Andrew Peter Dabbs: Justice for Robin Shea
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This episode discusses topics of domestic violence. Please listen with care. After a stubbornly long summer, fall had finally come to Norton, Massachusetts in October of 1981. Dead leaves stirred in the wake of the car's tires as it swept down West Main Street. The dark stretch of two-lane highway grew gradually darker as it led out of town, the businesses becoming more sparse and the sidewalks giving way to gravel and scrub brush.

It wasn't the type of road where one expected to see pedestrians so late at night. So when high beams illuminated the woman at the side of the road, the driver must have done a double take. She could barely stand. A thin figure staggering across the tall grass just passed the local YMCA camp.

The motorist didn't stop. It was late, and the road was dark and isolated. And they had no idea if the woman in the headlights had been attacked by someone or something still lurking nearby. So they pulled over down the road, found a phone, and called the police. That was how, shortly before 10:30 p.m. on the night of October 10, 1981, two first responders were sent to check on the woman.

Fred Russell, a Norton firefighter, wasn't working that night, but he heard the call and responded anyway. A local boy, Fred had been raised in the small southern Massachusetts town. He joined its local fire department just three years before in 1978, during his senior year of high school. He knew these roads well and had no trouble locating the grassy patch of land just across from the downtown café.

Fred pulled up his car behind the ambulance and got out. He recognized his coworkers, Lawrence Lamy and Reese Rounds. The veteran firefighters were slightly older than Fred and, like him, also served as EMTs. He saw that his colleagues were already stabilizing their patient, a woman who was unresponsive. She was white, petite, and young.

Fred would later learn that she was his exact age, just 21, but she looked even younger, perhaps in her late teens. In the light spilling from the open doors of the ambulance, he could see that she was in rough shape, blue denim jacket stained with blood, and her skin was marked with bruises.

It was a Saturday night. Was she walking home from a party? Was she clipped by a car that sped away? Was the driver intoxicated and afraid to catch a DUI? Fred had little time to dwell on these questions. Just moments after his arrival, his car's emergency brake dislodged and his vehicle lurched forward. The scene erupted into chaos. Fred's car struck both of the EMTs, adding two more to the toll of the injured.

Metal scraped metal as the car rolled forward into the open ambulance doors, casting shadows on the battered face of the woman on the ground. Neither Lawrence nor Reese were badly wounded, but they nonetheless radioed for a second ambulance, which came from the larger neighboring town of Attleboro. The second team arrived, loaded up the injured woman and rushed her to the nearest trauma center, Sturdy Memorial Hospital, also in nearby Attleboro.

Around 11:00 p.m., less than an hour since the driver's emergency call, the woman was rolled into an operating room, silent and unconscious. Under the bright surgical lights, the doctors noticed a chipped tooth and dark bruises, as well as some lighter ones several days old. It wasn't until they were removing her clothes that they discovered she'd been shot. How, they wondered, had no one noticed two sizable bullet wounds?

She never regained consciousness, never learned how hard the hospital staff worked to save her. They lost her just after midnight. She succumbed to her injuries. As the surgical team fought to save her, less than four miles away, police searched the tall grass at the side of West Main Street where she was found.

They discovered a discarded .45 caliber revolver and a bloodied pillow not far from the edge of the road. They immediately suspected it was the one used in the shooting, and both items were bagged and sent to a lab in Boston for analysis. Early in the morning of Sunday, October 11th, Norton Police Detective Sergeant Louis Brugliera faced a problem. He had no idea who was lying in the morgue at Sturdy Hospital.

The shooting victim, whose death he was now investigating, had no identification on her. Sergeant Brugliera didn't know where she came from or who was missing her. The victim was thin, barely five feet tall and less than 100 pounds. Her diminutive size led them to believe that she might be as young as 16. Her eyes were blue and her shoulder-length hair was brown.

She had a scar across the skin between the middle and ring fingers on her right hand, and a second one, circular, perhaps from a vaccination shot, on her left forearm. She was wearing Wrangler blue jeans and a blue denim jacket, under which she wore a red and white sports jersey.

Her brown leather belt had a marijuana leaf embossed on the back, and a second leaf adorned its buckle. She wore brown suede shoes and a silver ring with six alternating maroon and green stones. A silver chain hung around her neck.

An autopsy, conducted that same day, Sunday afternoon, confirmed that she had been shot twice and that the bullets appeared to be approximately .45 caliber in size, the same caliber as the recovered revolver. The gunshot to her torso had passed through her lung, heart, and pulmonary artery before lodging in her upper right arm. The second bullet had torn a devastating hole through her left arm.

Corroborating the ER staff's observations, the medical examiner also concluded that she had been beaten, and not just on the night she died. Bruises and scrapes covered her stomach, knees, legs, fingers, and face. Her right eye was blackened and swollen. The medical examiner also found bruising on each side of her head, just above the ear, one with a small puncture wound.

A witness who had been in the downtown area of Norton told police that they had seen a dark Jeep on West Main Street between 10 and 11 p.m. around the time of the shooting. The vehicle had a canvas top and a distinctive white-rimmed spare tire mound on the rear. Sergeant Brugliera gave a press conference that afternoon where he provided a description of the Jeep and the Jane Doe to the public. He emphasized that his team only wanted to speak with the driver.

For two more days, the body of the gunshot victim lay unclaimed in the morgue. It seemed that the newspaper's description was insufficient for someone to come forward and identify her. The investigative team thought that she might be a student at Wheaton College, a small liberal arts school located only two miles from where she was found. But with the help of their staff, they ruled out that possibility.

On the morning of Tuesday, October 13th, Sergeant Brugliera held a second press conference. This time, he changed his approach and distributed a photograph of the young woman's face taken posthumously. The photo isn't easy to look at. Taken from above, it captures a round but gaunt face with a sheet pulled up to her neck. Her eyes are closed. One is clearly bruised and swollen.

Her upper lip is drawn back, exposing chipped teeth. Framing her face is a shock of dark, tousled hair, some of it falling over the corner of her right eye. We don't even know who she is, he told the press. All leads about her identity have been dead ends.

Newspaper and television stations blasted it across southern New England. Its impact was swift. The day after the press conference, about 30 people reached out to the police to ask to view the woman's body. The response drove home for investigators the implication that there were so many searching for a missing loved one.

Those who contacted them represented just the ones in the area whose lost family member or friend might just maybe match the description of the woman shot in Norton, but each of them left the morgue without answers. Finally, a tip arrived from southern New Hampshire. A man who worked at Grenier Industrial Park in Manchester had seen the photograph and thought that it resembled a female employee who had not turned up to work that week.

He gave them a name, and that's how, nearly five days after her death, Robin Shea was identified. Her father looked at the body lying on the cold metal gurney, nodding wordlessly. He drove to her mother's home, and for the first time in a long time, they embraced.

Robin was born in 1960 in Littleton, New Hampshire to Robert and Joanne Shea, who went by Bob and Joan. She had two older siblings, a brother, Kevin, who was two years older, and a sister named Joyce, who was four years her senior. Before Robin started grade school, the family relocated to Hooksett, New Hampshire, a small town north of Manchester.

Her father had found work as the principal of Fred C. Underhill Elementary School, where Robin later attended. Bob wanted his children to be a model for the rest of the kids at school, but he fixated most of his attention on Robin, who seemed to struggle the most to meet his expectations. Perhaps it was growing up as the daughter of an authority figure that made Robin chafe so much against the rules. We spoke with Robin's sister, Joyce, to learn more about her childhood.

She recalled a story from fourth grade. Robin wanted to wear makeup for her class picture, but her parents had a rule.

No makeup, no piercings until they were 16. Robin acquiesced. But when the yearbooks came out, everyone was surprised to discover that Robin had done her eyes with blue eyeshadow under the nose of her father. Her disobedience was forever memorialized in the annals of the yearbook, and her father was furious.

That was a theme of their childhood. Bob conducted himself outside the family in a very different way than inside the family. He was very concerned about outward appearances. Looking back on it from the vantage of decades passing, it seemed trivial. But at the time, it was a focal point of the budding conflict. There were so many rules in the Shea home, and Robin found herself chastised regularly for breaking them.

She was the problem child. When Robin was roughly in first grade, her dad became the co-owner of a campground in Raymond, New Hampshire, which was just east of Manchester. It was called Pine Acres. It became the setting of many summers throughout the lives of the Shea children. Visitors would come and pitch a tent on a campsite or park an RV for a spell.

People brought their coolers, barbecues, and folding chairs. The beer flowed. It was the 70s, and hi-fi stereo systems were all the rage. The Shea family stayed in a farmhouse on the grounds that had plenty of rooms, enough for each of the kids to have their own. While the parents were dealing with the administration of the camp, the kids had time to themselves to explore.

Ground zero for fun on the property was a big converted horse barn that was filled with pool tables and pinball machines. Without the structure of the school year and the pressures that came along, it was a chance to hit the reset button. But by the time Robin was in junior high, the conflicts were growing in severity. Joyce recalled that Robin was unresponsive to consequence. When punishments were threatened, she would escalate things, saying, "Go ahead and spank me."

After a particularly bad one between Robin and Joyce, her father decided to get the juvenile justice system involved. Robin ended up being committed to a reform school for about a year, a residential program where she was separated from the rest of her family. By the time she returned from the program, Joyce was off to college, and her parents were on the precipice of divorce.

Arguments about Robyn smoking cigarettes or breaking one of the Myriad family rules heightened tensions. Joyce remembered working as a waitress for a long holiday weekend at a part-time job, saving money. And Robyn stole it. She confronted her about it, but she was apathetic. Her parents didn't get involved, leaving the girls to work it out for themselves. Joyce said, There were no apologies and little communication about our inner lives.

In 1974, at the age of 14, Robin began her freshman year at Trinity High School. Trinity was run by the Catholic Diocese in Manchester and had a reputation for not tolerating misbehavior from its students. According to one Trinity administrator, Robin transferred to Manchester Central High School in October, after just one month with the nuns.

When Joyce left for college, things began to take a turn in their relationship. Childhood grudges were left in the past, and she visited Joyce in Dover, New Hampshire. They were cutting up and giggling in the kitchen about washing her toaster. Some much-needed, light-hearted fun. In one photo, probably taken around 1977, Robin stands in front of a cluster of young trees, squinting into the sun.

Her long brown hair is feathered, and she wears flared rose-petal pink bell-bottoms and a flannel shirt. In another photo, she smiles sweetly, perhaps even shyly. This time, she's wearing a brown turtleneck under a knit sweater vest. There's an ageless quality to Robin in these photos. She could be 13 or 30. In her early high school years, Robin began dating a much older guy named Dan. He was eight years Robin's senior.

Despite the age difference, her family supported the relationship. He seemed to have a stabilizing influence on Robin, and Joyce remembered that Dan was head over heels in love with her. Around the same time that she started dating Dan, her parents separated and were moving forward with divorce. Robin and her brother ended up staying with their mom.

Their dad? He remarried right away to a woman closer in age to his eldest daughter than to him, and he moved on so completely it seemed as though they only saw him at Christmas. The void that was left from his departure was huge. Their conflict had been a central part of Robin's life. Robin ended up more or less living with Dan throughout many of her teenage years.

Robin didn't like school, and as soon as she could, she left, probably around her sophomore year. It wasn't uncommon for teenagers to leave school in the 70s and 80s. In New Hampshire, during Robin's teenage years, nearly one-fifth of high school students dropped out, so she got a job and contributed financially to the household.

Even without a high school degree, a young person could find work in Manchester in those days, New Hampshire's so-called Queen City. Since the 60s, it's been experiencing an industrial rebirth. Drawn by the inexpensive real estate and growing labor pool, a number of companies bought and renovated the old mill buildings that line the Merrimack River.

The city became a hub for manufacturers in various industries: semiconductor, textile, defense, and aerospace. In 1977, at the age of 17, Robin began working for Arm Tech Industries, an electronics manufacturer located in Manchester's Grenier Industrial Park. The company made parts for the military and industrial aerospace industries.

Among their clientele was NASA, who used Armtek electronics in their space shuttles. The personnel manager at her job described Robin as a good worker who was popular with fellow employees. In her three years at Armtek, she was promoted twice, and her last title was senior assembly operator. Despite a rocky start, Robin's life seemed to be on an upward trajectory, one with job security and a healthy social life.

But in the spring of 1980, things were about to change. She had ended things with her longtime boyfriend Dan and had met a new man. A violent man, 17 years her senior. How many face products did you have to go through before you found the one? No matter what kind of skin you have, it is hard to find a product that doesn't cause irritation.

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Mostly, he's a collection of facts scattered across a handful of articles plucked from archives. A blurry picture in a police file. For one mugshot, he stands in front of a white wall, a placard hanging from his neck reading, Goffstown, New Hampshire Police Department. A black man of average height, he has short hair, arched eyebrows, and a mole on the right side of his nose.

In the mugshot, he wears a red and white baseball cap with a prominent logo for Champion Auto Parts in all caps. His button-down shirt bears a patch with the words Dabbs Auto Service embroidered in cursive just above his left breast pocket. Though his legal name was Andrew Dabbs, he most often went by his middle name, Peter.

He was born in Virginia on December 10, 1942, but we found little information about how he came to live in New Hampshire in the 1970s. At the time, the state's population was 99% white. As FBI agent Sarah Dallaire would later note, he was literally the only black man in town. Everyone knew him, and he was very charismatic as well.

Peter was an experienced mechanic. According to the Manchester Union leader, he'd once owned his own auto shop on Beach Street. Additionally, he and his brother had an interest in a Texaco station that closed in 1974. The 70s were a difficult time for anyone selling gas, given the global shortage. By the spring of 1980, Peter was married and had two children, a four-year-old and an infant.

The family lived at 284 Central Street, a large multi-family home in the heart of the city, and just a 10-minute walk from Central High, where Robin attended school several years before. Domestic life didn't prevent him from finding trouble. Newspaper notices listed arrests for assault and the theft of a bicycle during this time in Manchester. He was also rumored to be dealing drugs in the area.

This is the snapshot we have of the couple when they began dating in April of 1980. Peter, a personable and charming troublemaker with a young family at home, and Robin, young, vivacious, and working hard to get her life on track. We don't know if Peter was estranged from his wife before or after he began seeing Robin. We tried to reach out to her for this episode, but were unsuccessful.

We do know that September of 1980 was a bad month for Peter. On Wednesday, September 3rd, he was arrested in Milford, New Hampshire for possession of cocaine, carrying a revolver without a license, and the reckless operation of a motor vehicle. For the cocaine charge, Peter entered no plea, and for the other charges, he pled not guilty. The following Wednesday, he was arrested for driving under the influence in Goffstown, where he was living at the time.

Peter and Robin moved in together in October of 1980, after six months of dating, much to her mother's chagrin. In December, after Peter failed to appear in court for his September charges, a judge issued a bench warrant. Simultaneously, a second bench warrant was also issued for his failure to answer complaints from police in Amherst, New Hampshire for failing to stop for an emergency vehicle.

Despite a string of run-ins with the law, over the holidays and the months that followed, the couple managed to stay out of the papers. Their streak broke in August of 1981, when Robin, then 21, was charged with stealing a vehicle. Those charges were eventually dropped. In early October, she and Peter moved into an apartment on Hampstead Road in Derry, New Hampshire, just across from the East Derry Fire Station.

Derry was quieter than Manchester, a mostly rural community. As an interracial couple, especially one with such a significant age gap, they may have raised some eyebrows amongst their neighbors.

Though they'd been living together for a year, they had only just moved into their new apartment when, on the afternoon of October 10th, they departed for a road trip to Massachusetts. Neighbors saw them getting into their landlord's vehicle, a dark blue Jeep with a canvas top. This was the same car that would be spotted later that night on West Main Street in Norton, the night of Robin's death.

Peter Dabbs had to move fast. Robin was gone, either dead or dying where he'd left her by the side of the road, and it would only be a matter of time before the authorities connected him to the crime. He drove back to Derry in the early hours of Sunday, probably aware that the neighbors would clock the jeep returning to the driveway.

His landlord, the owner of the vehicle, would later report that the garage adjacent to Peter and Robin's apartment was broken into, though nothing appeared to be stolen. Whatever Peter retrieved from the apartment, he took with him, along with the Jeep. That night, he stayed with his estranged wife and children in Manchester before departing on Monday.

We can only speculate as to whether his wife knew what kind of trouble he was in. Given his history with the law, she might have made an educated guess, but there's also a chance that she may have felt unsafe to report it. By the time that Robin's parents stood in Boston's Southern Mortuary looking over their daughter's body, Peter was a wanted man.

The Norton investigators were working with the state police and had obtained warrants for his arrest. A spokesperson for the Bristol County District Attorney's Office offered the media a detailed description of Peter and the Jeep.

The authorities knew little of his whereabouts in the two weeks following Peter's flight from Manchester. Because he had family and social ties in several states, an APB was extended to Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Colorado, and Florida. His mugshot and description were distributed widely across the areas.

While the police searched for Peter, Robyn's body was taken to McHugh Funeral Home in Manchester. The facility was known for serving the city's large Irish Catholic community. On Saturday, October 17, Robyn's family said goodbye to her in a private service. They later to rest in St. Joseph's Catholic Cemetery in nearby Bedford, where most of her mother's family was buried.

As she watched the casket being lowered into the ground, Joyce reflected on her final moments with her sister. Joyce was visiting her mother the weekend of Robin's death. Joyce was 25 years old and didn't see Robin often, but she saw her on Friday, October 9th, 1981, the day before her fateful road trip with Peter. She remembered that weekend vividly.

Robin had said that she was splitting with Peter and moving back in with her mom. Robin was doing her laundry at her mom's place. She was folding clothes in the living room when she got a call from Peter. She told her mom, I have to go. Her mom protested, but she insisted, saying, I have to go, but I'll be back soon. I have to drive Peter somewhere.

Robin was Peter's ride. He didn't have a driver's license. Peter was looking for cocaine and his connection seemed to be drying up. He was getting desperate. Joyce recalled that her mother was left with a feeling of discomfort, but with hope on the horizon that things were soon going to change without Peter in Robin's life. As Robin's mom, Joan, was watching her youngest child be buried, she felt intensely guilty.

In their final moments together, she'd been upset with her daughter because she'd left her half-folded laundry all over the living room. In the face of the enormity of the loss, the laundry felt trivial, but the anger was real. And so was the regret. Robin's brother, meanwhile, felt guilty too. It was he who had introduced Robin to Peter in the first place.

Joyce, too, felt regret, wondering if she had contributed to how things had turned out. She felt the pain of the loss of a dream, the dream of having a loving relationship with her sister when they were both adults.

Investigators on Robyn's case attributed her murder to her involvement in selling and using drugs. In fact, that district attorney prosecuting Robyn's case told the public that they believed she had died as a result of a drug deal gone sour. This theory is still kind of speculative, I think. Robyn's shooting seemed to have been an impulsive act.

But it's worth remembering that this was the 1980s, the advent of the war on drugs, and a time when narcotics were the focus of discourse about crime and criminality. Robin and Peter's drug use would have been the central focus of the investigation.

But when we inspect the event more closely, Robin's shooting doesn't have the cold, calculated quality one usually associates with revenge for stealing drugs or money. It happened quickly, seemingly unplanned, in a public place. It created a crime scene that Peter could neither clean nor control. He was left without many options and fled quickly.

Though drugs and Peter's need for cocaine may have played a part, it's not the full story. Robin's death has all the hallmarks of a domestic violence incident.

We know that Robin was being abused. Many of the bruises on her body had been healing for days when she died, while others were fresh. We know that Peter was given to impulsive behavior, as evidenced by his long string of arrests for petty crimes. His aggression may have escalated out of his need for drugs. Shooting Robin in the torso and leaving her to die by the side of the road seems like an impulsive action rooted in anger.

While drugs may have been present in Robin and Peter's lives, her killing speaks more clearly to the violent undercurrent of their relationship. Support for today's episode comes from Honeylove. If you've ever gone a full day or evening out wearing shapewear that's not comfortable only to get home and wish you hadn't worn it in the first place, you are not alone.

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Police finally cut a break on Saturday, October 24th, two weeks after the shooting. The dark blue Jeep that Peter was last seen driving was spotted at a shopping mall in Pelham Manor, New York, a suburb north of New York City. It had apparently been abandoned. Another vehicle, the description of which has never been released, was stolen from the parking lot at the same mall.

Knowing that Peter had extensive experience as an auto mechanic, police guessed that he had hot-wired the stolen vehicle. The Jeep was sent back to Massachusetts for ballistic and blood analysis. Shortly after the Jeep was discovered, the police got a tip that Peter had been staying in the homes of several friends in Mount Vernon, New York, a town west of Pelham Manor. At 6 a.m. on Sunday, October 25th, they raided a home where they suspected he might be.

The shocked occupants admitted that Peter had stayed with them for a few days, but had left five days prior. They claimed not to have known that he was wanted in a murder investigation, but did admit that he had been, quote, "acting strange." Just two hours later and less than seven miles away, Peter sat in a friend's apartment in the Bronx.

For weeks he'd been on edge, looking over his shoulder for flashing blue lights, wondering if each passing siren outside heralded his arrest. It's likely that he slept with all of his belongings on his body, or ready to grab at a moment's notice. All we know for sure is that when he heard the knock on the door, Peter was ready.

By the time the officers stepped across the threshold, he had run out the back door of the building and disappeared into the early morning bedlam of the city. His escape was flawless. Police in New Hampshire and New York remained on high alert, monitoring any location they suspected Peter might show up. His mugshot continued to circulate across national media. Investigators waited, expecting for Peter to make a mistake.

But that day never came. His stays in Mount Vernon in the Bronx represent the last known sightings of Peter Dabbs. In early November, the District Attorney's Office obtained an indictment against Peter after a secret grand jury hearing. This was a significant move by the state and indicated that they were confident in his guilt.

The DA himself announced to the press that investigators knew his route and expected to capture him soon. By December, Peter was placed on the FBI's most wanted list, meaning that his photo, arrest record, and fingerprints were sent to every law enforcement agency in the country. A poster with his information was also distributed to post offices across the U.S.,

Anyone waiting in line to send their Christmas packages would have seen Peter's face, smiling faintly under his baseball cap with a Goffstown jail placard hanging from his neck. The investigative team hoped to launch undercover operations in areas where Peter was known to have connections, but this was not financially possible.

For a long time, they kept in contact with law enforcement agencies in those regions, but eventually grew to believe that the suspect would not return to New England, where he might be recognized. Detective Weldon, a Norton police officer, doubted that Peter would be able to find gainful employment and thought that he would resort to under-the-table work. He thought that Peter would struggle to start up a drug business.

Weldon said, he'd need nine to ten grand. If you go in with a hundred bucks, you're going to be playing tiddlywinks all day. Months passed, which stretched into years, and Peter remained a fugitive.

In September of 1982, a federal arrest warrant was issued in relation to his unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. In essence, the charge not only added to those already levied against Peter, but also expanded the investigation to federal law agencies like the FBI and the U.S. Marshals. In 1985, Sergeant Brugliera lamented that Peter had only just slipped through his fingers.

We just never caught up with him. We gathered all the evidence. We've done all our preparation. It's solved. We just have to find him. There's always a possibility he'll surface. This case is still open. It isn't a dead issue.

Later that year, Governor Michael Dukakis announced the formation of the governor's Violent Fugitive Arrest Squad, a special unit tasked with tracking down the state's most wanted fugitives. He asked the public for assistance in seeking several men from southeastern Massachusetts who'd been on the run, some for years.

Norton Police Chief Benton Keene Jr. worked diligently to ensure that Peter, who was by then 43 years old, was on that list. Seeing him added to the 10 Most Wanted roster was among Chief Keene's proudest achievements on the force. Despite these efforts, no sign of Peter emerged.

In the fall of 2001, the Norton police detectives now assigned to Robbins' case hoped to raise awareness by featuring Peter's photo and information on America's Most Wanted. However, this plan was derailed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Peter's segment was never aired. Sunday, October 10, 2021 brought about the 40th anniversary of Robbins' murder and Peter's flight.

Robin, had she lived, would be 61 years old and Peter 78. To mark the occasion and renew efforts to locate Peter, if he was still alive, the FBI offered a $20,000 reward in exchange for information on his whereabouts. The agency also released a colorized and remarkably realistic age-progressed photo of what Peter might look like at 78.

In the headshot, he wears a collared shirt, a suit jacket, and a scowl. Hollows darken to the skin under his eyes, and his hair, now white, is receding. The cut of his jaw, the arched brows, the mole to the side of his nose, these familiar details remained. This older Peter's expression seems a strange choice for a man who purportedly moved through life with an easygoing charm.

Joseph Bonavolonta, a special agent with the FBI's Boston division, implored the public to stay alert for someone matching Peter's description. Someone out there knows where Peter Dabbs is, and we're asking you to contact us. We're doing everything we can to bring him to justice and provide some much-needed closure to Robin's family, who's already endured enough heartache.

FBI agent Sarah Dallaire was unconvinced that Peter was still alive, given his habitual drug use. But she still wanted to know where his flight from justice took him. We're trying to get a timeline, what he's been doing, who has had contact with him, who has seen him. We're trying to put the pieces together. Today, Peter would be 81 years old.

The threads that bound him to his former life seem to have been severed completely. His ex-wife has cooperated with investigators, and his two children, now in their 40s, were never suspected of harboring their father or even being in contact with him. The vacuum left by Robin's death, however, is one filled with grief. In an interview that Joyce had with the FBI in 2021, she said,

Robin died when she was 21, and I was 25. Her life was cut short. That was a really tough thing for me personally, but it was really devastating for my family. My family pretty much fell apart after that. Of Peter, she said, he had an abusive relationship with her when she was alive, which of course she kept from us.

We didn't really understand the hold he had on her, and the fact that he was threatening her and was really using her to get what he needed and wanted. He was 20 years older. We didn't know that. He had a wife and children. We didn't know that either. The reality is that this is unfinished, in the sense that I'm talking about it and he's out there somewhere. Maybe he's dead. And if he is, I would love to know that.

And if he isn't dead, if he's alive, he needs to pay for what he did. We may never know if Peter felt any remorse for what he did, if he ever thinks about Robin or the families that they both left behind. The truth is that there are two Peters now. One is dead, perhaps by his own hand or through violence, disease, old age, or habitual drug use.

But the other Peter is still out in the world, living out the twilight years that Robin was denied. Maybe he built a new life, brick by brick, starting with a fresh name. Or maybe he has been on the move, constantly one step ahead of his own shadow. This Peter is an old man now. His back is stooped and his eyes aren't as sharp as they once were.

His hearing is failing him, but he still tilts his head, just slightly, listening for sirens. ♪

The FBI is offering a reward of up to $20,000 for anyone who can provide information about the current whereabouts of Andrew Peter Dabbs. In 2024, he would be 81 years old. He is a black male, 5'10", with dark hair that may be gray. He has a mole on his nose, a scar on his arm, and skin grafts on his leg from a burn.

If you have any information, please call the Boston Field Office of the FBI at 857-386-2000 or leave a tip at fbi.gov.

If you're enjoying the show, it would make my day if you left a five-star review and some kind words wherever you listen. A detailed list of sources can be found at MurderSheTold.com. Follow Murder She Told on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook for more. Thank you so much to Joyce for sharing her memories with us.

Thank you to Byron Willis for his research and writing, Morgan Hamilton for her writing, and Erica Pierce, Brittany Healy, and Martha Bouton for additional research. If you have a case suggestion, you can email me at hello at murdershetold.com. I'm Kristen Sevey. Thank you for listening.

I'm sending my brother money directly to his bank account in India because he's apparently too busy practicing his karaoke to go pick up cash. Thankfully, I can still send money his way. Direct to my bank account.

Yes, I know I'm sending to your bank account. Western Union. Send it their way. Send money in-store directly to their bank account in India.