The Art of the Heist

Twenty-Six

On February 1, 1981, jury selection began in the Spinney-Webster murder trial. The proceedings were held at the old Norfolk County Courthouse in Dedham, an impressive nineteenth-century Greek Revival structure designed by renowned Massachusetts architect Solomon Willard.

Aside from its architectural provenance, the Dedham courthouse is perhaps best known for hosting the controversial murder trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-born immigrants and dedicated anarchists who were tried, convicted, and eventually executed in Dedham in 1927 for the armed robbery and murder of two pay clerks in South Braintree, Massachusetts. At the time, amid allegations of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct and accusations of anti-immigrant, anti-anarchist prejudice on the part of the jury, Sacco and Vanzetti’s executions were greeted with violent protests and work stoppages in cities around the world. Significant posttrial evidence including modern ballistic tests, revelations of mishandled evidence, recanted testimony, and a jailhouse confession to the crime suggest that the men were, in fact, railroaded to their deaths.

I was well aware of the history of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. That my contempt for authority had brought me to the same place as the two anarchists was a coincidence not lost on me as I entered the courthouse on the first morning of the trial. I could only hope the outcome of my trial would be more favorable than that half a century earlier.

Earle Cooley was as meticulous about jury selection as he was about every other aspect of the trial. There was controversy surrounding the selection process even before it began. Rumors of a feud involving Regan, Delahunt, Belotti, and Harrington had been making the rounds of the Boston media since the previous winter. Then, in October, WCVB, one of the local television stations, had aired an investigative news piece titled “Witnesses for Hire.” Doreen Weeks and Tommy Sperrazza were both featured prominently in the program, which focused on abuses in the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Paul Buckley, the special prosecutor in the reopened Spinney-Webster case, had fought to have the program kept off the air, arguing that it would make it nearly impossible for him to seat an impartial jury. A judge eventually allowed WCBV to air the program, but only after recommending that the judge in the Spinney-Webster case allow for extra challenges during the jury selection process. Both Buckley and Earle Cooley took full advantage of the allowance, painstakingly vetting each prospective juror. By the time the actual trial began, we had already been in the courtroom for nearly two weeks.

In his opening statement Paul Buckley outlined the state’s case against me. The prosecution wasn’t even going to attempt to prove that I had wielded the weapons that killed either of the two women. Instead, Buckley contended that I had ordered Sperrazza and Stokes to kill Spinney and Webster, giving the men exact instructions as to how to do so.

The motive Buckley outlined for the jury was shaky at best. After shooting DiVingo and Cirvinale, the prosecutor claimed, Sperrazza and Stokes panicked and brought the two women, both witnesses, to Doreen Weeks and Tommy Maher’s apartment in Quincy with the intention of killing them. But when their original attempts to stab the women to death failed to yield the lethal results that had hoped for, Sperrazza called me for advice. Afraid the women would be able to identify my voice, I ordered Stokes and Sperrazza to kill Karen Spinney and Susan Webster by stabbing them both in the head with a screwdriver. I then came to the apartment, helped transport the bodies to Northampton, and oversaw their burial.

The prosecution’s theory had several obvious flaws, the most problematic of which was the motive. In order to buy into Buckley’s version of events, the jury would have to believe that either Karen Spinney or Susan Webster could have recognized my voice over the telephone receiver. It seemed ridiculous to me, but I’d known jurors to overlook similar improbabilities. It would be my attorney’s job to make sure they didn’t.

In his initial remarks to the jury Earle Cooley focused on the credibility of the state’s main witnesses and the large number of inconsistencies in their various statements about the night of the murder. “This case,” Cooley told them, “will hinge on who you believe.” After the verdict in the Norfolk County Trust case, I was hopeful the Spinney-Webster jury would follow in the footsteps of their predecessors and choose not to believe Doreen Weeks and Tommy Sperrazza.

One of the first prosecution witnesses to testify was an old friend of mine from Milton named Clifford Kast. Cliffy and I had known each other since the sixth grade. He wasn’t the brightest guy, but he was sweet and likable. Like David Houghton, Cliffy was a legitimate working guy and only a peripheral member of my crew. He occasionally did small favors for me or my friends. Often this involved registering a vehicle-most likely a stolen one-in his name.

As it turned out, the 1967 Cadillac Stokes and Sperrazza were driving the night of the of the Spinney-Webster murders was registered and insured in Cliffy Kast’s name. Though Cliffy had registered a number of cars for me in the past, the Cadillac was not one of them. In fact, it was Sperrazza who had asked Cliffy to help him with the Caddy. Both Stokes and Sperrazza had accompanied Cliffy to get the car insured. Cliffy had told this to the police when they first questioned him about the vehicle, but it was not what they wanted to hear. By the time Cliffy testified before the grand jury he had changed his story, saying that he had registered the Cadillac at my behest and that I had accompanied him to do so.

That Cliffy had agreed to testify against me came as no surprise. He had always been an easy mark for bullies. Knowing what he’d most likely gone through with investigators, I felt sorry for him more than anything. But it wasn’t until he took the witness stand in the Dedham courtroom that I understood exactly what had happened.

As Cliffy settled into the dock on the morning of February 14, Paul Buckley looked on confidently. The prosecutor had no reason to expect any surprises. None of us did. All friendly witness are thoroughly vetted before testifying, and Kast was no exception. He and Buckley would have painstakingly reviewed his testimony the day before.

Buckley waited for Cliffy to finish taking his oath, then rose from his seat and approached the witness stand. “State your full name please,” the prosecutor said.

“Clifford T. Kast,” Cliffy replied.

“Where do you currently reside, Mr. Kast?” Buckley asked. It was a routine question, as were those to come.

“Emerson Road, Milton,” Cliffy answered.

“What is your relationship with the defendant, Myles Connor?” Buckley said, motioning in my direction.

Cliffy swallowed nervously. “Myles is a friend of mine.”

“And how long have you known Mr. Connor?”

“A long time. Since we were both twelve years old.”

Buckley nodded approvingly, then took a few steps back, like a pitcher preparing his windup. Clearly, all was going as planned. “In February of 1975, did Mr. Connor ask you to register a red 1967 Cadillac in your name as a favor to him?”

Cliffy swallowed hard, then glanced in my direction. He looked scared, really scared, like the kid I’d known in junior high.

“Please answer the question, Mr. Kast,” Buckley admonished him.

Cliffy ducked his head slightly, leaning toward the microphone in front of him. “No,” he said. His voice was barely audible.

This could not have been the answer Buckley was expecting, and for a moment he appeared not to have heard it. He turned to the jury with a satisfied look on his face. Then, finally understanding what Cliffy had said, he whipped his head around and stared incredulously at the witness stand. “Do you need me to repeat the question, Mr. Kast?” he asked.

Cliffy shook his head vigorously, his act of defiance making him suddenly brave. “No,” he said. “I heard you the first time. Myles didn’t ask me to register the Cadillac for him. Tommy Sperrazza and John Stokes were there. But not Myles.”

I could see Buckley struggling to control himself. “May I remind you of your testimony to the grand jury on this matter?”

“I remember exactly what I told the grand jury: that Myles asked me to register the car. That was what Clougherty told me to say,” Cliffy said, referring to John Clougherty, one of the FBI agents who’d investigated the case. “He gave me a form and said, ‘Read it, this is what I want you to say,’ quote, unquote. He said I’d be charged as an accomplice if I didn’t.”

Buckley’s face was red. “Are you saying you lied to the grand jury?”

Cliffy nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Perjury in a capital case is a serious crime. With Cliffy’s admission, the judge immediately ordered Kast’s testimony stopped so that he could retain a lawyer. He also ordered Cliffy held at the Charles Street Jail pending his reappearance in court. Within minutes, Cliffy was handcuffed and hauled out of the courtroom.

Unfortunately for Cliffy, all of this took place on a Friday, which meant he would be spending the entire weekend behind bars. Two days and three nights in the Charles Street Jail could make even the most hardened criminal do desperate things, and I fully expected Cliffy to change his mind over the weekend. But much to my surprise, he didn’t budge.

Buckley was cleary infuriated by Cliffy’s change of heart, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Even after repeated badgering by the prosecutor, Cliffy continued to insist that it was Sperrazza, not me, who’d gone with him to register the Cadillac.

During Earle Cooley’s cross-examination, Cliffy told jurors that he had been pressured to implicate me by Boston police officers, and later by Suffolk County ADA Philip Beauchesne who, Cliffy claimed, warned him, “If you don’t cooperate with us, I have enough evidence to indict you for being an accessory to murder.”

Recounting his meeting with the ADA, Cliffy admitted, “It scared the hell out of me.”

He also repeated his claim that FBI agent John Clougherty had told him exactly what to say to the grand jury.

As Cliffy left the stand I allowed myself to glance over at the jurors. I wasn’t expecting sympathy from them; considering the brutal nature of the murders, sympathy was too much to ask for, especially so early in the trial. But I was looking for something that would give me hope-distaste for Buckley, or at the very least skepticism about his methods. Much to my dismay, I saw neither. It was going to be a long trial, I thought.

Next on the prosecution’s witness list was Doreen Weeks. Weeks gave a wrenching account of seeing Susan Webster and Karen Spinney with Stokes and Sperrazza on the night of the murders. As she and Tommy Maher were leaving their apartment to go to the Beachcomber, Weeks recalled, she met Stokes, Sperrazza, and the two women coming down the stairs to her apartment. The men told Weeks and Maher that they needed to use the apartment for a few hours.

‘The girls were handcuffed and they were trying to get away,” Weeks testified. “The girl Tommy Sperrazza was with was holding on to the banister, trying to get away from him.”

Instead of attempting to help the women, Weeks and Maher continued on their way to the bar. But after spending some time at the Beachcomber, Weeks recalled, she felt sick and wanted to go back to the apartment. She called once, she told the jury, and spoke to Stokes, who told her to call back later. When she called the second time, she claimed, I answered the phone.

“Connor picked up the phone and started arguing with me,” Weeks testified, “that Tommy Maher was supposed to make the calls every hour to the apartment and I was not to make any.”

When she finally returned to the apartment several hours later, she said, there was blood spattered on the walls and on the bathroom sink and mirror, the sheets had been stripped from her bed and the mattress stained with blood, and the telephone was broken and bloody as well.

Weeks’s testimony, especially her claim that I had answered the phone at her apartment, was absolutely essential to the prosecution. In his cross-examination Earle Cooley set out to discredit Weeks by pointing out to the jury the many inconsistencies in her interviews with investigators. Key to Cooley’s defense strategy were taped recordings of conversations Weeks had with federal agents regarding my involvement in a number of crimes. It was during one of these interviews that Weeks told investigators that she had seen me kill my old friend Ozzy DePriest with an overdose of heroin and that I had set fire to the apartment of John Stokes’s girlfriend, killing her and her child. The recordings hurt Doreen Weeks’s credibility and made it absolutely clear that the federal agents interviewing Weeks knew full well that all three of my purported victims were alive and well and that Weeks was lying.

“Buckley’s going to fight tooth and nail to have those tapes excluded,” Earle Cooley warned me.

As Cooley predicted, the prosecutor objected vigorously to the recordings being played for the jury. Incredibly, the presiding judge agreed with him. The tapes, he ruled, would not be allowed into evidence. Additionally, the judge ruled to severely limit my attorney’s questioning of Doreen Weeks in regard to the benefits she’d received and the money she’d stolen while in the Federal Witness Protection Program.

The judge’s decisions were a huge blow to my defense. But Cooley pressed on as best he could with his strategy of discrediting Doreen Weeks, grilling her on her efforts to win a commutation of her then-boyfriend Jimmy Stokes’s life sentence and on the numerous inconsistencies in her interviews with various investigators, including contradictory statements she’d made concerning whom she’d seen bringing the girls into the apartment and what exactly she had told Norfolk County District Attorney Delahunt during their first meeting.

An article in the next morning’s Boston Globe remarked on Weeks’s testimony, saying Cooley “frequently drew the same response, ‘I don’t remember.’”

Earle Cooley had made his point, but whether Weeks’s foggy memory and the inconsistencies in her story were enough to sway the jury in my favor was anyone’s guess.

The last of the major prosecution witnesses to testify was Tommy Sperrazza. By then Sperrazza had been convicted of killing both Susan Webster and Karen Spinney, and he freely confessed on the stand to having done so. He had also admitted to the prison murder of John Stokes and to fatally shooting Donald Brown.

As Sperrazza recalled in gruesome detail the events of the night of the murder and the subsequent burial of the women’s bodies, the entire courtroom-spectators, jurors, and court officers alike-listened in rapt silence. Many kept their heads down while Sperrazza testified, unable to look at him. Others could not look away.

He spoke calmly and quietly, recounting the shooting outside the Roslindale bar and his subsequent decision to take the two young women to Doreen Weeks’s basement apartment. Once there, Sperrazza told jurors, he handcuffed Susan Webster in the bedroom and Karen Spinney in the bathroom. It was at this point, Sperrazza claimed, that he and Stokes then called me for advice. Supposedly afraid the women would recognize my voice, I ordered Stokes and Sperrazza to kill them, telling them that I was on my way to the apartment.

Sperrazza’s description of what happened next was chilling:

“We had weapons-guns-which we couldn’t use in the apartment,” he testified, “so we decided on stabbing them to death… I got a steak knife… Stokes had the screwdriver. I went in the bedroom where Susan Webster was and sat down beside her. She was lying down… I put the pillow over her face and stabbed her repeatedly.

“I walked out of the bedroom… I seen Miss Spinney stumbling from the bathroom to the kitchen-living room area. She was bleeding. She was mumbling. I took Miss Spinney, laid her on the kitchen floor, and stabbed her. Myles,” Sperrazza added, “was right there. Then I went in and took Miss Webster off the bed, put her on the kitchen floor, beside Karen. They were both alive. I was instructed how to kill them.”

Here he put his hand to his temple, pointing to the spot on his own head where, he claimed, I’d indicated the women should be stabbed. It was a dramatic gesture, especially coming as it did on the heels of such shocking testimony. Not a person in the courtroom could have failed to imagine the impact of the screwdriver on each woman’s temple. More than one of the jurors winced. Several glanced in my direction.

Earle Cooley did his best to discredit Sperrazza, questioning him about his cooperation with federal prosecutors, eventually getting Sperrazza to admit that he’d agreed to become a witness in order to keep his wife and mother-in-law from being prosecuted in connection with the Brown murder and that he himself had been transferred to a federal prison and into the witness protection program. Cooley also reminded jurors that Sperrazza had never once mentioned my name during his own murder trial. But Sperrazza had clearly been expecting this question and was quick with a response, claiming he had made a deal to keep my name out of the original trial and that in exchange I had promised to help him escape from prison once I was out on parole.

That I had overseen the burial of the bodies of Susan Webster and Karen Spinney was essential to the prosecution’s case against me. Earle Cooley and I both knew that this was also where Buckley had the best chance of winning over the jury. The fact that I had led Delahunt to the grave did not look good for me, especially since I was certain Sperrazza would never admit to the actual deal he and I had made with each other.

But by far the most damning piece of evidence to suggest that I might have had a hand in disposing of the bodies was the entry I’d made in the register book at Shaw’s Motel clearly stating my name and my mother’s Milton address. The entry and signature, penned in green ink and dated February 22, the night after the Roslindale shooting, provided definitive proof that I had been in Northampton around the time the bodies were buried. Sperrazza even went so far as to say that I had transported the bodies to Northampton and that my mother had come along, not knowing that the dead women were in the trunk of the car she was riding in.

There was one major flaw in Buckley’s theory: according to Sperrazza, the actual burial of the bodies had taken place the following night, around midnight on February 23. In fact, my band had backed up James Cotton in front of a full house at the Beachcomber that night. But Sperrazza and Buckley had constructed an answer for this as well. When confronted with my alibi by Earle Cooley, Sperrazza claimed that I had driven to Northampton immediately following my gig to help him and Stokes dispose of the bodies, a trip that at the time took nearly three hours to make.

There’s no way the jury’ll buy that bullshit,” Earle Cooley assured me when the prosecution had rested its case.

Indeed, the number of logical flaws in the prosecution’s version of events seemed overwhelming. But I was still worried. I’d been in enough courtrooms to understand the power of emotion in swaying jurors. Few crimes were more emotionally charged than the murders of Karen Spinney and Susan Webster.

Cooley wasn’t going to let my pessimism bring him down. A fighter to the core, he wasted no time in attacking the prosecution’s case and the testimony of their witnesses. The first person to take the stand in my defense was Joe Santo. Santo recalled Doreen Weeks’s visit to the Norfolk Correctional Institution in the summer of 1978 and her attempt to involve him in whatever deal she was making with authorities. Santo also disputed an earlier claim made by Sperrazza that I had borrowed his car in order to transport the bodies of Karen Spinney and Susan Webster to Northampton, saying he had been in Texas at the time, visiting his godchild.

Next to testify on my behalf were Larry Faherty, a sound man and audio engineer at the Beachcomber, and my band manager, Al Dotoli. Both men told the jury that I had been onstage at the club performing with James Cotton on the night Sperrazza claimed to have buried the bodies of Susan Webster and Karen Spinney.

Next, Cooley called on Boston police detective Robert Hudson. Hudson had interviewed both Sperrazza and Weeks regarding my participation in the murders. Under questioning by Cooley the detective recalled that both witnesses had made statements to him that were different from their sworn testimony in the case. According to Hudson, Doreen Weeks had an especially difficult time remembering the events of the night of the murder, making varying claims about who exactly had appeared at her apartment and at what time. Two other Boston detectives, as well as two FBI agents, also testified to inconsistencies in the statements made to them by both Weeks and Sperrazza.

Finally, Earle Cooley called four Walpole inmates, all of whom had spent time with Sperrazza on the prison’s Block Ten, to the stand. All four men testified to having discussed the murders of Susan Webster and Karen Spinney with Sperrazza, three of them before the bodies had even been discovered. All testified that although Sperrazza had bragged openly about killing the women, he never once mentioned my name in connection with the murders.

I desperately wanted to take the stand in my own defense; in particular, I was eager to explain to the jury how my name came to be in the register at Shaw’s Motel. But Earle Cooley was adamant that I not testify. His opinion was not unprecedented. Defense attorneys often resist putting their clients on the stand, knowing the risks involved in opening them up to cross-examination. In the end, Cooley’s arguments won me over and I agreed not to testify.

By the time the seven-week trial concluded, sixty-five witnesses had taken the stand, many of them giving contradictory evidence. It was an incredible amount of information for a jury to absorb.

“It’s insane,” Earle Cooley told the jury in his final argument. “The logic of the situation, as alleged by the government, has to come right up to you and scream, ‘It can’t be!’” He urged the panel not to convict me on the word of “a five-time killer who’s been paid for his testimony” and that of a “proven liar.”

“Myles Connor should not be whipsawed in a vicious, knockdown, dragged-out battle between law enforcement agencies,” Cooley concluded.

For his part, Paul Buckley was determined to paint me as a criminal mastermind and skilled manipulator-albeit one who recorded his name in a motel register while on a trip to dispose of two dead bodies.

“Who’s the schemer here?” he asked the jury. “Who’s the one putting it all together? Myles J. Connor, the leader of the band.”

Though I had my suspicions throughout the trial that most of the jurors were not exactly fond of me, my first real confirmation of this fact didn’t come until after the trial itself had concluded. On Thursday night, March 19, after thirteen hours of deliberations, one of the jurors, a college student from Quincy named Charles Graham, asked to be excused from the case. Earlier in the proceedings Graham had complained to the judge that his fellow jurors were discussing the case as the evidence was presented, something that is strictly forbidden under the rules of the court. In requesting to be excused, Graham once again stated that this was the case, saying he found it “impossible to work with this jury and that this jury was acting emotionally and not on the basis of reason and was not following the judge’s instructions.”

Graham’s petition was granted and a new juror chosen from among the alternates. At the judge’s instruction, the panel began their deliberations anew. Within hours they had reached a unanimous decision.

There is nothing as nerve-wracking as waiting for a jury to return their verdict, especially when you suspect, as I did, that the decision will not be a favorable one. As I waited out the hours in my holding cell on the second floor of the courthouse I thought about the two anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, who must have known what awaited them long before the jury returned. At least, I reminded myself, I did not face the noose, as they had-though at the time death seemed in many ways preferable to a guilty verdict.

It was not the idea of spending my life behind bars that terrified me, but the knowledge that, if convicted, I would never be able to overcome the monstrous reputation Paul Buckley had so carefully constructed for me. Everyone, including many of those who loved me, would believe me capable of ordering the violent deaths of two young women, of callously leaving their bodies to rot in an unmarked grave, and of forcing my own mother to ride along with the bloody corpses. These were the thoughts that kept me from sleeping that last night in Dedham.

They were the same thoughts that accompanied me to the courtroom on the morning of March 20, 1981, when the judge finally called us back.

I have little memory of the actual moment when the guilty verdict was announced, but those who were there that day, including the Boston Globe reporter who covered the case, noted that I appeared deeply shaken. I do recall the hush that descended over the courtroom when the foreman opened his mouth to speak, and the sound of choked sobs coming from the front row of the spectators’ section, where the parents of Karen Spinney were sitting. There is nothing that can mitigate that kind of pain, and I certainly do not begrudge the Spinneys their grief.

Immediately after the verdict was read, the judge sentenced me to life in the state prison for the murder of Susan Webster, announcing that my sentences in the second murder and the kidnappings would be imposed at a later date. With that, I was handcuffed, taken from the courtroom, and driven under heavy guard to Walpole prison.