The Art of the Heist

Twenty-Eight

In late August 1984 Earle Cooley came to see me in Walpole with good news: the Massachusetts Supreme Court had set aside my convictions in the Spinney-Webster case, citing the dismissal of Charles Graham from the jury and the limitations placed by the presiding judge on my attorney’s cross-examination of Doreen Weeks.

Cooley was elated. “We’re going to win this one this time around,” he assured me. “I promise.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” I told him.

With the verdict overturned, my life sentence was vacated as well. In October, pending a new trial, I was released from prison on $25,000 cash bail. There was little time for celebrating. The retrial was scheduled to begin in early February, giving us less than four months to prepare my defense. This time around, Cooley wouldn’t be pulling any punches.

Paul Buckley, the special prosecutor assigned to the original case, had been replaced by an assistant United States attorney Paul Healy Jr. The state’s case remained unchanged, relying heavily, as it had in the original trial, on the testimonies of Doreen Weeks and Tommy Sperrazza.

On February 3, 1984, the Spinney-Webster retrial got under way.

Doreen Weeks was one of the first prosecution witnesses to take the stand. The four years since her last court appearance had not been kind to her. Her skin was ashen, her hair disheveled. She slumped in her chair, struggling to keep her eyes open, while Healy questioned her about the night of the murders. Watching her fight to keep herself together on the stand, I almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

Earle Cooley’s brutal cross-examination of her began on February 14. I couldn’t have asked for a better Valentine’s Day present. Confronted with the recording of her 1979 interview with federal agents, Weeks had no choice but to acknowledge having told them that I had murdered Ozzy DePriest and set fire to the apartment where John Stokes’s girlfriend and baby were living. She also admitted to the theft of $22,000 in American Express traveler’s checks while in the witness protection program, to having voluntarily lived with John Stokes while he was on the run in 1977, and to later having approached law enforcement officials with the intention of winning Stokes’s freedom.

Sperrazza testified after Doreen Weeks, repeating the story he’d told jurors in the original trial. Earle Cooley once again hammered at Sperrazza’s credibility, questioning him on the various deals he’d made with state and federal prosecutors. This time around, Cooley also paid close attention to the issue of my motive, grilling Sperrazza on his claim that I had ordered the women killed out of fear that they would recognize my voice, forcing him to acknowledge that I had never actually met either of the victims.

Having learned his lesson the first time around, Earle Cooley was taking nothing for granted in the second trial. Cooley had assembled a huge list of defense witnesses, many of whom testified to the glaring inconsistencies in the various statements Doreen Weeks had made regarding my involvement in the murders. Norfolk County Assistant District Attorney Robert Banks told jurors that it had taken nearly a year of questioning for Weeks to use my name in connection with what had happened in her apartment on the night of the killings. Assistant Massachusetts Attorney General Stephen Delinsky testified that Weeks had admitted lying to him in July 1978 when she told him she had mentioned my involvement in the murders to Bill Delahunt. Joe Santo again told the jury that Weeks had come to see him at Norfolk prison to ask for his help in implicating me.

“She told me, ‘The agents I’ve been talking to want him bad and they’ll do anything to get him,’” Santo testified.

In addition, Cooley produced numerous transcripts of conversations Weeks had had with authorities, all of which were riddled with inconsistencies. In one, a July 1979 interview at Boston police headquarters at which two detectives and the police commissioner were present, Weeks insisted that in the weeks before the murders I was “constantly making up plans for the murder of the girls,” an allegation that not only was ridiculous considering the fact that I didn’t even know who Karen Spinney or Susan Webster were at the time, but also completely undermined the state’s case against me by suggesting that the killings had somehow been premeditated. Another transcript recorded Weeks’s response to being informed by federal agents that three of my purported victims, Ozzy DePriest and John Stokes’s girlfriend and child, were all alive and well: “That’s weird,” was all Weeks could think to say.

To refute Sperrazza’s claim that I had been with him and Stokes in Northampton on the night the women were buried, Cooley called a number of witnesses, including Al Dotoli, Lenny Baker, blues singer James Cotton, and Beachcomber owner James McGettrick, to testify that I had been onstage at the Beachcomber in Quincy, nearly three hours’ drive from the grave site, from 11:45 P.M. on February 23 to 2:00 A.M. on the twenty-fourth. Two employees from Maison Robert, the Boston restaurant where I’d taken my mother to dinner on the night in question, also testified to my whereabouts.

Another witness, Richard Duarte, a librarian and unofficial legal adviser at Walpole prison, testified that Sperrazza had come to him in the days before the bodies of Susan Webster and Karen Spinney were found, seeking advice. Duarte told the jury that Sperrazza, who said he’d been talking to police about the case, had been especially concerned about what would happen to him if he were found out to be lying. “He told me, ‘Connor was not there, he had nothing to do with the murders,’” Duarte testified.

One of the final defense witnesses to testify was Ozzy DePriest. Determined to leave no doubt in the jury’s mind as to Doreen Weeks’s ability to fabricate, Earle Cooley had decided to bring Ozzy into the courtroom to prove the obvious: that I had not murdered him, as Weeks claimed I had. Ozzy, who was working on a lobster boat out of New Bedford at the time, was none too pleased to have been hauled away from his paying job and into court, and he wasn’t shy about voicing his feelings on the matter.

In fact, when confronted with the gruesome details of his murder as described by Weeks, he was downright belligerent.

“Is it true,” Earle Cooley asked, “that in the winter of 1978 the defendant, Myles Connor, injected you with a fatal dose of heroin while you were in Ms. Weeks’s apartment in Quincy?”

Ozzy snorted. “Absolutely not.”

“And is it true,” my attorney continued, “that he stabbed you and then wrapped your body in a sheet?”

“Of course not!” Ozzy barked. “And I don’t appreciate being dragged all the way up here just to state the obvious.”

Earle Cooley had convinced me not to take the stand in the first trial, but I was determined to plead my case this time around. It’s hard to say how much weight, if any, my testimony carried with the jury. That I was innocent was what they expected me to say, no matter what. But I felt compelled to testify, if only for myself. When I first took the oath I was literally shaking with pent-up frustration. Looking the jury in the eyes and telling them I had had nothing to do with the murders of Karen Spinney and Susan Webster was one of the most emotionally charged moments of my life.

Cooley had warned me that Paul Healy’s cross-examination would be grueling, and it was: the prosecutor questioned me for over four hours. But I had waited so long for the opportunity to defend myself that, far from being intimidated, I was relieved to be able to set the record straight, especially where the register book from Shaw’s Motel was concerned.

“Do you really think I would have signed my name in bright green ink if I’d known what Stokes and Sperrazza were doing up there?” I countered when Healy asked me about the register.

When he had finished with his interrogation, Healy turned to face me one last time. “Sir, you wouldn’t lie to this jury to avoid being convicted of two first-degree murders, would you?”

It was the question I had been hoping he would ask, and I responded forcefully. “Sir, I wouldn’t take this oath and lie for anybody.”

In his closing argument Earle Cooley once again attacked the logic behind the prosecution’s case, saying, “The motive ascribed to Connor is so ridiculous as to require that this whole case be thrown out on that alone.”

Paul Healy’s assessment of his case was perhaps even less optimistic than that of my attorney. In fact, an observer walking into the courtroom for the first time during closing arguments would have had trouble telling whether Healy was working for the prosecution or the defense. Referring to Tommy Sperrazza, Healy called his star witness “the lowest form of human trash.” Refuting the claim that my signature in the motel register indicated that I had not been trying to hide anything, Healy declared, “The burden on the commonwealth is to prove him guilty, not to prove he’s smart.”

“As nonsensical as it might be,” the prosecutor concluded, summing up his case for the jury, “that’s the way it happened.”

“Not exactly a ringing endorsement for a guilty verdict,” my attorney gleefully remarked as Healy made his way back to the defense table.

“No,” I commented, scanning the faces of the jurors, trying to read the panel’s mood. “But we were surprised once before.”

Despite Earle Cooley’s repeated assurances, I was not at all confident that the outcome of the second trial would be any different than that of the first. After the jury left the courtroom on March 2 to begin their deliberations, I went back to my mother’s house in Milton to do some deliberating of my own.

My mother, who had been suffering from emphysema for some time, had gone into the hospital just a few days earlier, and the place was disconcertingly quiet without her. Her prognosis was not good, and the thought that she might die while I was in prison and that I could be denied the opportunity to say my good-byes to her only added to my fear that I would be convicted once again.

Determined not to leave my fate in the jury’s hands, I made up my mind to skip out on my final court appearance. If the jury voted to acquit, I’d be looking at a month or two for bail-jumping charges. On the other hand, if they found me guilty once again, I’d be going back to prison for the rest of my life. It was a gamble I was willing to take.

With my decision made, I drove to the hospital to see my mother. I had never before involved her in any of my illegal activities. But as sick as she was, I felt I had to tell her about my plan to jump bail.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, pulling a chair up next to her bed, laying my hand on her frail arm.

“Not so good,” she replied, laboring over each word.

“You look good,” I told her. It was a lie, and we both knew it.

“No, I don’t,” she corrected me.

I hesitated for a moment, listening to the mechanical ebb and flow of air going in and out of her lungs. “I’m not going back to Walpole,” I told her at last.

“Of course not,” she wheezed. “Everyone can see you didn’t kill those girls.”

“Maybe,” I offered. “But I’m not waiting around to find out.”

She shook her head, then opened her mouth to speak.

“Don’t try to talk me out of this,” I told her.

To her credit, she knew me well enough not to. But I could tell she wasn’t happy with my decision.

“I’ll come see you,” I promised her. “No matter what.”

The very next day, on March 3, 1985, after only eight hours of deliberation, the jury of six men and six women found me not guilty of all the charges against me, including the murders and kidnapping of Susan Webster and Karen Spinney, and two counts of accessory after the fact to the shootings of Ralph Cirvinale and Anthony DiVingo.

The verdict was read at 1:13 P.M. in Norfolk Superior Court at the Dedham Court House, but by then I was over sixty miles away. The night before, after leaving the hospital, I’d driven down to a friend’s house in Dartmouth, just south of New Bedford. It wasn’t until that evening that the news first reached me.

Any reasonable man would have turned himself in at that point, and I suppose that’s what I should have done. But I truly couldn’t help myself. By then running was second nature to me. I knew skipping out like that made me look guilty. But I also knew my actions made little difference one way or another. I would never be able to shake the fact that I’d been convicted of the murders the first time around, no matter what I did.

My plan was to leave Massachusetts, and perhaps even the country, but for the moment I was reluctant to stray too far from Boston. My mother was getting worse by the day, and my sister, Patsy, and I both knew she didn’t have long to live. Still, we were both taken off guard when, just nine days after the Spinney-Webster verdict was announced, she passed away.

“She’s at Malloy’s,” Patsy told me when I called her to find out the details of the funeral and visitation. “I won’t expect you to come, given the circumstances.”

“Don’t worry,” I told my sister. “I’ll be there.” I had given my word that I would visit my mother, and it was a promise I was determined to keep, no matter what the circumstances.

“The cops’ll be watching the place,” Patsy warned me. “They’ve had a couple of guys on our house since you took off, and a couple more over at Oak Road.”

“I’m coming to see her,” I said.

When I was growing up Milton was the kind of town where everyone, at least within their social stratum, knew everyone else. This was especially true for the Irish community, where the average number of children per family virtually guaranteed a connection to someone in the clan. The Malloys, who owned the funeral home, were such a family. As chance would have it, I had gone to school with one of their sons.

Tommy Malloy was a good kid, and I knew I’d be able to trust him. I called him as soon as I hung up with Patsy.

“Sorry about your ma,” he said. “You know we’ll take good care of her.”

“I’m sure you will,” I agreed. “But here’s the thing: I don’t think I’ll be able to come to the service tomorrow. I was wondering if we could arrange a private viewing.”

Morticians are on par with priests and psychiatrists when it comes being privy to people’s dirty little secrets. I’m sure mine wasn’t the first request of this sort Tommy had received. “Sure, Myles,” he said, without batting an eye. “You have something in mind?”

“As a matter of fact,” I told him, “I do.”

The next evening Tommy and I met behind Giuliani’s Garage in Quincy. With the cops watching the funeral home, I figured there was only one way for me to get inside without being seen: the way all of us eventually make our final trip to the mortuary, in the back of a hearse.

Tommy had gone all out for me. He’d brought his father’s brand-new Cadillac Superior, the best car in their fleet. In the back of the hearse was a magnificent mahogany casket, the wood polished to a high sheen. I highly doubt I’ll get that rich a send-off the next time around.

“Ready?” he asked, hopping out of the driver’s seat, opening the Cadillac’s rear doors.

I nodded, then climbed up into the back of the hearse. It had been my idea to make the trip into the funeral home inside the coffin. But now, faced with the reality of getting into the casket, I involuntarily balked.

“Don’t worry,” Tommy said, seeing me hesitate. “I won’t close it all the way.”

It was a meager consolation, but his reassurance gave me the confidence I needed. I slid into the casket and felt myself enveloped by the soft satin lining. Suddenly an unsettling thought occurred to me. “This isn’t hers, is it?” I asked.

Tommy leaned into the hearse and put his hand on the lid. “Whose?”

“My mother’s,” I said, swallowing hard.

Tommy shook his head. “Nah. This one’s for tomorrow’s burial,” he said. Then he lowered the lid, leaving me in utter darkness.

It wasn’t far from Giuliani’s to the funeral home, a ten minute drive at most, but they were some of the longest ten minutes of my life. Despite their plush appearance, coffins are surprisingly uncomfortable. By the time we reached Malloy’s I had come to the conclusion that cremation was the best option for me. As we turned into the driveway I lifted my head slightly and peered out through the narrow opening Tommy had left for me, catching a glimpse of the unmarked car parked across the street and the two plainclothesmen in the front seat.

We pulled to a stop by the morgue doors and Tommy cut the engine. Lifting the coffin’s lid myself, I clambered out at last.

“Visitation ended half an hour ago,” Tommy told me, glancing at his watch as he hastily ushered me inside the home and through the embalming room. “You should have the place to yourself by now.” We paused at the swinging doors that led to the viewing room. “Take as much time as you need,” he said, leaving me on my own.

I waited a moment, listening to Tommy’s fading footsteps as he disappeared back into the bowels of the building, readying myself in some small way for what I was about to do. Then I put my hand on the double doors and pushed through.

I was prepared to encounter death on the other side; what I had not expected was the living. The sight of a man standing on the far side of the viewing room caught me entirely off guard. For a moment, seeing the blue uniform I’d watched my father put on so many times, I thought he was a ghost.

“Hello, Myles,” he said, raising his hand, tipping his hat slightly.

“Hugh?” I said, recognizing one of my father’s old friends from the Milton Police Force.

Hugh glanced at my mother’s open casket. “You go on and say your good-byes,” he said, moving toward the door. “As far as I’m concerned, you were never here.”

He was gone before I had a chance to thank him.

Finally alone, I made my way to my mother’s side. Physically, my mother had never been a large person, but now, robbed of her indomitable personality, she seemed unnaturally small and frail. I bent down and slipped my arms around her tiny body, feeling the two sharp wings of her shoulder blades against my palms, cradling her for a moment, as she had no doubt cradled me on countless occasions.

It was without question the darkest moment of my life. Even so, I took some small comfort in the fact that my mother had lived to see me acquitted of the murders. If she had not, I might not have been able to live with myself.

On July 10, 1985, I was at the house on Oak Road with my daughter, Kim, and my son, Myles III. The house, which had been up for sale since my mother’s death, had finally sold, and we were there clearing out the last of her furnishings, including my vast collection, which I was taking to the house of another family member.

To tell you the truth, I was half expecting the cops to show up. Just the day before, one of the neighbors had walked by while I was sitting on the porch. I had a good four months’ growth of beard at the time. But though the shock of red facial hair hid my features, it knew it did little to disguise my identity.

I was inside when the cruisers pulled up, and I got a glimpse of them through the front window: at least a dozen marked cars blocking the street; and a phalanx of cops, some wearing state police uniforms, others in Boston PD blues.

As the men moved to surround the house I bolted for the back door, flying out the steps and into the yard. With little time and few options, I headed for the tool shed at the back of the garden, wriggling into the cramped crawl space beneath the shed’s floorboards. It was an uncomfortable spot, and not only because it was small and damp. Years earlier, after the Tijuana incident, I’d stored several leftover bundles of dynamite under the shed. Now I found myself literally nose to nose with the explosives.

Holding my breath, I peered out through one of the narrow openings in the shed’s cinder-block foundation. I could see at least a dozen pairs of boots fanning across the yard.

“The shed!” someone called. “I saw him heading for the shed.”

Within seconds I was surrounded. I heard the click of a safety and turned my head to see a state trooper peering in through the foundation gap, his gun pointing right at me.

“Just like old times, isn’t it, Myles?” the man said, grinning slightly.

That October, with Marty Leppo once again representing me, I pled guilty to the bail-jumping charge in Norfolk Superior Court. Like Earle Cooley, Marty was optimistic about my sentence. Arguing that I had already spent over four years in prison for the Spinney-Webster murder, Marty urged the judge to be lenient. But his pleas fell on deaf ears.

On Halloween I was sentenced to a year in the Norfolk County Jail, the maximum term allowable.