At 1600 Soldiers Field Road, there is an Acura dealership.
It is located in a section of Brighton that is walking distance from parts of
Watertown. Before there was a car dealership on that property, there was a popular
bowling alley known as Sammy White’s Brighton Bowl.
One day around Christmas time, in 1979, I impulsively stopped
in to purchase a gift certificate for a friend. Since neither one of us were
bowlers, I thought of it as kind of a joke-gift. When I walked in, the manager happened
to be at the cash register near the entrance. He was friendly and happy to
accommodate.
We chatted briefly, then he removed a gift certificate book
from a drawer, filled in the amount with a pen, and signed it at the bottom. His
name, which I did not know at the time, but would learn much later, was Donald
Doroni. He was 41 years old and he lived in Weymouth.
On the morning of September 22, 1980, his body was
discovered, along with the bodies of three other employees, David Hagelstein,
40, of Dorchester, Brian Cobe, 23, of Mission Hill, and Brian’s brother, David
Cobe, 21 of the Back Bay. Three of the men had been handcuffed behind their backs
and the fourth had his hands bound with a belt. All four had been bludgeoned
with a bowling pin and then shot once in the head, execution style. $4800 had
been taken from the safe.
If you were alive and lived in Watertown at that time, your
personal recollections might be somewhat similar to mine. Standing in line at
the Registry of Motor Vehicles, waiting for the dryer to stop in the nearby laundromat,
and having lunch at the bar in Lanno’s, conversations began or ended with the
Sammy White murders.
Sometimes the word community refers only to the
people who live within the geographic boundaries defined by the city, town, or
village in which they live. But sometimes community is born from a
shared experience. An act of pure evil has a way of creating a community among
those who respond with a common mixture of fear, anger, and grief.
For quintessential examples of communities expanding beyond
their borders, we have only to think back to 9/11, the marathon bombings, and the
killing of one terrorist and the capture of the other, when New York, Boston
and Watertown each found itself with virtual neighbors, living elsewhere on the planet, but sharing a common humanity.
On October 1, Boston police arrested Bryan A. Dyer, 41, a resident
of the Somerville YMCA. He was a former employee of the bowling alley, who had
been fired and had recently returned to try to get his job back. His request
was denied. Robbery and revenge were his dual motives.
Dyer’s arrest and subsequent conviction were the result of solid
police work, where evidence was carefully gathered and compiled and witnesses
were thoroughly interviewed.
Assistant District Attorney Jeremiah Sullivan easily won
the conviction and recommended a life sentence, saying that “society deserves
the assurance that this man will never walk the streets of Massachusetts
again.”
In passing sentence, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Randolph
Pierce wanted it to be known that, while he had been morally opposed to
consecutive life sentences, in this case he would make an exception. He
sentenced Dyer to four consecutive life sentences due to the “savagery and
brutality” of the crime.
I would venture to say that in the opinion of almost everyone,
justice was served.
Six or seven months after the murders, I was home, having
dinner with friends, when after a few hours of eating, drinking, and conversing,
someone suggested that we go bowling. By this time, the murders had grown dim
in my mind. We were about to head out the door, when the friend I mentioned earlier, disappeared and
returned holding the gift certificate that had completely slipped my mind.
We arrived at Sammy White’s, bringing our cheerful mood
with us. While the others were picking out bowling shoes, I handed the gift
certificate to a young guy at the register, who immediately went silent. He
looked up at me and said, “I’ll be right back.” He walked away, taking the gift
certificate with him. When he returned, he explained that seeing Donald Doroni’s
signature had thrown him for a loop. He had to show it to the current manager,
who himself was thrown for a loop. Both he and the manager were friends with Donald and I had unwittingly rekindled their nightmare.
About two years before
the Sammy White murders, in November of 1978, I and five co-workers, drove from
our company’s Brighton office (on Soldiers Field Road), to Indianapolis,
Indiana to set up and conduct a regional sales campaign. We would be working in
an office located in the town of Speedway, famous for being the location of the
Indianapolis Speedway and the Indy 500 which takes place annually on that racetrack.
When we arrived in Speedway, after driving straight through
the night, our first order of business was to find a restaurant and have
breakfast. Somewhere between the bacon and eggs and my second cup of coffee, we
all noticed an unmistakable vibe coming from the waitstaff and some of the
customers. There was a lot of whispering and we couldn’t help wondering if they
were whispering about us.
When our waitress noticed our puzzlement, she came over to
our table with a fresh pot of coffee, and holding back tears, she told us about
the recent “awful discovery.”
“Everyone in town knew these kids,” she said, whose bodies had just
been found in the woods, twenty miles away.
Jayne Friedt, 20, Daniel Davis, 16, Mark Flemmonds, 16, and
Ruth Ellen Shelton, 18, were the victims of what would become known as the
Burger Chef Murders. Daniel Davis and Ruth Ellen Shelton had both been shot
execution style. Jayne Friedt had been stabbed with so much force that the
knife blade broke off in her chest. Mark Flemmonds had been beaten with a chain
and was left to choke to death on his own blood.
The victims were still wearing their Burger Chef uniforms. Their
money and watches were left untaken by their assailants.
They had disappeared shortly after their 11pm closing time,
on November 17, 1978. $581 was missing from the safe and the back door had been
left open. When the Speedway police showed up, they concluded that the young
employees had taken the money and were out on the town, enjoying themselves.
They did not establish a crime scene. When the four of them
did not show up the following morning, the theory changed to robbery and
kidnapping. The next day, with the discovery of the bodies, the Indiana State
Police joined what had officially become a homicide investigation.
Meanwhile the fast food restaurant was allowed to open for business the
very next day and was allowed to be cleaned before it opened. Nobody
photographed the scene. When the bodies were found in the woods, evidence,
including the uniforms were not properly preserved.
Over the next few months, the morning and evening news reports
led with announcements of promising breakthroughs on the case. There were
reports of new leads and an eye-witness description of persons of interest.
In the restaurants and cocktail lounges where we soon became regulars, the climate remained one of fear, anger, and grief. Especially fear.
Waitresses
who had routinely driven themselves to and from work, were now driven and
picked-up by husbands, sons, or male friends. As people got to know us, we were
sometimes called upon to walk an employee or a customer to her car, especially
after dark. Sometimes, we just automatically did it without being asked.
Local law enforcement constantly reassured the public that lots
of investigators were actively working the case. The Speedway Police Department, the Indiana
State Police, the Indianapolis Police Department, and three different sheriff departments
were working tirelessly to bring the murderer or murderers to justice.
Almost a year after the murders, when my gig in Indiana was
up and I headed back to Massachusetts, the case was no closer to being solved
and the public’s fear of savage murderers on the loose was heightened by the
image of lots of well-meaning cops chasing their own tails.
In the decades since the murders, the story was kept alive
by new leads, new suspects, a confession given and recanted, and new theories
that went nowhere. A promising suspect who agreed to appear in a lineup, took
advantage of the advance notice to shave off his beard before appearing. The
case against him died right there.
On November 14, 2018, three days short of the 40th
anniversary of the murders, the Indiana State Police held a 40-minute news
conference. There was hope that a breakthrough in the case would be announced. In
reality, it was nothing more than a desperate plea to get some unknown witness
to come forward. In the words of the recently appointed chief of the cold case
unit, “Someone out there knows. Someone has been carrying around a 40-year
secret.”
Today, the case of the Burger Chef Murders remains
officially unsolved. To put it mildly, justice was not served and likely never
will be.
The Sammy White murders and the Burger Chef murders are
hardly in a class by themselves. Fast food restaurants, convenience stores, gas
stations, and other businesses that serve the public, that open early, stay
open late, and keep cash on hand, are attractive to robbers.
How many of those robberies end with sadistic murders is
anyone’s guess, but they are not exclusive to a particular region, demographic,
or type of neighborhood. They can happen anywhere. Two of those stories
happened to find me.
A common denominator in these crimes is that the
perpetrators are monsters, and the existence of monsters in our society is conspicuously
missing from the arguments of those who want to abolish or defund the police,
regardless of which popular euphemism they choose to employ in place of the
words: abolish and defund.
With enough tax dollars allocated for anti-poverty programs
and mental health, cops and prisons will become obsolete. So, when police
budgeting is addressed, you trim a little bit here and a little bit there, and
you funnel that money into “life-affirming resources and solutions.”
The irony is that, where there is an absence of violent
crime (like Watertown), utopian pipe dreams are most likely to receive the oxygen needed to
flourish. Of course, in utopia, there is no such thing as pure evil and real-life
boogeymen are no longer born.
In the 2018 news conference, conducted by the Indiana State
Police, we learned that the department was in the process of collecting
handwritten and typewritten notes, and scraps of information from the files of investigators
at multiple police departments, who are now either retired or dead, and
entering the information into a state-of-the-art database.
They are also counting on future technological advancements,
including artificial intelligence and new forensic testing tools, to provide
clues that currently don’t exist. There are those who would say that the
taxpayer dollars spent on this longshot of a cold case, where the perpetrators
may well be dead, is proof that the state police are over-budgeted.
I, for one, am heartened by the knowledge that they have
not given up the fight. They say they owe it to the surviving family members. I
agree, but more than that, I think the perseverance of the cold case unit, and
cold case units everywhere − win or lose − is good for the human race.
Monsters, whether alive or dead, should never be completely
forgotten.
One morning In 1983, I was taken aback by seeing the name
Bryan A. Dyer come across my tv screen. His lawyers had filed an appeal with
the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to have the judgements against him
thrown out, based on “faulty testimony” from a witness, and their client be given a new
trial.
The court had reviewed the entire case and pronounced:
“Judgement affirmed.” It was a good start to my day.
Bryan Dyer died in prison in 2011.
The scene of the crime, on Crawfordsville Road in Speedway, Indiana. My home on the road, the American Inn motel was located just across that road.
