Matthew Petty, Nonbue Investment's local property manager, said the company had been trying to get rid of troublesome tenants but that they tied the company up in Housing Court - and that the company only recently won an agreement to move the last four tenants out - just in time for a new owner to take possession of the property next month. Petty said the company agreed to forgo six months of rent and pay each of the remaining tenants $3,000 to move out.

Petty spoke at a Boston Licensing Board hearing this morning. The hearing was triggered July 25, when Lt. Stephen Meade of the police licensing unit visited the property at the request of the board to inspect its licenses - the certificate of occupancy issued by ISD and the lodging-house license issued by the board itself

Meade told the board he arrived around 2:45 p.m. and found both licenses - and that both had expired at the end of April, 2011.

Meade then proceeded to write up a citation for the property. Police discovered Hardy's body the next evening, after they say, State Police had arrested Jiminez in Concord for OUI - allegedly in a car belonging to a member of Hardy's family. Police say Jiminez killed Hardy a couple days earlier than that.

Police say Jiminez told a couple of patients in the alcoholism unit to which he'd been brought about the murder, they told police and officers entered the apartment and found Hardy's body in his bedroom - behind a padlocked door.

Meade said that knowing Hardy's body was upstairs while he was on the first floor was "chilling."

Petty said Nonbue bought the building several years ago and decided to do something good for the community by giving alcoholics and drug addicts a safe place in which to live during recovery.

It didn't work out well, he acknowledged. A live-in super, who oversaw three-times-a-week urine tests, suffered his own mental-health problems and moved out. MassHealth stopped paying for tenants' rent and a rougher group of people began moving in.

"We completely misunderstood how chaotic this house was going to become," he told the board. The house, he continued, "became volatile. It became very dangerous. Nothing over the top, but we began collecting knives and things of that nature."

The board votes Thursday on what action, if any, to take.