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McCabe slay case in jury's hands

By Lisa Redmond, lredmond@lowellsun.com

Updated:
01/25/2013 04:49:34 PM EST

WOBURN -- As 15-year-old John McCabe lay hogtied with rope, eyes tapped shut so he couldn't see and his mouth taped shut so he couldn't scream, prosecutor Thomas O'Reilly said every move tightened the rope around the teen's neck and brought him closer to death.

The last words the Tewksbury teen would have heard before he suffocated on Sept. 26, 1969, would have been his alleged killers taunting him by saying, "That will teach you not to mess with Marla," O'Reilly told a Middlesex Superior Court jury in the Michael Ferreira murder trial.

"John McCabe never had a chance," O'Reilly said.

Jury deliberations began Thursday afternoon and were to resume this morning.

During his closing argument on Thursday, O'Reilly told the jury that the 43-year-old cold case was cracked when one of Ferreira's co-defendants, Edward Allan Brown, now 60, of Londonderry, N.H., confessed to police, fingered his friends, and became one of the prosecution's key witnesses.

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"As callous as what they did, as horrible as what they did to John McCabe, maybe after 40 years of trying to ignore it, he (Brown) couldn't anymore," O'Reilly told the jury.

Ferreira, 58, of Salem, N.H., and Walter Shelley, 61, of Tewksbury, are both charged with murder. As part of a plea deal with prosecutors, Brown will plead guilty to manslaughter and serve no jail time in exchange for his testimony. Brown and Shelley were both 17 at the time of the murder, while Ferreira was 16.

"People make stupid damn mistakes when they are 16 years old, but they have to take responsibility for the acts they do," O'Reilly said.

But defense attorney Eric Wilson told the jury during his closing argument there is no forensic evidence that links Ferreira with the murder. Instead, Wilson told the jury McCabe was killed elsewhere by someone else and his body was dumped in the field.

Wilson argued that police overlooked or ignored other potential suspects, including a man who contacted two priests shortly after the McCabe murder claiming he had the teen's belt and that he used black gloves. Investigators would later learn black fibers were found on the tape on McCabe's eyes and mouth.

As for Brown, Wilson told the jury that police and prosecutors "fed" him information that fit their theory of the case, and out of fear, their theory became the last version of his story.

"This was not a fact-finding case, it was a fact-feeding case," Wilson said.

Prosecutors allege that McCabe was abducted by Ferreira, Brown and Shelley as he walked home from a school dance at the Knights of Columbus in Tewksbury to "teach him a lesson" for flirting with then-13-year-old Marla Shiner, Shelley's then-girlfriend and now-ex-wife.

The three friends drove McCabe to a vacant field in Lowell, used a rope to "hogtie" his ankles to his wrists to his neck, then taped his mouth and eyes shut. The trio then left while McCabe struggled to free himself. When the trio returned about an hour later, McCabe was dead.

A state medical examiner ruled McCabe died from asphyxiation by strangulation.

Despite an intense investigation in 1969, the McCabe murder became a cold case for four decades until police reopened the case in 2008 and began re-interviewing witnesses and suspects, O'Reilly said.

Two suspects from four decades ago were Ferreira and Shelley, but Brown wasn't on police radar until recently.

"Why would Brown implicate himself in a murder when he could have just blamed Ferreira and Shelley?" O'Reilly said.

Wilson told the jury that the defense-paid forensic pathologist testified McCabe was never hogtied based on the rope marks on the teen's body. When the body was found around 9:30 a.m. the following morning -- an estimated nine hours after his death -- his body was in rigor mortis and his legs were straight, not bent from being hogtied.

O'Reilly told the jury that if Brown was fed information about the case, including seeing crime-scene photos that show McCabe's body with his legs straight, "why would he create a scenario of his knees being up (hogtied) unless he was there?"

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