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Andrew Gustafson picked up the phone to call his wife at home on the afternoon of December 1st, 1987. He was hoping his wife, Priscilla, could arrange a sitter for their two children so the adults could go out that night and celebrate the completion of a recent business deal. The phone kept ringing. A recent burglary at the Gustafson home had Andrew on edge. Although the crime had happened when the family was away from the house, the phone kept ringing. There was no answer.
Their firstborn, Abigail, was seven years old at the time. Their son, William, was five. Priscilla was pregnant, expecting what would be the couple's third child. Andrew made a total of three phone calls home that afternoon. None of them were answered. When Andrew Gustafson returned home from work around 5:30 that evening, he saw his wife's car there. The house, recently decorated with holiday lights, was dark.
Neither the exterior nor the interior lights were on, which was odd as it was dark outside. Andrew knew something was wrong, but even then he couldn't imagine the horror that awaited him in the house or the living hell that he would have to go through. The details surrounding the atrocities inside the Gustafson house and the crimes leading up to the events of that December in 1987 are now the stuff of urban legend.
And while many alleged details surrounding the case and the perpetrator, Daniel LaPlante, have little basis in hard fact, they're still worth exploring. So here is the story of Daniel LaPlante. We'll do our best to separate conjecture from fact as we explore the case of this small-town teenage murderer. Part 1: All the Trademarks of a Killer in the Works
Daniel J. LaPlante was born in May 1970 in Townsend, Massachusetts to Elaine and Claude LaPlante. He had two brothers, Stephen and Matthew, and a sister about which not much is known. He was the second oldest child behind Stephen. In 1977, when LaPlante was seven years old, his mother filed for divorce, citing psychological and physical abuse directed toward her and the children.
During the divorce proceedings, the four children were living alone with their abusive father. Eventually, Elaine won full custody, along with possession of their house on Elm Street in Townsend. Claude soon left the state, disappearing to parts unknown. In 1981, Elaine married David Moore, who moved into the house with them. Some accounts say that David Moore was also physically, psychologically, and perhaps even sexually abusive.
but this seems to be based on rumor rather than fact. Whether Daniel LaPlante was abused by his stepfather or not, it seems clear that he was, indeed, abused by his biological father. In addition to this, court papers say that he was sexually abused by a counselor that was meant to help him. It seems that some adult was concerned with his well-being. Whether this was his mother or one of his teachers isn't clear.
What is clear is that he was assigned a counselor that was supposed to help him through his issues, two of which were diagnosed as dyslexia and hyperactivity disorder, which would later become known as ADHD. Instead, the psychologist sexually abused him. Some even say this abuse went on for a year.
While these abuses would surely factor into a court ruling today, they weren't mentioned much during the court cases that followed Daniel's heinous and strange criminal behavior. According to Joe Turner, an author who has apparently interviewed some of LaPlante's childhood acquaintances, Daniel was quiet, socially awkward, and didn't have many friends. Some described the dark-haired boy as having bad skin and greasy hair in his teenage years.
while others described him as "creepy." The house he lived in was described by neighbors as cluttered and dirty. Some accounts say he and his younger siblings slept on bare mattresses on the floor in the dirty house. There were always stray animals around, and Daniel soon cultivated a reputation for being a troublemaker. One neighbor said that anytime she saw Daniel LaPlante around, she watched him closely. It wasn't long before Daniel started to have run-ins with the law.
One of the first was an alleged rape and indecent assault of a 14-year-old girl in 1985. He was eventually charged with and convicted of indecent assault, but the records from the time are sealed, given the age of the victim and perpetrator.
But an incident a short time later catapulted Daniel's story into the realm of urban legend. An incident in which no one was killed, but was a clear precursor to his later crimes in December of 1987. Part 2: The Boy in the Walls: Myth or Fact? In his middle teens, Daniel cultivated a propensity for breaking into people's houses in his hometown of Townsend and surrounding areas, such as the nearby town of Pepperell.
The primary reason for these break-ins was theft, but he would often move items around in the homes. Whether he did this to scare the residents or just because he liked to rummage through the house looking for items to steal is unclear. Around this time, Daniel had a casual acquaintance with a sociable and friendly girl named Tina Bowen. Rumors of his charges got around to Tina, and she broke off the friendship with LaPlante. Apparently,
Daniel took this personally, setting his sights on Tina and her family, which consisted of her father, Francis, and her sister, Karen. This is where the facts of the case get sensationalized and fictionalized.
One popular recounting of the LaPlante story uses a fictional Andrews family in place of the real-life Bowen family. In the popular recounting, Daniel LaPlante didn't have an existing relationship with the Andrews girl. Instead, he's said to have broken into the Andrews household and retrieved their home phone number after seeing a picture of the older daughter, Annie.
According to many blogs, podcasts, and YouTube videos that took this inaccurate story and ran with it, LaPlante called up Annie, claiming that he asked a mutual friend from school for her phone number. After several conversations, including one in which LaPlante described himself as blonde, athletic, and captain of the football team, 15-year-old Annie Andrews agreed to meet with him. Some tellings say they went to the local fair. Others say they went and got ice cream.
Both tellings insist that, although Annie found LaPlante wasn't as described, she continued the date until the conversation turned to her recently deceased mother. In this version, LaPlante insisted on talking about the girl's mother, which prompted her to end the date and refuse further contact. It's easy to see why this fictionalized version of the story is attractive to people, because it gets stranger.
Several days after the date, the Andrews sisters, Annie and Jessica, decided to have a seance in an attempt to communicate with their deceased mother. They went to the basement with some candles and did what they thought was a seance, not really expecting to actually communicate with their mother. When their father, Brian, came home, they stopped the silly idea so as not to worry their father.
That same night, as the girls were lying in bed, they heard tapping on the walls. Thinking this was a communication from their mother, they grew excited and tried to ask questions of the spirit. But soon enough, they grew weary of the tapping, which would keep them up at night. And it seemed this mysterious tapping would only happen when their father wasn't at home or when he was sound asleep. Strange occurrences started to happen around the house.
The television would seemingly turn on by itself. Items would go missing or show up in strange places. Food would disappear. The girls attempts to tell their father what they thought was happening only brought disbelief and admonishment. Their father, Brian, thought that the girls were acting out as a strange way of coping with their mother's death. But the strange happenings continued and intensified.
When the girls heard tapping from their basement one day, they went down to see the words, I'm in your room, come and find me, written on the wall and what looked like blood. They ran out of the house and to a neighbor's place to wait for their father to get home. When Brian investigated, he found that the substance on the wall was ketchup, not blood. He was sure his daughters were acting out, doing this themselves. He decided it was time for them to see a psychiatrist.
Two weeks went by without further incident. The girls began to hope that the strange happenings were over. But when they were home alone again one day, they heard tapping and found another note scrawled on the wall that read, "I'm back, come find me." Once again, the girls ran to their neighbor's house and called their father, who came home to investigate. When Brian entered the house, he started to suspect that something strange was going on and his daughters weren't to blame.
This version of the story isn't all that clear on the details of why Brian would think this, but it makes for a better story. The fictional Brian went upstairs on his search and opened the door to a bedroom closet to see a young man with a hatchet in his hand. The young man was wearing Brian's dead wife's wedding dress, sloppily applied makeup, and a blonde wig. Brian fought with the young man briefly before he slipped away, seemingly disappearing without a trace.
Mr. Andrews then called the police, who arrived and searched the house. They eventually found a hidden crawlspace door with LaPlante hiding inside amid food wrappers and drink containers. The police then took him into custody. Upon inspection, they found that there were passageways between the walls large enough for LaPlante to move around the house without being seen. The assumption was that he'd been in the walls for some time. Weeks was the initial thought.
Some stories even suggest that LaPlante had been living in the house for nearly a year, tormenting the girls and spying on Annie through peepholes. While this version of events is certainly creepy, there are many things that don't add up. There seems to be no corroborating evidence other than blog posts and podcasts that all link to each other as sources, creating a feedback loop wherein the inaccurate tale keeps getting retold over and again.
This version also relies on convenient passageways inside the walls of the house that would allow LaPlante to stay hidden while knocking on various walls. The fact is, this all started with a fictionalization, creating the Andrews family out of the Bowens and distorting some of the facts for a more theatrical story. But the real story is crazy enough.
There are news reports from the Boston Globe and the Sun newspapers, as well as a firsthand account of a police officer who was on the scene that detail the actual events. According to Frank Bowen, who spoke to a reporter for the Sun newspaper, his daughter Tina went to the movies with LaPlante on a Friday night. The following Sunday, Daniel joined Frank, Tina, the youngest daughter Karen, and a family friend as they went out for Easter dinner.
but the friendship didn't last long. When Tina heard from classmates at school that Daniel had allegedly been charged with rape, she broke things off with him. It's unclear how long after Tina stopped seeing Daniel that he started breaking into their house. Like the fictionalized version, the girl started experiencing strange things in the home, but tapping on numerous walls wasn't one of them, and there was no seance involved. Instead,
The television channels would be mysteriously changed. Glasses of milk left out for a moment would be consumed and food would disappear.
Tina and Karen told their father about these things, but he didn't believe them. Months after Daniel's date with Tina and his outing with their family, Frank Bowen came home with his two girls and a young family friend to find the house in disarray. Since Frank had been with the girls, he knew that they couldn't have moved items around or used the toilet. It was December 8th, 1986.
Frank searched the house, sure that something was amiss, when he came upon a young man hiding in a closet, dressed like a Native American with a spiked hairdo and face paint. The young man was wielding a hatchet that Frank apparently kept on a bedside table. They didn't realize until later that this was Daniel LaPlante. Thanks to the makeup and the hairdo, Daniel corralled them into a bedroom, apparently unsure what else to do with them.
Luckily, Tina managed to slip out of the bedroom window and run to their neighbor's house to call the police. When the police showed up, they found that none of the Bowen family nor the family friend had been harmed. They also found no sign of the intruder. Understandably rattled, Frank Bowen moved the family out of the house. Two days later, on December 10th, he returned to the house in Pepperell to retrieve some items.
But before stepping foot into the house, he saw a face in the window. The face that had tormented him and his family just two days earlier. Using a neighbor's phone, Frank called the police. The officer that showed up immediately knew something was wrong when he went into the house and found a family photo stabbed into a wall with the words, "I'm still here. Come find me." Written on it in marker.
The officer saw another family photo stabbed into the wall with the words, "I'm going to kill you all" on it. With no doubt that someone was in the house, the officer, whose last name was Besenson, called for backup and searched the house only when two other officers arrived. Their initial search yielded nothing.
but Besenson was tenacious. He continued searching the house, finally finding an angled wall adjacent to a bathroom that was designed to hide plumbing pipes. There was a slim entrance near the home's foundation where a small person could squeeze through a gap between the outer wall and the separating wall to get to the hiding place. Sure enough, when Besenson looked into the small area, he found LaPlante curled up in there.
According to Besenson, LaPlante showed no fear despite having a gun pointed at him. The officers got Daniel out of his hiding place and arrested him without incident. Part three, the triple murder. Daniel LaPlante was arrested on December 10th, 1986 and charged with a number of criminal acts.
He was 16 at the time of the arrest. For about 10 months, he was held at a juvenile detention center while the authorities sorted out the case. A Boston Globe piece said he was held for so long without charges because authorities were waiting for him to turn 17 so he could be charged as an adult in Massachusetts.
There had been no possibility for bail until the courts decided to charge Daniel LaPlante as an adult for breaking into the Bowen house and holding the family against their will. Once it was determined that he would be tried as an adult, the bond was set. This prompted his mother to remortgage their house, getting the $10,000 in cash needed to get the 17-year-old out on bail. He was released in October of 1987.
In the months following his release, there was a series of break-ins in the area. One of them was notable for the items stolen. On October 14th, two .22 caliber Ruger handguns were stolen from a house less than a quarter of a mile from Daniel LaPlante's home. Also stolen was a significant amount of cash.
This burglary in particular would be important in convicting Daniel LaPlante of his horrendous crimes. Crimes that he had yet to commit in October of 1987. Crimes that, some would say, were just a matter of time given Daniel's record. The next month, on November 16th, he broke into the Gustafson home while Andrew, Priscilla, Abigail and William were all away from the house.
He stole a few items, including a cordless phone, two cable boxes, and some coins from a collection. When Daniel returned to the Gustafson house on December 1st, he was armed with at least one of the stolen pistols. While in the house, he encountered Priscilla and her five-year-old son, William, when they arrived home during his burglary. According to court documents, when Daniel heard the two enter the house, he considered jumping out of a window.
Instead, he decided to confront them. At gunpoint, he forced them upstairs, tying 33-year-old Priscilla to the bed and closing William in a nearby closet. Apparently, his first thought after tying Priscilla Gustafson to the bed was to leave, but once again, he decided not to. He proceeded to rape her. He then put a pillow over her head and shot her through the pillow with the stolen .22 caliber handgun.
He then took young William to a bathroom and drowned him in the bathtub. As he was leaving the house after committing the two murders, he encountered seven-year-old Abigail getting home from school. Instead of continuing to leave, he decided to commit a third murder, drowning the young girl in another bathtub. Injuries on the girl's body indicate that she fought against her attacker before he murdered her in the downstairs bathroom.
Andrew Gustafson, one of the small town's few lawyers, called his house around 3:45 that afternoon to see if his wife could get a babysitter for the children. There was no answer. He tried calling twice more to no avail. When he returned home around 5:30, the house was dark. Even though his wife's car was in the driveway, this was unusual. Andrew made his way into his house with an uneasy feeling. As he entered his kitchen, he called out for his wife
but received no answer in the eerie silence. He phoned a neighbor who often watched the children and asked if his wife was there. The neighbor said that she wasn't. She hadn't heard from Mrs. Gustafson at all that day.
Andrew Gustafson made his way upstairs to his bedroom, finding his wife on the bed, a pillow over her head, her skin lifeless and gray. He ran back downstairs and called 911. When help was on the way, Andrew went back up to the bedroom he shared with his wife, this time noticing the two bullet holes in the pillow over her head. As he testified in court later, he couldn't bring himself to search the house for his children. He was afraid that he'd find them dead.
When police showed up and searched the house, they found William face down in the upstairs bathtub. Abigail was dead in the downstairs bathtub. Andrew Gustafson's family, including the unborn child Priscilla was carrying, were gone, all executed by a remorseless killer. Around this time, Daniel LaPlante was at his niece's birthday party, goofing around with a young girl and acting as if nothing was wrong. Part Four: The Manhunt
Daniel LaPlante was quickly a suspect in the Gustafson murders. Police questioned him the day after the murders at the Townsend Public Library, where LaPlante was studying, but they didn't have enough evidence to make an arrest. LaPlante told them that he'd been at home all afternoon the previous day. When the police showed up at the house later in the day to ask him more questions, Daniel LaPlante fled, jumping off a porch and running into the woods behind their house.
What followed was the biggest manhunt in Massachusetts in the 20 preceding years. It involved a police helicopter, search dogs, and over 50 police officers from Townsend and the surrounding areas. Even some citizens came out to see what they could do to help. One police officer, Tom Lane, had a hunch that LaPlante would head toward an area he was familiar with, the nearby town of Pepperell.
Sure enough, phone calls started coming in from the town as citizens reported seeing a strange man in the area. When Lane and his partner were driving to a predetermined location to create a perimeter, a woman flagged them down and asked Lane to come into the house with her. The woman, Lynn McGovern, had arrived home 10 minutes before, but was hesitant to go into the house. Lane later said that he initially didn't think LaPlante was in the house, but he couldn't refuse to help the woman.
What he found when he entered the house made him think otherwise. He heard a loud noise from the second floor, prompting him to draw his Beretta. As he moved up the stairs in the McGovern house, he found a shotgun lying at the top of the stairs. It's unclear from Lane's recounting whether the shotgun belonged to the McGoverns or it had been stolen from another house in the area. Either way, Lane thinks that LaPlante had been upstairs, watching as he and his partner pulled up to the house.
The now retired police lieutenant thinks that the presence of two armed police officers, one inside and one outside in the cruiser, is the only reason LaPlante decided to run instead of initiating a shootout. According to Lane, LaPlante left the shotgun at the top of the stairs, went out the window, jumped onto the garage and fled the scene. It's likely that his presence there saved Mrs. McGovern's life that day, but Daniel was still on the loose.
He tried to gain access to another house, knocking on the door and telling the man who answered he was a neighbor. LaPlante told the man, Jonathan Lang, that he wanted to discuss Lang's dog getting into his trash, but Lang knew about the manhunt, so he refused LaPlante entry. LaPlante pulled out a handgun that was later determined to be stolen from the McGovern house and tried to force his way in. Lang shut the door, prompting Daniel LaPlante to flee.
The police searched for him through the night, combing the woods and searching the streets of the small Massachusetts town. They had no luck. The next day, Daniel LaPlante broke into yet another house, threatening a woman named Pam McKella with a stolen gun. He insisted that she drive him out of the area in her van. Pam drove him out of the neighborhood, but in a brave move, jumped out of the vehicle near the town hall. Daniel took control of the vehicle and continued on.
A policeman spotted the distinct orange pop-top van sometime later in the town of Ayer. He pulled the vehicle over, but LaPlante fled, abandoning the van by the side of the road. The searchers homed in on Ayer, eventually finding LaPlante hiding in a dumpster at a lumber yard. They apprehended him without incident. After getting a warrant, police conducted a search of the home that Daniel had been living in since childhood. Between their search of the house, the surrounding property, and the woods,
police found ample evidence that the prosecutor used to secure a conviction. Investigators tied Daniel to the crime through semen found on the bed on which Priscilla Gustafson had been raped and murdered, one of the little girl's hairs on his clothing, a pair of shoes that matched a print in the Gustafson yard, and at least one item stolen from the Gustafson house with Daniel's fingerprints on it.
In April 1988, Daniel's older brother Stephen and his friend Michael Pawlowski found the Ruger pistol used to kill Priscilla Gustafson hidden in the glove compartment of a broken down vehicle on the property. Stephen LaPlante and Michael Pawlowski also said that Daniel had asked them for .22 caliber bullets in the weeks before the murder, after the two guns were stolen from the Pindell house.
Since LaPlante was 17 at the time of the murders, he was tried as an adult. After only five hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of all three murders. The judge sentenced him to three life sentences to be served consecutively. Recent changes to Massachusetts state laws have prompted LaPlante to request early parole. His most recent attempts in 2017 and 2019 were not granted.
As of now, LaPlante will not be eligible for parole until he is 62 years old. After pleading not guilty to all three murders all those years ago, it seems that LaPlante had finally come to terms with his crimes. At a 2017 hearing, LaPlante said, "I murdered three innocent people.
"I do not have the words to fully express my profound sorrow, but I am truly sorry for the harm that I have caused." But according to a forensic psychiatrist who witnessed LaPlante cry over the murders in a 2016 interview, the words are empty of meaning and completely devoid of remorse. The psychiatrist, Dr. Fabian Saleh, doesn't believe Daniel LaPlante has been rehabilitated, and members of the extended Gustafson family agree.
