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You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening. The disappearance of a twenty one year old woman from a Massachusetts suburb became one of the most discussed crimes of the twentieth century. The discussion intensified when the public learned that she worked as a prostitute in Boston's notorious red light district, the Combats, and was linked by a trail of blood to a famous professor from Tufts University. When Robin Benedict vanished, the investigation and media circus that gripped the city of Boston hadn't been seen
since the days of the Boston Strangler case. On a Sunday morning in March nineteen eighty three, a small time pimp walked into a police station and claimed his girlfriend was missing. He said she had been on her way to visit a client named William Douglas. In the year that followed, the case drew in detectives, state troopers, scores of journalists, and even psychics, but Robin was never found. Boston Tabloid reconstructs a grizzly murder and explores one man's
bizarre obsession. In revisiting this legendary crime, Don Stradley consulted journalists involved in the media frenzy, prison authorities, arresting officers, and psychiatrists, all in an effort to unravel a most tangled story. Why was the city and the nation swept up in this sordid tale. It remains a grim and fascinating moment in Boston's history. The book they were featuring this evening is Boston Tabloid, The Killing of Robin Benedict,
with my special guest, journalist and author Don Stradley. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview, Don Stradley, my pleasure, Dan, thank you, thank you so much. Let's get right to the beginning of Boston Tabloid, and as you write, you introduce William Henry James Douglas born nineteen forty one in Saranac Lake, New York. Tell us about his father, Bill Senior and his mother Eleanor, and a little bit about their life and his early development.
Well, Bill Douglas was this sort of child who was shuttled around. They lived in a few different areas in upstate New York. His father was I believe he was a plumber, but he wasn't working full time. And his mother was also made at near hotels. She was a hotel maid, and even that was not full time work either. So Douglas had a couple of parents who, you know,
struggle to make ends meet. And what I noticed about Douglas and other criminals that I've written about, is that he was sort of a poor kid growing up in an affluent area. And I've always wondered, I've always wondered, does that sort of thing have an effect on kids as they're growing up. You know, they're constantly seeing how the other lives. You know, they were living in a very nice area, but they were sort of stuck in this kind of lower class kind of lifestyle. And Bill
Bill was a bit of a spoiled kid. He was a bit of a strange kid. He was off and by himself or just stuck in the trailer with his mother, left to his own devices. I think because he was an only child and he was born to parents who were a bit old. They were well into their forties when they had him. He just grew up as a
bit of a misfit, bit of an oddball. But he developed an interest in science and turned out to be very handy in his science classes, and he managed to become one of the top biology professors in the country. He was really cutting edge.
You talk about earlier on, before he becomes a star and after he discovers this aptitude for science and specifically biology, is that he had discovered pornography, and you write about the particular type of pornography that he discovered early on.
Yeah, he had an interest in pornography. He grew up in that period of time in the late fifties early sixties when there was just a big, massive boom in pornography, possibly because Playboy magazine had been such a success. Pornography was everywhere, magazines were sold fairly regularly, and bus stations and even supermarkets. But he loved pornography, and he developed a taste for bondage type of publications. He loved imagery of people being tied up and maybe tortured a little bit.
I don't know that he ever acted out these fantasies that he saw portrayed in magazines, but he had an ongoing interest in pornography, particularly bondage, and I guess you might even say some of the sato masochistic publications that were coming out he gravitated to that.
He read about his father dying in nineteen sixty three, and so he was just early twenties, and his mother psychologically deteriorated greatly after the death of her husband Dinj.
Yeah, psychologically and physically. She was probably in her sixties at that time and was barely able to look after herself. I don't know if it was some sort of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. It was some sort of issue that left her a bit of a recluse. And so suddenly the roles were reversed. William was now sort of the head of the household and he was going to college. At the times he was starting to branch out. He didn't really have time to be a doting son for his
sickly mother. He was moving out soon and on his way to becoming an academic star.
You're right that the college setting was very good for William and his intellect gave him an air of sophistication that he hadn't known before, especially due to the poverty that he grew up in.
Yeah. Well, you know, that happens with a lot of people. I think particularly it happens with young men. You know, suddenly they're in a new environment and they can show off a little bit. Had a particular talent for science, and you know, I think it brought him out of his shell. As they say, there were a lot of young girls who were suddenly interested in him, which had never happened before, and you know, he played that for what it was worth. I don't think he ever became
a ladies man. I think he remained the awkward, little oddball that he'd always been, but now he had a little bit of a personality now, a little bit of swagger that he could use. Was it must have been startling for him suddenly to be going out with women, Suddenly he had male friends, he joined a fraternity. I think he was being a young college man of the era. And if if you see a picture of him in his college yearbook, you know he's just a typical, typical
guy from that period. You know, flat top, haircut, suit and tie. And he lost a lot of weight in college. He'd always been an overweight kid, and in college he slimmed down, and you know, it looked like he was, you know, heading into some kind of normal adulthood.
You're right about meeting Nancy Bolton, this plane, heavy set and prim and proper woman. She had lost her father at a young age. Tell us about how they met and what soon happened afterwards.
Well, she was a nursing student, I believe, and he was often coming in contact with nursing students, and I think he played on that too. He was this aspiring professor and aspiring scientist, and I think he liked the idea of nurses that would be his assistance, as well as maybe a wife. And yeah, they married right after college. I think she may have still been in college right
after he graduated. They married, and again it looked like they were on their way to a pretty normal life, just a married couple in the late sixties by then.
I think you're right about that.
He was.
He applied for and was granted a National Scienceant's Foundation fellowship for a year a postgraduate study at Yale. Right, this turned out to be a pivotal moment in his life.
Yeah, he liked the idea that he was fitting in with a high browse set. You know, he was at Yale. Now he wasn't just going to you know, a small teachers college in upstate New York. He was at Yale. And I think that really boosted his ego. And that was when he started to show some of the signs of the aggressive ego, maniacal character that was to come as just being exposed to the people at Yale made him think, yeah, he's a big shot. Now he doesn't
have to do what other people tell him. He's a yalely he.
Writ about his assent and got a research job of a w Alton Jones Science Center in Lake Placid. He became director of the center's electron microscopy facility as well as an associate director of education. And he made his name known in research circles you write, specializing in tissue culture.
And he was well liked.
And now he was a family man with three kids, and he also seemed to be a pretty good dad and by all appearances a decent husband as well.
Yeah, in writing this book and trying to learn what I could about Douglas. I really couldn't decide if he was a decent family man who had a dark side, or if he was just a man with a dark side who happened to have a family. You know, I never really figured out what side of the fence I was on, And I feel that way about a lot of criminals, you know. They You'll talk to some psychiatrists who study these types of cases and they'll say everything
is just a ruse, you know, everything is masquerade. But I think he did have feel for his family and particularly his children. I think he wanted to be a good dad, even if even if it was on a superficial level. He wanted to present himself as a good dad, and he got involved in all of their activities. But then again, you hear about, you know, all the serial killers who also do the same thing. You know, from
BTK killer to whoever else. They all seem to be involved in, you know, civic activities, and they do present themselves as members of the community. So maybe maybe that's what he was doing. I don't know. He was a hard one to read it.
Sometimes you talk about him having some problems arising at Alton Jones, but he was such a highly esteemed person at this lab that he had a lot of free reign. But you talk about the Boston's combat Zone, and you introduce this place and describe it, So tell us about Boston's Red Light District, the combat Zone.
Well, Douglas was eventually hired by Tufts University Medical School, and the medical school was only about a block away from Boston's Red Light District, which was four or five streets, basically a neighborhood that was set up to be the
adult entertainment district for the city. I don't know if other cities had did it so deliberately, but in the late sixties early seventies, Boston actually designated an area to be the adult entertainment center, and you would see X rated movies, you would see exotic dancers, bars, nightclubs, peep shows, which I don't even know if they still exist. But back then, you'd pay a quarter and look through a hole of the wall and it'd be a girl on the other side doing something. And it was also heavy
with the sex and later on the drug trade. So Douglas. Douglas had probably heard of the combat zone because he was in Providence at one point he was in Connecticut
going to Yale. In Providence, he was going to Brown University, i think, and the combat zone was such an established area that he had known about it positive and when he landed at Tufts he probably quietly celebrated to himself, you know, not letting his wife know, but he was probably very happy to be near the combat zone as it was called, because, Yeah, right after work he could just put on his coat venture on out to where
all the strippers and prostitutes were. It was paradise for a guy like that who had grown up as a pornography addict. Now he was in a way, it was like going to Disneyland for him.
You talk about a particular place that became his favorite hangout, which was a good time. But before that, he moves out to a very wealthy suburb called Sharon, named Sharon, and so everything appearances look like they've really arrived and achieved a certain status. Meanwhile, he was fully immersed in going to this combat zone, which is close to where he worked.
Yeah, it's true. Sharon is a beautiful suburb and at the time it was one of those up and coming places, and he bought a beautiful home for his family. But he was also you know, just pull on exploring the combat zone. You know, he just had a huge appetite for anything pornographic. At the time, the pornographic bookshops were like they were almost like cathedrals. They were so enormous.
I mean, I'm old enough, I remember you could walk around in the combat zone, and as I say in the book, it was so close to you know, the shopping discst in the business district that it was not uncommon to just see businessmen having you know, lunch in the zone, just going to one of the barrooms and having a drink under lunch hour. And you'd see little old ladies wandering around because you could you could get a good slice of pizza in that neighborhood, you know.
And so Douglas was probably able to walk around without drawing much attention because a lot of everyday people were spotted in the zone. If you saw him in the zone, you wouldn't automatically think that he was up to no good. Chances are he may have been just on his way to get a beer somewhere or grab a quick lunch because it was near Chinatown, so you could sort of be anonymous, which I think he probably used that to his benefit. He was just a big guy walking around
in the combat zone. Nobody really paid attention to him, so you could be sort of anonymous. Even if your friends saw you, well, they were there too, you know. Isn't that big a deal, right, And it was also the kind of place where they still had pool rooms and the video game Boom was just starting, but at the time they still had pinball alleys. I don't think anyone under the age of forty knows what that is, but they were still sort of recreational places that people
would go to. So I think he liked the zone because even though he knew he was looking for prostitutes, he could have just been a guy going out for a drink in a game of pool.
Let's talk about as you write, his behavior grew much stranger by the middle of nineteen eighty two. He started coming late for work, maybe an hour or more. He had fanciful excuses, and people in the office said it sounded like he was telling lies. And people discovered also that he was spending nights on the couch in his office.
He looked pale. He looked sick.
He was sweating heavily, and he would sometimes disappear in the middle of the day. Some of his coworkers thought he was overworked. Tell us about their questions about a mysterious grad student named Robin Benedict.
Yeah, well, by then he was starting to burn the candle at both and says they say. He was spending all of his nights in the combat zone. And he met this young woman who was about twenty or twenty one named Robin. And he was head over heels for this young woman, and in order to help her make money, he started adding her name to his list of interns and employees at the school, and he would say that
she was his assistant. He never introduced her to anybody, and she never came into the school, but he would fill out his expense report and say, oh, yes, this woman Robin, she works for me. We owe this much money. And people were getting suspicious. He didn't know what was going on. They just know he was. He was looking sickly exhausted all the time. Their suspicions were growing.
The Good Time Charlie's is a strip club that Robin worked at. And this is the club that Douglas frequented and that's where they did meet. But you say that Robin had a background that included a miss SEUs and also so that you write that she was sort of a hybrid of escort stripper and messus and so on. So tell us about this relationship and what it's characterized by with Douglas and Robin.
Well, she looked at him as the cash cow. You know, she saw this lonely guy who was fascinated by her, and I think she played up to it. She saw him as an easy target. I don't think she wanted to be in the sex trade permanently. I think she wanted to get in there, make a big score, and then go on to do something else. That was what she kept saying. Now, of course, a lot of a lot of women in the sex trades say the same thing, you know, they say, oh, I'm only doing this part time.
But she looked at him as her big score, and he was giving her a lot of money. He would set up meetings with her throughout the day, you know, at night. He wanted to be the first guy she saw when she started her shift, so to speak, Yes, and he wanted to be the last guy she saw when she knocked off for the evening at two in the morning or whenever it was. So they would set up trysts so he could always be in her sight line.
And it was so strange that after a while it wasn't even sexual, which is one of the oddities their relationship. He was paying just for her company. At some points he wouldn't even set up sexual encounter. He just wanted her company. He wanted to take her out for a drink or dinner, go sit in the park on a park bench, and just be close to her. He was fascinated by her, so you know, she didn't play into his bondage fantasies. It's not like he had his pornographic
fantasies fired up by her. He kind of looked at her as almost some sort of you know, angelic figure. Maybe he started out thinking of her in more pornographic terms, but in a while he looked at her in a more angelic way.
You write in this book that Robin had a life that was unusual for somebody that ended up in sex work, especially at this younger age. But you talk about that she had an affair with a New England's Patriot linebacker and that she adapted to his religion.
He was a Jehovah witness.
And then he went back to his wife and his child. She had asked him if they could have a child together. He was not interested. And then while she was going out with this person the Acoustic, he was approached by a person named JR.
Tell us about JR.
And tell us about their meeting and what happened afterwards.
Well, Robin had been sort of the All American girl in a way. That was how a lot of people remember her. She was, you know, she was in the you know, the marching band and the drum and Bugle corp, that kind of thing. And she had always been interested in art and she wanted to go to art school. She had a very sort of suburban all American childhood, but she grew up in kind of a rough area, an area in Massachusetts that's a bit north of Boston, which is at the time was known for a lot
of drugs, a lot of sex trade. So she was even though she was an All American kind of kid, she was in an area that was a bit rough, and she wanted out. She wanted glamor, she wanted money, and she wanted it as quickly as possible. This character, JR. Was a small time pimp and he knew some players on the New England Patriots, and he was one of those characters who was always hanging around guys who had some money and liked to party, and he would get girls.
He'd bring in the females, and he saw Robin at a party and you know, nobody has it documented obviously, you know, there's no tape recording what happened. But apparently he just approached Robin and sort of put the idea in her head that she could make money working for him. But there was the other side of that. There was a detective who worked on the Caves who also claimed Robin had been dabbling in sex work while she was still in high school before she met this guy. So
it's a bit mysterious. It's a bit murky how she went from being this all American girl to a prostitute. We have most of the puzzle piece, but there's one missing. For that detective to say that she'd been doing it while she was still a senior in high school. That was kind of stunning when I found that out. And so when JR. Approached her, well maybe she wasn't so shocked. Maybe she'd already been dabbling in the sex trade. She
was running around with a fast crowd. She knew a lot of drug dealers and people who were interested in quick money, so she may have turned a couple of tricks while she was still in high school. It's a mysterious case. Tried to go into it as much as I could, but there was only so much information I did go.
You talk about the police intervening knowing that or believing that she's not an atypical hooker for lack of a better word. And so the parents, John and Shirley Benedict, were called, knowing that she was a little bit different and maybe that she could be possibly saved by this intervention. So they were called. They were called to the police
station another time. The parents were not support of her and Jr. In fact, the former linebacker Ray Caustic called the parents and warned them that this JR.
Was a pimp.
Yeah, it was said. You know the police in Boston, the vice squad, they knew of JR. Too. They knew he was a really small time pimp, and at that time, pimps were really kind of being pushed out of the picture, and a lot of sex workers were working on their own, So Jr. Was a rarity in that time period eighty three eighty four, where he was still trying to maintain that image of having a couple of girls work for him,
you know. But yeah, the parents didn't like him. He was just a traditional low life character.
You're right that Robin introduces Douglas to cocaine use and he's often enjoying himself on cocaine and now has the attention of a young woman, So you right that he must feel like a superhero right about that time, they graduate the swanky restaurants, and he also is hemorrhaging money as you write, but he's not delusional nor naive, and spending the money seemed to be part of the thrill that he had with this Robin.
Yeah, a lot of people would say that he was delusional, that he thought somehow, if he kept playing this role, that she would eventually fall in love with him. But I think he was a smarter guy than that, and he knew what prostitutes were all about. I mean, this was a guy who loved porn, he loves bookers. He was not naive in any way. I think He just liked the idea that he had this beautiful young lady.
He'd never known anyone like her. He had this beautiful young lady that if you put money in her hand, she would hang out with him all night. And so he needed to get that money, which led to him doing some tricky thing at the school. But I don't think he was delusional. Some people who wrote about the case years ago had that idea, but I think he was smarter than that.
Let's talk about what he does at Toughs University, the chicanery and deception that he employs there. Tell us what he says to her in terms of wanting her on to have some kind of record of employment and putting her on the payroll.
Yeah, he was really becoming like a mentor almost you know, a father figure, because it was almost as if she had told him that she didn't want to be in the sex trade for very long, you know, and he was saying, well, you need to have some kind of resume, you know, so I'll say that you work for me. So he was really pulling a lot of strings making it look like she was working for him at Tough and went on for quite a while, and it was
only through the school accountants. We're looking at the docket sheets, the accounting records, and they realized, you know, this guy Douglas is chalking up a lot of expenses. He was saying that he was taking trips to different states, and no one could remember if he had actually done any of these things, you know, And he eventually got caught
embezzling good amount of money. Can't remember the exact amount, you probably have it in your notes somewhere, but he got caught in bezzling and that was the first issue he had to face.
Yeah, you're right.
It was at that time sixty seven thousand dollars worth, you say, in today's money, roughly two hundred and fifteen thousand. Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
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Now you talk about this vice officer named Dwyer and he is going to Robin's trick pads and interfering with her business and also seeing Douglas at that time. Tell us about this interaction. What does he say to Robin? Also, more importantly, what does he say to Douglas.
Yeah, well, Dwyer was one of those hard nos Boston cops, you know, and he was in the vice squad for many years. And yeah, he told Robin, you know you're going to end up in trouble, and this is no wife for a young girl. Tried to say all the usual things to scare her out of the business, you know, and you know Douglas, you know, he told Douglas, you know, if you're a professor, you know this is not a good spot for you. Because he caught the together coming
out of one of Robin's makeshift pads. They called them trick pads. They were just little studio apartments in a Boston neighborhood a few blocks away from the combat zone and he caught them coming out one morning. And yeah, it turned out that Douglas was in cahoots with the police. He was feeding them information about Robin, which is another strange aspect to their relationship.
He was working to help the police, you write, by telling them when she set up a new trick pad and she had no idea because then he was there to comfort her and advise her and help her in any way. The other aspect of this was that he began stalking her as well when he couldn't be with her.
He wanted to know where she was, and all the financial pressure that he was facing made him, instead of being so polite like she had first met him, characterized by that, he was now demanding and much more possessive.
Yeah, can you imagine being so fascinated and obsessed with this woman that you know, not only was he seeing her all the time, but he would follow her when she was with another guy. You know, he would get in his car and drive drives slightly behind them and
keep track of them. And he would, yeah, he would, he would tell the police, Oh, there's a there's a prostitute on such and such a street because He wanted to create interference, you know, he wanted the vice squad to create problems for her so then he could swoop in and pretend to save her, be her important father figure,
however he imagined himself to be. That's a that is a big issue or not issue, but it's a big side of certain type of stalker mentality where they they want to make you uncomfortable so they can rescue, you know, they can come to the rescue. It's a weird psychological dynamic, and he had everything. Douglas had more than one psychological trait that could be explored. He was really all over the map.
At some point, Robin tells him that she no longer wants to see him in his stocking. He also had stolen a phone recorder, and he had found out, much to his dismay, that actually the boyfriend that she lived with was actually her pimp, and that Dwyer Weiskopp had mentioned that as well and drove the point home to him Douglas that he was spending all his money and all that money was going to her pimp.
Yeah, Dwyer was trying to straighten Douglas out, but it was a strange thing about Douglas where he knew the comp zone, he knew how it worked, he knew how the sex trade worked. Yet he acted so surprised when it turned out that Robin had a pimp. That was curious thing about Douglass. He was I don't think I don't think he was delusional, but maybe he was a
bit naive in that regard. But this Jr. Character, who was to me Jr. Is sort of the one of the one of the real bad guys in the story, because that I'm pretty sure it was Jr. Who was telling Robin they with this professor, get as much as you can out of them. You know, he's he's our golden ticket.
Now, I mentioned that at some point they have a falling out and she says she doesn't want to see him, she's not giving him her phone number, she says some disparaging things to him, But yet he just drafts in an apology. One thing that we didn't mention is that when he is not with her, he spends a considerable amount of his time drafting letters love letter not so much of a sexual nature, but more romantic letters to Robin. So at this time, when she says she wants to
have nothing to do with him. How does he take this information? And before we talk about his suspension from Tufts University and that pressure that is emanated towards William Douglas.
Yeah, she was getting tired of him, partly because he was running out of money. I think that was, you know, the main thing. I think she would have put up with him as long as the money lasted, and he was hoping she might just give him a chance to maybe make some more money because he was losing his job.
He was looking for another teaching job. He thought he was going to maybe move back to upstate New York and keep her on the payroll again, just as they had done in Tough He was scrambling and he was desperate, and he was so focused on her. He would he would write these lengthy love letters to her that strangely, she kept a lot of them, or maybe she kept all of them. Maybe at some point she was thinking
of using them against him. I'm not sure, but it was. Yeah, it was just coming to a climax where he was becoming more obsessed with her and she was becoming less interested in the arrangement that they had.
Let's talk about the circumstances in which she does not want to see him anymore, but he pleads for her to come and see him one more time. Tell us about the circumstances on that faithful night in question.
Well, there had been issues where she claimed he had something that belonged to her. It was never clarified what he had. He also claimed she had things that belonged to him. Sometimes he said it was work related, you know, something from an experiment that he was working on at Tufts, and she had kept slides that you know, he created. And at one point he called the police saying she was blackmailing him, and one policeman apparently over her per se, you give me my property that i that you have
and I'll give you this material. So there were a lot of, you know, vague hints that they were involved in this kind of cat and mouse thing with each other's property, but it was all vague, it was never clarified. And eventually she was out in about one night in Boston visiting a client and the client told the police, yeah, she rushed right out. She said she had to go see this client in Sharon in the suburbs. That could have only been Douglas and she got out there and no one saw her again.
Now JR.
Is the first person to be concerned. What does he do and what are the police reaction to his claims that his girlfriend is missing?
Well, JR. Reports that Robin's been missing, I think, I think immediately the day after she disappeared, he went to the police and they thought he was suspicious. They they found out he was a pimp, she was a prostitute. They thought maybe JR. Was somehow involved in her disappearance. It took them a while to forget about JR. As a suspect.
What happens with JR. And his talk with police?
At first, he actually hires a private detective, this Jack de Rosa. And what did he say to this detective about his girlfriend and who likely was the person that was responsible for her being missing?
Oh, yeah, he did. He hired a private detective and he basically said that it had to be this William Douglas character who was involved. And the detective traced Douglas all the way to Washington. Douglas was he was on a train to Washington to take part in some sort of ghoul related meeting iminine with the veterans. Some kind of veterans group. I can't remember exactly, but yeah, he found Douglas in Washington, and Douglas looked like a mess.
And he thought Douglas was suspicious. There was something about him that reeked. He was a little bit squirrely, but he couldn't pinpoint it. But that's uh, that was really the beginning of the end for Douglas. He didn't take long for people to be pointing fingers at him.
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Now you talk about this, you introduced State Trooper Paul Landry, and he's almost retired. He's at Foxboro State Police headquarters and he gets this assignment and two men had found something in a trash barrel. What did they find in this trash bag in that trash barrel?
Yeah, it was interesting. In those days, Massachusetts had just created the bottle bill, so a lot of people were going through trash fins looking for empty bottles to cash in. And these fellows got up early on Sunday morning and we're going down the highway, going into rest stops, looking in the trash bins and all the dumpsters, and they found a bag containing a hammer that was spotted with blood, and also some articles of clothing that were spotted with blood.
And these two fellows, who had been just looking for empty bottles, were pretty shocked to find this bloody weapon. And they stewed on it for a while, and one of them finally thought we should tell the police. About this. This doesn't look right, you know. So they contacted the state police and it was Paul Landry who got the call to go investigate this bloody hammer. And it was only a day I think, a day after Robin Benedict had disappeared and the murder weapon had already been found.
You say, it was this big sledgehammer with blood and one hair on it. So there was a large shirt, and we didn't mention that William Douglas is a large man. He had lost weight various times, but he ends up being overall a pretty large guy. And there's a little tan jacket that later is identified by the Benedicts as
being hers. And also, in a very vivid wild scene in this book, Jr. Brings an example or a sample of the perfume he bought for Robin and starts crying when he realizes that was her perfume and the perfume is on the jacket she wore that night.
Yeah, yeah, it was all the arrows were pointing to something bad happening between Douglas and Robin Benedict at his house. It was just all coming together pretty quickly.
Now there looks like a lot of circumstantial evidence then there's some audits and detectives get involved in looking at this case much differently. The media at first is reporting that this graphic arts student has been is missing, but soon the prosecution talks about what they believe is the real dynamics of this case and who this professor really is and who Robin really is. What is their idea
for William Douglas, Why would he kill this person? What was the real situation despite him saying that if there was no relationship, was he in love with this woman? And as a result in their investigation, what did they find out was likely in their minds, the motivation for her to go missing, her to be killed by William Douglas, Well, they.
Thought it was probably a financial issue. They thought there was some sort of a blackmail deal going on, but they didn't have concrete notions about anything. A lot of them were baffled. They never quite had the actual reason for him to kill her. He gave a confesses. People had their theories, but they never really did have a talk to a lot of people who were involved in
the investigation. They thought maybe she was going to blackmail him, maybe she had information about him, Maybe it was money, Maybe it was just an escalation of everything that had gone on that led to a violent altercation. Nobody really had the real concrete story.
There was a the investigation try to produce some way of determining where Robin's body was, and he was not saying anything and not giving up any information and certainly not confessing. There were the grand jury indictments and finally the trial was set and he's looking at a life sentence. So he has a capable attorney named Thomas Troy, and Kivlin is the district attorney, one of the district assistant
district attorneys prosecuting the case. Thomas Troy wants to try this case as William Douglas was insane and he and William Douglas, as you write, concoct some kind of excuse or reason for his odd behavior, his uncharacteristic behavior throughout this and they want to attribute it to the starvation diet that he went on to try to police Robin and as a result he was nutrient deprived and this
could be a possible defense. Now when they get to trial and despite all this circumstantial evidence, there still.
Is no body.
How do we get to the defense attorney and the prosecutor coming to an agreement and a flea bargain.
Tell us about that.
Well, Thomas Troy was a real character and a real influential character in the city. He had his hand in a lot of different pots, so to speak. And he approached the district attorney Ernie who was named Dela Hint, and basically he said, we're looking bad. The case is making everyone look bad because we don't have a body. But what if Douglas promises to turn up the body, can we get a manslaughter charge? And basically took off
from there. Dela Hunt thought it was a good idea, so he told the prosecution, you know, let's let's go with this. Douglas will tell us where the body is and he'll plead manslaughter. So that led to the next round of the story, which was just more more mystery, more confusion.
You write that he has offered this manslaughter deal and the Benedicts have to sign off, or they're asked to sign off, and they agree that if he because they want to know where their daughter was buried and they want to have that ability to be able to bury their their daughter. The idea, though, is that he he also has to admit has to outline the details of
what he did. And he is asked at court if he did murder Robin Benedict, and he said, yes, sir, So tell us about this endeavor to go where he said he had disposed of Robin's body.
Tell us what happens boy.
Well, you know, he said that he traveled all around New England, apparently with Robin's body in his car, after he had legend her with the hammer. He said that they had wrestled and fought, and you know, she had attacked him first, and he took the hammer away and used it on her and made it sound like, you know, oh, she hit me first. You know, that was sort of
the impression he wanted to give. And apparently he put her body in his car and then drove all over the place trying to find a suitable spot to dump the body. He ended up in Rhode Island and said, you said he threw it in a dumpster. And of course enough time had passed, because it took quite a
few months before they finally arrested Douglas. So by the time he made this confession that he had put the body in a dumpster, a lot of time had passed and no one could really figure out what would have happened to the body in a dumpster six or seven
months in the past, you know. So they were contacting dump sites around Rhode Island trying to guess what, you know, what dump it would have been in, and turned out that, you know, one one fellow who owned a dump that the body might have been in, he said, you know, there's probably six hundred feet of garbage on top of it.
By now, you know, you'd never find it. So that was that was a bit off putting for the Benedict family because they'd been promised that the body would be found as part of the Plea Barn and now they were hearing, now, we're not going to find anything. You know, it's buried in some mysterious garbage dump somewhere and we're out of luck. So they abandoned the police or the investigators. Their hands were tied, and the district attorney called off the search, which which was doubly aggravating.
He called it off when it seemed that William was lying or had this convenient lapse of memory, because at first there was a certain store, then it was another store, and he's a very intelligent guy, so maybe it was a very convenient excuse where it was knowing that it might be unlikely that they could find a body after that much time. What he had to do in court though, was outlined some details, and this really outraged a Benedict family.
In his account of what happened, you alluded to or mentioned about, one of the main flanks of what he had said was that Robin came with this pretty big sledgehammer hidden under her coat, like over her arm. She had somehow hidden this sledgehammer and had attacked him. First, he gives the account of why tell us this account that no one seemed to really actually believe, but the prosecution had to go with.
Apparently, Yeah, he claimed that she had borrowed the hammer from him, or actually, more precisely, his wife had borrowed the hammer from I think her father. Yes, And then Robin claimed she needed a sledgehammer to do some work around her apartment, and so Douglas gave her this hammer, and then she showed up at his house and that night sort of camouflaging the hammer because they were arguing over money, and he said that he didn't have the
money with him. He was a little bit short, a couple of thousand dollars that they were dickering over, and apparently she took out the hammer and started swinging at him. That was his story. Hardly anyone believed it, but that was the confession, and surprisingly a lot of people have sort of took it as gospel. People outside of the court,
the state troopers. I talked to the investigators. They never believed it because Robin was just you know, a small a small young woman, you know, And I've held that exact type of hammer and I need two hands to get a decent grip and to swing it right with the you know. To say that she was going to just start swinging at this guy, it was a little bit silly. And as one person said that the way he described the fight sounded like someone who had never been in a fight, you know, And you know, it
was a fishy confession. And I remember talking to the benedict's attorney, I said, how common is it for this to happen where they just go behind they go sort of behind the scenes, they create this kind of transparent story and they present that as a confession. They cooked it up, you know, they kind of sculpted it and you know, the benedict's attorney, he sheepishly said, it shouldn't happen, but it does, and that's the legal system at work.
You know, sometimes you can kind of finagle your way out of things.
The sentence that he did receive was eighteen to twenty years, kind of on the high end for manslaughter, but also that he was eligible for parole after twelve years. You talk about this case that it grew into a news phenomenon, and you talk about the Herald, which is a tabloid, and you talk about the prestigious The Globe in Boston as well, a newspaper, and also they coverage wall to wall on television.
Tell us about this media phenomenon, Well.
That was a time when true crime stories were really starting to take off. This is around eighty three eighty four, and it seemed like everyone was looking for the crime of the minute. You know, bookstores were starting to stock their true crime section as they'd never done before. Suddenly, bookstores were floored to ceiling with true crime titles. There
were true crime television shows. It was really becoming sort of a national phenomenon that the whole issue of crime crime was being presented as entertainment, and the Globe had tried to distance itself from the more gaudy crime stories, and the Herald stepped right in and then embraced this
true crime explosion. The Herald endless pages devoted to local crimes and national crimes, and the Globe thought, well, maybe this was a case that they could tap into and try to get some of that Herald readership, because the Herald was really picking up readers by focusing on these criminal cases. The gaudier the better, and so the Globe
kind of stepped out of their usual style. And some people say the Globe lowered itself and got into this kind of tabloid war with this newspaper across town, you know, but it was a big deal. I remember I was a kid, but almost every morning you'd wake up and you'd see a picture of Douglas or Benedict on the front page of either the Globe or the Herald. It became your sort of your morning entertainment, you know. You'd pick up the newspaper and you'd be having your morning
coffee and reading about this case. What happen with a lot of different cases, but this was one of the first ones to really kick off that sort of crime as entertainment phenomenon that we're still enjoying today.
Now, despite the parents' disapproval of the media portrayal and even the police detective that were involved, especially Paul Landry. What was the portrayal of Robin versus William Douglass, the convicted killer.
Well, it flip flopped a couple of times. At first, Robin was this art student. Then she became a prostitute. It was that was when it changed. When when the papers were free to call her a prostitute, then the case really took on a different kind of atmosphere. She was this young, beautiful prostitute and he was this brilliant professor, and she was the one who had lured him to the point of no return. You know. They went for that kind of angle, and it was it was unfortunate
because he was a bad guy. She didn't lower him into anything. He knew all about the combat zone. He was a sex addict, which was kind of a new phenomenon at the time. No one really talked about sex addiction. It was kind of a new thing. But he certainly qualified. But the papers loved playing on that beautiful young woman driving this guy to murder, you know, but it would change.
Sometimes it was a beauty and the beast type of thing, but once the combat zone became an integral part of the story was it was about this Boston sex worker who had manipulated this guy, driving him to the point of murder. That was sort of a simplistic way to do it, but that was how they sold newspapers.
This story captivated a US audience for all the reasons that you mentioned that it had all the ingredients that tabloids and newspapers have come to really appreciate. There was even a time when, again you feel very bad for the Benedict family that when he got out after nine years, less than nine years, there was some attempt. He tried to make it like there was an attempt for him to be able to tell for the first time where Robin's body was and answer any and all questions they may have for him.
A meeting was set up. Tell us about the results, What he did say? What did he did reveal?
Oh, he didn't really reveal anything. He had They set up a meeting at a little restaurant right and he got out early. He played the system. He used a good behavior so he knew how to play the system. He was brilliant at it in a way. I was able to look at his prison records and you could just see him. He had the steady correspondence with the warden saying that he had been teaching classes in prison.
He'd done this, He'd done that. He was a member of various societies in the prison, and he was teaching Bible classes in the prison. So he was able to work off a lot of time that way. So he set up a meeting with the benedicts, but he really didn't say much of anything. He basically told the same story that he had told in court, that she attacked him and he killed her in self defense, and he disappointed the benedicts. That's for sure.
You're right that he eventually ends up in a assisted living facility and passes away in twenty fifteen, maybe even suffering from Alzheimer's. That this story still had legs many years later. There was many versions of this story in various respectable journalists. It was fictionalized, dramatized, and even the true crime account was in various books by again esteemed authors. Tell us about that enduring interest people in this story that was elevated to be such a big story. In fact,
one of the crimes of the Century in Boston. Noted much later.
Well, it's funny, Dan, because people under a certain age don't really have any recollection of the story. They're interested when they hear about the book and they want to know more about it. But didn't have the kind of legs that you know, say the Menendez brothers or are a Pamela Smart kind of case. And I think that's because it didn't go to trial. He confessed and they never went to trial. Those other cases had long, extended trials,
which allowed more publicity, more coverage. At the time, it was one of the biggest cases in America, and I think the only reason people have forgotten it to a degree is because so many other cases came along after. Court TV was not around at the time of this case. It came a few years later, and I think that the cases that were covered by court TV, they became
a real sort of household names, you know. But this case, it was huge, and not just in Boston, but reporters from all over the country were coming into Boston to get a look at the combat zone, you know, to get to get a look at Douglas. It was a big deal and Boston hadn't had one like this in a while and wouldn't again for a few years. I think it wasn't until the Chuck Stewart case about four or five years later that was that they had anything
that matched the Douglas and Benedict case. And that was why I wanted to revisit it, because it felt like the window was closing on it, you know, and it was about to become this sort of dusty old museum piece that almost like no nobody remembers anything before OJ Simpson, you know, and I thought, you know, there were some big cases before that, so I want wanted to give
it one last look, you know. And also because the other stuff that had been written about it, and the occasional documentaries that were made that we can still see on you know, investigation Discovery Channel, those depictions of it all in you know, in nineteen eighty four, the prison door slams, and we don't know what happened after that, you know, and I thought, well, a lot of stuff probably happened, so I could to explore that his prison time, the aftermath that was as interesting to me as the
crime itself, and I thought, you know, I can capitalize on that because a lot of time has passed and I'll be able to dig up some info. The only downside was that so much time passed that a lot of people had passed away. A lot of police officers who worked in the case and attorneys who worked on it, a lot of them had passed away. And fortunately I was able to track down a few people and they were very helpful. Landry the assistant district attorney, they were
all great to talk to. They helped fill in some of the gaps.
Yes, I want to kudos to you for resurrecting this incredible story. I want to thank you very much Don Stradley for coming on and talking about Boston Tabloid, the killing of Robin Benedict.
For those that might have.
Wanted to check out your other work, do you have a website, do any social media?
They can look in Amazon. All my books are listed on Amazon. I've written five or six. I have another one that I'm shopping around right now. But yeah, they could just go to Amazon and look up this title and see my other books that I have available.
That's great.
Thank you so much, Don Stradley for coming on and talking about Boston tabloid, the killing of Robin Benedict. Thank you very much for this interview. You have a great evening and good night.
Thank you, Dan, thank you.