True Crime Tales

It is a cold late morning as they trudged along the leaf-strewn state forest path, not unlike that Veterans Day 47 years ago.

The two retired Raynham police investigators are solemn as they point out where the girl was found, remembering a life cut short just days after her fifteenth birthday.

"She was a great kid," Louis Pacheco, who was a sergeant in 1978. "I never heard one word against her. She didn't deserve this. She did not deserve this."

It was on this day, when restaurants offer discounted meals for veterans and small flags line the lawns of buildings, that a teen-aged cheerleader was found dead in the Freetown State Forest, two months after being abducted not far from her home.

Mary-Lou Arruda was riding her bike home from a friend's house when she went missing on September 8, 1978, just days after her birthday. From the start, no one considered her a runaway. Not her parents. Not her neighbors. Not her friends. Not the police. It was an abduction, even if no one saw her taken. There was never a doubt.

There were searches and hope, that undying-prayer-filled-hope that fills then shatters hearts. There were the two months of waiting in limbo until she was found tied to a tree by boys on motorbikes in the dark woods, miles from home. Dead.

It was a horror that gripped the town she grew up in. It is a pain that still lingers today beneath the surface.

On this day, 47 years after Mary-Lou was found, retired Raynham investigators Louis Pacheco and Paul Jordan walk through the woods where hope for her safe return finally ended. They are a bit older but the memory of the day she went missing and all the days that followed are still fresh. The days of searching. The days of tracking suspects. The days of gathering evidence. The grim day they learned she was found in another town in a sprawling state forest.

Paul Jordan was working the desk at the police station when he heard chatter on the Freetown Police Department frequency that a girl's body was found in that town. Louis Pacheco was in his cruiser when Jordan radioed him with the news.

There were other homicides in town in the years that followed but none touched their souls, and the souls of the other investigators, as the one that stole the innocence of their community.

"It changed the town of Raynham," Pacheco is saying, glancing toward the spot where Mary-Lou was found.

And no one forgot.

I do not have a neat desk. I do not have a neat office. Some might even say I work in chaos. But, as fellow clutter-writers may agree, there is organization to those piles of file folders and books on the desk, on the table, on the floor. Yes, I do know (usually) where everything is. I can pull out that stray note or report from what appears to be a random stack.

The state of my desk - and desks over the years - has been a point of contention for editors and a running joke among colleagues. There was a note in my "permanent file" at one newspaper threatening firing if the desk wasn't cleaned. A fire hazard may or may not have been mentioned. It was, after all, during the time when smoking was allowed in newsrooms but I don't really think that was the concern. A fellow reporter at another paper once wrapped my desk with police caution tape. My family just keeps my home office door shut and collectively shake their heads when peering in, hoping it doesn't spread to the rest of the house. Their hopes are dashed regularly.

When I started work at a college with my own office, I pledged to keep my desk neat. After all, there was now lots of space. File cabinets, shelves, drawers - all of the things you need to keep things orderly and tidy. And it worked. For awhile. Like a few months. I did try. I really did. I try to purge the paperwork as much as possible but find the only things I wind up tossing are the very things I need a month later. Once a year, I wheel the blue recycling bin from down the hall to my office, filling it with newspapers (yes, print newspapers), stray paperwork and other associated stuff while old tests go into a separate pile to be shredded. The bin gets filled, part of the desk top can be seen and the rest of the stuff winds up neatly stacked in a corner to be sorted later (at least that's what I tell myself) when there's more time.

The attempt at order often fails, though. Files get misfiled. Paperwork needed to be saved wind up tossed. The order of the disorder is disrupted. Would life and work be easier if everything was neat? Yes, probably, maybe. I have one drawer where notes, lectures, PowerPoint printouts and student handouts for a specific course are organized by week and topic. I've put everything back into the marked hanging files each week. It seems to work. But that drawer is filled with information about the history of journalism, times now stilled on the pages of textbooks. It isn't the one filled with news writing exercises and information about ever changing chaotic world of reporting. Apps bloom and wither (Meerkat and Vine come to mind). Technology (remember Google Glass?) is heralded one season then discontinued the next. The reporting classes will never be neat and orderly because the business like life: a bit messy and always in flux.

I'm hauling that blue bin down the hall again as the semester ends. I know it may fill up but there is much still left and more things to add to the office after the summer. In the meantime, I will be reading and writing and researching and adding to the stacks in my home office while writing my next true-crime book. And I do know where to find each report in the stacks.

Glenn Hall (photo by Kevin Kalunian)

A MAN OF HONOR

It was 2021 when we first met retired Pennsylvania State Trooper Glenn Hall at a breakfast place in downtown Butler, Pennsylvania. His long-time colleague, Danny McKnight, rounded up a group of retired troopers who helped him crack the 1965 disappearance of a 15-year old girl. It was the coldest of cold cases by the time they got involved with the case in 1987 but they were determined both to find the child and bring her killer to justice.

They did both.

I was with my husband in the nearby community of Saxonburg that week to give a talk at the library about my second book, The Ghost: The Murder of Police Chief Greg Adams and the Hunt for His Killer, and hoped to talk with McKnight some more about the 1965 case. I had met him earlier while researching The Ghost and he had mentioned a few of the other cases in his career. Intriguing and haunting cases. But it was the disappearance of a teenager named Patty Desmond and how they were able to find her that stood out.

McKnight insisted the investigation was not one he conducted alone. It was a team effort and he quickly set up that morning meeting with others who worked the case.

I am so grateful he did.

Lawrence Glenn Hall, was one of those retirees.

In my interviews with Glenn both in Butler and by phone, I learned about a man committed to family, his community, and his job. He was one of eight growing up on a 30-acre farm in Cabot, Pennsylvania, worked as meat cutter then joined the Pullman-Standard railroad car plant before becoming a Pennsylvania State Trooper. He was a teenager when he met his wife, Carol, and he was devoted to her (they married 64 years ago) and their three children.

It was in the field, as he and fellow trooper retiree Ted Swartzlander returned to the scene where the child was finally found, that I could see how the case never left his mind. He was older, with the aches of aging, but you could envision the youthful trooper of decades past as he trudged through the woods to locate where Patty was found. He - like others who worked that case - never forgot her.

After the book, Child Last Seen, came out in 2023, I spoke with Glenn a few times. His voice was sharp and he downplayed the health concerns that came with time.

When my cell phone rang recently, the caller ID came up as Glenn Hall. We hadn't spoken in more than a year and I hoped all was fine.

It was his daughter on the phone, breaking the news that he had passed.

He was 81 years old.

His obituary noted that when he was born in his family's home he weighed just three pounds and triumphed over many odds to live a fulfilling life.

His obit noted his sharp wit, his retirement work as a police officer in the schools and that he could recite the Pennsylvania State Police Call of Honor word-for-word until his last days.

The summer of 1988 was hot. That's what we all remember. It was a summer of beaches, pools, and seeking out air conditioning. No one expected it to also be the summer of grief.

It started on July 3, at least for the public, when the remains of a woman were found along Route 140 northbound in Freetown, a then quiet highway that ended in New Bedford at the corner of a park and zoo. She was found by a passerby who stopped to relieve herself in the bushes. The remains were partially clothed and had no identification. She would remain unidentified for months.

By month's end, on July 30, another body was found, this time on Interstate 195 in nearby Dartmouth, a town to the west of New Bedford, by two men on motorcycles who stopped to relieve themselves in the brush. The woman had no identification. She would also remain unidentified for months.

It would take months, and the reported disappearance of more women, before the community realized a killer lurked in its midst. Eleven women went missing sometime between April or March and September of that year. Nine were found; two remain missing.

The book I'm writing now delves into the dark corners of murder, grief and the toll the criminal justice system takes on families and a community. While it is a haunting story, it is also one that illustrates a single person can make a difference. It can be a cop. It can be a witness. It can be a single juror. It can be a therapist. It can be a child. One voice doesn't call out in a void. It echoes into the community and grows louder.

This story is about loss but it is also about growth.

It is a story about a small community banding together, one by one, to find justice.

No matter how long it takes.

It is a story of hope in the darkness.

It would take decades to find the killer in Massachusetts.

The community still mourns the man who led the department. His family still wonders what could have been.