A father's search for answers in son's cold case murder
I first met Bill McCabe a few days after a Massachusetts grand jury indicted three men in connection with the murder of Bill's 15-year-old son John. Johnny never made it back home to Bill and Evelyn McCabe's little Cape-style house in Tewksbury, Massachusetts after a Friday night dance in town.
His lifeless body was discovered the following morning.
That fateful Friday night fell on Sept. 26, 1969. When I first met them, Bill and Evelyn had waited more than forty years for a break in the case. They were excited, impatient for results, and absolutely welcoming to a stranger who wanted to know everything.
That day, Evelyn, at late 70-something (she still doesn't admit to a particular age) was up on a ladder, hacking away at an overgrown hedge, swearing like a sailor. Bill, then 83, was inside their house, the same little house Johnny never came home to.
Bill was calm and deliberate, serene really. He was clearly a bit frail, but he and Evelyn and I sat at their kitchen table and talked for hours that day, with equal time given to Bill's beloved boy John and to his beloved Boston Red Sox.
It was the first of many great talks and times I would go on to have with Bill and Evelyn McCabe and with their two girls, Debbie and Roberta, now both grown.
Johnny remained 15 forever. Photographs of him are on display throughout the McCabes' house. Bill maintained a detailed journal of events and newspaper clippings about the case. He put pressure on the police to keep working the investigation. Over more than 40 years, his commitment to find his son's killer or killers never wavered.
Behind his bright blue eyes, Bill McCabe burned with a need for answers to the questions that had plagued him ever since that Friday night: How did Johnny die? Did he suffer? Who would do this to an innocent kid? Why?
The last time I saw Bill McCabe was just after a jury found that one of the men charged with John's murder was not guilty. The long trial and the harsh winter weather had taken a toll on the old man, by then 85.
When he got to the courthouse the day of the verdict, he was too weak to make it up to the courtroom and waited in a room downstairs to hear the jury's decision. His wife Evelyn had to break the news to him. Not Guilty.
I came to the McCabes' house right after the verdict. Bill was clearly crushed, those blue eyes now watery with anger and grief and disbelief, his body weak with age and illness, his spirit broken in a way I had never seen. I tried to console him, tried to encourage him take strength in his faith, tried to explain the uncertainties of the legal process.
He and I had become very close through all our past talks. He was great guy, a guy who had been dealt a really bad hand. He seemed to enjoy my company. Maybe I was something of a surrogate son during a very trying time period of Bill's life. I sure hope so.
Two days after I saw Bill that last time, he was admitted to a hospital. Two days after that, he died, from heart failure. Did he die from a broken heart? I don't know. I do know he died a broken man. And I wish Bill had lived long enough to know that another jury, at another trial, would find that another of the three men charged with Johnny's murder was guilty.
Peter Henderson is a former "48 Hours" producer who covered the McCabe case. You can watch the full investigation, called "The Pact," online.