SWAMPSCOTT, MA — Cindy Cavallaro was a high school freshman working as a nanny for a Swampscott family on vacation in Puerto Rico when she got the phone call that would forever change her life.
Her boyfriend, 15-year-old Henry Bedard, had been beaten to death in a wooded area of the town called Swampscott View.
The date was December 16, 1974.
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“To me, it still seems very real,” Cavallaro told Patch on the anniversary of Bedard’s unsolved murder. “It doesn’t seem like it was 50 years ago. It feels like it did then.”
Cavallaro went to her eighth-grade dance with Bedard, who was a year older than her and was a member of the Swampscott High football team. She remembers frantically calling Bedard’s friends and family from Puerto Rico and even trying to help police with the investigation by conducting her own interviews and providing law enforcement tips and suggestions in the weeks, months and years that followed.
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She was interviewed for a 15-minute “Chronicle Unsolved” segment on the 30th anniversary of the case in 2004 and has her strong suspicions about who may have been responsible for what she described as a “horrific” killing.
“They pretty much literally beat his brains in,” she said. “The only way his father could identify him was by this scar on his foot. When someone beats someone like that there is rage and passion involved.”
Through all the leads, interrogations and improvements in forensics and technology over the decades, police were never able to make an arrest. But the details of the case remain pinned on the Swampscott Police Department’s social media homepage and each year the SPD and Essex County District Attorney’s Office put out a notice seeking anyone who may have information on the case to come forward and report it.
Though the emotions of those days are still raw for Cavallaro, Henry’s remaining friends in the area, and his family whom she said has largely scattered across the region and the country, she said she knows the message has become largely static for most who recirculate each year.
“The people who are still alive now don’t want to remember or weren’t even born when it happened,” she said. “Now it becomes one of those stories that kids are told growing up about this murder case that happened in town.”
Cavallaro said she believes one of the key focuses of the investigation — a baseball bat found at the scene with cryptic homemade etchings on the knob of the handle — overshadowed leads about those who may have had a motive or may have been threatening toward Bedard.
“I think they always put too much emphasis on the bat and the markings,” she said. “That bat could have been left behind by someone else and picked up by the murder or murderers. I just don’t think they would have been stupid enough to bring it themselves and then leave it behind. They put so much emphasis on it that someone who did own it would be petrified to take ownership of it (for fear of being accused of the killing).
“I think there were other things that could have been done and still could be done.”
She said she believes Bedard was the victim of being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” and may have put himself in peril because of his unwillingness to back down from a threat.
“He was a scrapper,” she said. “He wouldn’t look for a fight. But he was not one to walk away from one.”
Cavallaro said she has lost touch with many of the family and mutual friends in recent years who had been bound by their love of Bedard and their desire to see the case resolved.
But while she admits her hopes that there will be a confession have dimmed, the effects of her boyfriend’s vicious killing when they were young teens have remained very present throughout her own life.
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“I was a single, divorced mom with two kids and I became so vigilant about everything,” she said. “‘Where are you going? Who are you going to be with? Are you sleeping over? Can I call the parents?’
“That is why I am the way I am. When I went to my car, before they became push-button, I would put my keys between my fingers (as a self-defense weapon). I got my (license to carry a firearm) as soon as I could. As ironic as it is, I had a baseball bat and a can of Raid at every door because you don’t need a permit for Raid.
“The trauma is still there.”
Those with any information that may be helpful in solving the case are asked to contact Swampscott Police Det. Sgt. Candace Doyle at 781-595-1111, Massachusetts State Trooper Matt Murphy at 978-745-8908, or the Unresolved Case Tip Line at 1-855-MA-SOLVE.
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