Solved cold cases in Massachusetts
4 documented cases.
Jane Britton
Jane Britton, a 23-year-old Harvard graduate student in Near Eastern archaeology, was raped and bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment in January 1969. The case haunted Harvard and remained unsolved for nearly 50 years until, in 2018, DNA evidence identified her killer as Michael Sumpter, a convicted serial rapist who had died of cancer in 2001 and was therefore never tried.
Natalie Scheublin
Natalie Scheublin, a 54-year-old wife, mother of two, and cancer survivor, was found bound, gagged, beaten, and stabbed to death in the basement of her Bedford, Massachusetts home on June 10, 1971. Her husband, Lexington Trust Bank president Raymond Scheublin, discovered her body. A set of bank keys was missing and the couple's 1969 Chevrolet Impala had been taken and abandoned at a nearby Veterans Administration hospital lot. The case went unsolved for decades. In 1999, Massachusetts State Police ran latent prints lifted from the Impala through the FBI fingerprint database and matched a print on the car to Arthur L. Massei. Massei was not arrested until a revived cold case investigation built the rest of the case around that print, including a witness to whom he had bragged about a knife killing. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 2024 and sentenced to life without parole.
Rodney Wyman
Rodney C. Wyman, a 29-year-old window installer from Simsbury, Connecticut, was shot and killed during an armed robbery at the Town Line Motor Inn in Malden, Massachusetts, late on the night of August 22, 1983. Wyman and a co-worker had traveled from Connecticut to install windows at a local job and were staying at the motel; an armed man entered through a back window of their suite and, in the course of the robbery, shot Wyman once in the chest, the bullet piercing his heart, aorta and kidney. The intruder also confronted Wyman's co-worker, demanded money, and tried to take a television set before fleeing when a tamper alarm sounded and motel staff responded. Investigators lifted more than twenty latent prints from the scene, including prints from the underside of the television, but a 1980s search of the Massachusetts Automated Fingerprint Identification System produced no match and the case went cold for nearly three decades. In an October 2010 cold-case review, Massachusetts State Police latent print examiner Trooper Christopher Dolan reassessed the evidence. On November 9, 2010, after a negative state AFIS search, Dolan submitted two latent images from the television to the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS); within about ten minutes the system returned candidates, and Dolan positively identified the print, which came from a left little finger, as belonging to Shawn Marsh, then 46, of Holyoke, Massachusetts. A Middlesex County grand jury indicted Marsh for murder on September 9, 2011, and he was arrested. On April 25, 2013, Marsh pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 to 18 years in prison. The IAFIS match was later honored as the FBI's 2014 Latent Hit of the Year.
Susan Marcia Rose
Susan Marcia Rose, a 24-year-old woman from Johnstown, Pennsylvania who had moved to Boston and dreamed of becoming a lawyer, was found dead on October 30, 1979 in a Back Bay building under renovation at 285 Beacon Street. She had been struck in the head with a hammer and sexually assaulted. A Brighton man was tried for the killing and acquitted in 1981, and the case went cold for more than four decades. It was broken not by forensic science but by a confession: in August 2023, John Michael Irmer walked into the FBI field office in Portland, Oregon and told agents he had killed Rose in 1979, saying he had gotten sober and found religion. Investigators only afterward matched his DNA to material preserved from the scene, corroborating the account he had volunteered. Irmer pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in April 2026 and received a mandatory life sentence without parole.