1655
Groton was officially settled and incorporated in 1655.
about 0:05:33The story
On 8 September 2017 four members of one wealthy, philanthropic family were beaten to death with a baseball bat in a modest house on Common Street in Groton, Massachusetts. The victims were his mother, his grandparents and their live-in carer.
His mother, Elizabeth Lackey, known all her life as Buffy, was born in 1957, the only child of Frank Danby Lackey III, known as Dan, and his wife Elizabeth, known as Esu. Dan was born in New York City on 23 April 1928, attended Phillips Academy, Yale and Columbia Business School, served in the Navy and built a career in finance, ending as president of Spinnaker Capital in Boston. He and Esu married in 1956 and gave large sums away, much of it anonymously. In 1992 they bought a modest house on Common Street in Groton. Their daughter married Alexander 'Lexy' Krous, a tuna fisherman who kept boats at Monhegan Island and Rockport Harbor.
At Camden Hills Regional High School he got straight A's and was named an all-state jazz drummer in his senior year, and in 2014, aged 18, he joined a local band called Mostly Brothers and Company. He went on to the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, where he studied under the percussionist Jamie Hadad, gave a senior recital of his own compositions in April 2017 and graduated that spring.
There had been a warning. She told the first responders that he had joined some sort of cult and asked that they treat him with gentleness and without force. The episode passed and he returned to Oberlin.
Buffy came home from work at about 3.20 p.m., found the car and the keys gone, and spent six hours searching the places she thought a troubled young man might go: a breakwater, the PARC substance-abuse treatment centre, a Walmart car park. At about 9.40 p.m. she called a crisis hotline and then the Rockport police, describing him as a tender heart who was troubled and asking whether the police could trace her car through the tolls.
Buffy drove down, collected him, and on the way back to Maine they detoured to Groton to see Dan and Esu, 89 and 85, frail and largely confined to reclining chairs, who depended on their carer, Bertha May Parker, 68. The four of them sat down to a meal that afternoon.
He said he would do it with golf clubs from his grandparents' garage.
At 5.52 p.m. a neighbour on Common Street, Wagner Alcoser, had called 911 to report a naked, mud-covered young man at his door who kept saying he had murdered four people. He opened the door, closed it, then opened it again because the visitor looked like a skinny kid who needed help. Police found Buffy, Dan and Esu dead in their chairs in a kitchen covered in blood, and Bertha May Parker face down in a flower bed beside the driveway; she was the only victim who ran, and the only one struck from behind. He had gone to the garage for golf clubs, found the bat instead, practised his swing on apples outside, then attacked his family, stripped, covered himself in mud and walked to the neighbour's house. He told officers he had killed his family with a baseball bat, and later repeated, 'I freed them'.
He was taken to hospital, where he told a nurse he was a heroin user, though his friends and his mother said he took nothing.
The district attorney brought the bloodstained bat into court and described the practice swings on the apples, saying the calls from Maine came too late. Relatives gave impact statements about the brutality.