THE BATTLE FOR WATERTOWN: WHEN EVIL COMES KNOCKING

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 40^th 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.