How Natalie Scheublin’s 1971 Murder Took 53 Years to Solve

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In 1971, Natalie Scheublin was murdered in her Bedford home. Her killer walked free for more than 50 years. Then prosecutor David Solet started asking questions.

Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett

The blue-and-white Chevy Impala was missing. Raymond Scheublin noticed it the moment he pulled up to his home on Pine Hill Road—a quiet street in Bedford—in June 1971. He’d spoken to his wife, Natalie, earlier that afternoon, and the family car should have been parked out front. He walked through the garage door into the basement and glanced toward the stairs.

He froze.

Natalie, in shorts and a blouse, lay face-down on a blood-soaked rug. She had been stabbed twice, part of her skull bludgeoned into fragments. Her mouth had been gagged, her hands and feet bound with clothesline and articles of clothing. A piece of rope lay beneath her body. Raymond, a 52-year-old bank president who had served in World War II, hurried upstairs and called the police.

Bedford police officers arrived within minutes, calling in help from state troopers and homicide investigators. The door to the yard was unlocked—no sign of forced entry. Upstairs, Natalie’s purses had been rifled through, but nothing was taken. The silver and china were in their place. In the bathroom, the sink was streaked with blood, as if the killer had washed his hands before leaving. Police noted they found no murder weapon, but a paring knife and pinch bar were missing from the home.

Bloodstains in the sink of Scheublin’s Bedford home. / Photo by Tony Luong

Natalie was 54. She painted landscapes of the Concord River, kept a vegetable garden, and boated in Essex. She’d survived breast cancer—her daughter-in-law had washed her hair and helped her dress during the recovery. She had one grandchild and was planning to retire early with Raymond.

A police officer called the couple’s son, Kenneth, a Simmons graduate with a social work degree. “Your mother has been the victim of a homicide,” he recalled later, according to court records.

“Is this a sick joke?” Kenneth remembered saying. “I don’t believe you.”

The officer told him to hang up and call his parents’ house. On the other end of the line, Raymond told his son it was true.

Kenneth and his wife didn’t have a car and were out of cash, so they borrowed money from a neighbor and took a cab—17 miles to his childhood home. I just can’t believe this is happening, Kenneth repeated to his wife. When they pulled up, a hearse was backing out of the driveway.

Inside, investigators moved through the rooms, snapping photos and lifting fingerprints. Kenneth approached his father—not typically an emotional man—and offered a rare hug. Later that night, Kenneth recalled, according to court records, Raymond sat in shocked silence. At Natalie’s wake, it was all he could say: That bastard.

The house sat on a knoll at a bend in the road, encircled by woods. Police dispatched search teams, a State Police helicopter, and Air Force personnel. They canvassed neighbors and flagged down motorists. The killer had taken several keys from the home, including a set of bank keys. Raymond’s bank offered $5,000 for information and changed its locks. In this town of 12,500, residents had not been afraid to walk their own streets. Now they were. One neighbor reported seeing a neatly dressed man speed off in what looked like the Impala. The Boston Globe ran a police sketch: a slim man in his forties, fair complexion, and a bald spot.

Courtesy Boston Globe

Police found the Impala abandoned in the Veterans Administration Hospital parking lot, less than a mile away. Blood was inside. The car had been meticulously wiped down, but one clear thumbprint survived on a window. Detectives pulled the files of 750 VA patients, interviewing and fingerprinting many. One confessed—but officers ruled it a hoax. He hadn’t known about the stabbing. A pulp detective magazine later ran a piece titled “Mysterious Murder of the Banker’s Wife,” which made its way to a Kentucky prisoner who promised information in exchange for early parole. Another dead end.

What was the motive? Robbery gone wrong? Ransom? A psychotic attack? “It smelled more of a hit than just a random housebreak,” says Herbert Pike, the Bedford sergeant who responded to the crime scene. He is 87 now, living in Florida, and the only officer from that night who is still alive.

Without a national fingerprint database at the time, detectives couldn’t use the thumbprint on the Impala to identify a suspect. “Police admit they are stymied in their search,” the Globe reported at the time.

The case went cold. Raymond made near-daily trips to the cemetery to sit by Natalie’s grave. He sold the house less than a year after the killing and never remarried. He died in 2011 at 92 years old. The case file went into a box. The box went into storage. Natalie’s murder remained unsolved.

Among the evidence in a trial held more than 50 years after the murder: photos of Natalie Scheublin’s abandoned Chevy Impala. / Photo by Tony Luong

One day in 2020, the pandemic had nearly emptied the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office in Woburn. David Solet, who had spent the past year leading the office’s new Cold Case Homicide Unit—trawling through documents dating to the Civil Rights Era—used his keycard to enter the second-floor archives, accessible only to a handful of prosecutors, and stared at hundreds of boxes of cold-case files stacked 7 feet high, many yellowed and musty, some so caked in mold that he’d had staffers don protective gear and decontaminate them with a toothbrush in the parking lot.

The assistant district attorney glanced up and grabbed a box that felt heavier than most, labeled Scheublin, Bedford, 6/10/71, and peeked inside. Its contents—police reports, photos, sketches, and handwritten notes—had stiffened in the past half-century but were still legible. Flipping through, something caught his eye: a photo of a fingerprint, followed by pages of more recent evidence, a sign the case had already gotten a second look.

Solet could have joined a white-shoe firm after graduating from Harvard Law School, but chose the prosecutor’s office after working with indigent defendants and taking inspiration from a friend who worked with human-trafficking victims. He worked his way up to trying homicides and served as general counsel, the chief legal and ethical adviser to elected District Attorney Marian Ryan. His family eventually stopped asking when he’d get a real job.

After a four-year hiatus as legal counsel for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, during which he joined the Army Reserves, he returned to the DA’s office in 2019 to build the Cold Case Unit from the ground up. Aside from welcoming the challenge, he wanted to fight for families of murder victims he believed were deprioritized by law enforcement because of their race or class—to make good on the promise of equal justice under the law.

During his first year in the document morgue, he used a hand crank to retrieve boxes and leafed through sensational cases: decomposed bodies found in the woods, unidentified corpses buried without eulogy, mafia-style hits that shredded organs. He searched for hints police may have missed, retreading their paths, questioning lazy efforts. The work was demanding. Witnesses, cops, and journalists had died; physical evidence had been lost or destroyed. Many witnesses were originally uncooperative, but Solet wondered if time’s passage had blunted their misgivings. Perhaps they split with bad boyfriends, sobered up, or simply came to Jesus. “There are people who can be put under immense pressure to keep quiet,” he says, “and sometimes that can change.”

After pulling the Scheublin box and zeroing in on the fingerprint evidence, he scanned the entire file into PDFs so he could work on the case from his home attic—a makeshift pandemic office where cold-case boxes formed a semicircle around his desk and lamp.

There, he learned the thumbprint lifted from the Impala was so clear that cops at the time called it a “Helen Keller” print because even a blind person could see it. He also discovered that police reopened the case in 1999, following the FBI’s creation of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which quickly amassed tens of millions of prints of criminals and suspects, past and present.

The print belonged to a Lynn man named Arthur Massei—a career criminal whose specialty was bank fraud, with a history of charges for forging checks. He was 26, with a warrant out for his arrest, when Scheublin was murdered. He was still alive.

Solet’s strategy for building a case is to construct it like a stool. One or two legs are a start but often insufficient. Three legs are solid. Four are nearly unshakable. The fingerprint evidence was circumstantial—prints are fragile and can be damaged; misidentifications occur—but it was leg number one.

A snapshot of Natalie Scheublin (right). / Photo by Tony Luong

Squinting at his laptop through the attic’s dim lights, Solet came upon a trooper’s notes from a 2000 interview with Massei in a New York federal prison. Massei told the trooper he knew nothing about the killing, that he’d never been to Bedford in his life. Physically fit with dark hair, he hardly fit the description of the slim, fair-haired suspect sketched by police in 1971. Maybe the print meant nothing—Massei told the trooper that he could have unwittingly made a drug deal with the killer in Lynn. The trooper let the case go.

It was a plausible story. And deflating. But the next piece of evidence—an audio tape Solet grabbed from the case file—changed things. In 2005, out on bail after allegations of selling pills at a New Hampshire racetrack, Massei contacted police and tried to cut a deal: information on a 1971 murder in exchange for leniency on his pending charges. The trooper who’d visited him five years earlier traveled to Winchendon, a former textile town on the New Hampshire border, and knocked on his door. “God’s country,” the then-59-year-old called it.

Seated at a table, Massei told the trooper that in June of 1971, he’d just gotten out of jail when he was approached by a Lynn publican nicknamed Mr. Paul to do a murder-for-hire on behalf of a bank president with ties to the Winter Hill Gang. For $25,000, Massei would kill the banker’s wife.

“He says he wants his house broken into, and make it look like a breaking-in,” Massei told the trooper. “He wants his sweetheart to go to the angels.”

Massei claimed he’d declined. His cousin George carried it out, assisted by a triggerman named Buddy Leveridge and a Lynn bartender nicknamed Tony Dice, who’d signed on as getaway driver but bungled the pickup, Massei told the trooper. George, Massei said, never forgave himself and drank himself to death in 1996.

The trooper asked why he should believe any of this now.

“I’m giving ya a fuckin’ truth,” he replied, his dog barking somewhere nearby. “I can’t help it if you can’t solve it.”

The trooper looked for Mr. Paul and Tony Dice—both alive, but didn’t interview either one, according to court testimony. There were no records of a Buddy Leveridge and no connection between Raymond Scheublin and Whitey Bulger’s crew. Over time, the trooper got wrapped up in other investigations, and the Scheublin case went cold again.

Arthur Massei’s story was crazy—but maybe so crazy it was true.

Solet listened to the recording of the interview. Massei’s story was crazy—but maybe so crazy it was true. Either way, his intimate knowledge of Scheublin’s murder, combined with his thumbprint at the crime scene, was more than a coincidence. The prosecutor had leg number two.

Juggling a full caseload with only a paralegal and some college interns, Solet revisited the Scheublin files when he could. One day, he walked into the office of a recently deceased senior colleague, looking for documents, and spotted a folder labeled Scheublin. Someone else had been watching this case, too.

Later, Solet asked the Bedford police for a favor: a copy of the department’s 1971 leatherbound logbook with handwritten entries, the kind of relic discontinued in the ’90s. When he received the pages, Solet glossed over the small-town minutiae—someone’s dog escaped; the hardware store’s alarm went off; a stolen bike was found—until he reached the Scheublin entries and stopped. “Bank branch keys were STLN in murder,” a note read. “PLS watch until locks are changed.”

Massei’s main game was bank fraud. Solet kept turning the same question over: Why had he traveled all the way from Essex County to Bedford, passing hundreds of single-family homes, to end up at this one? The bank key was the answer. You only take bank keys if you want to get into a bank.

Solet knew not to get too excited. The killing occurred when Luis Aparicio patrolled the Red Sox infield and Carlton Fisk was still in the minors. No murder that old had ever been successfully prosecuted in Greater Boston. Not even close.

The crystal-clear fingerprint on Scheublin’s car window later identified as Arthur Massei’s (1971). / Photo by Tony Luong

No murder this old had ever been successfully prosecuted in Greater Boston. Not even close.

Solet researched Massei’s records and learned he was living in Salem. To bolster his case, he wanted information on Massei’s associates over the past five decades—friends, roommates, cellmates, criminal accomplices, anyone still alive. For help, he asked the State Police to lend an investigator. The assignment went to an affable trooper named Michael Sullivan, who, Solet soon found out, had grown up not just in Bedford but on Pine Hill Road itself—three doors down from the Scheublin home.

Sullivan graduated from Bedford High in 1998, and after an Army tour, joined the Bedford Police Department in 2001 and the State Police in 2013. His father, one of 15 siblings from town, coached Sullivan’s football and baseball teams. Sullivan was a catcher—“the one commanding the field, which makes sense because he was a natural, quiet leader,” recalls former classmate Mike Korik. When the Scheublin case reopened, Sullivan volunteered to solve it for Natalie’s family—and for Bedford.

Solet convened a meeting at the State Police conference room inside the DA’s office, which had a large table, a flat-screen TV, and Venetian blinds for privacy. Sullivan partnered with a Bedford cop, Richard Vitale, who he knew from his time on the force. Solet briefed them: Massei’s thumbprint, his knowledge of the murder, the missing bank keys. Their assignment was to track down people who might share something incriminating. Maybe they no longer felt threatened.

“I wanted them to help me scour the earth,” Solet says. “We looked for any rock we could turn over.”

David Solet, chief of the Cold Case Unit of the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, never gave up on Scheublin’s case. / Photo by Tony Luong

Most of the initial legwork fell to Solet, who searched criminal records, pulled police reports, studied news clips, and trolled social media. He mapped out a cast of characters from his office—decorated with his Judge Advocate General’s diploma, a vintage photo of Fenway Park, and a plaque gifted from a murder victim’s mother—like he was blocking out a play. Early mornings, he’d walk his dog, Pax, a rescue mutt from Arkansas, uttering facts aloud and hoping passersby didn’t think he was losing it. He was still juggling other cases, a slog that got harder after his paralegal was reassigned.

Many people he studied were dead, but several were alive. Phoning them wasn’t an option—many had criminal histories and would spook easily. This required shoe leather.

So Sullivan and his partner hit the road, making North Shore day trips to knock on doors. Sullivan was built like a linebacker, but his gift was disarming people with kindness—his natural disposition, Solet says.

After several interviews, the investigators formed a profile of Massei: humorous and often charming, a man who ran a successful bank-fraud hustle. “He was such an original,” former associate Toni Granese says. Several witnesses told investigators they feared him. One texted them from New York, worried that her husband and kids might learn of her past.

Sullivan updated Solet by phone every day about his trips to the North Shore, catching the prosecutor as he grocery shopped or schlepped his daughters to school. He began each morning with a cup of coffee with his father at his childhood home, passing the Scheublins’ old house daily. Some late nights, Sullivan listened to 1971 recordings of witness interviews, which drove his wife, a nurse, crazy. The investigators kept their assignment secret. If details connecting Massei to Scheublin went public, he might flee, or hurt a witness.

A mug shot of Arthur Massei from a 1991 arrest in Brattleboro, Vermont. / Photo by Tony Luong

One day, Solet turned up 1991 booking photos of a heavily mustachioed Massei and three young women charged with attempting to defraud a Vermont bank. One of the women, Granese, then 23 with dark hair spilling over her shoulders, was apparently living in Lynn.

At Solet’s request, Sullivan and his partner sped along I-95 in an unmarked blue Chevy Malibu. They knocked on the door they believed was hers. No answer. They had a second possible address and zipped over. Another strikeout. Sullivan suggested trying a home listed under Granese’s daughter’s name. They rolled down a quiet block near a cul-de-sac and pulled up to a small home with a gabled roof, white siding, and kids’ toys in the front yard.

Sullivan knocked. A dark-haired woman appeared. Her face was weathered and more wrinkled than the girl in the Vermont booking photo, but matched her updated driver’s license. He knew he’d found his woman.

“Hi, Mike Sullivan with the State Police,” he said. “Are you Toni Granese?”

The 52-year-old said she was.

“No one’s in trouble, everything’s okay, but we want to talk to you about Arthur Massei.”

Her eyes widened—like she was rewinding her mind to a forgotten time, tugging open a wound. “Is he looking for me?”

“No,” Sullivan said, pulling out his notebook. “We just want to ask you a couple of questions.”

Granese—a waitress, three years sober, and soon to be a recovery specialist—stepped outside. Her granddaughter was playing in the house.

For six or seven months in 1991, Granese would later testify in court, she and Massei had been on the road together, hitting banks from Pennsylvania to Maine. They’d dumpster-dive behind banks and surface with account numbers and names. They’d forge checks, deposit them, and ask for half the money back in cash. They’d stay in hotels, chat up bar patrons, and travel up and down New England—a Bonnie and Clyde act that worked until it didn’t. Her cut alone was half a million dollars, but it finally caught up to them in Vermont when they hit the same bank twice after a $26,000 score, Granese says.

Before they got caught, Granese drove while Massei rode shotgun, doing drugs, spinning stories, and bragging that he knew Whitey Bulger, she later testified. She took him for a bullshit artist. Then one day, he told Granese he’d stabbed someone with a knife in the person’s home, carving them up like a piece of meat. She didn’t believe him. But she wondered why he always carried a knife.

Years later, she found herself pondering if the story was true. “And the next thing you know, cops are at my door,” she says now.

Sullivan thanked Granese, keeping his face neutral. Back in the car, he turned to his partner.

“Wow, that was good, huh?”

As they sped off, he called Solet.

“Dave, you won’t believe it.”

Solet’s heart began to pound. The third leg of the stool.

A Massei mugshot from 1971. / Photo by Tony Luong

With Granese’s story, Solet’s instinct was to indict immediately—justice had been delayed for too long—but there were still steps to take. First, he wanted eyes on Massei; a quick arrest might be needed, and surveillance might also uncover more evidence.Sullivan traveled to Salem and found Massei living in a downtown apartment near the Witch House. Then in his mid-seventies, Massei wore a strong mustache and slicked dark hair and took daily walks through the city’s pedestrian market, popping into shops and cutting it up with people he knew. Sullivan kept his distance as he tailed him; getting caught would torpedo months of work. But he sometimes struggled to keep up with the remarkably spry old man, picking up his pace and ducking behind buildings as needed.

Massei had an odd habit of doing pushups in public and kept a strict routine, as if he were still in prison. When Sullivan mentioned it to Solet, the prosecutor grew queasy over dinner. Massei was still strong, possibly capable of violence, Solet realized, and he lived just a county away from his children, who at that moment were doing homework in their rooms.

It’s possible Massei knew he was being followed. During a snowstorm, he visited a Lynn acquaintance, Maureen Hohmann, a pet-grooming business owner in her early sixties who’d bought pills from him in the past. Massei occasionally stopped by her shop and sat with anxious dogs, Hohmann recalls now. She pitied him—he didn’t have a car, and she thought he was funny. He called her Mo.

Hohmann says Massei warmed up from the cold in her house and mentioned that police were after him for a murder he didn’t commit. “We were snowbound in here, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’” she recalls. Still, he was old. He didn’t seem the murderous type.

With only circumstantial evidence, Solet knew proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt would be challenging. He wanted physical evidence to help bolster his case—and there was a chance to get it.

When Scheublin’s body was discovered, police collected a piece of rope found under her. Four decades later, following DNA forensic breakthroughs, lab analysts determined the rope was handled by an unknown male. If Solet could obtain Massei’s DNA and prove a match, it was game over.

That wouldn’t be easy. Massei would never agree to submit DNA voluntarily, and a court-ordered swab would make him run after police let him go. Solet needed to collect it covertly and asked Sullivan to find a way.

A few days later, Sullivan watched as Massei walked through the market, gripping a coffee cup. For the next hour, he, his partner, and two more Bedford officers tailed him from afar, watching as he stopped for pushups and conversation. Massei held onto the cup the entire walk, and when he reached his apartment, he flipped it into a trashcan.

When Massei was out of sight, they rushed to the trash can, where an officer reached a gloved hand in and fished out the coffee cup. It said “Artie.”

Sullivan called Solet with the score, and the prosecutor told his friend at the State Police crime lab to be on the lookout for a sample.

Days later, the analyst called back. Solet braced himself. It was a miss.

Solet still believed he had the right man and typed up a letter of indictment for first-degree murder. A grand jury indicted him. Sullivan and a team of police and state fugitive officers went into Massei’s apartment building and asked the manager to call him down and play it casual. When Massei emerged from the elevator, he tried brushing past them but didn’t get far.

“Mike Sullivan, State Police. We have a warrant out for your arrest from Bedford,” the trooper said.

“Bedford?” said Massei. “For what?”

“Murder.”

Sullivan’s partner cuffed Massei while Sullivan read him his rights.

Before the arrest hit the newspapers, Solet called Kenneth Scheublin in Cambridge. “A man has been arrested for your mother’s murder,” Solet told him. Kenneth became emotional. “I was thinking that whoever it was would be dead by now,” he later said.

Back in Middlesex County, Massei pleaded not guilty and was held without bail. When Solet locked eyes with him at the arraignment, Massei had no idea who he was looking at. But I know you well, Solet remembers thinking, staring at the man whose photos he’d studied for nearly two years.

In the Middlesex jail, Massei set up a commissary account—flush with cash from a $25,000 personal injury settlement against UPS, after claiming he’d been hit by a truck, Hohmann says. He named Hohmann power of attorney and told her to keep the funds flowing.

As his case moved toward trial, Solet began listening to audio files of Massei’s recorded jail calls. For hours, the prosecutor tried to stay awake as Massei droned on about bad jail food and dwindling canteen funds.

Then Solet listened as Massei told Hohmann it was unwise to discuss certain things on the phone—better to use the mail. Solet jotted a reminder on a piece of scratch paper. The recording wasn’t enough for a search warrant, but if anyone could persuade Hohmann to hand over a letter or two, it was Sullivan.

Days later, Sullivan knocked on her door. After brief hellos, Sullivan told her they had questions for her about Massei. Her response caught him off guard.

Photo by Tony Luong

She ducked inside, returned with dozens of envelopes, and handed him the bundle. Many were still sealed. Massei had grown threatening, she told Sullivan. Eventually, she stopped reading them.

“He turned nasty on me when his money was running low,” Hohmann says now. “Once he threatened my mother, all bets were off.” Sullivan called Solet with the hopeful news. “Bring ’em back, and we’ll read them together,” Solet said.

An hour later, the envelopes were splayed across the State Police conference table, organized by postmark date. Solet and Sullivan dug in. Several notes, which alternated between uppercase and lowercase letters, were threatening. Solet also learned Massei ran a loan-shark operation on the side, charging some destitute borrowers up to 100 percent interest.

Solet wasn’t surprised by Massei’s repeated claims of innocence. But then he noticed something that made him stop in his tracks.

Massei referenced a woman named Judy Emma—the since-deceased girlfriend of Massei’s cousin George, the one he’d accused of the Scheublin murder during the 2005 Winchendon interview. Solet recognized the name.

“Hey, you don’t know anyone in their fifties or seventies or eighties who may have gone to AA meetings in Peabody, a church on Lynn Street, may have buddied up with Judy Emma?” Massei wrote. He mentioned one of Hohmann’s pet-store clients, a woman named Mary Ann Lupo. “Didn’t she go to AA meetings?”

Then he offered a proposition: If Lupo told his lawyer that Emma had once claimed George killed Scheublin, “I’d sure give one thousand so she could get to court.”

Solet couldn’t believe the gift. Innocent people don’t try to bribe witnesses.

The prosecutor was too measured to call it a clincher. But he might have just found the fourth leg of his stool.

Solet outside court. / Photo by Tony Luong

The morning of opening statements, in Massei’s trial, Solet slipped on a navy suit, knotted his favorite striped tie, and nibbled on a piece of toast—too nervous to eat anything more. At the defense table, Massei wore a hearing amplification device—a strategy to emphasize his old age, Solet suspected.

Kenneth Scheublin was preparing to testify. Since Massei’s arrest, Solet had come to know Kenneth as kind and dignified. The two men at the center of this—Kenneth and Massei—had both been in their mid-twenties when Natalie died. Now, after 10 presidential administrations, each was pushing 80, unable, in their own way, to escape the darkness of 1971. Their lives had collided again.

During Kenneth’s testimony, he talked of fond memories of his mother and the moment he learned of her death. There was also this: Three years after the murder, a sheet of paper arrived in the mail with magazine-clipped letters of various shapes and colors cut and pasted onto it. “You killed your mother over the will,” it read. During cross-examination, Massei’s attorney asked whether Kenneth’s father, Raymond, had any ties to organized crime—whether there was any reason he might have hired someone to kill his own wife.

Kenneth answered no to both.

Herbert Pike, the only living officer at the crime scene, traveled from Florida to testify. Silver-haired and dressed in a camel-hair sports coat, the 85-year-old spoke about the murder as his adult sons watched from the gallery. “I probably never stopped thinking about it,” he says now. As he left the stand, a former colleague pulled him into an embrace.

During closing arguments, Massei’s attorney declared there was “no evidence” connecting Massei to the crime. Massei’s appearance didn’t match the original police sketch. The theory that Massei broke into the Scheublin’s home to steal Raymond’s bank keys was “sheer speculation.” And the brutality of the murder—the stabbing, the bludgeoning, the bindings—suggested the crime was personal, not a calculated home invasion.

When it was his turn, Solet told jurors the DNA on the rope could have come from a gloveless police officer, a hardware store clerk, or an accomplice. The sketch might have depicted a potential accomplice, he said. Then he pulled out his ace—motive. Massei, he said, “went into the home of a bank president likely looking for bank documents or bank profit, and encountered Ms. Scheublin and tied her up. And having tied her up had to decide whether to let her live and potentially identify him, or to kill her. And after a period of deliberation, weighing the costs and the benefits, he killed her.”

After three days of deliberation, the jury found Massei guilty of murder—and of solicitation to suborn perjury for attempting to manufacture a witness in his letter to Hohmann. Solet took a deep breath and listened to the room exhale behind him. He allowed himself a moment of pride, then turned and spotted Kenneth in the front row. He seemed calm, even carrying a soft smile. When court adjourned, Solet and Sullivan huddled with Kenneth. (Kenneth chose not to comment for this story. Citing Massei’s appeal, Sullivan and Vitale did not have permission to comment. Massei did not respond to two letters sent to him at Massachusetts Correctional Institution–Shirley; his trial lawyer, Mark Wester, and appellate attorney, Neil Fishman, each declined to comment.)

During the sentencing two weeks later, Kenneth again took the stand. “One thing that hasn’t varied is the ache in my heart that I have carried with me for 53 years,” Kenneth said, describing the “image and the horror of what my mother must have gone through.” He pictured her getting dragged down the stairs onto the basement’s cement floor. “Did she plead with the perpetrator?” Kenneth said. “Did she say, ‘Don’t hit me?’ Did she pray to God? Did she yell out my father’s name?”

After learning of his mother’s death over the phone, it took him a decade before he could hear a phone ring without his heart pounding, he told the jury. “I resigned myself to the fact that my mother’s murder would never be solved,” he said, looking directly at the defendant. “It didn’t quite work out that way, did it, Mr. Massei?”

Scheublin (right) / Photo by Tony Luong

In the months following the trial, Solet continued leading the Middlesex Cold Case Unit, reinvestigating and prosecuting several murder and sex assault cases to conviction. He was named the county’s prosecutor of the year.

Behind the scenes, though, Solet says things were tense between him and his boss, District Attorney Marian Ryan. Both before and after the Massei case, he asked her repeatedly to add a second prosecutor to staff the Cold Case Unit, but she declined. At one point, Solet says, she offered a volunteer lawyer—a longtime campaign donor with no criminal law experience—who wrote just one memo.

Things came to a head after Solet began investigating a 1980s rape case—a stranger who had climbed through a first-floor hotel window in Bedford and raped a 33-year-old woman on a work trip. Solet used genetic genealogy to match crime-scene DNA to a man still alive. But the Massachusetts statute of limitations for aggravated rape is just 15 years. Forty-seven other states have longer limits—many with a DNA exception that stops the clock until a suspect is identified.

Solet says he approached Ryan to suggest she use the case to lobby for a new state law, but she declined, worried that a prominent local defense attorney wouldn’t get on board. “I was dumbstruck,” he recalls. “I think that she thought for her own political purposes, it was good to keep as many influential people happy with her as possible.”

When Solet called the victim to recommend a civil lawsuit, Ryan had instructed him not to reveal the suspect’s name—unless she asked. She didn’t.

In September, Solet typed up his resignation letter, handed it to Ryan, and told her he was running to unseat her as DA. “I said, ‘Marian, it’s not just about the Bedford case, but it is about the Bedford case,’” he says. “‘I don’t think what you did was right.’”

Solet announced his campaign that month, pledging to expand the Cold Case Unit into a national model. “We will not forget about the victims,” he says. He also promised to lobby to change the statute of limitations for rape. Ryan then announced she’d do the same. It infuriated him. (Ryan did not respond to requests for comment.)

More than 300 murder cases in Middlesex County remain unsolved. There is no state tracking system for cold cases. Boston reached out to all 11 of Massachusetts’ DA offices to ask about their oldest case resulting in a conviction; only the Hampden County office could cite a murder predating 1971, which was pleaded down to a manslaughter conviction.

That leaves more than 300 families in Middlesex County waiting. More than 300 Natalie Scheublins. Their files still sitting in a box.

This article was first published in the print edition of the May 2026 issue, with the headline,“Unsolved.”