1745
Settled by Europeans in 1745, during King War.
about 0:07:22The story
North Adams, Massachusetts, sits in the north-western corner of the Berkshires, in Berkshire County, about two and three-quarter hours from Boston. In 1979 it was a small mill town, its shoe factories, brickyards and machine shops still remembered, with the Sprague electronics plant still open. As a teenager he and his brothers were caught taking about 150 pounds of copper and brass fittings from the Olassen factory yard. He served with a base unit of the Air Force during the Second World War and married a woman named Claire in August 1943.
Claire died of multiple sclerosis on 23 June 1965. In 1979 Marilyn was 34 and they had three children: Jane, 14, Alan, 12, and Tracy, 4.
The trouble began at Easter 1979. On the Saturday night before Easter the couple went dancing at the Mountain View Restaurant in North Adams. Marilyn spent the evening dancing with a co-worker named Donald Labombard, a 42-year-old with a reputation as a lover, and would not dance with her husband. On the way home, and again at the house, they argued, and she told him she no longer loved him and wanted a divorce. He later said he never meant to use it.
From then on the marriage existed in a strange limbo. He threatened her with a knife, with the shotgun again, with a toy pistol belonging to the four-year-old, and once with a pair of scissors, asking her whether she would like them between the eyes. Jane heard the arguments and the threats, including threats of mutilation. Jill, his grown daughter, said he told her he was getting threatening phone calls from Labombard.
When the phone rang at the plant a few minutes later he picked it up and heard Marilyn say hello lover. She hung up, did not come home that night, and then told him by telephone that she had moved into her mother's house at Massachusetts Avenue with the children and was not coming back.
He wept at home and at work, stopped eating and sleeping, lost weight from about 140 pounds to 125, spoke openly of suicide, and twice had to be driven home by supervisors. He went to a local hospital, where he was diagnosed with a severe anxiety state and sent home with Valium. Co-workers, including Hope Lucier, described him as a trembling wreck who stared at the cafeteria telephone, convinced that Labombard was calling her there. On 7 October his daughter's mother-in-law visited and found him shaking so badly he could barely light a cigarette.
On 10 October he told Marilyn he would make her suffer like she had never suffered before, and he went with a neighbour's 17-year-old son to see his divorce lawyer, Richard Fitzpatrick, still hoping for a reconciliation. On 12 October Marilyn told her sister that she was in love with Labombard but had never dated him, only spoken to him on the telephone. After the shift the two men went to Bob's gun shop, where Hurley bought a .22 pistol, a starter pistol and ammunition for $98.87.
At about 2.30 on the afternoon of 13 October 1979 Marilyn went to the family apartment to collect clothes for the week. They sat at the dinette set. He begged her to keep the family together; she said she was going to court, that he would give her the furniture and get out. Then she stood, pointed at her crotch and told him he would never touch it again because she had something bigger and better. He took the new pistol from the hutch, loaded it and shot her twice in the chest. She fell. He stood over her and shot her again at close range. He then turned the gun on himself, but the bullet passed through his shoulder and he survived. The autopsy found three gunshot wounds to the heart and lungs, fired from within two to four feet, and a pair of wire cutters or scissors jammed into her chest and vagina.
Shortly before three he telephoned the neighbour's house. The boy called the police. At the hospital he was advised to say nothing; he replied that the devil made him do it, and then that he had done it because she was cheating on him.