Persistence of a Father Brings News in a Killing

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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The Saturday Profile: A Prolific Father of Haitian Letters, Busier Than Ever

Frankétienne has had prophecies of death (his own) and destruction (Haiti’s).

The earthquake that wrecked this country in January 2010? It was foreseen, said Frankétienne, the man known as the father of Haitian letters, in his play “The Trap.” It was written two months before the disaster and depicts two men in a postapocalyptic landscape, now a familiar sight in his Delmas neighborhood here.

“The voice of God spoke to me,” said Frankétienne, 75, later noting he had also long dwelt on the ecological ruin he believes the planet is hurtling toward. As for his death, that will come in nine years, in 2020, he says, at age 84. He is not sick, he says, but he has learned to “listen to the divine music in all of us.”

And so the prolific novelist, poet and painter — often all three in a single work — hears his coda. He is vowing to complete a multivolume memoir “before I leave, physically,” while keeping up an increasingly busy schedule of exhibitions and conferences.

“I am going to talk about everything I have seen from age 5 or 6,” he said recently at his house-cum-museum and gallery. “And stuff that hasn’t happened yet because I am a prophet.”

Eccentric. Abstract. A “spiralist,” who rejects realism and embraces disorder. Frankétienne — he combined his first and last names years ago — embraces chaos as a style he believes befits a country with a long, tumultuous history birthed in a slave revolt more than 200 years ago and scarred by a cascade of natural and man-made disasters.

In chaos he finds order.

“I am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life,” he said, his baritone voice rising as it does when he gets worked up over a point. “What I don’t like is nonmanagement of chaos. The reason why Haiti looks more chaotic is because of nonmanagement. In other countries it is managed better. Haiti, they should take as reference for what could happen in the rest of world.”

Scholars widely view Frankétienne as Haiti’s most important writer. He wrote what many consider the first modern novel entirely in Haitian Creole, “Dezafi,” in 1975, and a play well known here that challenged political oppression, “Pelin Tet.” It is a biting work from 1978 that is aimed, not so subtly, at Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of the dictator Fran?ois Duvalier and himself a former dictator known as Baby Doc, who returned here from exile in January.

Although not well known in the English-speaking world, Frankétienne has star status in French- and Creole-speaking countries and was rumored to be on the short list for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009.

After the quake, his works gained more international attention, particularly in Canada and France. “The Trap” debuted in March 2010 at a Unesco forum in Paris that named him an artist for peace; galleries in New York have organized shows featuring his artwork. Still, he also holds informal Sunday workshops with young artists in Haiti to talk about and critique their work.

“He is not only a major Haitian writer, he is probably the major Haitian writer, forever,” said Jean Jonassaint, a Haitian literature scholar at Syracuse University.

Frankétienne’s output, about 40 written works and, by his count, 2,000 paintings and sketches, comprises dense, baroque affairs. He invents new words, blending French and Haitian Creole. Long digressions are de rigueur. His paintings, which he says are selling particularly well these days, blur swirling blacks, blues and reds, often covered with poems.

He admires James Joyce, and it shows. “?‘Finnegan’s Wake’ was like a crazy book, just like I write crazy books,” he said.

Still, the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat said Frankétienne remained popular among Haitians, in part because some of his plays had been videotaped and passed around in Haiti and in immigrant communities in the United States.

“Pelin Tet,” in which the grim life of two Haitian immigrants in New York deliberately echoes the oppression of the Duvalier era on the island, is a touchstone for many Haitians, said Ms. Danticat, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Frankétienne and was, in part, inspired to write by his rise to the top.

“His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble,” she said. “It’s a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can’t imagine Haitian literature ever existing without.”

 

Life term for bridge death father

 10 April 2011 Last updated at 23:46 ET The girl was thrown from the bridge in full view of rush-hour commuters An Australian man who killed his four-year-old daughter by throwing her from a bridge in full view of rush-hour commuters has been jailed for life.

Arthur Freeman killed Darcey in a fit of rage, amid a bitter custody battle with his ex-wife.

His two sons, then aged two and six, witnessed the murder.

Judge Paul Coghlan ordered that Freeman would not be eligible for parole for 32 years, but said the 37-year-old was not beyond redemption.

The day before the murder, in January 2009, Freeman had been told his visiting rights to his children were being reduced.

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In delivering the life sentence, Judge Justice Paul Coghlan said that Freeman had tried to hurt his former wife as profoundly as possible, and had chosen a remarkably public place to have the most dramatic impact.

What particularly rankled the judge was that Freeman had never said sorry for his actions, and that others had somehow felt culpable for his actions.

Then he put four-year-old Darcey front and centre. "What Darcey's last thoughts might have been does not bear thinking about," he said.

He had telephoned his ex-wife and told her to say good-bye to her children because she would never see them again.

Dozens of motorists stuck in rush-hour traffic saw Darcey plunge to her death, and one eyewitness described how Freeman had returned to his car as if he had just posted a letter.

The jury heard that Darcey's elder brother, Ben, had begged his father to return because he knew the girl could not swim.

She sustained massive injuries in the fall and eventually drowned.

Judge Coghlan said Freeman had acted out of revenge.

"What Darcey's last thoughts might have been does not bear thinking about and her death must have been a painful and protracted one," he said.

"It can only be concluded that you used your daughter in an attempt to hurt your former wife as profoundly as possible"

Freeman's defence team claimed that he had been mentally impaired at the time of the incident, but the court rejected the argument.