He pores over its pages, editing here, scribbling there, his hands, at 83, not as dexterous as they used to be.
“Don’t look at the back,” he says. “There’s stuff there that I’m going to give the police.”
He wrote the first words 41 years ago, days after the body was found in a rain-soaked vacant lot on Maple Street here, his 15-year-old son, Johnny, strangled, tape over his eyes and mouth, a thick white rope around his neck, his wrists and ankles bound.
“It must take a special form of madman to senselessly murder a child, the effect of which could drive a family insane,” Mr. McCabe wrote.
In the book, he recalled Johnny’s baby steps, his early utterings (“Gah gee gay!” he would scream when he heard church bells ringing, mistaking them for the ice cream truck), how he would shake hands with his mother and father and say “God loves you” before he went to bed.
He recorded the ice-fishing trips, the baseball games, Johnny’s passion for fixing lawn mowers and his love of animals. And over the next four decades, he meticulously documented every clue he could find, no matter how tiny — a friend who saw Johnny at the Knights of Columbus dance in Tewksbury that Friday night; another who knew someone who knew someone who might have heard something.
He passed what he learned on to the police, calling them early in the morning or late at night, asking, “Anything new with the McCabe case?,” reminding them about his son, reminding them not to let Johnny be forgotten.
“Perhaps as the killer gets older and watches his children or his friends’ children grow, and as he reaches out to touch them, he will think of our son and our loneliness and sadness,” Mr. McCabe wrote.
Then, last month, the news came: three men, arrested in connection with the murder of John Joseph McCabe on Sept. 26, 1969.
The men were teenagers themselves at the time — tough boys, some of Johnny’s friends have told the McCabes — but much older now, their faces weary after the passage of four decades, after years of work, marriages and divorces, stints in the military. Weary also, perhaps, from the strain of hiding a terrible secret for so long.
All three, the McCabes realized, had attended Johnny’s wake and signed the guest book laid out for mourners.
Walter Shelley, now 60, worked at a box-making plant at the time of his arrest and lived with his wife in the same green, two-story frame house on Nelson Street in Tewksbury where he had grown up, a couple of miles from the McCabes’ house. Michael Ferreira, 57, was a forklift driver on medical leave from the Coca-Cola plant in Lowell and was often seen by his neighbors in Salem, N.H., walking with his wife and their dogs to a nearby pond, according to local news reports.
Allan E. Brown, 59, a retired Air Force reservist, seemed to have been “the weak link” in the chain, the police said. According to the police investigative report, he told them that Mr. Ferreira had threatened to kill him if he revealed to anyone what happened that night.
The Lowell police?had long had suspicions about Mr. Shelley and Mr. Ferreira but did not have enough evidence to arrest them. Then, in 2009, Mr. Ferreira mentioned a new name, Mr. Brown’s, saying he had been with him that night, according to the police.
Detective Gerry Wayne, who?had been obsessed with the?murder?for almost a decade,?was set to pursue the lead but he fell ill and died of cancer in 2009.?A new detective, Linda Coughlin, was assigned to the case this January. In?February, she and other investigators began a series of interviews with Mr. Brown, who at first insisted that he had nothing to do with the murder.
But at some point, Detective Coughlin said, “I think he knew that we knew that he was lying.”
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