Double trouble for cold-case murder suspect
A plot worthy of a “Sopranos” episode.
Prosecutors say that not only did they get their man in the 1971 cold case murder of a Bedford woman, but that they nabbed him again for trying to scam his way out of the rap.
“We allege that Arthur Massei took premeditated, purposeful steps to try to obstruct justice by seeking to procure false testimony in his upcoming murder trial,” Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said in a statement. “We take allegations of intimidation and threats very seriously and these additional charges reflect that.”
In March of last year, the Middlesex DA’S office announced that a grand jury had indicted Arthur Louis Massei, 77, of Salem, for binding, stabbing and bludgeoning 54-yearold Natalie Scheublin to death in the basement of her Bedford home in 1971.
Investigators had begun looking into Massei as a potential suspect in 1999 when his left thumbprint was found to be a match for a latent print picked up from the passenger-side rear window of Scheublin’s white and blue 1969 Chevy Impala, according to court documents.
The car was found at the Veteran’s Administration hospital less than half a mile from the Scheublin home the night of the murder.
Investigators conducted two interviews with Massei, following up on the fingerprint link. In 2000 he said he’d never been to Bedford and that he’d been in the Charles Street Jail in Boston at the time, according to a case document.
“This was false,” prosecutor David Solet wrote in his statement of the case, indicating Massei was “a fugitive from justice on the day Mrs. Scheublin was murdered.”
Last week, Massei was arraigned on additional charges of solicitation to suborn perjury in a capital case, attempted extortion, solicitation to commit usury, and threatening to cause physical injury or death.
At his arraignment for the Scheublin murder in Woburn District Court in March of last year, Solet said that Massei had once bragged, “Every time you came with a warrant, I knew the day before.”
At his most recent arraignment, the DA’S office said that he was trying to use those smarts to derail the prosecution’s case against him.
Back when the Scheublin cold case was reopened — which coincided with the creation of the Middlesex district attorney’s cold case unit in 2019 — state police troopers and Bedford police detectives identified a new witness, a woman who said that she’d been involved with Massei on some bank fraud schemes in the 1990s.
She allegedly told investigators that Massei habitually carried a knife and that he bragged that he had killed someone with it.
Last October, investigators “learned that the defendant, who was in the custody of the Middlesex Sheriff’s Office in Billerica, had been communicating by letter with a woman outside the prison.”
In those letters, the DA’S office stated that Massei offered to pay the woman $1,000 to pretend to be a witness and lie to the prosecution to make it look like Massei had been framed. He would even write the script, according to the statement, by providing “detailed instructions about what the witness should say, including what she had heard, who she had heard it from, and where she was when she heard it.”
And if payment for this tangled web of deception wasn’t sufficient, prosecutors indicated his letters “revealed an escalating level of threats … if she did not perform tasks to his satisfaction.”
Cajoling or coercing perjury wasn’t the only correspondence Massei penned.
Prosecutors added he also allegedly wrote more letters to keep a loansharking operation on the outside current by directing underlings to pick up debts he was owed at arm-breaking rates, like 100% monthly interest.
Should the preponderance of evidence — likely enhanced by his alleged letter-writing campaigns — prove sufficient for a guilty verdict, given his advanced age, Massei still will have cheated society and the Scheublin family out of his proper punishment.