1686
The area was colonised as part of Deerfield by the English in 1686.
about 0:04:21The story
On the morning of 24 October 1988, nineteen-year-old Sharon Gregory could not start her car at her family home in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Landry told her how to start the car and asked her to ring back if it did not work. She never did.
He collected him at 9.15 and they went back to Landry's house to tape MTV. Told it was Sharon, whose car would not start, he asked why her parents had not driven her. About fifteen minutes later he made a telephone call from Landry's father's bedroom, and some twenty minutes after that he asked Landry to take him home so he could fetch his own car and pick up his pay. He never collected the pay.
Sharon had written a psychological profile of him for a class, Cheryl had read it, and the sisters had mocked him about it, which he resented bitterly. He was steeped in slasher films, especially Jason in Friday the 13th; he owned hockey masks, combat boots, knives and a machete, and he had told friends he wanted to know what it would feel like to kill someone.
Around noon a neighbour saw a dark grey Chevette backed into the Gregory driveway and a man in stonewashed denim enter the house. Three to five minutes later the same man came out, got into the car and drove south. At about 12.30 Cheryl found Sharon in the upstairs bathroom. She had been stabbed more than two dozen times in the back and head, her throat had been slashed, and her abdomen, chest and head had been cut. There was blood through the bathroom, hall and stairs, a shoe print in the blood on the bathroom floor, and no weapon in the house.
On 25 October his Chevette was found abandoned on a farm road off Avery Road, about a hundred yards from a farm.
A manhunt followed through the autumn. There were reported sightings in Connecticut and Colorado and a dozen other states, a burglary of a house four miles from where the car was found, a scent picked up on Crittenton Hill Road, and repeated police denials that he was still nearby. America's Most Wanted and A Current Affair both planned segments. Halloween week made the panic worse: parents kept children indoors, the town considered calling off its parade, and a cinema delayed showing Halloween 4. Sharon's funeral drew more than 200 people, and on 23 November a vigil was held to turn attention back to her.
On 29 November 1988, a hunter named Kevin Purinton was following two deer on private land when he saw what he took for a dummy hanging from a tree. He had been dead for some time, about a hundred yards beyond where the police search had stopped. His death was ruled suicide by self-inflicted hanging.