Boston Globe
Boston, Mass.
by Steven Rosenberg
Dec. 16, 2004
p. D1
REGARDING HENRY ; THIRTY YEARS LATER, THE SCARS OF AN UNSOLVED MURDER LINGER
SWAMPSCOTT The sky was full of clouds, darkness was coming, and silence had returned to a rocky ledge the teenagers called SV, or Swampscott View. Soon it would rain hard, and all night. On the ledge, buried beneath a pile of leaves, lay Henry Bedard Jr. He was 15, and by 4 p.m. on Dec. 16, 1974, his skull had been crushed. Yards away lay the murder weapon, a baseball bat. His killer or killers were farther away.
Thirty years after his brutal death, no one knows who killed Bedard.
An investigation by the Swampscott police and the State Police never led to an arrest. There were no suspects. No leads. No motive.
"We never got anything that was worthwhile. Nothing. Nothing at all," said James Hanley, the retired Swampscott police captain who oversaw the investigation. "There were all kinds of theories. Theories like some hobo came down the track and killed him. A nut from Lynn could have done it. I never got anything that would kind to seem to have any credence to it."
The pain, shock, and confusion that overtook the small North Shore town in 1974 has eased over the years. Bedard is no longer a household name. His parents divorced and moved away. Classmates grew up and married. And along the way, Swampscott matured from a working- class town filled with craftsmen and General Electric employees to a select destination for professionals with six-figure incomes.
Still, every Dec. 16, Bedard's father and a core group of the murdered boy's childhood friends wonder why no one could ever have been charged with the crime in this close-knit town of 14,000 people where everyone seems to know everyone else.
"I was hoping that it would have been solved before I died," said Henry Bedard Sr., who is retired and living in Florida. "But it looks like it'll never be solved."
Childhood friends like Paul Zuchero have spent dozens of sleepless nights over the years going over scenarios that could have led to the murder and searching for any kind of motive. "It's unbelievable," said Zuchero, who remembers sitting next to Bedard at church the day before the teenager was murdered. Zuchero, who is now 45, still has his dead friend's ninth-grade graduation picture hanging on his refrigerator door. "I want him in the middle of everything," he said, pointing to a montage of family photos surrounding Bedard. At this point, he hopes that the murderer if he or she is still alive leaves a deathbed confession someday.
Over the past two years, Swampscott police and State Police have taken a renewed interest in the case. Thirteen months ago, Bedard's clothing and the murder weapon a 31-inch Louisville Slugger bat with cryptic markings on its handle were sent out for DNA testing. Police hope to match two partial fingerprints that were found on the blood-splattered bat.
The wooded area where Bedard was killed looks the same as it did 30 years ago. A path ascends from a former Boston & Maine rail bed up a small hill to the rocky clearing. The area can be seen from Paradise Road the second busiest street in town and overlooks Swampscott's Department of Public Works yard. Fading brown leaves are piled deep and make walking slow.
Just why Bedard walked along that clearing 30 years ago is still a mystery. In the summer, he had played cards with friends at the site, but when winter set in, the rocky clearing was no longer a place where friends would meet. Nor was it considered a shortcut back to his home, 1 mile away. "I just want to know why he was up there that day," his mother, Gloria Bedard, said in a short telephone interview.
At 15, the high school sophomore was on track to be a success. Street-smart and confident, he was less than a year away from buying his first car with the $900 he had saved from caddying and pumping gas at his father's gas station in Danvers. At 5-foot-4 and 135 pounds, he had earned a spot on the junior varsity football team. Friends remember him as a scrappy kid with a good sense of humor who would never back down from a threat. With his quick smile and blond hair, he was not shy when it came to asking a girl out for a date.
"I'd give an arm, a leg to find out who did it," said Cindy Cavallaro, who took Bedard to her eighth-grade dance. She remembers the small ring Bedard gave her when she was 14. After his death she wore it every day for two years, until it disappeared down her bathroom sink. "I was devastated. It was the last thing I had from him."
Retracing his steps
Henry Bedard began his last day of life by walking his younger brother to school and then continuing on for another 2 miles to Swampscott High School. Bedard attended all of his classes that day, but after school let out at 2:15 p.m. he altered his routine. Instead of walking home with friends, he took a bus from the school to the Vinnin Square shopping center. Between 2:30 and 3 p.m., he dropped off a roll of 8-millimeter film to be developed at CVS and purchased a bottle of perfume as a Christmas gift for his sister.
Around 3 p.m., two-fifths of a mile from the CVS, he was seen by then-lieutenant Peter Cassidy on Paradise Road. Cassidy waved to him and noticed that Bedard was walking fast. "He looked like he was in a hurry to get somewhere," Cassidy said. By 3:40, Bedard was almost a mile south of the CVS when several town workers spotted him walking across the DPW lot.
"He looked up and said, `Merry Christmas,' " said Tom Scanlon, who remembers seeing Bedard walking toward the abandoned railroad tracks that sit next to the DPW yard. Scanlon said Bedard held up a bag and told the town workers he was going home to wrap Christmas presents. The men watched Bedard disappear into the woods, onto the path of the former rail line. Scanlon then went back to work inside the wooden building just 10 feet underneath the ledge. Within the next 15 minutes, Bedard would be attacked just above the workers' heads and left to die. "We never heard anything," said Scanlon.
Around that time, Cliff Goodman was getting ready for his 10th birthday party. Two of his friends arrived at about 4 p.m. They didn't tell anyone that they had just found and then left an empty brown wallet and a CVS bag with a bottle of perfume on the ledge behind Goodman's house.
As darkness fell on the town, an icy rain began. Meanwhile, Bedard's parents began to worry when their son didn't come home for supper. "We knew something was wrong right away, because Henry was always home by 5:30 p.m.," said Zuchero. By 7 p.m., Bedard's father had picked up Zuchero, and together with friends and family, they drove in the heavy rain, searching in parks, woods, and back paths for Henry. "We were hollering in the middle of the woods; we thought he had fallen and hurt himself and couldn't move," said Zuchero. "We never, ever thought he was dead."
By the next day, Swampscott police had arranged for a helicopter to help search the town. During school that day, one of Goodman's friends told the 10-year-old about the empty wallet and perfume by the ledge. Intrigued by the find, Goodman and his friend reached the spot after school, around 2:30 p.m., and scanned the leaves for the perfume and wallet. Then Goodman and his friend started to scream. They had found Bedard, covered in leaves and blood; his head was cracked open.
"After all these years I don't like anything scary, or to be in the dark," said Goodman, who is now 40. He remembers being overwhelmed by a wave of emotions that followed in the hours after discovering Bedard's body. That night he kept the light on in his room as he lay in his bed. As he tried to sort out his feelings, he could hear the hum of portable generators that lit up the hill as police searched for clues. Since that night he has visited Bedard's grave more than a dozen times. "I never knew him, but I felt like I had to go," Goodman said.
On Dec. 20, 1974, 1,500 people packed St. John's Church in Swampscott. Children and adults wept as the priest described Bedard as "a good man." Inside the coffin, Bedard wore a Swampscott football jersey with the number 30. It was the same number his older brother had once worn for the high school football team.
The seaside town known for its quaint beaches, storied football team, and quiet neighborhoods was in shock. People began to lock their doors. Kids walked in pairs. Residents expected an arrest right away. "It was like a little hamlet, really; you felt that you were living in a really special place," said Zuchero. "My feeling is that on Dec. 16, 1974, that Swampscott died, the day Henry died, never to be seen again."
Cavallaro, who still lives less than a half-mile from the murder site, has never walked near the murder scene, and she drives out of her way to bypass the site. "It changed everything," she said, describing a town gripped with fear. "I don't think I ever looked at anyone or trusted anybody the same way after that."
A failed investigation
Right away, police acknowledged they had few clues outside of the bat, which had the Roman numeral VI carved into the butt. Any footprints around Bedard's body had been washed away by the half- inch of rain that had fallen during the night of the murder. The autopsy was delayed a day, and when it was performed, Bedard was not fingerprinted. Six months after the murder, a partial fingerprint was found on the bat when it was examined at the State Police lab in Boston. Despite interviewing coaches, Little League players, sporting-goods store owners, and the bat's manufacturer, police were never able to identify the bat's owner.
In 1998 the bat was sent to the State Police lab again, and a second partial imprint was identified. Because Bedard was never fingerprinted, police still don't know whether the prints are Bedard's or the murderers.
Bedard's closest friends are hesitant to place any blame on the investigation, yet some wonder whether the Swampscott police were qualified to conduct a murder investigation. While some people were singled out 30 years ago for questioning by police, others were never contacted.
Mark Gambale is still waiting to talk to the police about his memories of Bedard, who lived two doors away. Gambale remembers spending family vacations at the Bedards' summer home in New Hampshire, and he first played with Bedard as a baby. The two boys walked home from school together often, and they never used the clearing where Bedard was found murdered as a shortcut home. "Nothing is going to fix it, but you thought there would be a resolution to what happened," said Gambale. "Thirty years later, we're still waiting."
With a force of 35 officers in a town of 13,500 people, crime was a rare occurrence in Swampscott in 1974. According to the town's 1974 annual report, there were two armed robberies and five drug- related arrests. Patrol officers spent most of their time that year responding to service calls issuing 548 parking tickets, investigating 296 car accidents, and transporting 330 people to the hospital.
The Bedard murder was Hanley's first homicide investigation. He interviewed nearly 100 people. Nine teenagers took polygraph tests, and all passed. By the spring of 1975, four months after the murder, the case had turned cold and Hanley returned to other duties. With the hope of generating leads, a $10,000 reward was offered to help find the killer. There were no takers.
After several months, frustration, grief, and disbelief gave way to a numbness that settled on his close friends and his father. "I kept saying to myself that they were going to find out who, why, or what," said Bedard's father. "I just don't know what happened."
With time, the memory of the feisty boy who loved sports and was always home for dinner by 5:30 p.m. faded into the town's subconsciousness. A college scholarship was established in his name, and two high school yearbooks were dedicated to him in the first few years after his murder. But investigators who worked on the case have long retired, and now Bedard is usually referenced only when anybody talks about the town's sole unsolved murder.
"It's like an urban legend now," Ron Madigan, the current police chief, said of the Bedard case.
While three generations have been born since Bedard was last seen slipping into the twilight by the railroad tracks, longtime residents have not tired of the mystery. At the recent Swampscott- Marblehead Thanksgiving football game, a group of middle-age men talked about the murder on the sidelines. Longtime residents say they have developed a habit of looking up at the rocks above the DPW yard every time they drive by. Others, like Bedard's old girlfriend Cavallaro, can't help but wonder if the murderer is still living in town.
"How do I know that someone I went to school with wasn't involved or knows something?" she said. "In a town this small, everybody knows everybody's business. It's like a little Peyton Place. How can something like this be kept so long?"
While the Swampscott police never developed suspects, the town's principal investigators believe the murderer was someone who knew Bedard.
"I think it was a friend of his. I think it was somebody very close to him," said Cassidy, who knew Bedard's family and continued to work on the case when he became police chief.
Hanley agrees with Cassidy. "I think it was someone in his circle of friends. I firmly believe that. . . . It's a logical conclusion to make," he said.
Bedard's closest friends scoff at the retired investigators and believe it's time to start the investigation from scratch.
"After 30 years it's time for them to think outside of the box," said Zuchero, who wants the police to re-interview everyone who knew Bedard.
A mile down the road from the cul-de-sac where he once lived and played stands a simple gravestone with the name Bedard. Unlike the smooth and ornate granite monuments that fill the Swampscott Cemetery, Bedard's is understated. Tufts of rock jut out from the front side, and on the back he's identified as a son who lived from 1959 to 1974.
His friends aren't sure if they'll be coming today to the gravestone. "I'll light a candle and say a prayer for him," said Zuchero.
In Zuchero's kitchen the light will flicker on the picture on the refrigerator of the 15-year-old boy who is forever smiling.
Boston, Mass.
by Steven Rosenberg
Dec. 16, 2004
p. D1
REGARDING HENRY ; THIRTY YEARS LATER, THE SCARS OF AN UNSOLVED MURDER LINGER
SWAMPSCOTT The sky was full of clouds, darkness was coming, and silence had returned to a rocky ledge the teenagers called SV, or Swampscott View. Soon it would rain hard, and all night. On the ledge, buried beneath a pile of leaves, lay Henry Bedard Jr. He was 15, and by 4 p.m. on Dec. 16, 1974, his skull had been crushed. Yards away lay the murder weapon, a baseball bat. His killer or killers were farther away.
Thirty years after his brutal death, no one knows who killed Bedard.
An investigation by the Swampscott police and the State Police never led to an arrest. There were no suspects. No leads. No motive.
"We never got anything that was worthwhile. Nothing. Nothing at all," said James Hanley, the retired Swampscott police captain who oversaw the investigation. "There were all kinds of theories. Theories like some hobo came down the track and killed him. A nut from Lynn could have done it. I never got anything that would kind to seem to have any credence to it."
The pain, shock, and confusion that overtook the small North Shore town in 1974 has eased over the years. Bedard is no longer a household name. His parents divorced and moved away. Classmates grew up and married. And along the way, Swampscott matured from a working- class town filled with craftsmen and General Electric employees to a select destination for professionals with six-figure incomes.
Still, every Dec. 16, Bedard's father and a core group of the murdered boy's childhood friends wonder why no one could ever have been charged with the crime in this close-knit town of 14,000 people where everyone seems to know everyone else.
"I was hoping that it would have been solved before I died," said Henry Bedard Sr., who is retired and living in Florida. "But it looks like it'll never be solved."
Childhood friends like Paul Zuchero have spent dozens of sleepless nights over the years going over scenarios that could have led to the murder and searching for any kind of motive. "It's unbelievable," said Zuchero, who remembers sitting next to Bedard at church the day before the teenager was murdered. Zuchero, who is now 45, still has his dead friend's ninth-grade graduation picture hanging on his refrigerator door. "I want him in the middle of everything," he said, pointing to a montage of family photos surrounding Bedard. At this point, he hopes that the murderer if he or she is still alive leaves a deathbed confession someday.
Over the past two years, Swampscott police and State Police have taken a renewed interest in the case. Thirteen months ago, Bedard's clothing and the murder weapon a 31-inch Louisville Slugger bat with cryptic markings on its handle were sent out for DNA testing. Police hope to match two partial fingerprints that were found on the blood-splattered bat.
The wooded area where Bedard was killed looks the same as it did 30 years ago. A path ascends from a former Boston & Maine rail bed up a small hill to the rocky clearing. The area can be seen from Paradise Road the second busiest street in town and overlooks Swampscott's Department of Public Works yard. Fading brown leaves are piled deep and make walking slow.
Just why Bedard walked along that clearing 30 years ago is still a mystery. In the summer, he had played cards with friends at the site, but when winter set in, the rocky clearing was no longer a place where friends would meet. Nor was it considered a shortcut back to his home, 1 mile away. "I just want to know why he was up there that day," his mother, Gloria Bedard, said in a short telephone interview.
At 15, the high school sophomore was on track to be a success. Street-smart and confident, he was less than a year away from buying his first car with the $900 he had saved from caddying and pumping gas at his father's gas station in Danvers. At 5-foot-4 and 135 pounds, he had earned a spot on the junior varsity football team. Friends remember him as a scrappy kid with a good sense of humor who would never back down from a threat. With his quick smile and blond hair, he was not shy when it came to asking a girl out for a date.
"I'd give an arm, a leg to find out who did it," said Cindy Cavallaro, who took Bedard to her eighth-grade dance. She remembers the small ring Bedard gave her when she was 14. After his death she wore it every day for two years, until it disappeared down her bathroom sink. "I was devastated. It was the last thing I had from him."
Retracing his steps
Henry Bedard began his last day of life by walking his younger brother to school and then continuing on for another 2 miles to Swampscott High School. Bedard attended all of his classes that day, but after school let out at 2:15 p.m. he altered his routine. Instead of walking home with friends, he took a bus from the school to the Vinnin Square shopping center. Between 2:30 and 3 p.m., he dropped off a roll of 8-millimeter film to be developed at CVS and purchased a bottle of perfume as a Christmas gift for his sister.
Around 3 p.m., two-fifths of a mile from the CVS, he was seen by then-lieutenant Peter Cassidy on Paradise Road. Cassidy waved to him and noticed that Bedard was walking fast. "He looked like he was in a hurry to get somewhere," Cassidy said. By 3:40, Bedard was almost a mile south of the CVS when several town workers spotted him walking across the DPW lot.
"He looked up and said, `Merry Christmas,' " said Tom Scanlon, who remembers seeing Bedard walking toward the abandoned railroad tracks that sit next to the DPW yard. Scanlon said Bedard held up a bag and told the town workers he was going home to wrap Christmas presents. The men watched Bedard disappear into the woods, onto the path of the former rail line. Scanlon then went back to work inside the wooden building just 10 feet underneath the ledge. Within the next 15 minutes, Bedard would be attacked just above the workers' heads and left to die. "We never heard anything," said Scanlon.
Around that time, Cliff Goodman was getting ready for his 10th birthday party. Two of his friends arrived at about 4 p.m. They didn't tell anyone that they had just found and then left an empty brown wallet and a CVS bag with a bottle of perfume on the ledge behind Goodman's house.
As darkness fell on the town, an icy rain began. Meanwhile, Bedard's parents began to worry when their son didn't come home for supper. "We knew something was wrong right away, because Henry was always home by 5:30 p.m.," said Zuchero. By 7 p.m., Bedard's father had picked up Zuchero, and together with friends and family, they drove in the heavy rain, searching in parks, woods, and back paths for Henry. "We were hollering in the middle of the woods; we thought he had fallen and hurt himself and couldn't move," said Zuchero. "We never, ever thought he was dead."
By the next day, Swampscott police had arranged for a helicopter to help search the town. During school that day, one of Goodman's friends told the 10-year-old about the empty wallet and perfume by the ledge. Intrigued by the find, Goodman and his friend reached the spot after school, around 2:30 p.m., and scanned the leaves for the perfume and wallet. Then Goodman and his friend started to scream. They had found Bedard, covered in leaves and blood; his head was cracked open.
"After all these years I don't like anything scary, or to be in the dark," said Goodman, who is now 40. He remembers being overwhelmed by a wave of emotions that followed in the hours after discovering Bedard's body. That night he kept the light on in his room as he lay in his bed. As he tried to sort out his feelings, he could hear the hum of portable generators that lit up the hill as police searched for clues. Since that night he has visited Bedard's grave more than a dozen times. "I never knew him, but I felt like I had to go," Goodman said.
On Dec. 20, 1974, 1,500 people packed St. John's Church in Swampscott. Children and adults wept as the priest described Bedard as "a good man." Inside the coffin, Bedard wore a Swampscott football jersey with the number 30. It was the same number his older brother had once worn for the high school football team.
The seaside town known for its quaint beaches, storied football team, and quiet neighborhoods was in shock. People began to lock their doors. Kids walked in pairs. Residents expected an arrest right away. "It was like a little hamlet, really; you felt that you were living in a really special place," said Zuchero. "My feeling is that on Dec. 16, 1974, that Swampscott died, the day Henry died, never to be seen again."
Cavallaro, who still lives less than a half-mile from the murder site, has never walked near the murder scene, and she drives out of her way to bypass the site. "It changed everything," she said, describing a town gripped with fear. "I don't think I ever looked at anyone or trusted anybody the same way after that."
A failed investigation
Right away, police acknowledged they had few clues outside of the bat, which had the Roman numeral VI carved into the butt. Any footprints around Bedard's body had been washed away by the half- inch of rain that had fallen during the night of the murder. The autopsy was delayed a day, and when it was performed, Bedard was not fingerprinted. Six months after the murder, a partial fingerprint was found on the bat when it was examined at the State Police lab in Boston. Despite interviewing coaches, Little League players, sporting-goods store owners, and the bat's manufacturer, police were never able to identify the bat's owner.
In 1998 the bat was sent to the State Police lab again, and a second partial imprint was identified. Because Bedard was never fingerprinted, police still don't know whether the prints are Bedard's or the murderers.
Bedard's closest friends are hesitant to place any blame on the investigation, yet some wonder whether the Swampscott police were qualified to conduct a murder investigation. While some people were singled out 30 years ago for questioning by police, others were never contacted.
Mark Gambale is still waiting to talk to the police about his memories of Bedard, who lived two doors away. Gambale remembers spending family vacations at the Bedards' summer home in New Hampshire, and he first played with Bedard as a baby. The two boys walked home from school together often, and they never used the clearing where Bedard was found murdered as a shortcut home. "Nothing is going to fix it, but you thought there would be a resolution to what happened," said Gambale. "Thirty years later, we're still waiting."
With a force of 35 officers in a town of 13,500 people, crime was a rare occurrence in Swampscott in 1974. According to the town's 1974 annual report, there were two armed robberies and five drug- related arrests. Patrol officers spent most of their time that year responding to service calls issuing 548 parking tickets, investigating 296 car accidents, and transporting 330 people to the hospital.
The Bedard murder was Hanley's first homicide investigation. He interviewed nearly 100 people. Nine teenagers took polygraph tests, and all passed. By the spring of 1975, four months after the murder, the case had turned cold and Hanley returned to other duties. With the hope of generating leads, a $10,000 reward was offered to help find the killer. There were no takers.
After several months, frustration, grief, and disbelief gave way to a numbness that settled on his close friends and his father. "I kept saying to myself that they were going to find out who, why, or what," said Bedard's father. "I just don't know what happened."
With time, the memory of the feisty boy who loved sports and was always home for dinner by 5:30 p.m. faded into the town's subconsciousness. A college scholarship was established in his name, and two high school yearbooks were dedicated to him in the first few years after his murder. But investigators who worked on the case have long retired, and now Bedard is usually referenced only when anybody talks about the town's sole unsolved murder.
"It's like an urban legend now," Ron Madigan, the current police chief, said of the Bedard case.
While three generations have been born since Bedard was last seen slipping into the twilight by the railroad tracks, longtime residents have not tired of the mystery. At the recent Swampscott- Marblehead Thanksgiving football game, a group of middle-age men talked about the murder on the sidelines. Longtime residents say they have developed a habit of looking up at the rocks above the DPW yard every time they drive by. Others, like Bedard's old girlfriend Cavallaro, can't help but wonder if the murderer is still living in town.
"How do I know that someone I went to school with wasn't involved or knows something?" she said. "In a town this small, everybody knows everybody's business. It's like a little Peyton Place. How can something like this be kept so long?"
While the Swampscott police never developed suspects, the town's principal investigators believe the murderer was someone who knew Bedard.
"I think it was a friend of his. I think it was somebody very close to him," said Cassidy, who knew Bedard's family and continued to work on the case when he became police chief.
Hanley agrees with Cassidy. "I think it was someone in his circle of friends. I firmly believe that. . . . It's a logical conclusion to make," he said.
Bedard's closest friends scoff at the retired investigators and believe it's time to start the investigation from scratch.
"After 30 years it's time for them to think outside of the box," said Zuchero, who wants the police to re-interview everyone who knew Bedard.
A mile down the road from the cul-de-sac where he once lived and played stands a simple gravestone with the name Bedard. Unlike the smooth and ornate granite monuments that fill the Swampscott Cemetery, Bedard's is understated. Tufts of rock jut out from the front side, and on the back he's identified as a son who lived from 1959 to 1974.
His friends aren't sure if they'll be coming today to the gravestone. "I'll light a candle and say a prayer for him," said Zuchero.
In Zuchero's kitchen the light will flicker on the picture on the refrigerator of the 15-year-old boy who is forever smiling.
Boston Globe
Boston, Mass.
by Steven Rosenberg
Dec. 16, 2004
p. D1
REGARDING HENRY ; THIRTY YEARS LATER, THE SCARS OF AN UNSOLVED MURDER LINGER
SWAMPSCOTT The sky was full of clouds, darkness was coming, and silence had returned to a rocky ledge the teenagers called SV, or Swampscott View. Soon it would rain hard, and all night. On the ledge, buried beneath a pile of leaves, lay Henry Bedard Jr. He was 15, and by 4 p.m. on Dec. 16, 1974, his skull had been crushed. Yards away lay the murder weapon, a baseball bat. His killer or killers were farther away.
Thirty years after his brutal death, no one knows who killed Bedard.
An investigation by the Swampscott police and the State Police never led to an arrest. There were no suspects. No leads. No motive.
"We never got anything that was worthwhile. Nothing. Nothing at all," said James Hanley, the retired Swampscott police captain who oversaw the investigation. "There were all kinds of theories. Theories like some hobo came down the track and killed him. A nut from Lynn could have done it. I never got anything that would kind to seem to have any credence to it."
The pain, shock, and confusion that overtook the small North Shore town in 1974 has eased over the years. Bedard is no longer a household name. His parents divorced and moved away. Classmates grew up and married. And along the way, Swampscott matured from a working- class town filled with craftsmen and General Electric employees to a select destination for professionals with six-figure incomes.
Still, every Dec. 16, Bedard's father and a core group of the murdered boy's childhood friends wonder why no one could ever have been charged with the crime in this close-knit town of 14,000 people where everyone seems to know everyone else.
"I was hoping that it would have been solved before I died," said Henry Bedard Sr., who is retired and living in Florida. "But it looks like it'll never be solved."
Childhood friends like Paul Zuchero have spent dozens of sleepless nights over the years going over scenarios that could have led to the murder and searching for any kind of motive. "It's unbelievable," said Zuchero, who remembers sitting next to Bedard at church the day before the teenager was murdered. Zuchero, who is now 45, still has his dead friend's ninth-grade graduation picture hanging on his refrigerator door. "I want him in the middle of everything," he said, pointing to a montage of family photos surrounding Bedard. At this point, he hopes that the murderer if he or she is still alive leaves a deathbed confession someday.
Over the past two years, Swampscott police and State Police have taken a renewed interest in the case. Thirteen months ago, Bedard's clothing and the murder weapon a 31-inch Louisville Slugger bat with cryptic markings on its handle were sent out for DNA testing. Police hope to match two partial fingerprints that were found on the blood-splattered bat.
The wooded area where Bedard was killed looks the same as it did 30 years ago. A path ascends from a former Boston & Maine rail bed up a small hill to the rocky clearing. The area can be seen from Paradise Road the second busiest street in town and overlooks Swampscott's Department of Public Works yard. Fading brown leaves are piled deep and make walking slow.
Just why Bedard walked along that clearing 30 years ago is still a mystery. In the summer, he had played cards with friends at the site, but when winter set in, the rocky clearing was no longer a place where friends would meet. Nor was it considered a shortcut back to his home, 1 mile away. "I just want to know why he was up there that day," his mother, Gloria Bedard, said in a short telephone interview.
At 15, the high school sophomore was on track to be a success. Street-smart and confident, he was less than a year away from buying his first car with the $900 he had saved from caddying and pumping gas at his father's gas station in Danvers. At 5-foot-4 and 135 pounds, he had earned a spot on the junior varsity football team. Friends remember him as a scrappy kid with a good sense of humor who would never back down from a threat. With his quick smile and blond hair, he was not shy when it came to asking a girl out for a date.
"I'd give an arm, a leg to find out who did it," said Cindy Cavallaro, who took Bedard to her eighth-grade dance. She remembers the small ring Bedard gave her when she was 14. After his death she wore it every day for two years, until it disappeared down her bathroom sink. "I was devastated. It was the last thing I had from him."
Retracing his steps
Henry Bedard began his last day of life by walking his younger brother to school and then continuing on for another 2 miles to Swampscott High School. Bedard attended all of his classes that day, but after school let out at 2:15 p.m. he altered his routine. Instead of walking home with friends, he took a bus from the school to the Vinnin Square shopping center. Between 2:30 and 3 p.m., he dropped off a roll of 8-millimeter film to be developed at CVS and purchased a bottle of perfume as a Christmas gift for his sister.
Around 3 p.m., two-fifths of a mile from the CVS, he was seen by then-lieutenant Peter Cassidy on Paradise Road. Cassidy waved to him and noticed that Bedard was walking fast. "He looked like he was in a hurry to get somewhere," Cassidy said. By 3:40, Bedard was almost a mile south of the CVS when several town workers spotted him walking across the DPW lot.
"He looked up and said, `Merry Christmas,' " said Tom Scanlon, who remembers seeing Bedard walking toward the abandoned railroad tracks that sit next to the DPW yard. Scanlon said Bedard held up a bag and told the town workers he was going home to wrap Christmas presents. The men watched Bedard disappear into the woods, onto the path of the former rail line. Scanlon then went back to work inside the wooden building just 10 feet underneath the ledge. Within the next 15 minutes, Bedard would be attacked just above the workers' heads and left to die. "We never heard anything," said Scanlon.
Around that time, Cliff Goodman was getting ready for his 10th birthday party. Two of his friends arrived at about 4 p.m. They didn't tell anyone that they had just found and then left an empty brown wallet and a CVS bag with a bottle of perfume on the ledge behind Goodman's house.
As darkness fell on the town, an icy rain began. Meanwhile, Bedard's parents began to worry when their son didn't come home for supper. "We knew something was wrong right away, because Henry was always home by 5:30 p.m.," said Zuchero. By 7 p.m., Bedard's father had picked up Zuchero, and together with friends and family, they drove in the heavy rain, searching in parks, woods, and back paths for Henry. "We were hollering in the middle of the woods; we thought he had fallen and hurt himself and couldn't move," said Zuchero. "We never, ever thought he was dead."
By the next day, Swampscott police had arranged for a helicopter to help search the town. During school that day, one of Goodman's friends told the 10-year-old about the empty wallet and perfume by the ledge. Intrigued by the find, Goodman and his friend reached the spot after school, around 2:30 p.m., and scanned the leaves for the perfume and wallet. Then Goodman and his friend started to scream. They had found Bedard, covered in leaves and blood; his head was cracked open.
"After all these years I don't like anything scary, or to be in the dark," said Goodman, who is now 40. He remembers being overwhelmed by a wave of emotions that followed in the hours after discovering Bedard's body. That night he kept the light on in his room as he lay in his bed. As he tried to sort out his feelings, he could hear the hum of portable generators that lit up the hill as police searched for clues. Since that night he has visited Bedard's grave more than a dozen times. "I never knew him, but I felt like I had to go," Goodman said.
On Dec. 20, 1974, 1,500 people packed St. John's Church in Swampscott. Children and adults wept as the priest described Bedard as "a good man." Inside the coffin, Bedard wore a Swampscott football jersey with the number 30. It was the same number his older brother had once worn for the high school football team.
The seaside town known for its quaint beaches, storied football team, and quiet neighborhoods was in shock. People began to lock their doors. Kids walked in pairs. Residents expected an arrest right away. "It was like a little hamlet, really; you felt that you were living in a really special place," said Zuchero. "My feeling is that on Dec. 16, 1974, that Swampscott died, the day Henry died, never to be seen again."
Cavallaro, who still lives less than a half-mile from the murder site, has never walked near the murder scene, and she drives out of her way to bypass the site. "It changed everything," she said, describing a town gripped with fear. "I don't think I ever looked at anyone or trusted anybody the same way after that."
A failed investigation
Right away, police acknowledged they had few clues outside of the bat, which had the Roman numeral VI carved into the butt. Any footprints around Bedard's body had been washed away by the half- inch of rain that had fallen during the night of the murder. The autopsy was delayed a day, and when it was performed, Bedard was not fingerprinted. Six months after the murder, a partial fingerprint was found on the bat when it was examined at the State Police lab in Boston. Despite interviewing coaches, Little League players, sporting-goods store owners, and the bat's manufacturer, police were never able to identify the bat's owner.
In 1998 the bat was sent to the State Police lab again, and a second partial imprint was identified. Because Bedard was never fingerprinted, police still don't know whether the prints are Bedard's or the murderers.
Bedard's closest friends are hesitant to place any blame on the investigation, yet some wonder whether the Swampscott police were qualified to conduct a murder investigation. While some people were singled out 30 years ago for questioning by police, others were never contacted.
Mark Gambale is still waiting to talk to the police about his memories of Bedard, who lived two doors away. Gambale remembers spending family vacations at the Bedards' summer home in New Hampshire, and he first played with Bedard as a baby. The two boys walked home from school together often, and they never used the clearing where Bedard was found murdered as a shortcut home. "Nothing is going to fix it, but you thought there would be a resolution to what happened," said Gambale. "Thirty years later, we're still waiting."
With a force of 35 officers in a town of 13,500 people, crime was a rare occurrence in Swampscott in 1974. According to the town's 1974 annual report, there were two armed robberies and five drug- related arrests. Patrol officers spent most of their time that year responding to service calls issuing 548 parking tickets, investigating 296 car accidents, and transporting 330 people to the hospital.
The Bedard murder was Hanley's first homicide investigation. He interviewed nearly 100 people. Nine teenagers took polygraph tests, and all passed. By the spring of 1975, four months after the murder, the case had turned cold and Hanley returned to other duties. With the hope of generating leads, a $10,000 reward was offered to help find the killer. There were no takers.
After several months, frustration, grief, and disbelief gave way to a numbness that settled on his close friends and his father. "I kept saying to myself that they were going to find out who, why, or what," said Bedard's father. "I just don't know what happened."
With time, the memory of the feisty boy who loved sports and was always home for dinner by 5:30 p.m. faded into the town's subconsciousness. A college scholarship was established in his name, and two high school yearbooks were dedicated to him in the first few years after his murder. But investigators who worked on the case have long retired, and now Bedard is usually referenced only when anybody talks about the town's sole unsolved murder.
"It's like an urban legend now," Ron Madigan, the current police chief, said of the Bedard case.
While three generations have been born since Bedard was last seen slipping into the twilight by the railroad tracks, longtime residents have not tired of the mystery. At the recent Swampscott- Marblehead Thanksgiving football game, a group of middle-age men talked about the murder on the sidelines. Longtime residents say they have developed a habit of looking up at the rocks above the DPW yard every time they drive by. Others, like Bedard's old girlfriend Cavallaro, can't help but wonder if the murderer is still living in town.
"How do I know that someone I went to school with wasn't involved or knows something?" she said. "In a town this small, everybody knows everybody's business. It's like a little Peyton Place. How can something like this be kept so long?"
While the Swampscott police never developed suspects, the town's principal investigators believe the murderer was someone who knew Bedard.
"I think it was a friend of his. I think it was somebody very close to him," said Cassidy, who knew Bedard's family and continued to work on the case when he became police chief.
Hanley agrees with Cassidy. "I think it was someone in his circle of friends. I firmly believe that. . . . It's a logical conclusion to make," he said.
Bedard's closest friends scoff at the retired investigators and believe it's time to start the investigation from scratch.
"After 30 years it's time for them to think outside of the box," said Zuchero, who wants the police to re-interview everyone who knew Bedard.
A mile down the road from the cul-de-sac where he once lived and played stands a simple gravestone with the name Bedard. Unlike the smooth and ornate granite monuments that fill the Swampscott Cemetery, Bedard's is understated. Tufts of rock jut out from the front side, and on the back he's identified as a son who lived from 1959 to 1974.
His friends aren't sure if they'll be coming today to the gravestone. "I'll light a candle and say a prayer for him," said Zuchero.
In Zuchero's kitchen the light will flicker on the picture on the refrigerator of the 15-year-old boy who is forever smiling.
Boston, Mass.
by Steven Rosenberg
Dec. 16, 2004
p. D1
REGARDING HENRY ; THIRTY YEARS LATER, THE SCARS OF AN UNSOLVED MURDER LINGER
SWAMPSCOTT The sky was full of clouds, darkness was coming, and silence had returned to a rocky ledge the teenagers called SV, or Swampscott View. Soon it would rain hard, and all night. On the ledge, buried beneath a pile of leaves, lay Henry Bedard Jr. He was 15, and by 4 p.m. on Dec. 16, 1974, his skull had been crushed. Yards away lay the murder weapon, a baseball bat. His killer or killers were farther away.
Thirty years after his brutal death, no one knows who killed Bedard.
An investigation by the Swampscott police and the State Police never led to an arrest. There were no suspects. No leads. No motive.
"We never got anything that was worthwhile. Nothing. Nothing at all," said James Hanley, the retired Swampscott police captain who oversaw the investigation. "There were all kinds of theories. Theories like some hobo came down the track and killed him. A nut from Lynn could have done it. I never got anything that would kind to seem to have any credence to it."
The pain, shock, and confusion that overtook the small North Shore town in 1974 has eased over the years. Bedard is no longer a household name. His parents divorced and moved away. Classmates grew up and married. And along the way, Swampscott matured from a working- class town filled with craftsmen and General Electric employees to a select destination for professionals with six-figure incomes.
Still, every Dec. 16, Bedard's father and a core group of the murdered boy's childhood friends wonder why no one could ever have been charged with the crime in this close-knit town of 14,000 people where everyone seems to know everyone else.
"I was hoping that it would have been solved before I died," said Henry Bedard Sr., who is retired and living in Florida. "But it looks like it'll never be solved."
Childhood friends like Paul Zuchero have spent dozens of sleepless nights over the years going over scenarios that could have led to the murder and searching for any kind of motive. "It's unbelievable," said Zuchero, who remembers sitting next to Bedard at church the day before the teenager was murdered. Zuchero, who is now 45, still has his dead friend's ninth-grade graduation picture hanging on his refrigerator door. "I want him in the middle of everything," he said, pointing to a montage of family photos surrounding Bedard. At this point, he hopes that the murderer if he or she is still alive leaves a deathbed confession someday.
Over the past two years, Swampscott police and State Police have taken a renewed interest in the case. Thirteen months ago, Bedard's clothing and the murder weapon a 31-inch Louisville Slugger bat with cryptic markings on its handle were sent out for DNA testing. Police hope to match two partial fingerprints that were found on the blood-splattered bat.
The wooded area where Bedard was killed looks the same as it did 30 years ago. A path ascends from a former Boston & Maine rail bed up a small hill to the rocky clearing. The area can be seen from Paradise Road the second busiest street in town and overlooks Swampscott's Department of Public Works yard. Fading brown leaves are piled deep and make walking slow.
Just why Bedard walked along that clearing 30 years ago is still a mystery. In the summer, he had played cards with friends at the site, but when winter set in, the rocky clearing was no longer a place where friends would meet. Nor was it considered a shortcut back to his home, 1 mile away. "I just want to know why he was up there that day," his mother, Gloria Bedard, said in a short telephone interview.
At 15, the high school sophomore was on track to be a success. Street-smart and confident, he was less than a year away from buying his first car with the $900 he had saved from caddying and pumping gas at his father's gas station in Danvers. At 5-foot-4 and 135 pounds, he had earned a spot on the junior varsity football team. Friends remember him as a scrappy kid with a good sense of humor who would never back down from a threat. With his quick smile and blond hair, he was not shy when it came to asking a girl out for a date.
"I'd give an arm, a leg to find out who did it," said Cindy Cavallaro, who took Bedard to her eighth-grade dance. She remembers the small ring Bedard gave her when she was 14. After his death she wore it every day for two years, until it disappeared down her bathroom sink. "I was devastated. It was the last thing I had from him."
Retracing his steps
Henry Bedard began his last day of life by walking his younger brother to school and then continuing on for another 2 miles to Swampscott High School. Bedard attended all of his classes that day, but after school let out at 2:15 p.m. he altered his routine. Instead of walking home with friends, he took a bus from the school to the Vinnin Square shopping center. Between 2:30 and 3 p.m., he dropped off a roll of 8-millimeter film to be developed at CVS and purchased a bottle of perfume as a Christmas gift for his sister.
Around 3 p.m., two-fifths of a mile from the CVS, he was seen by then-lieutenant Peter Cassidy on Paradise Road. Cassidy waved to him and noticed that Bedard was walking fast. "He looked like he was in a hurry to get somewhere," Cassidy said. By 3:40, Bedard was almost a mile south of the CVS when several town workers spotted him walking across the DPW lot.
"He looked up and said, `Merry Christmas,' " said Tom Scanlon, who remembers seeing Bedard walking toward the abandoned railroad tracks that sit next to the DPW yard. Scanlon said Bedard held up a bag and told the town workers he was going home to wrap Christmas presents. The men watched Bedard disappear into the woods, onto the path of the former rail line. Scanlon then went back to work inside the wooden building just 10 feet underneath the ledge. Within the next 15 minutes, Bedard would be attacked just above the workers' heads and left to die. "We never heard anything," said Scanlon.
Around that time, Cliff Goodman was getting ready for his 10th birthday party. Two of his friends arrived at about 4 p.m. They didn't tell anyone that they had just found and then left an empty brown wallet and a CVS bag with a bottle of perfume on the ledge behind Goodman's house.
As darkness fell on the town, an icy rain began. Meanwhile, Bedard's parents began to worry when their son didn't come home for supper. "We knew something was wrong right away, because Henry was always home by 5:30 p.m.," said Zuchero. By 7 p.m., Bedard's father had picked up Zuchero, and together with friends and family, they drove in the heavy rain, searching in parks, woods, and back paths for Henry. "We were hollering in the middle of the woods; we thought he had fallen and hurt himself and couldn't move," said Zuchero. "We never, ever thought he was dead."
By the next day, Swampscott police had arranged for a helicopter to help search the town. During school that day, one of Goodman's friends told the 10-year-old about the empty wallet and perfume by the ledge. Intrigued by the find, Goodman and his friend reached the spot after school, around 2:30 p.m., and scanned the leaves for the perfume and wallet. Then Goodman and his friend started to scream. They had found Bedard, covered in leaves and blood; his head was cracked open.
"After all these years I don't like anything scary, or to be in the dark," said Goodman, who is now 40. He remembers being overwhelmed by a wave of emotions that followed in the hours after discovering Bedard's body. That night he kept the light on in his room as he lay in his bed. As he tried to sort out his feelings, he could hear the hum of portable generators that lit up the hill as police searched for clues. Since that night he has visited Bedard's grave more than a dozen times. "I never knew him, but I felt like I had to go," Goodman said.
On Dec. 20, 1974, 1,500 people packed St. John's Church in Swampscott. Children and adults wept as the priest described Bedard as "a good man." Inside the coffin, Bedard wore a Swampscott football jersey with the number 30. It was the same number his older brother had once worn for the high school football team.
The seaside town known for its quaint beaches, storied football team, and quiet neighborhoods was in shock. People began to lock their doors. Kids walked in pairs. Residents expected an arrest right away. "It was like a little hamlet, really; you felt that you were living in a really special place," said Zuchero. "My feeling is that on Dec. 16, 1974, that Swampscott died, the day Henry died, never to be seen again."
Cavallaro, who still lives less than a half-mile from the murder site, has never walked near the murder scene, and she drives out of her way to bypass the site. "It changed everything," she said, describing a town gripped with fear. "I don't think I ever looked at anyone or trusted anybody the same way after that."
A failed investigation
Right away, police acknowledged they had few clues outside of the bat, which had the Roman numeral VI carved into the butt. Any footprints around Bedard's body had been washed away by the half- inch of rain that had fallen during the night of the murder. The autopsy was delayed a day, and when it was performed, Bedard was not fingerprinted. Six months after the murder, a partial fingerprint was found on the bat when it was examined at the State Police lab in Boston. Despite interviewing coaches, Little League players, sporting-goods store owners, and the bat's manufacturer, police were never able to identify the bat's owner.
In 1998 the bat was sent to the State Police lab again, and a second partial imprint was identified. Because Bedard was never fingerprinted, police still don't know whether the prints are Bedard's or the murderers.
Bedard's closest friends are hesitant to place any blame on the investigation, yet some wonder whether the Swampscott police were qualified to conduct a murder investigation. While some people were singled out 30 years ago for questioning by police, others were never contacted.
Mark Gambale is still waiting to talk to the police about his memories of Bedard, who lived two doors away. Gambale remembers spending family vacations at the Bedards' summer home in New Hampshire, and he first played with Bedard as a baby. The two boys walked home from school together often, and they never used the clearing where Bedard was found murdered as a shortcut home. "Nothing is going to fix it, but you thought there would be a resolution to what happened," said Gambale. "Thirty years later, we're still waiting."
With a force of 35 officers in a town of 13,500 people, crime was a rare occurrence in Swampscott in 1974. According to the town's 1974 annual report, there were two armed robberies and five drug- related arrests. Patrol officers spent most of their time that year responding to service calls issuing 548 parking tickets, investigating 296 car accidents, and transporting 330 people to the hospital.
The Bedard murder was Hanley's first homicide investigation. He interviewed nearly 100 people. Nine teenagers took polygraph tests, and all passed. By the spring of 1975, four months after the murder, the case had turned cold and Hanley returned to other duties. With the hope of generating leads, a $10,000 reward was offered to help find the killer. There were no takers.
After several months, frustration, grief, and disbelief gave way to a numbness that settled on his close friends and his father. "I kept saying to myself that they were going to find out who, why, or what," said Bedard's father. "I just don't know what happened."
With time, the memory of the feisty boy who loved sports and was always home for dinner by 5:30 p.m. faded into the town's subconsciousness. A college scholarship was established in his name, and two high school yearbooks were dedicated to him in the first few years after his murder. But investigators who worked on the case have long retired, and now Bedard is usually referenced only when anybody talks about the town's sole unsolved murder.
"It's like an urban legend now," Ron Madigan, the current police chief, said of the Bedard case.
While three generations have been born since Bedard was last seen slipping into the twilight by the railroad tracks, longtime residents have not tired of the mystery. At the recent Swampscott- Marblehead Thanksgiving football game, a group of middle-age men talked about the murder on the sidelines. Longtime residents say they have developed a habit of looking up at the rocks above the DPW yard every time they drive by. Others, like Bedard's old girlfriend Cavallaro, can't help but wonder if the murderer is still living in town.
"How do I know that someone I went to school with wasn't involved or knows something?" she said. "In a town this small, everybody knows everybody's business. It's like a little Peyton Place. How can something like this be kept so long?"
While the Swampscott police never developed suspects, the town's principal investigators believe the murderer was someone who knew Bedard.
"I think it was a friend of his. I think it was somebody very close to him," said Cassidy, who knew Bedard's family and continued to work on the case when he became police chief.
Hanley agrees with Cassidy. "I think it was someone in his circle of friends. I firmly believe that. . . . It's a logical conclusion to make," he said.
Bedard's closest friends scoff at the retired investigators and believe it's time to start the investigation from scratch.
"After 30 years it's time for them to think outside of the box," said Zuchero, who wants the police to re-interview everyone who knew Bedard.
A mile down the road from the cul-de-sac where he once lived and played stands a simple gravestone with the name Bedard. Unlike the smooth and ornate granite monuments that fill the Swampscott Cemetery, Bedard's is understated. Tufts of rock jut out from the front side, and on the back he's identified as a son who lived from 1959 to 1974.
His friends aren't sure if they'll be coming today to the gravestone. "I'll light a candle and say a prayer for him," said Zuchero.
In Zuchero's kitchen the light will flicker on the picture on the refrigerator of the 15-year-old boy who is forever smiling.
