Town note
The city motto is 'Benigno Lumine', which James says is Latin for benign power.
about 0:06:19The story
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is a town of about 43,900 people in Berkshire County, in the north-western corner of the state, roughly two and a half hours from Boston. In August 2011 three men disappeared from a first-floor apartment there, and their dismembered bodies were later dug out of a grave in Beckett.
The two sparred in the living room for about fifteen minutes, and when Ryser asked to stop, everyone else in the room set on him. They beat him with fists, feet and a wooden board with nails in it for three to five hours. He blacked out and woke covered in blood. The next day he was in too much pain to eat, and when he got home his mother flipped out. He told doctors and police he had been jumped at the Pittsfield Common. He had a punctured lung, a broken arm, severe head trauma and bruises over 75 per cent of his body.
A spark from the water heater set off a flash fire. Ryser faded into obscurity.
David er, 44, a handyman with mental and physical difficulties and diabetes, did odd jobs for him in exchange for cocaine. er went to Berkshire Medical Center and then to the police barracks, where he asked whether the state police had a witness protection programme. He was told to call if anything else happened.
Nicole Brooks, one of his s, told New York police that er had robbed her at gunpoint and shot at her. Scott Langdon, another friend, got er to drive him to Wells and planted the gun and Brooks's wallet in the truck.
er was terrified. He asked the district attorney's office for protection, and his friends said later that he was told nothing could be done until something happened. The office said it offered to relocate him twice and that he chose to stay in his apartment, and that he never asked again once the case was under way.
The victim needed 32 stitches.
On 27th August 2011 tropical storm Irene dumped rain on the area. er, his roommate Edward Frampton, 58, and their friend Robert Chadwell, 47, stayed in the apartment. A neighbour asked er to move his truck sometime after 10 p.m., and Chadwell spoke to his boyfriend at about 11.20 p.m. That was the last anyone heard from them. Shortly after midnight the upstairs neighbour heard banging on the door.
At 5.30 a.m. he was at a convenience store buying sweets, cigars and cigarettes with wet cash, his boots and jeans soaked and mud on his shirt. He said his gun misfired, that er ran into the woods, that one of the others shot him and brought him back, that er begged for his life, and that he then shot him and the three were dismembered and gutted in the rain.
That evening the Buick, holding the remains in plastic bags, was left at a property in Beckett. The three men were reported missing on the Monday; Frampton's case worker had found the apartment empty, the television on, his medication and wallet left behind and a cushion on the floor. The calendar stopped at Saturday 27th August.
The bodies were found on 7th September 2011 and dug up on 9th and 10th September. The prosecution described the torture, the stabbing, the shooting and er being made to watch his friends die, and the defence said there was no physical evidence and that the witnesses were hoping for leniency.