You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Geesy Bundy Dahmer The Nightstalker VTK 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 Zufanski.
Good Evening.
In the tranquil towns of New England during the nineteen seventies, a sinister mystery unfolded when several boys vanished without a trace and the community's piece was shattered. With law enforcement stymied in its search for answers. Whispers of a possible serial killer surfaced, especially after one boy's body was found years after his disappearance, but what happened to the others
remained a heart wrenching puzzle. In twenty thirteen, author David mc grath, a former host on the Law Enforcement Today Network and an investigator with a relentless drive for justice, watched the documentary about the cold case investigation regarding the missing boys. Himself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and active in his community with the sex abuse therapy group, McGrath was struck by the number of unanswered questions in
the documentary. What followed, beginning in January twenty fourteen, was a five year quest to find the answers to this child abduction and murder mystery. Traveling all over the United States, he uncovered a labyrinth of dark secrets just beneath the surface and unknown to most residents of the Biccolic communities from which the boys disappeared. Haunted by his own past, he had to navigate these dark waters if he wanted to bring truth and justice to the victims and their families.
The book that we're featuring this evening is Obsessed, A Survivor's Quest to Find the Lost Boys of New England, with my special guest, private investigator, writer and author David McGrath. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. David McGrath.
Thank you so much.
Dan, so glad to be back, and I appreciate you allowing me to come on for the second time to talk about the new book.
I really appreciate it.
Man, Thank you so much and congratulations on this new book, Obsessed, A Survivor's Quest to find Justice for the Lost Boys of New England. You just mentioned that, let's talk about the first version of this book or when you first tackled some of this subject matter. Tell us about Monster, and then tell us about the genesis of this book obsessed.
Thank you Dan.
When I wrote Monster, I had about six hundred and fifty pages of handwritten notes over multiple notebooks.
And I didn't want to write you know, Warren.
First of all, I had no idea that you know, when you write a book about child murder and child rape and pedophiles, you know, you're starting to think about like, what kind of audience would actually pick this up, you know, never, so you have that going against you right away, and then you have the idea of the book being, you know, the true crime version of Warren Peace.
So I didn't want it to be that.
So I always kind of had an idea that two books would be. I would have The Monster, the first book, which really just kind of chronicles the life and crimes of one man, in particular Wayne Chapman, with sprinkling in of some of his cohorts like bar Jona and Charles Pearce, and the new updated book was going to be more of you know, these other child murders that happened around the time that Chapman and Barjona and Pierce were active, and updates on where they've all gone since I published
in twenty twenty two. And you know, when you publish a book and you do podcasts like yours, which have tremendous reach, people are going to come to you with new information and you're going to have to vet that information, chase it down, reinterview people, maybe interview some people that you know are very close to it, like I did.
And that's really what the new book is.
It's a continuation of Monster, but also, hey, this is what I've found out in.
The last two years.
Here's some loopholes that I've been able to close, and I've even named more names now and certain murders that people are going to remember from the first book.
So that's what the new book is.
And Monster was, you know, the original book was just get as much as the information that I've compiled over seven years out, get it out of my head and into a book that's coherent so people can digest it and understand what exactly happened from say, nineteen seventy four to nineteen seventy seven here in this region.
Dam now tell us the states that are primarily involved in this story.
Well, you start obviously with Massachusetts, primarily the Boston area, Providence Rhode Island, which is just about a thirty minute drive ninety five cells from Boston.
You have a missing person two missing boys.
In the state of Maine, which is a couple hour drive north. Still in the New England region, you have Connecticut, where multiple girls went missing in the nineteen seventies and were tied to some of these men. And you have other states too. You have Virginia, you have Ohio, you have Upstate New York. Obviously it's more just like an Eastern Seaboard type of thing, But primarily I focus on the New England region, the sixth states in New England minus New Hampshire.
Dan.
For audience that did not hear about Wayne Chapman, tell us a little bit about Wayne Chapman before we get into some of the other heroic and not soil heroic characters in this story.
Well, Wayne Chapman was a pedophile, a totally fixated child predator who was born and raised in upstate New York and around early nineteen seventy two. Somehow, some way, Wayne Chapman ended up living in the Providence, Rhode Island area. And for those of you who read the first book, you know I was theorized that the reason why Chapman ended up in Providence was because it was the at the time, it was the hub of child pornography production, sales, distribution of the.
Entire United States. And it certainly was.
I mean, there's FBI files dating back to the late nineteen sixties, specifically around mob boss Roy DeMeo, who worked in the out of New York, who they picked up cables of him speaking.
On wiretap saying that he's selling his.
Child pornography distribution business down to Providence to Raymond patriarcha who ran the Providence wing of the organized crime. So the mob was heavily involved in the production and distribution selling of child pornography here in Providence, and I believe that's how a young Wayne Chapman came to Providence. Now, a man who lived in upstate New York had been committing crimes his entire life. He had already been in prison for molesting young boys in the states of Pennsylvania,
in New York and even crossed over the border. He wrote a fair amount and talked a fair amount of how he crossed over the border in New York into places like Montreal and Toronto and had been indulging in the underground sex industry there, specifically around children in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies. And you know, I always theorized that you know, did he did?
He did?
He just simply wake up in the morning and throw darts at maps and end up in Providence, Rhode Island.
It's just you know, six hours away. How did that happen?
And how it happened is these men who peddled porn here in Providence where I live, needed low level foot soldiers to go out there and produce it. And that's how Wayne Chapman ended up here. And that's how it came to be that a lot of these boys went missing, because what was happening is they were simply just doing what all pedophiles do. They were getting in positions where
they could have some sort of power over children. They were making up fake four H clubs, which here in America are sort of like these boy scout clubs where you know, underprivileged, underserved children can kind of go and have like a big brother type of situation. You know, they can take them out and you know, take them to sporting events and out fishing and things like that.
And I've interviewed, you know, scores of Chapman victims who were part of those fake four age clubs where Chapman would basically just make flyers and put them out around and say, hey, you know, this is the kind of club that I that I'm in, this is what I do, and I can take care of your children. And parents
were handing them over to him. And what he was doing is he was separating them from their social groups, their families, and he was out there always with camera in hand, you know, performing sort of sexual acts with these children and selling them when he was caught. Dan, this is a guy who worked at as a janitor making three fifty an hour. He had state of the art camera equipment in his apartment in Providence. He had
a dark room. Think about that. Think about what that would have cost in the early in the mid nineteen seventies for a guy making three dollars and fifty cents an hour, who had already been in prison, who simply had a high school education, He had no job. He was not a successful man by any measure. What it was was he was well funded. And that's how that's that was the to give you your listeners the scent of what it was like here at that time. The
mob was heavily, heavily involved. It was a million dollar industry even at that time in the nineteen seventies, and guys like Chapman and his ilk were were their jobs was to get out there and produce it.
And that's what he was doing.
Now they even go even darker than the child porn, not allegations, the child porn evidence. You take us to Brockton, Massachusetts, and one of the boys missing is David John louise On, and so tell us about this, the events or the circumstances surrounding his being missing, and how you introduce a important character, Detective Frank Gentile.
Well, Chapman was very mobile. He had an old converted bread truck, and he ended up in multiple different towns across Massachusetts.
How I'll never know. I just he had sort of some sort of.
In in all these different towns cross Massachusetts, which is a prevailing thing in this book.
And in Brockton.
He ended up being in Brockton one day and finding David Lewison. I don't know if Chapman set out to kill Lewison. I think, as always he was setting out to, you know, get a boy to where he could kind of get him alone, so he could take pictures and then of course, you know, hand them over to his masters so they could be produced. But every once in a while, unfortunately, of all the victims that Chapman had
sexual abuse victims, some of them turned up missing. And however that happened, I'm not sure, but David Lewison goes missing in nineteen seventy four in April, if I remember correctly, and his father was a mayoral candidate. He was a very you know, he was a man that was well known in the town of Brockton. He had just ran for mayor and actually lost, but he was still had
a prestigious law firm in town. And after Dave went missing, the Brockton police got together and you know, they focus hard on you know, perhaps it was a former client of his father's, or maybe somebody who didn't agree with his politics in town. And Frank Genteel, who was a sergeant on the Brockton Police department, he was a detective, always thought that the hallmarks of the Lewison thing disappearance was had a lot of hallmarks of a stranger coming
into town and taken Lewis in. And there had been other cases of little boys missing. There was one much later after this that really rocked that town. It was nothing new. It's a low income area. It's sort of a town that's known to be tough in the state and Lewison. The trail went cold on Lewison for years. There was just no There was no real, real good suspects,
There was no real leads. One of his little friends had mentioned something about a black man maybe named Africa, and I went into that rabbit hole a lot in the book. It wasn't until nineteen seventy six where Chapman was pulled over on the New York State Thruway. And you know, I detail the vehicle pullover in as much detail as I possibly could. You know, Chapman was pulled over and you know, there was child pornography all over his dashboard. They found reels and reels of child pornography.
In the back of his truck. They found hand drawn maps of different towns, including Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Andy Paglisi would later go missing Rockton towns like that, and they eventually pulled him in and interviewed him regarding the lewis In case because they realized that they had a real child predator on their hands, and they wanted to talk to him about every missing boy case that was anywhere
close to where Chapman had been. And as it turns out Chapman's they had basically gone through his garbage and they had found receipts from the town of Brockton gas receipts around that time, and Chapman had admitted multiple occasions that he was the one who took David Lewison and then recanted his confession.
How far do you want to go with it? Dan here?
But eventually, in nineteen eighty they did end up finding David Lewison's body. It was in the bottom of a home that was being basically put under construction.
It was being renovated.
It was one of those multifamily apartment buildings where you know there are nine rooms I believe if I remember right, and a young boy had basically found him and named David o'meira. And there's a lot of discussion that maybe o'meira was also a Chapman victim, maybe somebody who.
Was being groomed in the book.
In both books, both versions of the books, I really kind of pour over how David Lewison's body was come to be found. Frank Genteel had no luck, you know, the sort of the entire town of Brockton has no real understanding of how Lewison's body was found and how they were led to it. Was it simply just you know, happenstance that this young boy fell upon the body or did he know something, And it's just one of those things, really strange things that happen in crime cases.
Dan, I don't know.
I've researched the ownership history of that home for years and years to see if there's anybody in that house who was connected to Wayne Chapman, and I just could never find it. And unfortunately, David o'meier committed suicide years later and was the victim of child of sexual abuse.
So there's there's it's a real mystery, and you know, the only silver lining I would say is that David Lewison's family at least were able to lay their son to rest, and his father has a place to visit him before his death, but no real answers there in the Brocton case.
That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now, this book is a product of years of your particular exhaustive, incredible investigation and which you term you coin as obsessed, basically the title of this book. But this exhaustive investigation. Also in this book feature heroic people, dedicated detectives like Detective al Mints. So introduce Detective al Mints and his interactions with Wayne Chapman.
Yeah, I mean, look, Detective Mints was a guy who was in the Here in Rhode Island, we have a massive navy presence in Newport and a lot of men come in from out of town. And al Mins was a Florida guy who was about to end his Navy career in Newport and was simply driving around in Providence and saw a Providence police recruitment poster and said, you know, maybe I'll stay in town and join the police force.
And he does in nineteen sixty eight. What al Mince didn't know is that he was in the middle of the most corrupt town in New England, maybe in the entire country.
Dan I mean that and.
Think about the ground that covers with Las Vegas, Chicago, Philadelphia, places like that.
There is no corruption like Providence corruptions.
So Mins Joins becomes a sex crime detective pretty quickly after four years. What happens was that traffic stop happens in nineteen seventy six. Chapman's pulled out of the vehicle. They find thousands of pictures of young boys, the reels the child pornography, and the New York State Police at that time, in nineteen seventy six put out a teletype with the pictures and they say, if you recognize any of these kids, can you please give us a call?
And this is across the country. Now there's pictures of these young boys in Alaska and they're trying to figure out, can you guys help us with these victims. Alman's just sitting at his desk and he sees a picture of a boy taken at the Roger Williams State Park here in Providence. Now I bring my kids there often. There's a statue in the middle of the park with a gigantic dog. You can't miss it. It's been there for years. Mint sees that recognizes it. And says, oh, I got
a victim. One of these kids is in Providence. He grabs a picture, he heads out. He gets the guy's name. He realized that Wayne Chapman lives in his neighborhood in Providence, an area that he put trolls. He heads over to Wayne Chapman's house. He talks to the kids in the neighborhood. You know, they tell him that, you know, they use language I won't use here, but they basically said, yeah, we know the guy's gay and he's got a dark room up in his house. So Mince goes through is trash.
He finds receipts from Brockton, he finds receipts from southern Rhode Island. He finds him from Lawrence, and he knows that there's a missing boy just weeks prior to that named Andy Peglisi in the town of Lawrence and request an interview with Wayne Chapman. So Mince heads up to New York Interviews. Chapman gets him to confess to the disappearance of Lewison and Andy.
Paglisi, the Lawrence boy.
Now, I should back up a little bit and let people know that in August of nineteen seventy six, a little boy went missing in the town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, from the Higgins Memorial Pool. They had brought Green Berets out from the ten Special Forces Group, who is located for Devn's. They had done a massive search for this boy. It was the biggest story in the state for about
a week. The police came out and said that he's probably with a family member, and the media attention died down because people believe that, Okay, he is with a family member, he'll be returned safe. The story basically dies for a few weeks. Wayne Chapman is found in possession of the boys sock at that traffic stop, and Albert Mintz,
you know, questions Chapman. He gets them under sodium pentathal eventually, which is a sort of a truth serum, which is obviously an investigative technique that would never be used today, but we're talking about nineteen seventy six here. He gets him to confess to both murders disappearances, and then Chapman of course recant, So that's why he was never indicted for any of these. Mints really connected well with Chapman. You know, I've interviewed al scores of times. He's still
alive and well living in Jacksonville, Florida. And you know, he always just appealed to Chapman's good sense in the sense of, you know, the town of Providence was mob run, and he made sure to make the point to Chapman that, hey, listen, you're abusing a bunch of little Italian boys. How do you think that's gonna go over when you're in prison? And Chapman agreed that I probably wasn't gonna go over too well for him, and he got him to agree
to confess to a lot of things. And then you know, eventually, unfortunately, whether it be through council or discussing it with other inmates, Chapman recanted all of his confessions. And there was just never enough evidence saved to be able to put in front of a grand jury to indict Wayne Chapman for those two murders that he almost certainly did.
There's no one else but him that could have done it.
And just to finish up on Mints, you know, the town of Providence, like I said, is the most career uptown.
In the United States.
And I'll give you the perfect example regarding Mints, a few years later after this, and Alice told me this, these stories himself, These come straight from him.
It's not hearsay.
There was a shop that was located across the street from the Providence Police Department main headquarters here on Westminster Street in Providence, and they were selling child pornography out of a storefront and Albert Mintz came in and said, you know, hey, listen, we got to shut this down. This is obviously we can't do this as against the law.
We're going to have to shut down this store. And within forty minutes of getting back to his office, his lieutenant had called him in and basically told them, listen, you're not gonna You're not going to bul over the pornography business in this town. You're just not going to do it. And that's when Albert mints quit. That's why his career only lasted eight years on the Providence Police Department. And to this day, dan the city of Providence is ran by the adult entertainment industry.
Nothing has changed.
It has the most adult nightclubs per capita of resident of any city in the United States, and most adult bookstores. And it all started in the nineteen seventies. Right there at that time, and it still remains to this day the biggest point of the economy at that time. The police department was not going to allow this sex crimes detective to put an end to that.
It just wasn't going to happen. So that's why his career was very short.
There incredible tell us about this Bridgewater treatment center and the reason why not only Chapman but the other cohorts were going to be talking about shortly really wanted to go to Bridgewater rather than serve a sentence in a regular prison.
Sure, so Chapman doesn't get indicted for the Poglici murder or the lewis and murder. Unfortunately, the grand grand jury returned no bill on the Lewis and murder and he was never indicted for anything to do with Peglici. It was just simply he confessed for Canton and that was sort of the end of it. To this day we have no real clarity on it. But he was convicted of two rapes in nineteen seventy five in Lawrence, so
he was given a fifteen to thirty year sentence. Nathaniel by Jonah, another pedophile from Worcestern Massachusetts, who had connections to Wayne Chapman, was convicted of taking two boys, attempting to murder them, rape them, and then eventually tied them up and stuck them into the trunk of his car in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. He gets a twenty year sentence and they reconnect. In Massachusetts. We have a law on the books that is the law in some states. Other states
it's not. I know Washington State California have this law where the state can basically you can be done with your sentence. You can have no commitments at all to law enforcement or the state, but you can be designated as a sexually dangerous person due to your long history of commit sex crimes, and that will earn you a spot in the Bridgewater Treatment Center, which is a treatment center located in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, which is right off about
thirty minutes south of Boston. And you know, it's well known that it was a country club and Barjona Chapman and a lot of people have asked me over the years, well, how do you know that Barjona and Wayne Chapman knew each other outside of the prison walls before their long prison stints. And the reason I know this is because there's been there was communications between the two of them when they first hit jail, so they would have never
cross paths in the penal system before Bridgewater. But Wayne Chapman was writing often to Nathaniel Barjona telling him that.
Hey, you need to get your lawyer to get you over here.
In Bridgewater, which was basically a state mental hospital for sex offenders. It wasn't as you know in your listeners. I've worked in prisons, I've worked in state, I've worked in federal, and I've worked in county prison dan in my career and sex offenders and not treated well as you would imagine.
They're the lowest on the totem pole of criminals.
And it was quite obvious that Wayne Chapman and Bardriona were not going to last in prison. So they both
eventually reconnected in Bridgewater. And I don't know if you have any specific questions to that, but there was, you know, basically a covenant of Chapman Pierce Charles Pearce, who was another man that you know probably deserves some backstory here who connected with them in prison or Bridgewater, and you know, sort of form this kind of unholy union that you know, led to a lot of suffering for other little boys.
Unfortunately, go ahead and tell us about this what you term serial predator necrophiliac Charles Pearce, tell us about his background, and also let's talk about soon enough about the connection you think these people have in terms of murder.
Sure well, Charles Pierce, this is sort of a shadowy character and this whole thing, I think he probably deserves a book onto himself. But Pierce was a carnival worker who was from the city of Haveral, Massachusetts, was the next town over from Lawrence, Massachusetts, so.
Very very close.
Pierce had been abusing young children for basically his entire life. He was an older man by the time he connected with Barjona and Pierce. He had killed a little girl in the town of Boxford, Massachusetts in the late nineteen sixties. He was a main suspect and had confessed at certain times to killing a young girl in the town of tall And, Connecticut, and had basically been shipped between Florida
and Massachusetts for his entire life. He lived in Hillsborough County in Tampa Bay area down south and kind of split his time between the south and the north up here in Boston, as many New Englanders do when the weather starts to get cold. He was also, like I said, a carnival worker, so he kind of traveled throughout the Midwest, in the American South. So there had been reports of another little boy that I talk about who went missing in downtown Chicago, Proper, who was more than likely a
Pierce victim. And you know Pierce, Unfortunately there's not he died in nineteen ninety nine, and there's not a lot of court documents out there related to Pierce. But I will tell you that, you know, I've had a lot of discussions with state troopers detectives about Charles Pierce, and he admitted at one point to about one hundred child murders.
Obviously, I don't believe that.
When asked at one time, you know, how many bodies do we have out here, Charlie, he really couldn't remember. He just simply said, there's just so many. And I believe that he had connections to Barjona and Chapman on the outside before prison. And I believe that Charlie Pierce might have helped get that David Lewison's body into that
steamer trunk and underneath that house for Wayne Chapman. I think that when Wayne Chapman went out to commit crimes in the mid to early nineteen seventies in New England, Charles Pearce was on his speed dial for when he needed to get rid of a body.
Not Barjona.
Barjona was way too recognizable. He was around three hundred and fifty four hundred pounds, scraggly beard, long hair. If you ran in Nathaniel Barjona, chances are you weren't going to forget him. Pierce was the like Chapman, you know, normal height, you know, normal to above average height, normal look. You know you wouldn't remember these two guys. I think that you know, Pierce was probably the guy who was helping Chapman get rid of some of these bodies.
I really do, well, give us some more information that you think puts these people together as accomplishes, some of the skills that one person didn't have, or the intellect and another person didn't have, and maybe just the motivation for all of these people to operate with each other in the first place.
Yeah.
I think that like any group of people, especially pedophiles, you know, they know that the rest of the world is basically disgusted by their behavior, and they're really shunned by polite society. So when you find each other, you have a tendency to stick together. And I've noticed that, as I've noted in all of my writing, I've certainly noticed that behind the prison walls with pedophiles kind of
grouping together, you can kind of always find them. And that's because they're just so disgusted, you know, the rest of people are just so disgusted by them that you know, you have to find some validation in each other. And that's what I believe Pierce and Barjona did. And remember, I mean, Chapman was a like eighty IQ guy, not a guy who could who I would really, you know,
consider a master criminal. But Pierce was and Barjona was, and those guys knew to deny, deny, and I believe that they coached Chapman to deny all of these you know, after those confessions, you know that Chapman made to Albert Mintz when he was honest for one time in his life and talked about how he had murdered those two boys and disposed of their bodies, and talked about certain things that you know, Andy PAGLSI was had on it that day, and certain things that David Lewison had on
that day that only could be known to the people that saw them that day.
There was a lot of things.
There that that Chapman mentioned that could only be known to someone who had seen Andy that day. He was certainly there, multiple eyewitnesses put him there. So after those confessions, he never confessed to anything again. He just simply acted like that never happened. And I believe that's why. That's
because Pierce got to him. And I think that their operation was the selling and distributing of child pornography, and anything that got in the way of that, like a murder, or brought heat upon them like a murder, was something that Charlie Peerce was going to have to deal with. And that's how I believe that they were connected. I think if Chapman never set out to murder these boys, I don't believe that he was one of those guys who had this sort of now Barjona, that's a different story.
I believe that he actually got off on the pain of his victims, and that certainly can be noted on multiple occasions.
I'm happy to go into that.
I think Chapman was a pedophile, but really there for business. But sometimes when you're trying to create these specific sexual scenarios with little boys, specifically those who have health problems or things like that, things have a tendency to get out of hand, and their business was going to suffer if there's a bunch of bodies around. And I think that's where Charlie Pierce came into it.
Dan, that's just as that's an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now you talked about that Charles Pearce confesses on his deathbed then directs authorities to a field in lawrence, let's talk about some of the potential misdirection that these guys employ with law enforcement and also the idea that they may just be confessing just to get to a hospital setting.
Yeah.
I you know, my opinions have sort of evolved on that. Dan, that's a great question. Thank you for asking it. You know, in the beginning of this, you know, I used to think that while this guy is making these confessions because he's this brutal child murderer, and it's all true, and you know, these criminals are not that sophisticated, but you know, the evidence beares out the exact opposite.
I just think that.
Charles Pearce was doing hard time in a Florida prison down in Tampa Bay, where as somebody who's worked for the Florida doc in my past and knows that, you know, those summers with no air conditioning and a cell block can be tough. And I've lived it and I know, and there is a lot of motivation to get the hell out of there and get and confess to a crime in Massachusetts and get yourself extradited to a mental hospital that is well known for having, you know, carnivals
inside the hospital. That's not a joke, that's not over, that's not me adding fluff. That is literally what they would do. They would have carnivals with pedophiles running the rides. So I don't believe any of Pierce's confessions, especially to these fields that were dug up in Lawrence. There were
certainly no bodies ever found and no more murders. Pierce went down for one murder, that's it, the Michelle Wilson murder in Boxford, which he absolutely did anything else I have, I don't believe hardly any of it, because there's just no evidence that Charles Pierce ever killed another child in Massachusetts. So nobody's ever turned up. It's just simply his conjecture, and I think he just liked to play games with police.
And the only other murder that I can absolutely, in my heart of hearts tie to Charles Pierce would be that Chicago murder of that little boy went missing during the carnival. And you know, i'd keep a lookout for some of the work that I'm doing right now because I think that we're going to get some finality to
this old cold case very very soon. So yeah, to answer your question, Dan, I just think that he, unlike Chapman, was a somewhat sophisticated criminal and could kind of gain the system to work for him a little bit if he confessed to these murders that he didn't do.
Let's talk a little bit more about Nathaniel bar Jonah and that's not his original name, and their contact contact with Chapman in Bridgewater, but also that you have correspondence between Nathaniel bar Jonah's friend, a Doc Bowman, and so very interesting correspondence that you talk about and write about in this book.
Well, Barjona was born just the quickest backstories born and Worcester, which is a central Massachusetts large city, ended up committing crimes, you know, at a breakneck pace. Basically the first crime he ever committed was a day of his high school graduation.
He was a pedophile who did prefer boys.
He often would mistake little girls with short haircuts for boys. He ends up abducting a child on the day of his high school graduation, ends up being a female child with a short haircut. Once he realizes that she's a girl, you know, he beats her nearly to death in the front seat of his mother's vehicle, and then it kind
of just goes from there. He ends up getting abducted, excuse me, ends up getting indicted on a kidnapping charge where he put those two boys into the back seat of his trunk, excuse me, into the trunk of his car in Shrewsbury. He ends up also in Bridgewater. There's a lot of correspondence between him and Chapman about you know, how could they have known each other unless they knew each other on the outside.
So that's how I sort of started putting that together.
They'd never cross paths in the prison system, so they certainly couldn't become friends then. So let's just fast forward to Bowman. You know, bar Jonah does you know, about ten years of that sentence and ends up getting released in the early nineteen nineties out of Bridgewater, and you know, he immediately comes out in the town of Dudley, Massachusetts. He's found in you know, a mother had and her son had gone to a post office, and you know, the mom had ran in really really fast, and you know,
did horrify all your parents out there? She she comes out to her son basically with a three hundred pound man sitting on top of him.
Wow. And Barjona and you know I mentioned earlier that.
He he liked to inflict terror on his victims, unlike Chapman.
I really believe he got off on the terror.
So you know, the mom had shoot Barjona away and called the local authorities. The local authorities had already had an idea of who Barjona was. He was just such a prolific criminal that one of the local cops recognized his his description and ended up over at his mother's house.
They grabbed him.
He gets out that afternoon and he takes a cab, and you know, he had read the police report on the woman who turned him in, had her address, So he takes a cab that afternoon.
Mind you, he had just gotten out of prison.
He had just done almost a decade for you know, in a mental institution for abduction of two little boys. He's out, you know, a week, and he's taking a cab to this woman's house and he just simply stood at the front door and scared the living hell out of the mother and father and a.
Little boy, obviously.
And the very next day he's in court and they basically say, you know, the judge doesn't put him back in jail.
They give him probation.
He tells the judge, listen, my brother owns a bunch of property in the town of Great Falls, Montana. I am out of Massachusetts. And the judge is basically just happy to see him. Go listen, get the hell out of here. Great you're leaving the state. Check in with probation, make sure that they get squared away with the probation office in Montana, and.
You'll be good to go. Barjona never does that.
He just simply walks out, hitches this trailer and heads off with his mother to the town of Great Falls, Montana.
Now.
Now, when he gets there, he picks up a charge pretty immediately for allegedly molesting a young boy who he was babysitting. He meets a man named James Doc Bowman, who is a sort of At the beginning of my investigation, I thought that he wasn't going to be such a central figure.
But as I began to look.
Into Doc Bowman more, I realized dan that he had actually lived in Massachusetts as well.
He had been a founding member of the Nambler.
Group, which is operated, unfortunately to our great disgrace and my home state, since the mid nineteen seventies. We can certainly get into that. That's probably a discussion onto itself. So I'm really curious as to how bar Jona and Bauman got together. I think there's much more there. I think there might even been some pre planning there. I think that they absolutely knew each other at one point, and maybe a cross paths back here before ending up there.
Either way, they're both now unfortunately problems of the state of Montana, and they begin to get into a bit of a love triangle with a ten year old boy named Zach Ramsey in.
The town of Great Falls. This boy goes missing.
It's a long, convoluted story of just how bar Jona what he did to this boy allegedly. Unfortunately, again, which is a recurring theme in this book, to my great anger, they just could never get enough evidence to indict Nathaniel Barjona on the murder of Jackary Ramsey.
Eyewitnesses put him.
As the very last person ever see him on the day of February eighteenth, nineteen ninety four. Bowman, who was also a pedophile, a long standing with years and years in history. I mean, I had traced him back to the nineteen sixties Dan where he was this character Doc Bowman, he had been a music teacher in the town of Denver, Colorado in the late nineteen sixties, and he basically had a mob with pitchforks at his door running him out town because so many boys had complained that he had
groped them and molested them. The amount of victims that this man had was just it's unbelievable, and it's unbelievable how he's still on the streets in nineteen ninety four, all these years later, you know. So he tells Barjona of his plan. You know, they're going to take He's going to take Zach. He's going to pretend that he's his grandfather. He's going to drive to the Canadian border,
and he's going to take this boy away forever. Barjona had other ideas, and that morning Zach Ramsey went missing. The last person to be seen with Zachary Ramsey was a Nathaniel Barjona in an alleyway in Great Falls, Montana, which I had been to multiple occasions in the investigation
of this book. Barjona's Montana activities are really incredible when you look at them in totality, the amount of boys who had complained about him molesting them he had oftentimes he to the point dan where he had and then impersonating a police officer as basically a school resource officer.
Which is a common thing in the States.
Not too sure if it's common in Canada, but a lot of schools in the States will have a police officer dedicated to that school, where he's a uniformed officer who's in that school all day.
The kids begin to know him, et cetera, et cetera.
Barjona had spent so much time at the local elementary school.
Now think of this.
This is a convicted pedophile with years and years of history of violent crimes.
Towards children, and nobody ever questioned it.
Nobody knew that he actually wasn't a police officer and he was actually just a pedophile trying to get closer to kids. You know, Ramsey disappears. A detective from Gray Falls, Montana man named James Cameron, who worked with me good amounts for this book and was excellent with this time, always suspected Barjona of it.
Spent years and years, to the detriment of his.
Marriage and his career, really lost it all to prove that Nathaniel Barjona was the one who abducted an eventually cannibalized zach Ramsey. And the reason why the cannibalization alleged, why that comes into play, is because Bowman and Barjona had.
Written notes back and forth to each other.
Where they talked in code about zach Ramsey's body and they called it deer meat d e ar as.
In deer as a term of endearment or your wife.
And a detective with the Great Falls Police Department told me on the record that with his first initial search of Nathaniel Barjona's apartment. He opened the freezer and there was a there was a ton of bag meat and it smelled horrible, and he shut it and he said, Jesus Christ, this guy needs to clean out his freezer. He thought it was just bad meat. And what he didn't realize was he was probably staring at the body of Zachary Ramsey and maybe could have closed the case
right then and there. It's just a lot of luck or bad luck, depending on how you look at it. And unfortunately, the murder of zach Ramsey will never ever be solved because Nathaniel Barjona is long dead and anyone who knew about it. You know, I recount the story in the book Dan of how Bowman was going to basically confess to James Cameron, the detective on the case that Barjona had had taken Ramsey, killed him and cannibalized him.
And the day that they were supposed to meet, James, Doc Bowman at a heart attack on the stairs of the Great Falls.
Police Department and died. Incredible, incredible story, you know, yeah, incredible.
That's just as an opportunity to stop we're second to hear these messages. Now, we talked about this incredible claim of cannibalism, but we also talked about Charles Pearson necrophilia. And I have to say that this is the first time I've ever seen an author make the connection from all the way from nambla to child porn to molestation and rape to necrophilia. Can you make that connection?
Yeah?
Yeah, and real quick, Dan, if you and you know, just so people understand, you know, the nambuok this, these these connections are all if someone was to do wanted to do the work, you could certainly make the connections no problem.
By reading the court documents, we know.
That Barjona had, you know, the the FBI had come in on the a special agent named James Wilson had become obsessed. He was part of the Montana Resident Agency of the FBI. He in fact still lives to this day and we just saw each other not too long ago, and he's a guy who's still obsessed. In fact, Barjonah had written a bunch of codes a lah you know, the Zodiac killer, and he and he and he kind of kept them with them in his notebook and a lot of those codes were broken and they were recipes
basically little boy stew things like that. So he had an interest in human flesh. He had expressed that multiple times. And this FBI agent actually the last time we spoke years later. After all this has kind of faded from public memory. Barjone has been dead since two thousand and eight. He still kept Barjon his codes in his wallet. It was incredible. That's how much this case can drag you in. You know, it really does kind of just it's all encompassing once you start to get a handle on it.
And the Namblet connection is again mostly is just from court documents they you know, and I don't know how much you want to hit on this, but if you're talking about a sign of the sort of the period of what it.
Was like in New England in the nineteen seventies.
Just you know, minutes, you know, miles away from where Andy Baglisi disappeared, you know, twenty minute drive away from where David Lewison disappeared. In the town of Revere, Massachusetts, which is a beach town north of Boston, there was a sex ring that was broken up adult males, specifically one named Richard Paluzzo, who was an advertising executive who worked at his father's company. It was a massive company in the fifties, sixties and seventies called Plue Uzzoh Advertising,
which was started by his father. Now, neighbors had complained as early as nineteen seventy five that there were young boys outside of Paluzzo's home all hours of the night, days times, drinking alcoholic beverages, smoking marijuana, and eventually the police broke it up and what they found was address books and victims willing to come forward that had been pimped out by Paluzzo to very famous and affluent men all around town in New England, and.
A lot of them.
Some of them were headmasters of schools, police officers, head of endercinology cancer research in Boston hospitals. These were men of all walks of life, and so Paluzzo had gotten a thirty year sentence for his role in pimping out these young boys. And some local prominent gay activists who wrote for certain rags had written extensively about how this
was a witch hunt against gay men. Specific a man named David Brill who was a very very prominent at the time gay writer and activist, and he had written constantly about how this was a witch hunt. There were really no victims. And Dan, I've seen these court documents. These kids lived on the fringes of society. Some of them were orphans, had no family, and these men simply scooped them.
Up and destroyed their lives.
And these guys had just all of them, I mean, certain guys that I mentioned from those core documents when I dug into their past and interviewed people.
Who knew them.
You know, there was a man who was a headmaster at a school called the fesson In School, and it was a boarding school, an elite one in a very affluent town called Newton, Massachusetts. And this man I've interviewed scores of people who lived under this guy's rule at the fesson In School. One boy recounted to me how you know, he would get him high and drunk, and he would hang him from the ceiling and he would abuse his body. He would whip him, I mean, and
it was just known. And when the FBI finally came in and arrested some of these men at the Fessenden School, the kids got up and cheered in the middle of school. I mean, it was incredible when you look at it. Who was involved in this sex ring. But circling back to Nambla, Reil had written about it so long and he had whipped up the local gay community into thinking
that this was a witch hunt. And in nineteen seventy seven, while Paluzzo and one of the main curators, a man named Frank Domiano, who had a history it's such a long history of abusing boys dating back to the late nineteen fifties in California, you know, I talk about him extensively in the book, they organized what was essentially a stand in at the Bridgewater Home for Sexually Dangerous the mental hospital that we mentioned earlier, and they had done
a big standout in nineteen seventy seven in response to the Bridgewater excuse me to the revere sex cases being adjudicated, and that evening is when the original Namble meeting took place all the as it's called the twenty two Nambla meeting, and that's how that group was formed, which was called in Time magazine the most hated group in America. They'd come into national prominence. The FBI eventually infiltated traded their group.
I had spoken to a.
Man named Bob Hamer for the book, who was an FBI agent who was assigned to infiltrate NAMBLA.
He did so very effectively.
Recounted one story to me of how he was at a toy store in New York City with about a dozen NAMBLA members and they were making some very suggestive comments towards boys who were there shopping with their families. And Bob told me, Dave, if I had a grenade, I would have pulled the pin right there. And you know this is a man who Hamer, who he he got so far into this group, Dan, that he was
writing for their newsletter. Literally he was putting out NAMBLA newsletters and they were very they were huge on putting out communications. I have them all dating back to the mid nineteen seventies. Their first ever clubhouse or main office, if you will, located just half a mile away from Fenway Park down the North Station area, Boston. But you know the point of it is the Nambler connection can be drawn right to its affirmation was right there at the Revere Sex Ring in nineteen seventy seven.
That's where it was created.
Dan, you have continued to investigate the crimes of Wayne Chapman, Nathaniel Barjona, and Charles Pearce. But you say that someone that kept the story alive of her friend Andy Pooh Glsi. She made an award winning documentary Have You Seen Andy? So you say that she continued with her journalism to keep the story in the public spotlight and also to continue her own investigation.
Yeah.
I mean, if it weren't for that documentary, we certainly wouldn't be talking, probably wouldn't know the story. You know, I first saw Have You Seen Andy? Back when my first son was born around twenty thirteen, and that's what got me into you know, I never spoke to Melanie. You know, obviously we know each other how but you know, I had never once reached out to her when, you know, I told myself, Okay, I'm going to take on looking
at this myself. And I figured that would just be like the easy way out, because Melanie certainly seemed to know everything. You know, she grew up with Andy, she lived there, she was at the pool that day. I can't be Dan. I wasn't born until nineteen eighty four. I wasn't even alive when all this happened. You know, the bottom line is, you know, she lived it. She can't tell it. She can tell it better than I
can from that perspective, you know what I mean. But you know, I never spoke to her in the research for any of these books because I just figured, you know, what are you gonna do? Go to somebody and tell me, Hey, tell me everything?
You know? You know, I mean, that's lazy. So yeah, her work.
I feel like, you know, my work has expanded on Melanie's work. Not one uped it or made it any better. It is simply just put it out there for more to see that.
Listen.
You know, in the nineteen seventies we had a real problem here with a lot of missing kids, and to this day, you know, other than maybe one that I talk about in the book that I think we had a big hand in, and that's the case in Webster, Massachusetts and Andrew Motto, none of these cases are never mind solved, and they're hardly even known about.
And how's that possible? You know? That's why I think Mel's such a hero.
You take us back in the book to this harrowing scene August twenty second, nineteen seventy six. Again you say
that Wayne Chapman is at the Higgins Memorial Pool. But you say that he didn't have any fear of being recognized even though he had salted these boys a year before at the same Poolredit you say that there was multiple based on your research, there was multiple offenders at the pool that day, and you think that you have an idea of specifically offenders that were at that pool that day assisting Wayne Chapman.
Well, there was five sex offenders based off the Lawrence Police Department reports of who was present that day. Wayne Chapman was one of them. And how I know this is Wayne Chapman had a childhood bout with polio. He walked with a limp, as many kids of the forties and fifties unfortunately did until we developed the vaccine which saved many many lives. But unfortunately Chapman had had some side effects from it and walked with a slight limp.
He also had a scar on his forehead.
So you know, just going back, you know, the year prior he had you know, committed rapes, he had raped two boys in the woods behind the Higgins Memorial Pool. Melanie Perkins again just to you know, she was friendly with both of those boys as well and had a big hand and helping those boys as the years went on, and she deserves.
Her kudos for that.
So, like you said, Chapman had absolutely no fear of coming back to that pool where you know, you'd just raped two boys a year prior. And I believe the reason why he did that, Dan is because he had help in that area. And one thing that has been brought to light since the book, the first version of this book was published, is there was a store which I've visited now multiple times, right around the corner from the Stadium housing projects where the Higgins Memorial.
Pool was located.
This store was owned and was known to sell and distribute child pornography out of the storefront, much like the Providence store that we mentioned earlier. The two men who ran that store, who you know presumably made you know thousands off of being the neighborhood child porn dealer, were both Providence based men. They both lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and I believe that those two men were Chapman's plug into the Lawrence area. And that's something that has just
been brought to light to me. Unfortunately in the last two years, so much more to come on that. I definitely touch on it in the new version of the book and give some alternative theories to how Chapman got there, but either way, he was comfortable in the Lawrence area, even after committing crimes that would put him in jail for thirty years. So that said, after Polici went missing, there was a lifeguard that was interviewed who worked the
day of the crime and worked the next day. You know, the next day there's a massive search going on for Andy. There's military, there's police, they're canvassing the neighborhood. And the lifeguard described Wayne Chapman. Came up to her and asked her have they found anything on the missing boy, and she described Wayne Chapman to a t, as did multiple
other witnesses. Now, there were five sex offenders at the pool that day, and I believe that based off of witness Remember when Andy went missing, there.
Was a little boy with him and it was a boy.
Named Ray Clark who was a friend of Andy's who did not come forward with his story until years later. He was abducted with Andy and taken into the woods and Ray ran away. He left his friend there and had turned around at one point, and he said that when he turned around, he saw Andy Paglici under a rock getting hit with a rock by a man, Wayne
Chapman and another unidentified man. And I believe that man was Charles Pearce, and especially if the rock, if there is validity to that, which I have absolutely no reason to not believe.
Ray Clark.
We know that he had done the very same thing to that little girl, Michelle Wilson in Boxer, Massachusetts. He had beaten her with a rock and killed her, kept her body in the truck, and he had a van much like Chapman's. He admitted to Beliee signed Affi David's under under penalty of perjury, that he kept Michelle Wilson's body in that truck for weeks after she was dead, and he had sex with the body. So I believe that's way that Charlie Pearce was there trolling for victims.
And you know, once Chapman was done doing whatever he had to do to get his pictures, Charlie Pearce kind of took over, or however that worked.
I'm not too sure.
I've only known to the people who are there in God, but I believe that he was his. He was Wayne Chapman's accomplice on that day, not bar Jona, because Barjona.
Was just way too recognizable, as we mentioned earlier.
So that's what I believe happened, Dan, and I believe what they did with Andy's body. There's a lot of different opinions out there. If you ask Melanie, and I respect her opinion as the utmost authority on this subject. She believes that he was buried somewhere out in the woods behind the stadium housing projects. I've always rejected that theory until last summer. Me and Melanie went out there and walked through the woods together again. We visited this
crime scene, we visited the pool together. I walked the entire route that Wayne Chapman would have walked with Andy Buglisi. And I get to tell you, Dan, those woods are so dense that it could absolutely be possible that you could bury somebody there and nobody would fall upon it.
It is not the type of place where you'd go walk your dog.
It could be in the exact same spot that it was from nineteen seventy six. But my theory always was, and it's the theory of the Providence Police Department as well, is that they took Andy's body put it in the back of Wayne Chapman's van and brought it here about a mile from where I lived. To Miriam Hospital where
Wayne Chapman was a janitor. He had keys, and the manipulation of the furnace downstairs, the burner where they burned body potts after amputation, they burned rats, and I believe that's what they did with Andy's body.
And has it ever been confirmed? It just can't be. Unfortunately, we're just never going to know.
There's no real bow that I can put on this for anybody, but I will tell you this. Albert Mintz went to the Merriam Hospital just days after they realized that Chapman may have been involved in this disappearance, and he found that there was an unauthorized burn the night that Andy P. Gleasey went missing, and there was human DNA that Unfortunately, now again this is a there could been a ton of human DNA in there.
There burn a lot of body parts that day.
I don't know, but all these burns, and I've been to Miriam, I've been there multiple times. I was just there a few weeks ago pulling Chapman's HR file to look at the days that he was off and called in and I wanted to cross check myself on a few things that I had always kind of thought but didn't know. Those furnaces were turned on by keys. You had to literally put keys in a slot and turn them.
And Chapman's bosses and administration there would have had to have known that, And unfortunately nobody knew ahead of time. It just happened, and nobody can really tell you what happened. And I think that that's really an interesting thing that unfortunately will just you know, only could be known to the people were there at the time.
What investigation the.
Hospital did in to why a janitor who wasn't on shift that night came in and performed an unauthorized burn and for what reason?
Dan, Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. One thing left for the Gleasy case was that you mentioned that there was some socks, bloody socks found in Charles Pearce's van, and those were linked to Andy's sister.
Yes, it was actually sorry, go ahead.
Dan, pardon me. So anyway, these socks what happened in terms of being tested for DNA.
So it was actually not it was actually in Chapman's van, not not Pierce's yep. And what had happened was that morning that was the hottest day of the year. August twenty second, nineteen seventy six was the hottest day in the history in the city of Lawrence for that calendar year.
It was around one hundred and three degrees at the height.
And Andy's mother had grabbed him and said, are you really going to wear those socks to the pool? You know, his sister, you know, went to a Catholic school, had these high knee like knit socks, you know. And he was like, yeah, whatever, I'm just gonna take him off anyway. So it's stuck in his mother's mind that, hey, Andy wore these wolf socks to the pool today. One wolf sock matched it perfectly to what you know when when when it was found, they kept it in New York
and they sent it down to Providence. Albert Mince went and got Andy's mother, drove her up to Providence, and she about fainted when she saw the sock. She said, Yep, that's andy sock. That's my daughter's sock. That's the last sock that I saw Andy wearing. And it ends up in Wayne Chapman's van a serial predator who had been by multiple witness accounts at the pool that day and had been there the year prior, raping boys by his
own admissions. So a lot of things are starting to come together circumstantially for Chapman being the at least the main suspect in the disappearance of Paglisi. Unfortunately, Dan, you know, a key part of this book is, you know, I think that we tend to put these police in detectives on a pedestal. You know, they have badges, they have power over people. By the end of the day, they really are just people, and they're really kind of can fall into the same pitfalls that all human beings can.
They make mistakes, they're sloppy, etc.
Etc. And that was certainly the case here.
Unfortunately, those socks were never tested when DNA testing came around because they were simply just lost. Nobody knows really what happened to the sock. I've never gotten a good answer, But somewhere between the transfer of evidence from Providence Police Department to Lawrence, the socks were lost. The sock was lost, The key piece of evidence never saw the light of day.
Again.
You chronicle a lot of what you might call police missteps through all of these investigations, lenient sentences and these dangerous offenders not being recognized as such. You talk about Lawrence Brewhot, a Boy Scout leader, about Lawrence brew Hat and also the Doctor. Did you call a chapter called the Doctor?
Yeah?
Well, you know, when I first when I first got on the ground reporting on this stuff, Dan, people would tell me a lot of things.
You know, people tell you a lot.
Of things when you're talking to them face to face, and they think that the conversation is only known to you and them, you know, And I really that's kind of my way of reporting. I'm going to go right to the source and just talk to people on the ground.
And when I started doing investigations into the Revere sex case, a lot of people had brought up to me a sex ring that had been going on in the town of Wakefield, Massachusetts, which is not too far from Revere, you know, maybe ten to fifteen minutes away from Revere. And that's how I fell upon Lawrence Brijo, who was a Boy Scout leader who had been raping young boys in the Scouts for fifteen years, to the point where there was a class action lawsuit regarding Brehout's troop that
almost bankrupted the boy Scouts. To this day, you'll see commercials on TV.
Hey were you a boy Scout? Were you sexually abused?
Call this number get a part of this class action lawsuit. And that all comes to back to the Wakefield Boy Scout Troupe Peer in Massachusetts, where Lawrence Breho was abusing boys at just incredible paces. Unfortunately, Briho dropped dead in prison. He got a fifteen year sentence. You know what they found in Briho's how home was what was most interesting to me. He had a dark room, very simpler to just Chapman's. He had state of the art camera equipment.
He had a address book of what was called very influential people, specifically gay men and the state of Massachusetts. And none of those men wherever brought into requestioned. You know, no police reports, no court records regarding as far as I know.
Dan, they were never questioned.
And you know, the question I asked in the book is simply, you know, what secrets did Lawrence Brijo take with them to the grave. You know, this was a guy who worked as a school teacher, you know, wasn't paid very handsomely, but again, much like Chapman, he had state of the art camera equipment, the pictures of young boys, a dark room set up in his own home, a laundry, list of men in an address book, and no questions asked.
And I find that to be beyond suspect. You know, when they brought Richard Paluzzo in for interviewing the Revere sex ring leader, you know, I have the transcripts of the interview. I printed him in the book, and they ask him, you know what famous influential people were involved, and Richard Paluzzo tells him, Look, I'll have a hit out all my life if I tell you guys what exactly how much? The depth of who's involved in this
sex case. And that's a key question in this book regarding Brijo, the doctor who will talk about in a minute and the Revere sex ring is.
I don't really think we know any you know, I don't think we know one percent of what really happened there. I don't think we do.
And that's the key point of my reporting is to shine some sunlight on what exactly these guys were doing and who was involved in that's most important. It doesn't you know, it's injustice for all, not injustice for some.
Dam M tell us about doctor Reardon and some of the disturbing information and material they find police.
Yeah, well, you know, when I was doing my big Chapman investigations, you know, between like twenty fourteen and twenty eighteen, people had been telling me that Chapman was connected to some doctor who lived in Connecticut. This doctor had long died.
A family had bought their dream home in the town of West Hartford, Connecticut, about an hour's drive from where I am now in Providence, you know, a couple hours from Boston, and they had been remodeling their basement and they knocked down a wall, and you know what it fell out was the to this day, Dan, the biggest cachet of self produced child pornography that has ever been
entered into evidence at any American police department ever. You're talking upwards of fifty thousand self produced reels of child pornography, pictures, the actual abuse material. And again you know, I'm gonna harp on. You know, I'm in possession of cutout pictures of Reardon. Again, no abuse material depicted, of course, but the pictures of the men performing the abuse are right
there in front of your face. You're looking at unidentified men who abuse children with this doctor filming it and no answers on who they are.
So this family handed over all this.
To the West Hardford, Connecticut Police Department, and as it turned out, this doctor who was the chief of endercinology at a hospital and now you're talking an executive who makes upwards of three hundred thousand dollars a year, one of the most respected doctors in the entire hospital, and he had been sending out fake flyers to parents all over the Hartford area saying, hey, we want your kids to get involved in this growth study that I'm doing,
and I need to see them one on one. You set out in the waiting area and he was abusing these kids, boys and girls, I mean by the hundreds load, and taking pictures of them. And he printed his pictures on a specific type of paper that the Connecticut detectives who to this day continue to call me to discuss it because they're obsessed with figuring out who exactly reared and worked with. Because there's tons of different men in these pictures and who they are is very important.
They could be out there right now. We don't know.
This wasn't that long ago, Dan, He only died in two thousand and six. So you know, this guy had been terrorizing kids forever. And you know, the connection I was looking for was does he have any New York connections to maybe upstate where Wayne.
Chapman grew up.
As it turns out, Dan, they had rated a summer home that doctor Reardon owned and it was in upstate New York, about twenty minutes for when Wayne Chapman grew up. And again they found a slightly smaller but still massive cachet of child pornography located in the walls of these homes. And they were all self produced. These pictures weren't bought at some store. These were self produced and printed in his home. And they knew that because the specific paper
that he used to print it. They had not seen that anywhere. That was very specific to Reard, and he used the specific paper. So this doctor, you know, I touch on it on the book because again, it's very hard and all encompassing to make this a story that's so convoluted, with so many players, into a coherent storyline for people to follow. But it's what this guy did and who he worked with and who he may have
had connections to. Is really kind of fascinating to me and deserves its own and maybe deserves its own book, Dan, who knows, maybe we'll be talking again. But this guy's crimes are incredible, the breath of them, incredible.
Authorities were very suspicious and did perform ground penetrating radar but didn't have any results to find bodies. You title the last chapter the end for now, and you talk about Wayne Chapman in Bridgewater, but you really talk about the desire for you to face Wayne Chapman face to face.
Yeah.
Well, unfortunately it didn't bear the type of fruit that you think about. But I had read a book by a guy named James Renner, who's one of my favorite true crime authors, and he had written a book about disappearance of a girl that he had went to school with named Amy Mahalovich, and he had chased down this guy to flow. You know, the details I don't remember one hundred percent now, but you know, it kind of
struck a chord with me. And I told myself, if I ever get the chance to see Chapman and talk to him, I'll try and do it. And you know, I'll spare you the details. But anyway, I tried to do it, and we did. We did get face to face, and I just told him, you know, I'm gonna use I just thought to myself, I'm gonna use a ruse. I'm gonna tell him like, you know, hey, uh, I'm gonna tell him like they found Paglici's DNA at the hospital,
you know, and they didn't know that. And and when I told him that, you know, I kind of leaned in and told him, uh, you know, and.
Again I describe it in the book.
You know, I've been around a lot of bad people, you know, I've been around Caliban and al Qaeda and Hakhani network terrorists in Afghanistan, and I've been around I've worked on death row Dan, I've worked on juvenile boot camps. I've worked all over and been with a lot of bad people, and I've never seen you know, Chapman was like a reptile.
He wasn't even like a human being. You know, he just sort of lived like a like a.
Crocodile, just just he's just there to eat, and he really doesn't care about you know, there's no ability to feel, you know, and there's there's people like that when you come across them, you know it, you know.
And and I told him that, and he didn't have much of it.
He just simply told me, I've never met Andy Puglici, and I've never and I don't even you know.
He basically told me, I don't know much about the case. I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about, you know.
And and I said, you're going to live with that, that denial for your entire life, huh. And then he and then we were all kind of pushed apart from each other. And you know, at that time, I wasn't really doing well mentally, you know. You know, Frankly, Dan, it's these when I talked about James Cameron, the Great Falls Detective. I think at some point he just kind of it just overtakes you, and he kind of just
he gave up on taking care of himself. And you know, and I don't mean brushing his teeth in the morning. I mean like basic things. I mean like, hey man, you got to eat where, you gotta freaking you gotta go to bed, you got to have a night out with your wife. You know, you got to do stuff other than worry about this freaking crazy people on the streets, you know, And that's kind of where I was at that time. Am I saying that's a good idea?
No?
Am I encouraging other investigators and authors to do the same. Absolutely not, But at the time that's I thought that was a good idea. And you know, as a forty year old man now who's a little bit smarter and a little bit you know, more seasoned, I don't I wouldn't do that, but it's what I chose to do.
Then you talk about John Cameron and the toll that it had on him, sticking to this investigation and trying to nail Nathaniel bar Jonah for far more than he had already been nailed for. You talk about al Mins taking things very very seriously, and of course yourself and this book title obsessed. Is that what you meant by the title obsessed?
Yeah, that's could have been, frankly the only title for this book, you know, and it is definitely an obsession. You know, everybody kind of has their thing. And Dan, you've written a true crime book, you know, you there's no such thing as writing a book or doing an investigation. Half asked or excuse my language, or or with one foot in you're diving in that water and you're immersing yourself.
You know, you're living it, you're breathing it, you're eating it.
You're talking to people who were involved in it, you're talking to victims, you're talking to families.
You know.
In the new book, I write a chapter called Unmasked. You know, if I could just speak on this, Dan, I don't know if it was going to be a question, but I think it's the most important part of the new book. Is there was a boy who disappeared, four year old boy named Andrew Motto in the town of.
Webster, Massachusetts.
And this happened in nineteen seventy eight, so Wayne Chapman and Barjona and Pearce were already locked away and they couldn't have hurt any more children. But when I started researching the case, I found a lot of fodder online that Nathaniel Barjona was the one who abducted little Andrew Motto, and the police had tied it to him, and basically, you know, it was just a faded complete that Barjona
was the one who did it. And you know, I knew that that could not have been true because Barjona was already long gone, as I said, So you know, I set out to sort of correct that misinformation. And you know, the town of Webster is pretty close to where I live. It's easy for me to get there, and so you know, I just started looking into that case.
And what I.
Found was there was actually a man in nineteen ninety nine in the town of Burval, Rhode Island, which is the next time and over from Webster, different state, but that's New England geography. You're one foot in mass you're one foot in Connecticut, and you don't have to really go too far. You know, we're all kind of close
to each other. So when I started looking into it, I noticed that, you know, a man had actually confessed on his deathbed to abducting Andrew and burying his body behind his house on a need some power lines in a very rural area of Rhode Island in Burrowville. But that man's name was never released. And between nineteen ninety nine and the time that I produced this book in twenty twenty two and now this new book here in
twenty four I scoured death record Dan. I must have spent a year in my life in the town of Webster in Burrowville, Rhode Island. Looking through online obituaries, I knew that this man had died of cancer, and you know, I spent so much time just trying to get somebody who fit that death, who could have died of cancer
and could have been alive. In nineteen seventy eight, when Andrew I disappeared, and I actually went on a YouTube show about a year and a half ago, a live show, and I had discussed how, you know this has been fuddled me. I had never been able to get this man's name, and Dan, you know, the power of the Internet.
Within an hour, the man's daughter was in my inbox explaining to me that, you know, not just you know sometimes when you're in the public sphere and I know, you know this dand people come out of the woodwork, and then maybe they're not credible and you get to kind of sift through that. But immediately she offered me photo evidence of her father's house being dug looking for Andrew's body. You know, we unmasked that man in this
in this book. You know, it's a real loose end that's tied up in a disappearance of another young boy in the state of Massachusetts, and just how it happened and why it happened. And you know, I'll give you another one, Dan, This boy, the clothes that he was wearing ended up sixty miles away in the town of Wooburn, which is right next door to the town of Wakefield, and also a very short drive from the town of Revere. Right, I mean, they're all sort of right there. So how
did that happen? There's so many mysteries there. And again it's this book, more than anything, is a period piece, Dan. This is what happened between these years. Here's where the men that were involved, and how the hell did we let it all happen? And how don't people know about it? That's what it is.
In this incredible investigation. You walk the streets where these young victims walked. You try to get in the head of the offenders. You speculated, you looked at inferences, You study the material, the codes, the letters of the correspondence. You looked at everything, and you vow in the end of this book to continue and to never stop looking.
Yeah.
Well, I mean I don't think it's I think when you when you write, ye, now, two books on a specific period of time and specific crimes with specific families. It's very hot. You're always tied to that, you know. I think there's a lot more to be known. You know,
new things have come to light. You know, on the night Andy Piglici disappeared, just think of this, witness came forward now and it said and now again, you know, we've all kind of done this a long time and probably know that people come forward and the human memory is faulty, and sure it's not always you can't take what everybody says at face value, right, you just can't. And unfortunately that's just the way it is. Nobody gets
convicted on witness statements. It's you need evidence too, and you know, but someone did come forward on the night that Peglici disappeared and said that a police officer from the town of Lawrence and a marked vehicle was struggling with a young boy trying to get him in to his police car. And this was located in the Project
housing project where Andy Perglici lived. Chasing that thread to ground, what we uncovered was there was a school resource officer from the town of Lawrence who was caught after Andy Polici disappeared with another young boy in his vehicle and was fired from the force, and it admitted to sexually abusing that boy from that school. And that was the
same exact area that Andy Poglici lived in. So there's was certainly at least one predator located on the Lawrence Police Department at the time that Andy Pivli disappeared, And that offers some other alternative thoughts to maybe what happened that night. Me to that day now, I'm still utterly
convinced that Japman was the perpetrator. He said so himself multiple times, But there's more to be known about what exactly was going on in that town at that time, and that's the type of material that keeps me looking into this harder. And you know, I don't think I'll ever stop until I hear of some task force being set up to investigate what exactly happened in the seventies more. I think that'll be the day that I finally say, you know what, David's time to move on to a new story.
But I still haven't really found that validation.
Dan, Yes, incredible. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about your extraordinary book, Obsessed, A Survivor's Quest to find Justice for the Lost Boys of New England. For those that might want to find out more information about this book, can you tell us about a website or any social media that you do.
Sure, yeah, I'm really not on Twitter, but you can find me. You can find me directly at Dave dot McGrath substack dot com. Just type in David McGrath. You can message me there, email me there, read all my writing there, specifically on this case and specifically many other cases that I'm interested in. I try to update it least twice a week. You can find me there, and of course the book is everywhere. A kindle great audio version of the book coming on for those of you
know nowadays like to listen to audio. I think the narrator is excellent and the story kind of really unfolds like a drama. And I'm really it's my first audio book and I'm really proud of the way it turned out.
Dan, Oh, great, sounds great. Thank you so much David McGrath for coming on and talking about Obsessed, a Survivor's Quest to find Justice for the Lost Boys of New England.
Thanks Dan, Thanks to all your listeners talk soon.
Thank you so much, good night,