Solved cold cases in Massachusetts
6 documented cases.
Danny Croteau
Danny Croteau, 13, the youngest of five altar-boy brothers from Springfield, Massachusetts, was last seen alive on Friday, April 14, 1972. The next morning a Chicopee police officer found him floating face down in the Chicopee River, still in his school uniform. He had been beaten about the head, most likely with a rock, and had a blood alcohol level of 0.18. Within days investigators were looking at the family's friend and former parish priest, Richard R. Lavigne, who was seen alone at the riverbank, asked police whether blood would still be on a stone thrown into the river, and gave statements that did not add up. A brother said an anonymous caller who sounded like Lavigne called Danny's death an accident. Lavigne was never charged. He pleaded guilty in 1992 to molesting two other boys and was defrocked in 2003; DNA testing in the 1990s and in 2004 could not tie him to the scene. In April and May 2021, after a cold-case unit reopened the file, Lavigne, 80 and in a Greenfield medical facility, gave eleven hours of recorded interviews in which he said he brought Danny to the river, gave him a good shove, tossed the object he hit him with into the water, and later saw him floating face down. On May 21, 2021 Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni authorized a murder warrant; Lavigne died of COVID-19 pneumonia that evening. On May 24 Gulluni named him as the killer and closed the case.
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.
Patricia Moreno
Patricia "Tricia" Moreno, 17, lived with a foster mother and the woman's two teenage daughters in a third-floor apartment on Henry Street in Malden, Massachusetts. Just after 3 a.m. on July 20, 1991, police found her face down on the fire escape landing with a single gunshot wound to the head. She was still breathing and died at Massachusetts General Hospital that afternoon. No gun or cartridge casing was found and there was no sign of forced entry. Everyone in the apartment said they had heard two shots and could not say who fired them. Police learned that Rodney Daniels, the boyfriend of the foster mother's oldest daughter, who was staying there that night, had several handguns and had threatened Moreno, but he said he had been asleep in an armchair and no one was charged. In 2020 the Middlesex County district attorney's new cold case unit reconstructed the shooting and found that the bullet's path fit a shot from the apartment doorway. Investigators then located a former downstairs neighbor, who had been out of the country, and who described a man fitting Daniels's description on the fire escape. A woman who had protected Daniels in 1991 had also told friends and relatives, before she died, that he killed Moreno. Daniels was arrested in South Fulton, Georgia on September 27, 2021. In August 2023 a Middlesex Superior Court jury convicted him of first-degree murder.
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.