Lincoln is a safe, quiet town most of the time, but not always. In a packed Bemis Hall in late January, four former and current Lincoln Police Chiefs shared anecdotes about some of the more interesting—and tragic—situations they’ve encountered over the years.
Jim Arena, who was chief from 1976 to 1995, recalled an incident in the early 1980s when high-tech executives and Lincoln residents An Wang and Ken Olsen received threatening letters demanding money, and some time later, there was an explosion from a device on a utility pole that the threatener had planted “to show he meant business,” Arena said. The suspect turned out to be a soldier stationed at Fort Devens.
Before coming to Lincoln, Arena was police chief in Edgartown, Mass., at the time of the Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 (“we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he quipped).
Al Bowles, who succeeded Arena and served as chief from 1995 to 2003, described the time a flat-bed trailer got stuck on the hump of the railroad crossing on Tower Road. He was able to disconnect the cab, but an oncoming train hit the trailer, though another one coming from the opposite direction managed to stop. (The crossing now has a warning for low-bed trailers.)
A more serious incident took place in 1961, when police discovered a murder/suicide in a cottage on Lincoln Road. According to a July 3, 1961 article in the Boston Globe, Agnes Whitlock, who had been under psychiatric care, shot her 12-year-old son as he slept and then turned the gun on herself. The bodies “were in a hot house for a significant amount of time,” Bowles said. About 40 years later, the new owner of the house (which has since been demolished) was also found dead inside, he added.
Bowles also recalled the “great Lincoln drug bust” in the early 1980s when police served warrants to arrest tenants living in the Beaver Pond Road home of the d’Autremont family. “There was a significant amount of illegal whatever in the house,” including $20,000 in cash, several pounds of heroin and cocaine and sawed-off shotguns, Bowles said. The renter turned out to be hiding between floor joists in the basement, “and the only thing that gave him up was his bladder,” he said. The suspect later skipped bail and went back to his native Peru.
One of Lincoln’s biggest mysteries is what happened to Joan Risch, who disappeared in 1961 form her Bedford Road home and was never found. Her husband came home to find the telephone ripped out and blood on the floor, but no one knows her fate; it was later discovered that she had borrowed several library books about murders and disappearances. Then-Police Chief Leo Algeo “said it would always be a stone around his neck,” recalled Mooney, who was on the Lincoln police force at the time.
Lincoln police were also involved in the investigation into the 1985 disappearance of 9-year-old Sarah Pryor of Wayland (a skull fragment matching her DNA was later found), and the stabbing death in a Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School bathroom of Sudbury student James Alenson by fellow student John Odgren in 2007. Odgren, a special-needs student from Princeton, Mass., pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity but was convicted and sentenced in 2010 to life without the possibility of parole.
Other deaths that Lincoln police have investigated:
- Robert McDonald, a Chelsea resident whose body was found in 1998 in Minute Man National Historical Park in Lincoln, had been stabbed more than 80 times. Two Newton men who had been drinking earlier with the victim were later arrested and convicted in the murder case.
- A hiker came across the partially decomposed body of a woman off Baker Bridge Road. The victim, who had worked at the Naked i Cabaret (a strip club in Boston’s infamous Combat Zone) had been murdered, Bowles said.
- A suicide victim found in the woods off Route 117 was unidentified for many years until his fingerprints were finally matched to those of a man who had been arrested at a Vietnam protest in California.
- Steven Rakes was found dead on the side of the road in Mill Street in 2013. He was an alleged extortion victim of mobster Whitey Bulger and had attended Bulger’s murder trial on the day of his death. Police charged Sudbury resident William Camuti (who allegedly owed Rakes money) with putting poison in Rakes’s iced coffee, then driving around until Rakes died and dumping the body in Lincoln. Camuti is set to go on trial soon.
Arena recalled two traffic stops in Lincoln that turned out to be anything but routine. In 1991, a car flagged for speeding wouldn’t stop; police chased it to the corner of Sandy Pond and Baker Bridge Roads, where it crashed. The driver, who had a knife in the car, had murdered his mother in Florida and was driving to Maine when he passed through town. In 1996, police pulled over a van late at night and saw a sawed-off shotgun under the seat; the driver was later convicted of a double homicide in Boston using that gun, Arena said.
Then there are the less serious but equally memorable calls, such as the time when the elderly priest at St. Joseph’s Church called police to say he had fallen and couldn’t get up. Police broke down the door of the church and rectory but couldn’t find him—because it turned out he was actually at the home of a family member in Bedford. Another time, a woman called police in the middle of the night saying a burglar was rattling her back door; it turned out a horse had escaped and was doing the rattling.
One day, a woman whose house had been broken into came into the police station with an envelope she said might be related to the burglary. “I had to keep a very straight face when I opened the envelope and there was a picture of the lady, shall we say, al fresco. I told her I would certainly keep it just in case,” Arena said. “All I can say is, she would never be a candidate for Playboy.”
He kept his word about hanging on to the photo, though. Mooney said he found it in the same desk when he himself was cleaning it out for his own retirement years later.
