Unsolved: Worcester

It's the middle of the summer.  Worcester. 2004. On July 18, just after 2 a.m., Andre Edmonds is shot in the chest and killed outside of the Lakeside Avenue apartment complex in Worcester's Columbus Park neighborhood. A month later, shortly after midnight on August 19, Sal Lopez is shot in the stomach and killed while sitting in a parked car with a friend on Hawley Street. Police believe the murde...

It's early in the morning, around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, October 12, 1982.  A crew of Providence & Worcester railroad workers are on the Boston & Maine railroad tracks that run alongside Interstate 290 expressway and Crescent Street in Worcester. As the workers make their way along the tracks, heading in the direction of Lincoln Square, they discover the naked body of 24-year-old Ethel Bosworh under t...

It's just before 2 a.m. on September 21, 2008. A fight that started at a nearby house party has spilled into the street at the corner of North Ashland and Dix streets. In the middle of the escalating brawl, William Smith, a 19-year-old Becker College freshman, is slashed on the arm with a knife. Moments later, as the chaos continues, William is struck again. A knife has been driven through his che...

It's Sunday, July 15, 1973. At around 3 p.m., the body of 56-year-old John Lund is pulled from under the rubble.  John marks the tenth victim from a July 11 fire that destroyed the five-story rooming house at 728 Main Street. It took demolition workmen more than 72 hours to recover John's body from the debris. The fire was Worcester's deadliest in its history. And officials believed from the start...

July 11, 1973. It's described as "the worst night ever" in Worcester's Main South neighborhood. Just before 3 a.m., at the back of a rooming house at 728 Main Street, an arsonist sets a fire on the second floor of the five-story building's wooden porch.  The fire quickly spreads, engulfing the dozens of one-bedroom apartments and the tenants that live in them. 10 tenants died in the fire. 29 peopl...

It's Monday, June 15, 1992 and summer has started early in Worcester. It's around 12:45 p.m.. Temperatures have reached a high of 75 degrees. Worcester's public schools are already dismissed for summer vacation and Main Street is buzzing.  Children and adults alike are outside in Worcester's Main South neighborhood enjoying the sunny weather, completely unaware of the dozen or so Worcester police...

It's 2:15 in the afternoon on Wednesday, June 5, 2019. Temperatures have peaked, reaching nearly 80 degrees on an overcast day in Worcester.  Police are called to Early's towing on Park Avenue. A van had been towed to their lot minutes before. The smell coming from the van, and the hundreds of flies coming out of the van, convinced Early's staff to call the WPD. When police arrived, an officer cli...

You won't find the name Travis Monroe listed among the Worcester Police Department's unresolved homicide cases. On the morning of October 1, 2006, Travis' body was found lying in the road on Fales Street near the corner of Gunnarson Road in Worcester's Burncoat neighborhood. Travis' death certificate states the immediate cause of his death was blunt impact to his head with skull fractures and brai...

Unsolved: Worcester returns for Season 5 on Tuesday, June 13.  The penultimate season will shine a light on 10 unsolved murder cases, including the unusual circumstances surrounding the death of 17-year-old Travis Monroe in 2006, a two-part episode special on the 50th anniversary of Worcester's deadliest fire, and our first look at the sinister acts of the Main South Woodsman nearly 20 years later...

In today's special episode, we have the great opportunity of speaking with Bob Ward, reporter for Boston 25 News and host of New England's Unsolved.  Bob has been awarded multiple Boston/New England Emmy awards and a Massachusetts Associated Press Award during his extensive career.  Bob joined Boston 25 in 1996 and launched New England's Unsolved in early 1999. The show briefly ran as a podcast in...

It's the oldest unsolved murder case on file with the Worcester Police Department Detective Unit. March 11, 1951. 20-year-old Irish immigrant Sean Goggin is gunned down inside the entrance of a home on Fairhaven Road in Worcester's Burncoat neighorhood. Two men in trench coats, one wearing a handkerchief to cover his face, fired three shots into the Fairhaven Road home, with one bullet striking Se...

What would you do if someone sent you a text message of a photo of the corpse of a family member or loved one? That's what happened to Carmen Rivera on Easter Sunday 2009. Carmen was on her way to Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester when she received a photo of her son, 25-year-old Luis Rosario, dead on a gurney at the hospital. Luis had been shot twice in the chest outside of a house party on Ham...

Walter Palmer climbed one flight of stairs to the second floor of an apartment building at 16 Millbury Street in Worcester's Green Island Neighborhood. It's Saturday evening, August 5,1989, Palmer was surprising his friend John Riley.  The door to John's studio apartment was locked, so Palmer used his spare key. When he opened the apartment door, Palmer stood there in shock.   John Riley sat lifel...

It's the middle of the summer. Worcester, 1987. 30-year-old Patricia Evans has just returned to the city after spending a month in a detox center in Springfield.  For over five years now, Patricia has been back and forth, in and out of treatment centers across the state. The constant battle with her addiction to drugs had taken its toll on the young mother of four. But leaving detox this time, the...

It's around 2:15 a.m. on August 1, 2003.  Worcester's Main Street bars and clubs have closed for the night.  Kwaku Osei Owusu and four of his friends pile into his car parked at the corner of Portland Street and Franklin Street. A sports car pulls up suddenly next to Kwaku's black sedan. Someone in the sports car points a gun in the direction of Kwaku and within an instant, 10 shots are fired into...

It's around 8:45 p.m. on February 23, 1991. 28-year-old Bruce Wood and his 5-year-old son, Bruce, Jr., are walking down Chestnut Street in downtown Worcester. They're heading home with their dinner from McDonalds. Bruce Sr. got his son a Happy Meal. They're spending the weekend together. The father and son are about 10 minutes away from Bruce's apartment on Quincy Street when a man ran up to Bruce...

A ceremonial tree planting and plaque unveiling at Worcester's Arbor Day celebration is being held at 10 a.m. on Friday, April 28, 2023.  We encourage our listeners to join us at the event to help honor the lives of the many women victims of murder in Worcester, both solved and unsolved. Special thanks to Jennifer Hernandez, committee member on Worcester's Advisory Committee on the Status of Women...

It's around 1 a.m. on January 13, 1993. Worcester Police officers arrive at the Public Inebriate Program, or PIP, shelter in Worcester's Main South neighborhood. Police are at the shelter to arrest James Earl Johnson…he's wanted for the murder of 42-year-old Vicki Lehtinen, whose body was found in the basement of a Pleasant Street apartment building just three days before. Vicki had been beaten an...

It's just past midnight on Sept. 22, 1992. Paulette Andrea pays her tab at Barney Google's, a neighborhood tavern on Washington Street in Worcester's Green Island neighborhood. She hugs her friends at the bar goodbye and exits the front door, taking a right toward Harding Street and Ellsworth Street. Paulette has about a 15-minute walk home to her apartment on Lawrence Street.  But she never makes...

It's around 6 a.m. on January 31, 1989. A maintenance worker at Anderson Tool and Stamping Company on Mason Street, is taking out the trash. When the worker steps outside and turns the corner onto the factory's loading dock, he sees the body of a young black woman laying face down about 10 feet away below the loading dock. The woman, wearing a black leather jacket and jeans, is covered in blood. L...

It's the morning of October 23, 1984. Kathleen Viviamore wakes up in her family's apartment on Southgate Street. Kathleen looks in to check on her daughter, Patricia Ann Gonyea, who was supposed to come home late the night before from her boyfriend's house. But Patricia wasn't in her bed. She wasn't even in the apartment. Patricia was killed while walking home from a nearby bus stop the night befo...

Unsolved: Worcester returns for Season 4 on Tuesday, April 11. The new season will shine a light on 10 more unsolved murder cases under investigation by the Worcester Police Department's Detective Unit. Season 4's episodes tell the stories of 10 unsolved homicides spanning 6 decades, including a string of unsolved murders of young women in the late 80s and early 90s, and the oldest unsolved murder...

In early January 2022, 15-year-old Sue Paye ran away from her Worcester home. It's believed Sue packed her belongings and boarded a bus at Union Station heading toward New York City. The extensive efforts by Sue's family to find her haven't been successful and they haven't seen Sue or heard from her in over 15 months. In what will be the most recent case we explore over the six seasons of Unsolved...

In early November 1998, five-month-old baby Marlon Santos disappeared. And for two straight days, Marlon's foster parents failed to alert the Worcester Police Department that baby Marlon was missing. It was around 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 7, 1998, that Jose and Yolanda Castillo reported Marlon missing. The foster parents blamed not being able to find a babysitter for their children and two...

It's mid-September 1982. The summer is winding down in Worcester and 27-year-old William Garlick and 33-year-old John V.J. Joyce, Jr. hop into William's 1980 black Corvette for a quick trip up north to Maine. But they're not heading to Vacationland for a late-summer getaway. The two men are on their way to collect a debt of $22,000, likely running an errand to collect money owed to a Worcester-bor...