Town note
First called the plantation of Winnacunnet, a name so awkward the hosts joke about it.
about 0:07:24The story
Hampton, New Hampshire, lies in the south-east corner of the state, about fifty minutes from Boston and thirty-five from Manchester, with a population of just over fifteen thousand and a reputation as a quiet beach town. In the summer of 1988 it became the setting for a murder that grew out of a grudge more than a decade old.
Robert Cushing Sr. was born in 1925. He served as a marine in the Second World War, taught maths in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and in elementary schools in Seabrook, then retired into real estate, where he was twice his company's salesman of the year and served as a director of the local board of realtors. He and his wife Marie had seven children. The eldest, Robert Jr., known as Renny, was a political activist in the anti-nuclear movement, a member of the Granite State Alliance and a founder of the Anti-Seabrook Clamshell Alliance; he later became a state legislator.
At fifteen he accidentally shot and killed a friend while messing about with a gun. Shortly afterwards he held up the Salisbury diner with a gun and spent a year in reform school. In his mid-twenties he joined the Hampton police department. The background check came back clean because the name was new. He collected commendations, one for helping catch the man who robbed a Hampton Falls gun shop in the 1970s and one in April 1986 for helping catch a man after the attempted murder of a police officer. His first wife, Beverly, later said that during their marriage he often held a gun to her head and threatened her with a hunting knife.
The trouble with Cushing began in 1975. A car crash in front of Cushing's house killed two teenagers, and Cushing objected to the number of photographs the police were taking of the scene. A neighbour, Ann Johnson, then seventy-one, watched the argument from across the street. Within a year there was a second incident. People signed it, the petition was handed in, and nothing came of it.
They married quickly. He gave her what she later called an ultimatum, my son or him, and she handed the boy to her first husband, Raymond McDaniels, and stopped seeing him. A wooden fence separated the two yards.
On the evening of June 1, 1988, Marie Cushing was watching a Celtics game on television and her husband was in the kitchen with a beer and the newspaper after an afternoon of planting flowers. At about ten o'clock there was a knock at the door. Cushing opened it and two shots came from a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun. Marie later said she heard two shots, saw red lights and watched her husband go up into the air and fall backwards; she saw flames from the gun and his stomach ripped apart and knew she had to get him to a hospital. Neighbours heard the blasts. One couple, Leslie and Harry Bobalas, and their daughter, saw a man in his twenties running across the street; Leslie had noticed a man in his twenties in the Cushings' driveway shortly before the shots.
The investigation went nowhere for six weeks. Cushing had no enemies. Detectives wondered about a real estate deal, an affair, or someone angry at his son's political activism. No weapon was found. He said he could not look at Cushing any more, that the grudge from 1975 still burned. He told the boy he had stolen a confiscated sawed-off shotgun from police evidence, walked over and shot him. He dressed in black, she dressed as a young man in karate gear with her hair pulled back and stood guard in the driveway with a karate staff. They disposed of the shotgun and it was never found.
The base said it had no jurisdiction. He said he had done it because he was still angry about 1975, because he resented Renny Cushing's anti-nuclear campaigning, and because he had watched Cushing succeed while he looked on from his window.
His lawyer, Mark Sisti, said he had been drinking heavily and had taken Xanax and Halcion and was incoherent, a zombie. After a two-and-a-half-day hearing the judge ruled the statements voluntary and admissible. Then the public defenders found two letters. The lawyers resigned rather than represent a client who had lied to them, and new counsel had to be found.
New Hampshire's insanity law is unusual.
In 2003 she gave an interview, sought a pardon on the ground that she had been a battered wife, and spoke of reconnecting with the son she had given away, Ray McDaniels Jr., who was living in Arizona with four children.