CHAPTER 4
The Prime Suspect
| |
 |
|
Andy,
and the main
characters
in his case
Andy Puglisi,
a 10-year-old Lawrence boy who vanished without a trace in 1976.
Melanie Perkins,
Andy's childhood playmate, now a filmmaker working on a documentary about his disappearance.
Alan Roy,
a neighborhood resident who came across what may have been a grave in the area where Andy was last seen.
Tony,
Alan's friend, who was with him when they discovered this oddly shaped hole.
Gary Thibedeau,
a troubled neighbor interrogated by police in connection Andy's disappearance.
Faith Puglisi,
Andy's grieving mother, questioned by police.
Angelo Puglisi Sr.,
Andy's irate father.
Jerome Phillips,
Faith's spurned boyfriend.
Wayne W. Chapman,
a convicted pedophile whom police consider the prime suspect in the case.
|
|
In the course of investigating the 1976 disappearance of a childhood friend, Andy Puglisi, and filming a documentary about the case, filmmaker Melanie Perkins has been sifting through tips, interviewing police, family members and former neighborhood residents. Now she turns to the main suspect.
By Judith Gaines, Globe Staff, 07/07/99
 ayne William Chapman never used drugs. He wouldn't touch a drop of alcohol. He never even swore.
And by all accounts he was - and still is - a deeply religious man.
But he also has a dark, perverse side, and for nearly 23 years he has been the main suspect in the disappearance of Andy Puglisi.
Without ever interrogating him about the case, Lawrence police publicly announced in 1976 and in later years that they believed - but could not prove - he had abducted 10-year-old Andy, a Lawrence native.
Today Chapman, 51, sits in the Sousa Baronowski Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in Shirley. He spends his time reading the Bible, typing letters, trying to get his high school diploma, and watching too much television.
What links him to the Puglisi case is this: Andy was last seen at the same pool where Chapman a year earlier met two young boys, lured them to a nearby park, and raped them. He is serving a 15- to 30-year sentence for the assaults, which he admitted soon after Andy disappeared.
He also was known to authorities as a pedophile and a schizophrenic, suspected of several sexual assaults on other young boys and convicted previously in at least one case. And witnesses told police they saw someone who looked like Chapman in Lawrence on the day Andy disappeared: Aug. 21, 1976.
Lawrence police now say they don't know why Chapman was named as the main suspect in Andy's disappearance without being interrogated. The lead detective for many years, Captain Joseph Fitzpatrick, is dead, and records of the investigation are scanty, haphazard, and incomplete. "Pathetic'' is how Melanie describes them.
Chapman says he had nothing to do with Andy's disappearance and refuses Melanie's repeated requests for an interview. "Including his name in your documentary would serve no purpose other than to unfairly brand Mr. Chapman,'' his lawyer, Matthew S. Robinowitz, writes to her in September.
Eventually, Chapman corresponds with Melanie, but still declines to be interviewed on camera. However, he finally agrees to talk to the Globe; the interview takes place May 13.
He's a heavy, lumbering guy in a dirty T-shirt and prison uniform. He has a pale, pasty face and constantly winces, as if in perpetual cringe.
He admits he was in Lawrence at about the time Andy disappeared. But he says he just happened to pull off the highway in a place he later learned was Lawrence. He went to a drug store in a shopping plaza and got right back on the highway after a brief stop. He claims he never saw the pool or Andy, and spent no other time in the city. He was living in Providence at the time.
Wayne Chapman, a prime suspect in the disappearance of Andy Puglisi, is in prison in Shirley for sexually assaulting two boys in 1975. The phot is in black and white so Chapmans color-coded jumpsuit will not identify his cellblock.
(Globe Staff Photo / Suzanne Kreiter)
|
Pouring through old newspaper clips and police records, and interviewing detectives who worked on the case, Melanie is piecing together other information about Chapman's life and his whereabouts at the time Andy disappeared.
She has learned that about two weeks after Andy vanished, Chapman was arrested in Waterloo, N.Y., for driving a stolen van - a blue converted bread truck. Police found a starter pistol on his dashboard, pornographic magazines, scores of photos of children, a bloody sock, a tape of Chapman talking to himself about obscene acts he'd like to perform on boys getting off a school bus, and more.
Routine blood tests allegedly were conducted on the sock. But the results, as well as the sock, have been lost, according to Lawrence police.
After Chapman's 1976 arrest in New York, the first detectives to interview him at length were Richard Chapin, a state investigator from Waterloo, and Al Mintz, who handled most of the sexual abuse cases for Providence police.
In Providence, Chapman worked as a janitor at Miriam Hospital, where his job included incinerating amputated body parts. Some unauthorized burnings occurred around the time Andy disappeared. "The possibility would have existed for him to dispose of a body that way,'' Chapin says. "Sure would have been difficult to trace.''
Police found pornographic magazines and a bloody sock in this van that Wayne Chapman was driving when he was arrested in 1976.
|
Shortly after his arrest, Chapman admitted to sexually assaulting at least 15 boys, all ages 7 to 10, from Providence; Brockton, Webster, Worcester, and Concord, Mass.; Norwich, Conn.; and communities in Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. Police believed he occasionally was violent, but he insisted he never intended to harm anyone.
"I wanted love,'' he told Mintz in a taped interview. He said he didn't get enough of it at home.
His mother was supportive, but his father was cruel, Chapman claimed. For instance, he told Mintz that his father made him stand waist-deep in snow in his pajamas after he peed in bed. "Wayne felt he couldn't do anything right. The only thing he ever achieved in life was perfect attendance at Sunday school,'' Mintz says.
When Wayne was 9 or 10, two older girls forced him to have sexual intercourse, Mintz says. "They laughed at him the whole time. He was humiliated.''
He focused sexually on prepubescent boys, Chapman told Mintz. "It had something to do with the girls molesting him at that age and something to do with his father's treatment of him,'' Mintz explains. "When he was making love to [the boys], they were the same age he was when he felt most mistreated.''
Typically, Chapman told Mintz, he lured his targets by asking them to help him find his dog; then he took them into nearby woods and assaulted them.
Trying to live a more conventional life, he married in 1972. But he and Alice Chapman, who was 19 years older than he was, separated just a few months later. She had six children by two former marriages and he had too many conflicts with them, Alice says in a phone interview, as her 10 parakeets chirp in the background.
Chapman's parents still live in Jamestown, N.Y., where he grew up. They have a three-bedroom home, neat but dingy. Pictures of animals, mostly dogs, are prominently displayed. On a lowering sort of day, Wayne's parents, Betty and Arthur Chapman, defend their home life and their oldest son.
"Wayne was a good boy. Had a heart the size of a bushel basket,'' says Arthur, 75. A retired truck driver, he's tall and thin with a drawn, blank face. During the interview, he mostly stares out a window.
Betty, 76 and suffering from Parkinson's disease, is lying in a lounge chair near the television, which is constantly on. She's heavy, cheerful, nervous, chatty; as she talks, she sucks a shaky finger.
She describes Wayne as a quiet boy who didn't have much confidence and kept to himself. He especially liked to roam in the woods with his dog.
Asked about claims that Wayne molested boys, she says, "It wasn't molesting. I understood that it was playing around, and feeling. He saw himself in these boys. He wouldn't hurt them.''
Wayne's youngest brother, Kurt, who now lives in Amherst, N.Y., is bitter about his family. He stands throughout a two-hour interview, too agitated to sit down.
"We had an alcoholic father who burst into rages, a mother who took barbiturates and didn't look at what she didn't want to see,'' he says.
His mother was overprotective of Wayne, while his father took no interest in him, or in any of his children, Kurt adds. "My father's idea of an afternoon with Dad was going to a bar and leaving the kids in a parked car. He'd go in in one mood and we never knew how he'd come staggering out.''
Kurt claims that when he was 4 and Wayne was 14, Wayne tried to seduce him. Wayne also tried to molest another brother. But, Kurt says, their parents chose not to deal with Wayne's problems, despite all the warning signs.
Arthur Chapman, asked about claims that he was a severe father, says he never beat his sons. If anything, he says, he was too permissive.
Betty confirms that they had a difficult household. But she says she didn't know about Wayne's attempted molestations of his brothers until several years after they occurred. She adds that she and Arthur arranged for Wayne to get psychiatric counseling in his teens.
Kurt doubts that Wayne could have abducted and killed Andy Puglisi. "In my family there was all sorts of stuff going on - drugs, sexual abuse, alcoholism. But I don't think there was murder,'' he says.
Melanie believes that Wayne Chapman is lying about his familiarity with Lawrence. After all, shortly after Andy disappeared, he admitted to raping two boys he met there, and one of his victims told her the route Chapman took to get from the pool to Den Rock Park, where he raped them. "He couldn't have found the way if he didn't know the area well,'' she says.
She remains suspicious of Chapman, whom she considers manipulative and dangerous. But Melanie concludes he probably is a weak pedophile - too timid, too inept, and too childlike himself to engineer the murder of a street-savvy boy like Andy.
"He preys on young children because he can. As they got older, he couldn't do it,'' she says. "He's a Mama's boy. He was trying to seduce these kids to get love, or horsing around and it got out of hand. He's not smart enough to take Andy without a trace, or to incinerate him.''
If Chapman took Andy and accidentally killed him while having sex, she says, "he would have run. He wouldn't have buried the body - unless he had help.''
Chapter 5: The Disappearing Psychic
|
