The Tragic Murder of Henry Bedard
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I'm Kristen Sevey. This is Murder, She Told. Eighteen-year-old Cheryl Bedard eyed the clouds, wondering if it would rain again soon.

She gripped the steering wheel of her car unconsciously. Her stomach knotted with anxiety. It had been a difficult day for Cheryl. She had been out all night in the rain with her family, scouring the town of Swampscott for her younger brother, Henry. Though she wanted to believe it was a lapse in judgment, it was completely out of his character to worry her parents like this. Henry, at 15 years old, simply didn't pull the kind of nonsense you might expect from other teenagers.

It was 3 a.m. when they finally returned home, dried off, and got a few hours of rest. She'd risen to the gray morning light streaming through her window and hoped that she would hear her brother's voice downstairs. But the voices she heard were unfamiliar and serious. On the first floor, her parents were speaking with William Carlin, the chief of police,

A former sailor and a marine, the police chief was an imposing figure standing in their living room, as he explained that the state police would be providing search and rescue dogs and helicopter assistance in the expanding search for her brother. Her parents' theory was that Henry was badly injured, unable to move or call out. The cops' theory? He was a runaway. Run away from what, she thought to herself? He had nothing to run away from.

Over Cheryl and her siblings' protests, her parents insisted that their children go about their day as normal. Perhaps they hoped that the daily routine would blunt the growing dread that they, too, were feeling. Cheryl noticed the blue-gray bags under her little brother's eyes and their solemn expressions as they were shepherded out the door. Fourteen-year-old Stephen to middle school and little six-year-old Scotty to preschool.

She paused reluctantly at the door. But her parents insisted that she too drive to Boston for her college classes. Her eyes peered at every bush and every cluster of trees as she made her way out of town. Cheryl suffered through the long day, struggling to focus, consumed by the thoughts of her brother Henry. In the afternoon, her class is over, she began the 40-minute drive back to Swampscott.

In town, she noticed that her tank was low and pulled into the local Uva's gas station. As she stood at the pump, Cheryl felt the weight of eyes upon her. She glanced up and caught a cluster of people staring, most of them familiar faces. They looked away quickly. That was small-town life in Swampskip, Massachusetts. Everyone was looking for a morsel of gossip.

Her road, dead-end MacArthur Circle, was eerily quiet as Cheryl pulled into the familiar driveway. Her parents' cars were in their usual spaces, but the cul-de-sac was crowded by several official-looking vehicles that did not belong to the Bedards. Something was off. There were no little kids playing in the street this day, no errant soccer ball darting between her wheels.

As she rose from her car, she saw her father emerge from the side door of the house. A version of her father, anyway. This man seemed much older than he had yesterday, ashen and worn. He wrapped his daughter in a tight hug, and the words spilled out of him. Your brother's been shot in the head. He's dead.

She would recall 35 years later, quote, nothing ever prepared me for that reality. No words could ever describe the magnitude of the grief I felt. She cried out like an animal that had been seriously wounded. The sound of her own pain still ricochets in her memory today. Her legs buckled and her father caught her as she fell forward.

She would later say that she herself, Cheryl Bedard, the sister of Henry Bedard, died as well that day. The kitchen was a grim tableau. Her mother sat at the table, head in her hands, surrounded by friends and neighbors too shocked to comfort her. And what comfort would they provide? Cheryl moved past them like a ghost, descending the steps into the basement family room.

There was Scotty, six years old and much too young to process any of this, but old enough to know that Henry was not coming home. Cheryl laid down on the couch, pulling him into her arms, and began to cry. Henry Bedard Jr. absolutely glows in the recollections of those who knew him. The words happy-go-lucky, nice, and cheerful are repeated often. He was a kind, thoughtful boy with a big heart and a good sense of humor.

Friends and strangers alike would comment on his ever-present smile. Henry was the third child of Gloria Bedard and Henry Bedard Sr., but I'll refer to Henry Jr. simply as Henry, and his father as Henry Sr. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1959. Their eldest son, John, was born in 54, Cheryl in 56, then came Henry, and then Stephen in 1960.

Finally, in 1968, they welcomed their fifth and final child, a boy they named Scott, a span of 14 years from their youngest to their oldest. The Bedard family lived in Lynn, Swampscott's neighbor to the south, until Henry was 11. In 1970, they returned to Swampscott, the town where Gloria and Henry Sr. had attended high school themselves.

They moved into a two-story home on a cul-de-sac at the end of a short street called MacArthur Circle. They were just a mile and a half from the high school. By then, Henry Sr. was operating a Sunoco station in the town of Danvers while Gloria worked at the Beverly National Bank. On Sundays, the family attended St. John the Evangelist, a Catholic church in the downtown district. The family was by no means wealthy, but they lived comfortably, vacationing in New Hampshire in the summers.

It was in Swampscott that Henry lived a childhood so wholesome it was beyond credibility. He had a true passion for sports, especially baseball. In Little League, he was known as "Hammering Hank," a moniker that stuck with him through junior high. There, he played football, hockey, street hockey, ran track, and participated in the school's sports discussion programs.

Even in the summers, he couldn't sit still, water skiing behind the boat until the year that his father turned the wheel over to him. In her blog, his sister Cheryl would recall Henry tearing down the length of Big Island Pond in Hampstead, New Hampshire, saying,

My fondest memory at the lake was when he would take me water skiing. He would drive the boat close to the areas with lily pads and weeds. Usually, Henry would flash a very large smile before he was about to do something playful or mischievous. Just as I was skimming through on my skis, he turned around and flashed his pearly whites. That was my warning to cross the wake and get out quickly. He was getting ready to stop the boat and sink me in the muck.

He won the battle a few times, and we had some great laughs about it. By sophomore year at Swampscott High, Henry was proving to be quite the athlete, despite his small stature. At 15, he was only about 5'4 and 135 pounds. His gym teacher, Donald Hallett, said of Henry, He was small, but he was fast, and he really hustled. He was the kind of boy you would have wanted for your own son."

In the spring, Henry ran track, and in the fall, he played on the junior varsity football team. He had his eye on the number 30 jersey when he joined the team, as it was the number worn by his older brother John when he played on the high school team as well. But someone had already been assigned that number. So, with his own money, he purchased a number 30 jersey and hung it in the closet in the hopes that he could lay claim to it the following year. Henry believed he could accomplish anything he set his mind to.

He was a good student, too, and he seemed to be well-liked by his classmates, who elected him to serve as the sophomore class representative. At the end of junior high school, he began dating a girl in his class named Cindy Cavallaro. Every day, he and Cindy walked home from school together. Henry got along well with his siblings. His older brother and sister adored him, and his youngest brother, six-year-old Scott, held him high on a pedestal.

Henry was especially close to his father, for whom he worked part-time on Saturdays at the Sunoco station in Danvers. He was eager to drive, and he planned to get his license on his 16th birthday, in part so he could open the station on the weekends and allow his dad to get some extra sleep. He had already saved up $900 to buy his first car.

Henry was equally ecstatic about purchasing his own bicycle with the money he'd saved during the summer of 1974. Between working for his father and caddying at the local golf course, he had finally saved up enough and asked his sister to take him to the shop to pick it out. Cheryl would later recall, "'We were driving home and each time we passed someone, Henry would hang out the window and exclaim, "'Wahoo! I got a new bike! Can you believe it? I got a new bike!'

He kept yelling out in excitement all the way up the hill, through the entire neighborhood. He was so excited he just couldn't contain himself. Once we returned home, he rode off into the sunset. I don't think I saw him for days. That was Henry Bedard Jr. in the fall of 1974, embracing a childhood so idyllic it seems to have leapt out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

It would be nice to leave him there, preserved in time and memory, in the sun-dappled space between childhood and an adulthood that he would never know. An unseasonably warm and wet holiday season crept up on Swampscott at the end of 1974. Temperatures throughout December hovered in the 40s and 50s. Puddles accumulated on paved surfaces that should have been slick with ice.

The sky seemed to have taken on a permanently gray, marbled aspect, and bursts of salty ocean wind scattered dead orange pine needles across the windshields of the parked cars. In the gap between school sports seasons, Henry spent a lot of time at home with his family, playing with his little brother and watching Sunday football with his father after church. As the weather turned cooler, the Bedards began to prepare for the holidays. Henry loved Christmas.

Unlike many children who looked forward to unruly stacks of presents under the tree with their names upon them, Henry really enjoyed the role of gift-giver. He put a lot of thought into what he would buy his parents and each of his siblings. That was on his mind when he rose early on the morning of Monday, December 16th. He brushed his teeth and did his chores, greeting his father as he took the trash out to the curb.

After breakfast, he walked his younger brother, Stephen, to the junior high school, where only last year, he himself had been a student. They parted ways, and Henry continued the additional two miles to Swampscott High, arriving just in time for homeroom. His day seemed to have been fairly normal. He attended all his classes, ate lunch as usual, and joked and chatted with his friends. Perhaps he caught up with Cindy, shared a quick kiss and a roguish smile before darting off to his next class.

Around 2.15 p.m., the bell rang, and a wave of teenagers spilled out of the double doors at the front of the building. Henry stepped into the gray, gusty afternoon and got on a bus that stopped at Vinnan Square, a shopping center about a mile northeast of the school. Vinnan Square was one of Swampscott's main commercial hubs, a strip center with big parking lots and big stores. It was just across from the Swampscott Mall and boasted the more practical conveniences of daily life.

grocery stores, department stores, and a pharmacy. Henry walked into the CVS and made his way to the photography counter, where he dropped off a roll of 8mm movie camera film to be developed. Henry was looking forward to seeing how the film turned out. He hoped that they properly immortalized the day that he gunned across his friend's yard on a borrowed motorbike.

In the beauty section of the store, he paused. Perhaps some nearby female shoppers hid their smiles at the sight of a teenage boy earnestly scanning the rows of glass perfume bottles and boxes until he found the right one. There. Love Cosmetics' Musky Jasmine Flower. The little pink-capped bottle came in a rose-colored box and smelled like the olfactory equivalent of a soap opera. It was his sister's current favorite scent.

He hoped she would be happy when she opened the box on Christmas morning. Henry left the CVS about 3 p.m., walking briskly southwest down Paradise Road. The collar of his coat turned up against the wind. Swamska Police Lieutenant Peter Cassidy recalled waving to him, thinking to himself, Henry looked like he was in a hurry to get somewhere.

At 3.40 p.m., Henry crossed the large paved lot of Swamscut's Department of Public Works. He wished workers a Merry Christmas and showed them his pharmacy bag, explaining that he was going home to wrap presents. They watched him disappear in the back corner of the lot, where the pavement transitioned to the woods, to the path of a former railroad line. Within minutes, Henry would be dead.

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Late in the afternoon, a rain began to fall on the roof of the Bedard home. The sky turned the color of a bruise, deepening as the sun sank lower. Inside the house, Henry Sr. peered out into the wet darkness. It was unusual for his second son to miss dinner, served daily at 5.30 p.m. At first, he and his wife Gloria sighed and wrote it off as the growing pains that came with raising teenagers.

Perhaps he was having dinner at a friend's house, or with his girlfriend and her father. It must have slipped his mind to call home and let them know that he'd be late. But as the deluge grew heavier outside and the dishes were cleared from the table, the Bedards felt a sense of unease. This was very out of character for their son. He was dependable and conscientious of others.

Growing worried, they called around to his friends, but no one could say that they'd seen him since school let out that afternoon. At 7 p.m., Henry Sr. made a decision. He called Paul, one of Henry's closest pals, and asked him to rally some of the other boys to form a search party. They would know best where his son might be. Henry Sr. called some of the other adults to join the search, too.

Then he, John, Cheryl, and Stephen donned their rain jackets and boots and went out into the night. The group dispersed, spreading out across Swampscott's parks, playing fields, and wooded pathways to look for Henry. They sloshed through puddles growing deeper by the minute thanks to the downpour. Paul would later recall, "'We were hollering in the middle of the woods. We thought that he'd fallen and hurt himself and couldn't move.'"

At no point did he or his fellow searchers believe that Henry could be beyond their help. Around 9.15 p.m., a sodden and panicked Henry Sr. returned to MacArthur Circle and conferred with his equally distressed wife. It was time to call in the cavalry.

They called the Swampscott police to report their son missing, giving the responding officer his description. Five foot four inches, a lean 135 pounds, with a mop of sandy brown hair. He was wearing a brown jacket and light blue patterned trousers. Often, missing teenagers are dismissed as runaways. Perhaps because of Henry's sturdy reputation in the community, the Swampscott PD took the report seriously and sent officers to join the search efforts.

Still, they peppered the hunt with hints that Henry could have simply run away. Henry Sr. didn't believe that they shared his sense of urgency or fear. He later said, They didn't search like I did. Every puddle, every branch. The search continued into the early hours of the morning. Flashlights and hoarse voices cut through the persistent downpour to no avail.

Finally, around 3 a.m., the exhausted searchers threw in the towel. Wet and shivering, Henry Sr. and his children piled into the family's car and blasted the heat. He drove slowly, peering into the trees illuminated by the high beams on the tense, silent ride home.

They would later learn that their headlights had swept over the very spot where Henry lay, lightly covered by dead leaves, which, in the darkness, were sufficient to foil them. The next day, Tuesday, December 17th, in the afternoon, two young boys were making their way down a trail that ran behind the houses on Norfolk Avenue. Power lines ran across its length, and the trail itself was the former site of an old Boston and Maine railroad line.

The steel tracks themselves had been removed, but the contours of the ground remained. Beneath the humming cables, the boys trudged through yellow stalks of grass that were still damp with last night's rain. Fading brown leaves were piled deep and made walking slow. One of the two boys, Cliff Goodman, had just had a birthday the day prior. His comrade was one of his birthday guests, and he had piqued his curiosity. They were on a mission.

There were some interesting treasures that had been discovered on Monday. An empty wallet and a bottle of perfume. Plus, there was also an old Playboy magazine rumored to be floating around the area. Cliff knew this place well. His bedroom looked out onto the railroad bed and the woods beyond.

At this time of year, the skeletal branches of the trees were depleted of their foliage, and the ground was red and brown. They soon located the wallet, and it didn't look like it had been there long. It was totally empty. And then they found the perfume, Love's Musky Jasmine Flower, in its CVS bag, with a receipt for $5.75. The date on the receipt was Monday.

Why, they wondered, would someone have bought perfume the day before and just discarded it in the woods? Off of the railroad bed was an incline to a spot famous in Swampscut amongst a certain set, called Swampscut View. Once you ascended the short hill, you'd break through the trees and be on a rocky scrap of land that overlooked the Department of Public Works yard and Paradise Road beyond.

You could wander as close as you dared to its edge, which overlooked a sheer rocky face that dropped 30 feet to the pavement below. Perhaps it was this flirtation with danger that made it a popular place with Swampscott's youth. They didn't quite make it to the rocky section of Swampscott View when they came upon a disturbance to the leafy forest floor. In a shallow grave, covered with leaves and other detritus, was the body of Henry Bedard.

His clothes were drenched in rainwater and blood, and his head was a grisly sight. Both boys screamed, one dry heaving as he struggled not to vomit. He ran home, his friend in tow, and grabbed his mother by the arm. He later said, "'I dragged her up there because she wouldn't believe me, and I wouldn't shut up,'

Many years later, in 2010, Cliff would tell the Lynn Daily Item, "...that moment was almost frozen in time. I was in disbelief at what I was looking at, but I couldn't deny what I'd seen." Before long, the Swampscotton State Police descended on the area, while the local fire department directed floodlights to combat the approaching darkness.

Among those present on the scene was Lieutenant Peter Cassidy, who was horrified by what he was seeing. He knew Henry, knew the boy's family quite well, actually. In his own youth, he had played football for Swampscott High alongside Ray and Bob Mansfield, Henry's maternal uncles. He was friendly with Henry's parents and had likely watched him grow from a small child into a young man.

And he realized with a growing sense of dread. He had seen Henry just yesterday, not far from Swampscott View, and maybe only minutes before he was killed. The teenager had crossed in front of his unmarked police car, waving a hand and greeting as he walked a quick pace down Paradise Road. Lieutenant Peter Cassidy had been one of the last people to see Henry Bedard alive.

He watched as Essex County Medical Examiner, Dr. Albert Shube, did a cursory exam on Henry's body. He believed that Henry had died from a severe head wound, likely a gunshot, approximately 24 hours earlier. But he wouldn't make an official ruling on the cause or manner of death until he'd had a chance to conduct an autopsy the next day.

For hours, the police searched Swampscut View, the abandoned railroad bed, and the forest surrounding Henry's body. Due to heavy rains the night before, they discovered no footprints, and even if they had, the terrain was so well-trafficked that the killer's footprints would have been amongst dozens of others. Unfortunately, the weather had done considerable damage to any latent evidence at the crime scene.

In the trees about 50 feet from where Henry had been found, police discovered a baseball bat. Had it been discarded by the killer or dropped by a careless child passing through? Investigators carefully collected the bat, knowing that it would need to be examined by the state police crime lab for fingerprints and traces of blood. Henry's body was taken to Lynn Hospital for closer inspection. It was nearly 2 a.m. when Chief Carlin dismissed most of his officers for the night.

Lieutenant Cassidy returned home, but he had trouble finding sleep. A series of haunting images cycled through his mind. Lieutenant Cassidy made a pledge to himself that, whatever it took, he was going to find the person who left Henry in the cold, wet leaves near Swampscott View. The investigation into Henry's murder was led by Swampscott Lieutenant James Hanley, supported by Peter Cassidy and a third lieutenant, Paul Sherry.

Their team was also assisted by the Massachusetts State Police and members of the Essex County District Attorney's Office. Their first course of action was to retrace Henry's steps from the moment he left school on Monday afternoon. Officers went to Swampscott High and spoke to his friends and classmates. They showed his pictures to employees at Vinnan Square. Plenty of people recalled seeing the boy going about his errands, and some said that they had witnessed him jogging or walking quickly down Paradise Road.

The last sighting of Henry seemed to have been around 3.40 p.m., when he was spotted by several town employees crossing the paved yard at the Department of Public Works. The DPW, as it was called, mainly dealt with the repair and maintenance of the roads and sidewalks. It was located on Paradise Road, about a mile south of Vinnens Square. Behind the department's maintenance and storage buildings was a sheer rock face, at the top of which was Swampscott View.

It was at the DPW yard that Henry was last seen alive. Several of the workers noticed him and recalled him lifting his bag in greeting and shouting Merry Christmas over the breeze. The workers responded in kind and thought nothing more of it. One of the employees present noted that he and his co-workers went back inside the DPW building soon afterward and heard no sign of the violence that was being perpetrated just feet away from their facility.

Between 4 and 4.30 p.m., two young boys, on their way to Cliff Goodman's 10th birthday party, found the empty wallet and brand new perfume, suggesting that Henry was already dead. His body was likely still warm just 30 feet away. That means that Henry was killed between 3.40 p.m. and 4.30 p.m., a window of time that is at most 50 minutes.

The fact that the boys found the wallet so quickly was a testament to the fact that this spot was centrally located and commonly used. In other words, an incredibly exposed location to kill someone in broad daylight and bury them in a makeshift grave, at a time of year when there are no leaves on the trees to conceal their movement. Police and the medical examiner estimated the attack occurred sometime around 4 p.m. on Monday.

During his examination, Dr. Shube had also discovered that Henry had not died from a gunshot wound, but from a series of blows to his head. It appeared that the killer, or killers, had used a blunt object to strike him at least five times, likely at the site where his body was found. Because nobody heard Henry call out, the police believed that he was knocked out with one blow, and then, once he was on the ground, struck repeatedly in quick succession.

The baseball bat was the critical piece of evidence. Though it was branded a Louisville Slugger, it was actually manufactured by Hillerick & Bradsby, a company out of Louisville, Kentucky. The model was often used by Little League teams in elementary schools. It was 31 inches long, and the model was identified as Henry Hank Aaron 125LL. The LL stood for Little League.

It was a blonde-colored wood and was decorated on the business end with a signature by the Pro Baseball Hall of Famer, Hank Aaron. Hank Aaron's nickname was Hammerin' Hank, the very same nickname that Henry Bedard enjoyed. And in a strange and unsettling coincidence, it was a bat bearing his signature that was used to kill Henry.

Police believed that the bat was the murder weapon, perhaps the key to the entire case, and the community went into high gear trying to determine its provenance. An otherwise ordinary bat was made unique by the distinctive markings found on it. All bats of this type had a two-inch diameter knob at the bottom. It's the button on the butt of the bat just below where you hold it, made of the same wood as the rest, a light-colored wood like ash.

The bat was in pretty good condition, but there was some blackening as though it were scorched in a campfire, and there were some unique markings on its knob. The first marking of note was the number one, placed precisely in the center of the two-inch knob. It was a manufacturer's marking, and it was more or less stamped into the bottom of the bat, indicating its size.

It wasn't this one, but the other markings that drew the interest of the cops and the entire community of Swampscott. There were a series of straight lines that were carved into the knob, right on top of the one. Three slashes appeared to make the Roman numeral 6, spelled V-I, and two more slashes appear to make a horizontal line across the top and bottom of the number. Five slashes in total.

Part of the etching was worn away by abuse, so it wasn't obvious this was the correct interpretation. Turned 90 degrees to the right, the V with the line below it instead made the letter K. It's conceivable that the letters M or N or L might have been a part of the picture. Some people think the portion of the carving resembles a simple stick figure-like drawing of a sword.

To me, the most persuasive interpretations are the Roman numeral 6 or the letter K. You can see photos of this bat on MurderSheTold.com. Investigators wondered if the etchings were the initials of the killer or if the number 6 matched a young player's jersey. Little League players often put their jersey number on their bat. To avoid the confusion with the number 9, someone might have opted to use Roman numerals instead.

The police showed the bat to coaches of local baseball teams and the owners of several sporting goods stores, but nobody was able to determine where it came from or who had owned it. Local PD sent the bat to the state crime lab for analysis. They promptly confirmed that the stains on the bat were indeed human blood.

This was the pre-DNA era, so their next step was to determine blood type. But it's unclear if they were able to do that or not. The Boston Globe quoted state police detective Alfred Dumling, who reported that the blood type was determined, and it matched Henry. However, the Lynn Daly item later quoted Swampscott police chief William Carlin, who said that the state police were unsuccessful in identifying the blood type on the bat.

Although they may not have had blood type, the crime lab was able to lift a partial fingerprint from the bat. Their first step was to compare it to Henry's own fingerprints, but they ran into a problem. Henry's prints were not on file anywhere, and he had already been buried. It's customary for fingerprints to be taken if an autopsy is conducted, but for whatever reason, Essex County Medical Examiner Albert Shube failed to do so.

To this day, it has still not been determined whether or not that fingerprint belongs to Henry. The mystery that loomed largest, however, was why someone would want to take Henry's life. By all accounts, he was a nice kid with a sunny disposition from a good family. Had he simply had the misfortune of running across the path of some malevolent individual? His empty wallet left investigators wondering if robbery might have been a motive behind the attack.

Henry's loved ones estimated that he might have had as much as $30 on him that day, even after shopping at Vinnensquare. It wasn't a fortune, but maybe it was enticing enough. Or maybe the killer was known to Henry. What had brought Henry to Swampscott View that day at all? According to his friends and siblings, if he were heading home from shopping at Vinnensquare, he had no reason to be walking that particular route. It was out of his way.

Cutting through the DPW yard, traversing the old B&M rail line, and climbing Swampscott View just wasn't a cut-through he would have used. His sister said the only shortcut she could think of was a lumberyard on Elm Place. The question hung in the air like sour milk. What if Henry knew his killer? What if Henry, unbeknownst to him, had made a date with Death, a fellow murderous youth in Swampscott?

A young killer who blended in with a tight-knit community.

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A pall had been cast over the children of Swampscott. Their innocence had been taken. There was no going back to the fantasy that death only visited the ailing and the elderly. The children moved together in tight groups, hustling back to the safety of their homes before darkness fell each night. Little Cliff Goodman would lie awake in his bedroom with the light on.

He didn't know Henry personally, but he was nonetheless shaken by the brutality of his murder and the image forever seared in his mind of finding him. Every year, he would share his birthday with the anniversary of Henry's death. He would later recall grappling with this trauma. At an older age, your vision can get a little blurred. But when you're a little kid, the stuff you see is right there. And it's always with you.

This has left me with psychological scars, including an aversion to darkness. I remember looking out my window that night, which faced the scene, and hearing the sound of the gas-powered generator the police had set up to light the site. Here I am, a 10-year-old boy, looking up at that, and the movie Helter Skelter had just come out. I was petrified the people who killed him would come back to get me.

Across town, a red-eyed Cindy rotated a small ring back and forth on her finger and thought of the boy who had given it to her the year before. The boy with whom she had shared her first kiss. The boy who had taken her to their 8th grade dance. Cindy's childhood ended in December of 1974. As she would later recall, it changed everything. I don't think I ever looked at anyone or trusted anybody the same after that.

She would wear that ring for two more years until the devastating day when she watched it slip down the bathroom sink, just out of her reach. Henry's funeral service began on Thursday, December 19th, just three days after his death in Lynn, the town south of Swampscott. McGinn-Landrigan Funeral Home held visiting hours all afternoon and evening, remaining open until 10 p.m. to accommodate the 2,500 visitors who came to show their love and support to the Bedard family.

The next day was his funeral mass, and the interest from the community was enormous. The administrators at Shaw Junior High and Swampscott High attempted to gather permission slips from the students who planned to attend, but because of the sheer number of children who crowded their offices, including Henry's entire sophomore class, administrators soon gave up on the paperwork.

A somber sea of about 500 children and teenagers made the half-mile walk from the school to St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church. A crowd of nearly 1,500 people pressed into the church and spilled out onto the steps and sidewalks. Henry's funeral would be remembered as one of the largest in the history of the town.

Behind the altar was a unique floral arrangement, a sea of carnations fashioned into a gridiron, designed by the Bedard siblings to honor Henry's love for football. In the closed casket, Henry himself was wearing the blue and white jersey bearing the number 30, which he had bought with hopes of wearing it on the field one day, and the new shoes Cheryl intended to give him for Christmas.

Prior to the service, a photographer for the Lynn Daly item captured the Bedard family clustered tightly together, as though helping each other to stand. After the service, the organist played the Battle Hymn of the Republic over low murmurs and quiet weeping. Henry's casket was carried out by ten of his closest friends and classmates. From there, the hearse carried him to Swampscott Cemetery, an old historic graveyard a mile from the Bedard's family home.

There, Henry was laid to rest beneath a simple gravestone, bedarred on one side and his name on the other, with no epitaph, just the year of his birth and the year of his death, 1959 to 1974. The much-too-abbreviated story of a son told with only two dates. The whole of Swampscott held its breath and waited for news that the murderer had been caught.

The holidays were a time of joy and celebration for many families. But invariably, the mood would change as Henry's name emerged from the lips of Swampscott residents, followed with a slight frown, downcast eyes, and a slow shaking of the head. A tragedy. A real tragedy. Surely the police had promising leads on who killed Henry and why.

But as one week turned into another, and no suspect was arrested, the wheels of the rumor mill began to turn. Whispers around high school spoke of other students who had disappeared from Swampscott High around the time of Henry's death. Was there significance to the timing? Or was it just a coincidence?

Word spread that Henry had been murdered for $80 cash that he'd won from a poker game he'd played with some friends. His football coach and the athletic director scoffed at this. He told reporters that the kids Henry ran around with would never have that much money on them. That's over $500 in today's money. On the last weekend of December, the Swampscott police questioned a man in Lynn who reportedly bragged about committing the murder.

This lead, however, turned out to be a false one, and the man was dismissed without arrest. On Monday, December 30th, the police released photos of the baseball bat to the public, hoping that someone would recognize the etchings on the bottom. The public was asked to rack their brains, to think back two weeks to the afternoon of Monday, December 16th, to try to remember anyone carrying a bat near Swampscott View.

A bat is something that's not easily concealed on someone's person. And if the killer brought the bat onto the murder site that afternoon, it would be incredibly brazen. It boggles the mind to think that someone walked either through dense residential neighborhoods or down a busy street carrying the murder weapon in plain view. Not to mention the visibility of the murder site itself. Did the murderer leave the bat in the woods so that no one would see him leaving with it?

Another question on everybody's mind was who would own such a bat? It was a Little League bat. Who generally had access to one? A young teen? A father? The sibling of a player? Someone somehow involved with Little League baseball, it would seem. But with the abundance of bats in the community, it seemed that everyone could be a suspect.

Chief Carlin told the Daily Item of the images of the bat. We aren't releasing these photographs because we're up against a stone wall, but because the papers have requested it. We haven't exhausted all our leads. We're constantly getting stories from kids. Some don't amount to anything, but we check them all out. We do believe that there are young people in this community that have not told us everything they know about the case, and we hope that they will come forward.

We have no hot suspects. We are still hoping for a break. Since nearly the beginning of the investigation, Chief Carlin had been vocal in his opinion that Henry had been killed by someone he knew, likely another teenager or a group of teenagers. In early January, the investigative team began to re-interview about 50 people, most of them teens.

Nine young people, who were never named, were administered polygraphs. All of them passed. Around this time, the Louisville slugger found at the scene was sent to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C. for further forensic testing. They hoped that technicians would be able to glean some new information. It would be over a month before the lab returned the bat to the local police.

Chief Carlin told the press, The FBI has informed us that not even their instruments were sensitive enough to determine the blood type of the stains remaining. The local PD and local community refused to sit idly and wait for a confession, so they threw themselves into raising a reward for any information that would aid the investigation. It began with the daily items offer of $1,000 on the first day in 1975.

Their goal was $10,000, which would be about $63,000 in today's money. By March of 1975, the fund had already reached $7,000. Daily Item editor John Morin told the public that the money would be directed to an account at the Essex County Bank of Lynn. He told the Daily Item, "'What we've decided to do is keep it in the bank for three years. If the crime is unsolved by then, then the money will be withdrawn and returned to the donors.'"

But the interest, which we estimate to be in the vicinity of $2,000, will be given to the Henry Bedard Jr. Scholarship Fund. The months passed by, and the interest continued to accumulate in a fund that was never used. If there was someone who knew what really happened on that gray day in mid-December, they were staying quiet about it.

Cheryl was the first to go. She had known from the very day that they had found Henry's body that her time in Swampscout was coming to an end. She couldn't mourn him in the place that he died, not where his killer might brush past her on the sidewalk. For a time, her parents stayed in the house at MacArthur Circle. Gloria and Henry Sr. were grateful for the support from the community.

Their two youngest children, Stephen and Scott, still lived at home, and the couple helped their two boys move forward. In the summer of 1976, when Henry would have been preparing for his senior football season, the Bedard family moved to Florida. Perhaps the warm air and fresh start would give their youngest sons a chance to enjoy a childhood that wasn't colored each day by tragedy.

Over the span of the next three decades, they would receive updates on the investigation that seemed to go nowhere. Investigators left the Swampscott PD and new ones came on board. When Chief Carlin retired in October of 1980, he shared that the Bedard case was the only major disappointment in his 30-year career.

He told the Lindaly item, I know the boy's family. I'm really very sorry that we've been unable to come up with a solution. We've tracked down every lead and whatever anything comes up, we chase it down immediately. The case is still open, obviously. I always thought we'd come up with the answer. We still have hope that someone, someday, will come forward with the information we need to solve the case.

It was a sentiment that Swampscott Lieutenant Peter Cassidy, friend to the Bedard family, would understand when he was promoted to chief. For years, he kept a glass paperweight on his desk with Henry's photo inside it. The boy would have been in his 20s by then, had he lived the same age as Peter's own children. When he retired from the force in the spring of 1990, he took the paperweight with him.

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Air Plus, license 2705157063. Well, I gotta get back to it. Dispatch, this is Mindy, go ahead. Henry's case floated back into the public eye from time to time. In 1998, 24 years after the murder, the Louisville Slugger was sent back to the state crime lab to be tested once again. A second partial fingerprint was identified, but like the first, has never been matched.

Late in 2000, a woman named Rhonda reached out to Swampscott PD and said that she had witnessed Henry's murder. She told officers that a recent story in the Salem Evening News on the case had jogged her memory. Rhonda, who was 11 or 12 at the time of the murder, claimed that she had been visiting a friend in Swampscott when she saw the attack.

Police dutifully checked out her story, but it was full of inconsistencies. Furthermore, she had a history of filing false police reports. Working with a sketch artist, she developed a composite sketch of the killer that strongly resembled her ex-boyfriend. At that point, the understandably frustrated Swamska police chief had her arrested for making a false report.

The 30th anniversary of Henry's murder brought some renewed interest in the cold case. The baseball bat and Henry's clothes were sent back to the state crime lab for a third time. Unfortunately, investigators were unable to find traces of blood or fingerprint evidence that hadn't been detected previously. By then, the Bedard family had long since left the family's new home in Florida.

Gloria and Henry Sr. eventually divorced. She returned to Massachusetts while he remained in the Sunshine State after retiring. While Henry Sr. had long maintained his faith in the integrity of the investigation, he had given up on one day understanding why his son was killed. He told the Boston Globe, I was hoping that it would be solved before I died, but it's looking like it will never be solved.

Henry's older sister, Cheryl, has only been back to Swamska at once. She stood in the place where her brother died and felt no close to understanding why he was killed. From the shores of Florida and nearly 50 years' distance, she stopped trying to understand what could have driven somebody to take Henry's life. In an article she wrote for the Swamska Reporter in 2009, Cheryl described the aftermath of her brother's murder.

The days that followed were carried out with such a numbness, mechanically. My physical body was barely functioning, and my soul and spirit had vanished. I was in this state for quite some time, followed by the weeks, months, years of mourning, denial, crying, anger, and a search for answers.

There was an emptiness gnawing at my soul. I refused to be a part of a society I could only see as savage, cruel, hostile, unloving.

In the years that followed, she found it difficult to make connections and trust others. Her faith and the birth of her daughter helped restore some of her former joy in life, but she maintains that the tragedy destroyed a part of her that could never fully be recovered. She wrote, Henry's death was the beginning of a journey I never wanted to take. 2009 was also the year that Henry's girlfriend, Cindy, created a Facebook page in his memory.

Within a year, nearly 500 people had followed the page. Many left comments with their memories of Henry and reflected on that terrible era in Swampscott's history. Cheryl was frustrated so many people had remembered that day, but no one had come forward. She wrote in The Reporter, It is difficult for so many to believe that this case will never be solved.

Rumors, allegations, and theories have circulated for all these years. Some whispered about in fear. Swamska is a small community where everyone knows everything about everyone. Someone must know what happened. In February of 2011, Cheryl published a blog in remembrance of Henry, on which she expressed her gratitude for the thoughts and memories that people had shared with her.

But she did note that very few of Henry's closest friends, those who had carried the casket at his funeral, had reached out to her. She offered her personal email and encouraged them to do so. Also in 2011, Cheryl received a phone call from a former teacher at Swampscott High, Mr. Spencer. Now in his advanced years, Mr. Spencer wanted her to know something he had witnessed between Henry and another student on the day of his death.

He claimed to have seen Henry and the unnamed classmate arguing over money. He claimed that both boys were absent in their last period, though this contradicts statements by other witnesses who said that Henry had gone about his day as usual. Unfortunately, Mr. Spencer passed away later in 2011, before he could provide any further detail.

The Swampscott PD and Massachusetts State Police met with the cold case investigators from the New England State Police Information Network, also known as NESPEN, and agreed to do a full review of Henry's case. This would include combing over more than 100 witness statements and interviews conducted in the 1970s. But as of today, Henry's case remains open and unsolved.

This December, 2024, will mark the 50th anniversary of the crime, and the window for bringing the killer, or killers to justice, grows smaller by the day. As Detective Sergeant Jay Locke, one of the two Swampscott detectives working on Henry's case, stated in 2021, "...evidence degrades. Memories fade and people die, so every day you're losing a little bit more."

Justice in Henry's case might not end in a conviction. It might look like something else. Henry's mother, Gloria, never received an answer for why her son was taken from her. She passed away in 2014 at the age of 80. Likewise, Henry's oldest brother, John, died of Parkinson's in 2022. His other siblings, Stephen and Scott, are scattered about the country.

And of course, there's Cheryl, who's still waiting for the day that someone will pick up the phone and tell her a story about a warm, cloudy December day 50 years ago. It's not a happy story, but it's nonetheless one that she needs to hear. If you have any information on the murder of Henry Bedard, please contact the Swampscott Police Department at 781-595-1111.

A detailed list of sources and photos from this episode can be found at MurderSheTold.com. You can find more Murder She Told on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Thank you to Morgan Hamilton for her writing, Byron Willis for additional writing, and Erica Pierce and Sarah LaFortune for their research support. If you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear from you at HelloAtMurderSheTold.com.

I hope that I've honored your loved ones and kept their memory alive. I'm Kristen Sevey. This is Murder, She Told. Thank you for listening.

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