The Paradiso Files: Boston's Unknown Serial Killer - Hardcover

Burke, Timothy M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586421409 ISBN 13: 9781586421403

Publisher: Steerforth, 2008

Synopsis

In this bold and suspenseful true-crime story, former homicide prosecutor Timothy M. Burke makes his case against one Leonard Paradiso. Lenny “The Quahog” was convicted of assaulting one young woman and paroled after three years, but Burke believes that he was guilty of much more – that Paradiso was a serial killer who operated in the Boston area, and maybe farther afield, for nearly fifteen years, assaulting countless young women and responsible for the deaths of as many as seven. Burke takes the reader inside the minds of prosecutors, police investigators, and one very dangerous man who thought he had figured out how to rape and murder and get away with it.
The Paradiso Files generated headlines when first published in February 2008. Nine days later, Paradiso died at the age of sixty-five without commenting on any of Burke’s accusations, including that he murdered Joan Webster, a Harvard graduate student who disappeared from Logan Airport in 1981. Boston-area prosecutors announced in September 2008 that Burke’s revelations had led them to reopen the unsolved murder cases of three young women – Melodie Stankiewicz, Holly Davidson, and Kathy Williams. There were “too many similarities between the individual cases to ignore,” a prosecutor involved in the new investigation said. Burke’s account leaves little doubt that Paradiso’s deeds should go down in infamy, alongside those of the Boston Strangler.

About this title

About the Author:

Timothy Burke grew up in rural upstate New York. The youngest of twelve children, he is a graduate of Syracuse University and Northeastern University School of Law. Burke successfully prosecuted more than twenty-five murder cases and more than fifty major felonies while assigned to the Homicide Unit of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, including heading an investigation into the activities of mobster Whitey Bulger, currently number two on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Legal counsel to more than twenty Massachusetts law enforcement agencies, Burke is married, the father of four children, and maintains an active law practice in suburban Boston.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

It was the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. On November 28, 1981, Eastern Airlines Flight 960 out of Newark touched down at Boston’s Logan Airport shortly after 10:30 pm in a raw wind. On the plane Joan Webster, a second-year graduate student at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, grabbed her coat, purse, and brown leather totebag, filled with textbooks, and waited in the stuffy cabin for the plane to empty. It had been an uneventful hour-long flight as Joan chatted with other passengers about the holiday spent with her parents in her home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and the architectural program she was enrolled in at Harvard. She was, her family would later say, in a buoyant mood, excited about a design project she was working on with two of her classmates. The project she was working on was of particular concern to Joan. She had decided to leave New Jersey after a cocktail party planned for that Saturday night. She needed to get back to Boston that evening because of a meeting she had scheduled early Sunday morning to discuss the project with her colleagues, she told her parents. The news didn’t sit well with Terry and George Webster, who wanted their youngest child to return to Boston by car the next day with her older sister, Anne, who worked in the Boston area. When Joan insisted, the couple gave in. After the cocktail party at the home of family friends, her parents and Anne drove her to Newark Airport, handing her twenty dollars to take a cab from Logan Airport in Boston to her dormitory in Cambridge. Wary of her daughter becoming the victim of a mugging, Terry cautioned her to remove the gold charm bracelet she was wearing on her wrist. Joan took off the bracelet, filled with charms from years of childhood travels, and slipped it into her purse. With no way to know that she was saying good-bye to her parents and sister for the last time, Joan stepped into the airport terminal to board her Boston-bound flight. By the time her plane touched down that Saturday night, Joan was exhausted. Dressed in the same black suit and red paisley shirt she had worn only hours before to the cocktail party, the attractive young woman stood by the baggage claim area with her Chesterfield coat slung over her arm, waiting patiently for her dark plaid Lark suitcase. She grabbed the bag, stuffed with a weekend’s worth of clothing as it slid past on the luggage carousel, walked out of the terminal into the chilly night air, and simply disappeared.

About this edition

• Publisher: Steerforth
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1586421409
• ISBN 13: 9781586421403
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368