1637
First settled as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637.
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Robin Nadine Benedict was born on 19 July 1961 and grew up in Methuen, Massachusetts, near Lawrence on the New Hampshire border, the fourth of five children and the first daughter. Her father, John Benedict, was a commercial photographer for Raytheon in Lawrence and managed the White Eagles Drum and Bugle Corps; her mother, Shirley, managed a jewellery store in a Lawrence mall. Robin played the flute, drew constantly and signed her work with a tiny bumblebee, and graduated from Greater Lawrence Regional Vocational School before winning a place at the Rhode Island School of Design to study graphic design. By her late teens she was working as a sex worker in Boston, at Good Time Charlie's, a hustler bar at Lagrange Street in the Combat Zone, using her middle name, Nadine. She lived with her boyfriend, Clarence "JR" Rogers, who was widely described as her pimp.
His mother was a German immigrant who worked as a maid and his father was a plumber; he worked his way through Plattsburgh State, won a National Science Foundation fellowship for a year at Yale, took his PhD at Brown and taught at Edinburgh State College in Pennsylvania before a research post at the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, New York. In 1978 he became a tenured professor of anatomy and cellular biology at Tufts University. He lived at Sandy Ridge Circle in Sharon with his wife, Nancy, and their three children, was consistently voted the best teacher in his department, brought in large research grants and was regarded as a gentle, buttoned-up family man.
In April he met Robin at Good Time Charlie's and fell in love with her. He saw her almost every day through the summer, paying $100 an hour and spending $300 to $500 a day, and the pair began using cocaine together. To fund it he embezzled about $67,000 from Tufts, mostly in $25 petty cash requests signed over to his lab assistants and through putting Robin and JR's ex-girlfriend on the payroll as research assistants. From the autumn of 1982 he stalked her: a dozen calls a day, piles of letters, break-ins at her apartment, a stolen answering machine and its remote, stolen mail, and calls to her family. On 31 January Tufts suspended him with pay after auditors found false vouchers.
Nancy stopped payment on a $200 cheque Bill had written to Robin, which Robin had deposited two days later. She arrived at his house at 10.30 p.m. Nancy had found a note saying Robin was coming and had left; she returned at 11.30 p.m., saw Robin's car, drove around for 45 minutes, and came back at 2.15 a.m. to find Bill asleep. Robin was killed in the upstairs bedroom between 10.30 and 11 p.m. At 11.42 p.m. a caller claiming to be Robin told the answering service she was on her way to Joe's party, but the operator thought the voice sounded like a man pretending.
He then drove north into Boston, called again at 2.12 a.m., and was in Rhode Island by 5.29 a.m. The next morning a man named Joseph, collecting bottles at the rest stop, found a blood-soaked tan blazer, a blue work shirt and a two-and-a-half-pound sledgehammer with a strand of dark hair on it in a trash barrel. His friend told him to put it back, and he did, but two hours later his conscience got the better of him and he called the state police. Trooper Paul Landry took the bag to the state crime lab; the blood was type A, less than 24 hours old, and the hair was human.
On 11 March Robin's parents filed a missing persons report and her father identified the blazer as hers. The letters JR handed over showed an obsession. On 20 March police searched the house and found Robin's pocketbook, credit cards, phone books, pink underwear and flute in his closet, along with a bloodstained windbreaker whose pocket held a quarter-sized chunk of human brain tissue. They also found cassette recordings of him harassing a massage parlour and of him narrating the murder to an unidentified voice, a draft note blaming the embezzlement on a blackmailing woman, an audit report and annotated copies of Robin's and JR's phone bills. Nancy identified her own stitching in the bloody work shirt and handed over the matching spool of thread.
Robin's silver Toyota was found in June or July in a tow-away zone near Penn Station in Manhattan, the plates gone but the VIN intact, smelling of decomposition, with dried blood and brain matter inside. Genetic marker analysis matched the blood to Robin's family. The sledgehammer was traced to Nancy's father.
In open court he said he had killed her and struck her with the hammer, and JR stood up screaming. Investigators doubted him: the wound looked like a cut rather than a sledgehammer blow, the hammer was his father-in-law's, and luminol found no blood on the bed, though he had spent the search lying on it.
He described cleaning up, dragging the body downstairs wrapped in bedding, putting it in the Toyota, dumping the bloody clothes at the Mansfield rest stop, driving into Boston, then to a dumpster in Brookline where he said the body made a noise, and finally to a shopping centre in Providence where he put her in a dumpster. The dumpster was never found; under hypnosis he produced a partial serial number, but the matching waste was traced to the Johnston, Rhode Island landfill, and the state declined to search it at a cost of about $150,000. Robin's body was never recovered.
The defence, Thomas Troy, called him a gentle, sensitive man ruined by sex and intrigue. The judge gave him 18 to 20 years for manslaughter and a concurrent five years for the embezzlement. Nancy visited him three times a week until they divorced in 1987, the year he was disciplined for a sexual act with another visitor and married a pen pal, Bonnie Jean Smith. The Benedicts met him and asked where their daughter was; he would not say.