The one true crime case you just can't get over?

This boy is a young teenager named John Joseph McCabe.

John lived in Tewksbury, MA with his parents and two sisters. In 1969, he was a 15-year-old high school student.

On the evening of September 26th of that year, John had innocently gone to a community center in town to attend a dance that was being held for local teenagers.

However, John did not return home after the dance. His parents spent a terrifying and frantic night looking for him, but could not find him.

The next morning, three boys were cutting through a vacant field in Lowell, a mill town which neighbored John’s hometown of Tewksbury. In the field, they stumbled upon John’s body. He had been gagged and hogtied, and his cause of death had been strangulation from the rope that was used to tie him.

Of course, police launched a full-scale investigation to find the murderers. They spoke with many kids, teenagers, neighbors and others in the community to see if somebody might be able to point them in the direction of who could’ve been responsible for this heinous murder. But all they were able to find out was that John had last been seen hitchhiking after the dance, and nobody saw what happened to him after that.

For the next several decades, many rumors swirled around the Tewksbury and Lowell communities about who could have committed the crime, with many people believing that a serial killer or an outlaw biker gang had kidnapped John while he was hitchhiking and subsequently murdered him. But for more than 40 years, nobody had any definitive answers.

Then, in early 2011, three of John’s former classmates were arrested for his murder. One of these now-grown men had been racked with guilt for decades and had finally decided to come forward and confess that he and two of his friends had been responsible for John’s murder. The ringleader of this group of friends had been a guy named Walter Shelley.

On the night of September 26th, 1969, Walter had been angry with John because he believed that John had been flirting with Walter’s girlfriend at the dance. When Walter and his buddies saw John thumbing for a ride after the dance was over, they decided to teach him a lesson by forcing him into the car they were driving, driving him to Lowell, tying him up and leaving him in a field. Allegedly, they did not intend to kill him, but only wanted to scare him as punishment for flirting with Walter’s girlfriend. They left him tied up in the field and drove around for about 45 minutes before returning to the scene. But when they did return, they discovered that John was dead, having been strangled by the ropes that they had tied around his neck.

To make matters worse for John’s family, his parents discovered upon looking at the guest book from John’s wake that all three of these teenage boys had attended the wake and funeral. These murderers saw first-hand the grief and agony that they had caused John’s friends and family members, and even that hadn’t been enough to compel them to let anyone know that they had been the ones who killed him.

In 2014, Walter Shelley was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of John McCabe, but since he was in his early ‘60s by this point and had gone on living his life with no repercussions for more than four decades, he was still able to live the majority of his life as a free man despite having killed someone when he was just a teenager.

This is a case that I find truly haunting and infuriating at the same time. A young, innocent, idealistic teenage boy loses his life at the hands of a group of his own peers simply because he may have innocuously flirted with a girl who happened to be “going steady” with another guy. John’s life was cut severely and viscously short all because the girl he may have had a crush on just happened to be dating a cruel, violent, cold-blooded bully.

John Joseph McCabe: March 13th, 1954-September 26th, 1969.

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