Dark Downeast - The Murder of John Donaldson (Massachusetts)

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

It’s been more than 45 years since John Donaldson was killed while sitting in his parked car just yards away from the safety of his own home in Harvard, Massachusetts. It took years for investigators to build a case and arrest a suspect, but it would all prove to be a distraction from the truth. Now, Johnny’s siblings are taking up their little brother’s case one last time in hopes of finally uncovering the answers they deserve. If you have information about the 1979 murder of John Donaldson, please contact the Massachusetts State Police Detectives assigned to the Worcester County D.A.’s office at 508-453-7589 or [e-mail] source material and photos for this episode at: darkdowneast.com/johndonaldson Dark Downeast is an audiochuck and Kylie Media production hosted by Kylie Low.Follow @darkdowneast on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTokTo suggest a case visit darkdowneast.com/submit-case

It's been more than 45 years since John Donaldson was killed while sitting in his parked car just yards away from the safety of his own home in Harvard, Massachusetts. It took years for investigators to build a case and arrest a suspect, but it would all prove to be a distraction from the truth. Now, Johnny's siblings are taking up their little brother's case one last time in hopes of finally uncovering the answers they deserve. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of John Donaldson on Dark Down East. It was approaching midnight on April 5th, 1979, and 20-year-old John Donaldson was wrapping up another dishwashing shift

at the Sheridan-Boxborough Hotel in Boxborough, Massachusetts. Washing dishes wasn't exactly his first choice of jobs. He was originally hired to work the front desk, but a demotion had him in the kitchen, scrubbing food from room service plates and sanitizing flatware after dinner service each night. John, who was better known as Johnny to his family and friends, had found himself back in his hometown of Harvard, Massachusetts

after struggling to keep up with his coursework in college. He flunked out and left school in December of 1977, but he was told he could reapply when he was ready, and that seemed to be his plan. But until then, it was washing dishes and living at home with his parents, paying $15 a week rent at the same house he grew up in, on Lovers Lane in Harvard. Most of the friends Johnny had grown up with were away at college by then, but he made new friends among the kitchen staff at the hotel, many of whom were younger high school kids. After their shifts, he and a few co-workers would usually find a place to hang out

and throw a couple beers back. That was their plan on the night of April 5th and the early morning hours of April 6th, 1979. Around 12.45 or one o'clock in the morning, another dishwasher, 17-year-old Robert Kurt Allen, who went by Kurt, hitched a ride with Johnny in his 1974 orange Ford Pinto, and the pair went to meet up with their other co-workers, a 16-year-old we'll call Thomas Brown and his 18-year-old brother, Greg Brown. I'll be using fake names for privacy reasons.

According to research by Johnny's siblings, Susan Donaldson and Jim Donaldson, who has personally reviewed much of the case file for the investigation, the Brown brothers and Kurt all lived on Hillcrest Drive in Harvard, but the Browns' house was their usual hang after work. That night, like many others, they sat in Thomas and Greg's secluded driveway listening to music, smoking cigarettes, drinking a few beers, and possibly smoking some pot and snorting cocaine. By around 2 a.m., Thomas and Greg decided to call it a night, but Kurt and Johnny lingered a bit longer in the driveway. Around 3.15 a.m., and a few more beers and

cigarettes later, Johnny drove Kurt a few houses down to his place before making his own way back home to Lover's Lane. It wasn't unusual for Johnny to sit in his parked car once he got down to his place before making his own way back home to Lover's Lane. It wasn't unusual for Johnny to sit in his parked car once he got back to his parents' house every night. Just a few yards from the house where his parents slept, Johnny would listen to a few more tracks on the car radio and have another cigarette since his mother wouldn't tolerate smoking in the house. It was a quiet ritual, a little time to himself before he finally found his way up the driveway to bed. Around 3.50 a.m. on April 6th, Johnny's quiet ritual there in the privacy of his own car and driveway was interrupted by a visit from a police officer.

A patrolman named Ronald Robbins was driving down Still River Road parallel to Lovers Lane and spotted Johnny's headlights through the trees. Officer Robbins decided to pull down the quiet side street and talk to Johnny. It was reportedly a short, benign conversation. Robbins asked John what he was still doing up, and Johnny said he usually got out of work late but would go inside soon. Robbins either offered Johnny a cigarette, or Johnny asked him for one, and then Robbins told him to go inside when he was finished. Johnny said he would, and then Robbins got back into his cruiser and left. It was the last time anyone saw John Donaldson alive.

I had the opportunity to speak with all three of Johnny's siblings as part of my reporting for this case. Each of them shared a different viewpoint from which to understand Johnny's story. Susan, the eldest Donaldson sibling, has been writing about Johnny's case and its impacts on her family for her forthcoming memoir, Finding Johnny. Debbie, her younger sister, helped me get to know Johnny through her memories of him. And Jim, who is closest in age to Johnny, has been closest to Johnny's case and the investigation since day one. During the spring of 79, Jim was also temporarily living at his parents' house in Harvard with Johnny. The brothers had a few nights of bunking up in the same bedroom,

but most of the time Jim stayed with his girlfriend a few towns over. Around 6.45am on the morning of April 6th, Jim was just getting back from his girlfriend's place to get ready for work when he turned the corner onto Lovers Lane and saw Johnny's orange Pinto in the driveway as usual. As I was turning the corner and pulling in, I noticed these sort of like scratches on the side of the car. And I noticed that the window on the opposite side, the passenger door side, was cracked. And then as I pulled in, I thought I saw him in the car. Now, all of this is happening over like two or three seconds. And I can remember thinking, oh, he's asleep in the car. Oh, did he damage his car? Oh, what is the glass on the passenger door doing cracked? And as I pulled in and pulled in next to him, I started to get a really creepy feeling that something wasn't right here because bullet holes in cars leave a pretty

distinctive mark. And I just started to get a really bad feeling about what I was looking at. Jim got out of his own car to get a closer look through Johnny's car window. He was back like he was asleep and slumped and I saw a very, very small trail of dried blood on the side of his head. And again, my first thought was, oh, he had an accident. But as I approached the car, there was this feeling that this isn't good. And as I got up to the car, it was clear that he, at first I thought he was unconscious, but it immediately became evident that he was probably dead because of the color of his skin. His hands were in his lap. There was a burnt out cigarette in one finger and there was a pool of blood in his lap.

He looked very peaceful, but it was pretty clear that he wasn't alive. And I think I reached in to feel his pulse, but I immediately felt that his body was cold. I think I woke my parents up and I told my father that I thought John was dead and he was in the driveway. And so he immediately told my mother to stay right where she was. And then we walked out together. Now, my father was a veteran news reporter. He had worked in the business for many years. He served in Europe during the war. He'd seen a lot of really, really nasty stuff in his career. And I was thinking about this as we walked out of the house and across the driveway,

and I didn't go with him over to the car. I just didn't want to go back over there. And he walked over, and he looked in the car, and he immediately, I could just tell by the look on his face, he immediately knew what he was looking at. The next few hours were a blur of police cruisers and crime scene tape. Chief John Reardon was among the first on the scene for Harvard Police,

soon followed by Massachusetts State Police detectives. Over the next few hours, investigators processed the scene, including the interior of Johnny's car and the immediate area surrounding it. Just as Jim described what he saw that morning, investigators found Johnny in the driver's seat and his hands were in his lap with a burned-out cigarette between his left fingers. Meanwhile, a state ballistics expert found six shell casings on the ground between the car and a stone wall at the entrance to the Donaldson's driveway. Those shells were determined to be from a.22 rifle and, based on their placement, were likely shot from a distance of about 60 feet. Johnny's sister Susan told me that the autopsy later showed her brother died from a single gunshot,

also fired from a.22 caliber rifle. One shot went through his left cheek and pierced his brain stem, and according to the medical examiner, killed him instantly. His head wasn't turned, so we don't think he heard the shot or heard anybody coming. So we assume he was asleep, that he might have fallen asleep. That's all we know. The medical examiner placed Johnny's time of death sometime between 4 and 5.30 a.m., and his death was ruled a homicide. As police started interviewing family and friends and others about John Donaldson, they learned about the quiet yet popular guy who was liked by pretty much everyone who knew him. Lacking any glaring motive for someone to want Johnny dead, was this all a fatal instance of wrong place, wrong time?

An accidental shooting became the early working theory because police in a neighboring town were investigating several shootings of their own. Around the same estimated time frame of John Donaldson's murder in Harvard, police in nearby Boxborough received reports of shootings around town. According to a piece published in the Evening Gazette, during the early morning hours of Friday, April 6th, six shots were fired at the window of the Boxborough Liquor Store, better known as Pete's Package Store. A few cars parked on Liberty Square Road had their headlights shot out, and the gas pumps at B and F Exxon Station were also riddled with bullets. That gas station was right across the street from the hotel

where Johnny worked. Further investigation into those shootings found that the bullets were from a.22 caliber rifle, just like the gun that fired the fatal shot in Johnny's death. In fact, ballistics experts reportedly determined that the bullets came from the very same firearm that was used to kill Johnny. The concurrent investigations gave way to a working theory. Maybe whoever was driving around and shooting at area businesses and parked cars in Boxborough also found their way down Lovers Lane in Harvard, several miles away, and fired a few shots at Johnny's car, too, not knowing he was inside finishing a cigarette. That night, the police told us there was no moon, it was very dark, there were no streetlights on Lovers Lane.

Perhaps a group of kids drove down, saw his car, didn't see Johnny in it, and shot at the car. The bullet shots are sort of random. So that was the initial theory. Chief Reardon of Harvard PD said in the Evening Gazette that they hadn't ruled out random violence in Johnny's death. But as the investigation into the shootings of gas pumps and parked cars in neighboring Boxborough continued, the random shooting theory evolved. For someone to just stumble upon Lovers Lane and the Donaldson driveway didn't seem like the most plausible explanation. There's a clear case to be made that those who did it were intentionally going to shoot Johnny's car. Because all the other shootings took place many miles away.

They made the point of coming over. And Lover's Lane isn't easy to find. You have to know where you're going. So somebody came over to Lover's Lane to shoot at Johnny's car. But who and why? Johnny's family couldn't fathom why he'd ever be the target of a killer, but his siblings also agreed that they didn't know much about Johnny or his life at the time. Susan was living in Switzerland, Debbie was in California,

and even though Jim was local, he and Johnny's lives were hardly intertwined. They didn't know how he spent his time, who he hung out with, and none of the Donaldsons had ever met Johnny's co-workers at the hotel, the three guys he was with the night he died. Police had tracked down those hotel co-workers for interviews. Fellow dishwasher Kurt Allen told investigators about the beers he, Johnny, Thomas, and Greg shared in the Browns driveway just a few hours before Johnny died.

He also told them that Johnny had dropped him off at home on the same street as the Browns when they left together that night. As for Thomas and Greg Brown, their parents reportedly vouched for their whereabouts during the estimated time of the murder. The brothers were home in bed. The Donaldsons didn't hear much more about those friends during the early stages of the investigation. They were just three of over a hundred interviews conducted by police during those first few days and conversations were ongoing.

At the same time, Harvard Police Chief Reardon had shared a new lead with state investigators. Local PD were looking into a possible connection between Johnny's death and a break-in just a few days earlier. A neighbor's house across the street from the Donaldson's had been broken into in the days prior to Johnny's death, and a.22 rifle was stolen during the break-in. The suspect identified for the break-in and theft

was a teenager named Josh, who also lived on Lovers Lane. According to Susan Donaldson's research on this incident, Josh denied stealing the gun from the neighbor's house, but the investigation uncovered that Josh had recently given a similar.22 rifle to someone who worked at the hotel with Johnny, one of the Brown brothers,

16-year-old Thomas. When Thomas gave the gun back to him, Josh said it was broken, something about a firing pin being damaged. Now, police were able to track down the stolen.22 rifle, and it was broken just as Josh had claimed, but the damage made it impossible to trace the shell casings at the scene of Johnny's murder back to it. So they couldn't say for sure if the stolen gun was the same one that fired the bullet that killed Johnny. However, shell casings found on the neighbor's property, presumably fired before the gun was stolen and damaged, didn't match the casings in Johnny's case either. The information that got back to Jim Donaldson and his father, who were most in contact with investigators at the time, came in the form of vague reassurances.

They were working on it. About a month passed without any significant updates. But then the phone rang with a call from a state police detective. They had a suspect. It's pretty standard procedure for police working a homicide investigation to seek out the last person or people who saw the victim alive. In Johnny's case, Harvard police had a written record from the last known person to see

and talk to Johnny before he died. One of their own, patrolman Ronald Robbins. Robbins had documented his visit with Johnny and everything about his shift during the early morning hours of April 6th in his police log. Well, almost everything.

Now, one of the things that put Ron Robbins under suspicion by police was that on the night of the murder, before he saw Johnny, Ron Robbins had driven a girl on duty out of town back to her dorm room in Fitchburg. Even though Ron Robbins had entered into his police log that he stopped and spoke to Johnny around 3.50 in the morning, he hadn't logged that he'd driven someone out of town to Fitchburg State University more than 15 miles away from Harvard while on duty. When state police investigators discovered this connection and the omission, they began to wonder what else Robbins possibly left out about that night. The state police became very, very suspicious about the integrity of his story.

And they never gave us the actual details of what he said, but it became pretty evident pretty quick that he might be a suspect. Making things even more compelling, this person that Robbins drove back to campus was the sister of Josh, who was a suspect in the stolen.22 rifle from a neighbor on Lovers Lane. It all seemed interconnected somehow, or as Susan described it, a quote-unquote triangle of connections. With that, state police brought Ronald Robbins in for a polygraph test, which he reportedly passed. He was cooperative and explained away the omission in his police log,

saying he was afraid he'd lose his job if the higher-ups knew what he was doing on his shift. State police detectives remained suspicious, though, and were confident enough in their new theory to tell the Donaldson family all about it. And you have to understand, the state police told my father and I very, very quickly after all this happened that they had discovered this, as if they found the smoking gun, you know what I mean? Confident or not, they didn't have enough to arrest the guy at the time. But the case was building behind the scenes. Four months after the murder, Ron Robbins very weirdly shot up his own house with a.22 rifle.

They looked at the casings, they didn't match, but Chief Reardon was concerned enough that he suspended Robbins from the force. And then in September, Robbins quit the force and moved out of town. Ronald Robbins was out of sight, but not out of mind. The questions about his possible involvement in Johnny's murder lingered, yet any momentum police thought they had soon fizzled out. No physical evidence tied Robbins or any other suspect to the shooting. The co-workers Johnny was with that night had alibis, and no other leads came in to direct the investigation forward. Nearly five years passed without any major updates in Johnny's case.

The original Harvard chief on the case moved on to a new post in another town, making way for a roster of new leadership in the years that followed. Chief Philip Collins took over in 1983, the fifth chief in almost as many years, and he believed he would be the one to finally crack Johnny's case. He was a deeply religious man, and he believed that he had a messianic calling and a voice from God that he would find the murderer.

But this holy confidence led him down a path paved with prayers rather than evidence, where divine intervention obscured the truth more than it revealed it. For several months leading into 1984, the new interim Harvard chief, Philip Connors, and his detective, Charlie Waite, worked together on the investigation. They had the previously uncovered evidence, circumstantial evidence, that Ronald Robbins was the last person to see Johnny alive plus his admitted trip out of town while on duty. But it wasn't enough back in 1979, and it still wasn't enough when Connors reopened the case. They needed something else, and that something came in the form of a new witness with inside info.

In January of 1984, a man came forward claiming to know Ron Robbins and said that during a fishing trip about a year or two earlier, Ron allegedly made some statements about knowing who killed Johnny and where to find the murder weapon. The witness, by the way, was facing drug-related charges in a different town and it's possible he was hoping for some leniency in his sentencing. But nonetheless, these secondhand coded statements allegedly made by Robbins were plenty for the Harvard police chief to take action. So Chief Connors, without contacting the DA's office or the state police, masterminded the arrest of Ron Robbins, who had been with the Air Force Reserve and was

out at Chicopee Airport ready to board a plane to Europe. So Charlie Waite and two other cops went out to Chicopee, arrested him. Ron Robbins was arrested February 23rd, 1984, and arraigned on charges of being an accessory after the fact in the murder of John Donaldson. Chief Connors said the arrest was the result of, quote, prayer and hard work, end quote. He also said his department anticipated additional arrests in the coming weeks. As most clearly defined by Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute, an accessory after the fact is someone who assists someone

who has committed a crime after the person has committed the crime with knowledge that the person committed the crime and with the intent to help the person avoid arrest or punishment.

So Robbins was being accused of involvement with Johnny's murder, but not of being the actual trigger man. Still, in the eyes of the public and Johnny's family, he might as well have been arrested for murder. At that time, they had us and everybody else convinced he did it. From the very beginning, though, it seemed the case against Robbins was doomed. The DA's office, finally brought into the fold after Harvard PD circumvented the proper order of operations when it comes to an arrest like this, considered the evidence against the suspect.

It was clear the case was built on a flimsy foundation of circumstantial evidence and second-hand admissions. And then that flimsy foundation gave away completely when the supposed informant recanted his story and refused to sign a statement. And we went up to the DA's office and they said, look, we're not going to convene a grand jury over this. There's not enough evidence. And if we do this and he walks, we will never get the opportunity again. And the Harvard police screwed up and they should have never arrested him. So they let him go. Later that summer,

Ronald Robbins filed suit against the town of Harvard and Chief Connors Officer Waite and Officer Paul Murphy for alleged civil rights violations relating to his false arrest and imprisonment. The suits settled out of court in 1988. Robbins received $40,000. And that was the end of it with Ron Robbins. And the town was never able to pursue it again. And then he died in 2022. Johnny's case went back into a deep freeze.

The Donaldson family moved forward the best they could, and Johnny was always on their minds, but life rolled mercilessly on. In the midst of the bungled arrest, they also lost their father to cancer in March of the same year. And we always felt that he died of a broken heart. It was very difficult. I think it was most difficult for him to express his grief. While nothing further developed to strengthen the case against Robbins in the following years,

the Donaldson siblings maintained a degree of suspicion that he was somehow involved in Johnny's murder. But then, more than two decades after the arrest and release of Ronald Robbins, an unprecedented move by the new Harvard police chief changed what the Donaldsons believed to be true about the case, all in an instant. And I was still pretty much of the belief that Ron Robbins had done it.

They just couldn't prove it. But simultaneously, something happened. I contacted the yet again new police chief at the town of Harvard and said, I understand you guys might still have files on his case. He goes, yeah, we have files, but we've been asked to turn in the files to the state police. And I don't know why he did this. I think he did it because he didn't like state police. He said, but if you want to come in,

I'll be glad to show you the files. Let me tell you, as someone whose job it is to get my hands on case files and investigative documents, this never happens. If a case is open and active, the files are not public, and therefore pretty much no one, not even the family, can see them. Jim knew this, so he booked a flight and got to Harvard as soon as he could.

He walked into the Harvard Police Department on December 30, 2005. And I just said, put all the files in the conference room, but I don't want to see the crime scene pictures. I really don't want to see those. And I went in, there was a couple of boxes, and he let me stay in there as long as I wanted. And I went through every file, and I discovered that point where they became obsessed with Ron Robbins and just basically stopped all the other interviews. And I read just, I could not believe some of the stuff that I was seeing. It was overwhelmingly clear that investigators were

stuck on Ron Robbins like a dog with a bone. And once they started down that path, all other possible suspects and leads fell by the wayside. That was it. They literally shut off the spigot to all of the other investigations and turned all their attention to him. It was, I mean, you could feel it and you could sense it even though we didn't know much. But years later, when I saw the police files, it was literally like within 24 hours, nobody even cared about anybody else. They only cared about him. As Jim read through each page and studied the investigative documents so many years later, he thought there were obvious other avenues the investigation could have and should have followed. They had people that they knew of that had motives to want to shoot at Johnny's car.

They had witnesses that knew who Johnny was with prior to the murder. They had people that said right in their interviews that Johnny might have owed him some money. They might have gone down and shot at his car because, you know, he owed him money. I mean, there was a million reasons for them to go back in and look at this group of people. And there was no reasons for them to really pursue Ron Robbins, except Ron Robbins was the last one to see him alive and had lied about his whereabouts during a part of that evening. at details of his brother's murder investigation, seeing what he perceived to be missed opportunities in the very first days of the case. He took notes and summarized what he learned from the files, but he didn't think to take pictures at the time. As the chief told him they would be,

those files were turned over to state police after Jim reviewed them. The DA's office likely has everything now, and neither Jim nor any other member of the Donaldson family has seen them since. In fact, the DA's office is not very pleased Jim was allowed to review the case file in the first place. In 2007, about two years after Jim saw the files, the new Worcester County District Attorney Joseph Early Jr. took office and made it his priority to devote attention and resources to the county's unsolved cases.

Early created the Unresolved Case Squad within the Massachusetts State Police Detectives Unit, and John Donaldson's murder was among the cases getting a fresh look. Susan and Jim met with the DA's office in June of 2008. It was the first time in a long time they got any information out of investigators. According to an agenda and outline of that meeting, the district attorney's office revealed their list of suspects in Johnny's murder. The family heard the names of Johnny's three friends from the hotel,

the teenagers he hung out with in the hours before he was killed, Robert, Kurt Allen, Thomas Brown, and Greg Brown. The outline simply says that interviews led to the development of these suspects. Ronald Robbins is not identified as a suspect, according to this outline. In fact, the DA's office called the arrest of Ronald Robbins catastrophic for the town and the Donaldson family. The very last lines of the meeting agenda reads, quote, The Massachusetts State Police Detective Unit, Worcester County, will initiate a re-examination of this case in an attempt to bring to bear today's technology and improved investigative techniques to try and bring some measure of satisfaction to the Donaldson family, end quote. It seemed like Johnny's case might have a chance to be solved this time, for real.

Unfortunately, any confidence Johnny's siblings had in the renewed investigation waned. The unresolved case squad's funding ran out, and nothing further happened with Johnny's case. The next time the Donaldson siblings got an audience with investigators was an entire decade later. In May of 2018, Jim sat down with Massachusetts State Police the assistant district attorney and a case analyst to discuss the status of Johnny's case They opened the meeting by informing Jim they'd created a task force for Johnny's case

and then they launched into a conversation about Johnny Was Jim sure his brother wasn't involved with something nefarious. Though the team of investigators wouldn't answer any of his questions in return, Jim had a feeling he knew what they were implying. When Jim reviewed the Harvard PD case file years earlier, he saw mention of an undercover DEA agent working at the same hotel as Johnny. It was another lead he felt investigators ignored in favor of chasing down Ronald Robbins. So, in this 2018 meeting, with

the implication that Johnny was wrapped up in something illegal, Jim asked a few direct questions. Well, we understand that there was an undercover DEA agent working at the hotel around the time my brother was working there. He was interviewed at the time. He said that he heard Johnny's friends say they were going to do something to him because he owed them money.

I said, is that true? We can't disclose any of that information. Did this person exist? Well, that person may have existed, but we think that person is deceased. We're like, well, if he's deceased, then why does it matter? They will not confirm anything because it's part of an ongoing investigation. According to notes Jim sent his sisters following that 2018 meeting, investigators said that the supposed undercover DEA agent ultimately recanted his statement.

The investigators at that meeting refused to answer almost every other question Jim levied at them. However, they did inform him that evidence had been submitted for testing. They did not disclose what that evidence was, the type of testing done done or any timeline for results, but hopes and expectations were high. Once again, though, the Donaldsons were let down. Nothing new came from that meeting were the evidence analysis. Several more years passed without answers. In 2003, after some pressure, the DA's office granted the Donaldsons another meeting. We asked them what their theories were they would not say. We asked them what evidence they had

they wouldn't say. We asked them what attention was being put on the case they wouldn't say. Investigators did share at least one piece of information during that meeting, but it was anything but encouraging. One of the most shocking things that I learned just last year when we were sitting down with police and the cold case unit in Worcester was that they never wore gloves. They said that all the evidence was compromised. Because we asked, could you test the casings for fingerprints? I think in some of the new technologies they can do that, but they said absolutely not.

It had been compromised. The Donaldsons have not heard anything new since that meeting. We were promised that the investigator who's handling the case would be in touch with us. We've heard nothing. They've never reached out to us. They've done nothing. Jim doesn't take the lack of updates personally. He knows that the DA's office and detectives are

probably working on other things with a higher chance of getting solved, newer cases with DNA evidence and things like that. According to a solvability factor worksheet provided to the family in 2008, Johnny's case was ranked 21 out of 32. But even with an understanding and perspective that Johnny's case, now more than 45 years old, is going to be a challenging one to crack, the Donaldsons are more than deserving of some real answers, and they are willing to do the work themselves to uncover the truth, if only they were permitted to do so. Jim told me that at one point, his family wanted to hire a private investigator to look into John's case, but they aren't allowed to do that.

They've asked again to see the files, but were denied access. wish that families had more avenues to be able to take on these investigations when the state investigators and the district attorney's offices are failing at what they're doing. It is families like the Donaldsons who are left hanging in the balance, haunted by unanswered questions and unfulfilled promises of justice. The passage of time only deepens wounds and dims hopes as vital evidence grows cold and memories fade or die with the witnesses themselves. In this turbulent landscape, the voices of the victims and their families are often drowned out and lost in the noise, leaving them to grapple with the agonizing uncertainty of unresolved loss with little

recourse. The journey towards truth and justice for surviving family members is an uphill battle. Navigating the landscape surrounding cold case homicide investigations is often hindered by political agendas, budget constraints, and competing interests within law enforcement agencies. All these factors often leave cold cases in limbo, relegating them to the back burner of investigative priorities. Despite it all, Jim, Susan, and Debbie are undeterred. They're taking action for Johnny and for themselves. They are working together on what they feel might be the last chance to get answers for their late for themselves. They are working together on what they feel

might be the last chance to get answers for their late little brother. Somebody out there knows something. And you know, time is running out. Johnny would be 66 this year. And his contemporaries, his friends, would also be in their 60s. And already, Kurt Allen,

who was one of the chief suspects, he was the friend, the dishwasher friend he had drinks with the night of his death. And Ron Robbins, the police officer who was the last to see him alive, they're dead. So this is our last shot. Johnny was the quiet and kind little brother

with an unexpected quick wit. He was a really bright kid. He was a really bright kid. He was a really gentle kid. He had a great sense of humor, great dry sense of humor, which I really enjoyed about him. We started to get to know each other quite a bit better probably in the last six months of his life. Having those few months with him prior to his death

is something that I feel pretty blessed to have had. He wasn't the loudest voice in the room. He was a quiet kid. He was a nice kid. My mother called him a dreamer. He was contemplative. He loved his dog. He used to lie with his dog and listen to his favorite music.

He loved the Eagles, Desperado. He loved Queen, We Are the Champions. And I can just see him there loving his dog. He was a great kid. And he died too young. Johnny's sister Debbie shared so many stories of her littlest brother. From the baby she and Susan lovingly called Peaches to the memory of their very last visit when, as adults, the Donaldson siblings smoked some pot after Christmas dinner and then went bowling. There's a photo of the four of them together for the last time, grinning with the knowledge of their illicit activities.

Debbie laughed at the thought of it, yet her eyes missed it over knowing all the moments they didn't get with Johnny, the countless memories they were bound to make. With Johnny, you never get over it, but you get used to it. And I see him in people. On his birthday, I always remember the day he died. And I always remember his birthday. And I always cry, and I'm glad I do. It was such a loss. It was such a stupid loss. And it just broke up the family. And it made it difficult for all of us surviving to find a life, again, where you could say, I'm not afraid.

I am happy. It took a long time, a really, really long time. And I'm, what, 72 now, and I still cry. But they're good tears, and it's good memories. If you have information about the 1979 murder of John Donaldson, please contact the Massachusetts State Police Detectives assigned to the Worcester County DA's office at 508-453-7589 or email worcesterdaunresolved at mass.gov. Next week is an off week to Dark Down East.

You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at darkdowneast. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East. Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audiocheck. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?