WOBURN - Only minutes after Timothy Stryker was handcuffed and sent to jail for orchestrating a plan to commit perjury in a civil lawsuit, Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr. vowed to continue an investigation into the former doctor, who remains the prime suspect in the killing of his girlfriend 16 years ago.
"That's where the evidence points," Leone said yesterday, promising Dr. Linda Goudey's family that he will push the case.
Goudey was 42 when she was found strangled in her car in October 1993 in the parking lot of New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, where she worked as an obstetrician. No one was ever charged, but Stryker, an endocrinologist at Memorial, quickly emerged as a suspect. Goudey and Stryker had a romantic relationship at the time, and Stryker's only alibi was that he was home.
Stryker, who declared his innocence initially, was not charged at the time.
Yesterday, however, Stryker pleaded guilty in Middlesex Superior Court yesterday to multiple counts of conspiracy to commit subornation of perjury, five counts of subornation of perjury, and one count of conveying something of value to a witness. He was sentenced to four years in prison, with four years of probation.
In 2006, Goudey's family won a civil lawsuit, amounting to some $20 million in damages and interest, that held Stryker responsible for her death. That is when, as Leone put it, Stryker's "ball of yarn" began to unravel. After the civil verdict, Stryker, now 56, orchestrated a plan with a former handyman and patient and a man he had just met to concoct a phony story as groundwork for an appeal of the civil suit.
According to the plan, Richard Chambers, the handyman and client, persuaded a man Stryker had never met to say in an affidavit that he had seen Goudey just before she died with a man who resembled Boomer Esiason, the former pro football quarterback. The new witness, Craig Pizzano, 18 at the time, told prosecutors "wanted to clear an innocent man."
But prosecutors quickly grew suspicious. After an investigation, Stryker was charged with concocting the story and promising Pizzano thousands of dollars and Chambers prescriptions of OxyContin if they went along. Pizzano was never charged. Chambers has pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate in the case against Stryker.
Yesterday, Stryker did not say anything as he was led away in handcuffs, but his lawyer, Kevin Mahoney, said that the scheme was poor judgment by a man who was "distraught" by the loss of his reputation and the sizable judgment in the jury award.
"He absolutely denies any responsibility for Dr. Goudey's death," Mahoney said.
The message did nothing to settle Leone, or Goudey's family.
"Worst of all, he has again sucked years of life away from a family that had only begun to heal," Goudey's brother, John Rafuse, said in the statement.
Milton Valencia can be reached at mvalencia@globe.com. 
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