Dark Downeast - The Murder of Margaret Pizio (Massachusetts)

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

MASSACHUSETTS, 1979: It was August 20, 1979 and 35-year old Margaret Pizio was clocking into her overnight shift at the Susse Chalet Motor Inn in Seekonk, Massachusetts.Margaret should have returned home the next morning, but as it got later and later with no sign of her, the growing unease in the house was palpable. And then the phone rang. A reporter wanted to speak with someone about Margaret Pizio's murder.Beth Pizio was just a few days shy of her 9th birthday when her mother was killed. Over four decades later, Margaret’s murder remains unsolved. Beth hopes that by sharing her mother’s story, it’ll reach the person or persons who have been withholding information all these years, information that could answer the question that looms over Beth to this day – Why?If you have information regarding the unsolved 1979 homicide of Margaret Pizio, please contact State Police Lt. Ann Marie Robertson at 508-961-1918, Massachusetts State Police Unresolved Cases Tip Line at 855-MA-SOLVE (855-627-6583) or text the word “Bristol” to CRIMES (274637), followed by the tip. View source material and photos for this episode at darkdowneast.com/margaretpizio 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 was August 20th, 1979, and 35-year-old Margaret Pizio was clocking into her overnight shift at the Swiss Chalet Motor Inn in Seekonk, Massachusetts. Margaret was a divorced mother of four children. Three of them lived with her at the time. And so when she had to work one of her three jobs, the kids stayed home with their grandfather. Margaret should have returned home the next morning. But as it got later and later with no sign of her, the growing unease in the house was palpable. And then the phone rang. And it was a reporter from a local radio station who wanted to talk to somebody about my mom's murder. Beth Pizio was just a few days shy of her ninth birthday when her mother was killed. Over four decades later, Margaret's murder remains unsolved.

Beth hopes that by sharing her mother's story, it'll reach the person or persons who have been withholding information all these years. Information that could answer the question that looms over Beth to this day. Why? I'm Kylie Lowe and with Beth Pizio, this is the case of Margaret Pizio on Dark Down East. I was born in Riverside, Rhode Island in 1970. It was a very residential area, very heavily suburban. All of the families around us were, you know, middle class. My dad is an electrician, and so he would have been, you know, working class blue collar. And my mom didn't work.

I'm the third of four kids. And it was just a very, it was a very straightforward, standard suburban upbringing, I think, at least at first. There were a ton of kids in the neighborhood. My mom decorated cakes for us for our birthdays. That was one of her hobbies, you know, and it was a good area to grow up in. That straightforward, standard suburban upbringing in Rhode Island changed course when Beth's parents, Ed and Margaret, decided to divorce.

My parents were a couple that probably shouldn't have gotten married. I don't think that they knew each other that well when they did marry, although they'd been dating for quite some time. But still, they had different goals. My mom wanted to work, and my dad didn't want that. And I think she felt frustrated by how closed in her life was just raising four kids. I mean, the divorce is obviously traumatic. There's no way it's not. And at the time it was a lot more traumatic because you weren't supposed to get divorced. There was still that kind of hanging over everything.

And my mother was raised a Catholic, and she very strongly believed that that shouldn't happen. But it really needed to, because they really, they pushed each other's buttons. And they knew exactly how to do that and exactly how to drive each other crazy. The divorce changed many things for the children and for Margaret, who had to find a way to make ends meet without any work experience to fall back on.

My mother had no skills. She hadn't gone to college and she'd never worked. We were in the middle of a recession. And so she took a bunch of low-paying, low-skill jobs in order to support us. To Beth's memory, Margaret worked as a fast food cashier on a factory assembly line and, according to the Boston Globe's reporting by Joseph Quinlan, the night clerk and auditor at the busy Swiss Chalet Motor Inn in Seekonk, Massachusetts. Yeah, it was rough. She was working three jobs. We didn't see her that often. And when we saw her, she was often very tired, short with us. My grandfather would come over and watch us while she was working. So that's kind of what that was like. It was hard. And seeing my dad was hard too, you know, because we saw him on weekends and for, you know, special occasions and stuff. And that was hard too, because

the pieces didn't go together anymore. Though working three jobs and caring for her children could leave Margaret exhausted and short-tempered, Beth has warm memories with her mother, too. My mom was very religious, and I think that was a safe haven for her after the divorce. And she loved going to yard sales and finding bargains. We would be driving and we would see like blueberry bushes with ripe blueberries and we would pull over and pick blueberries. She didn't have time after the divorce because of all the working, but she liked to bake and she liked to decorate cakes.

And I have a picture of me at one with a cake that she decorated. Something you need to know about Margaret Pizio. She had strong beliefs and was often compelled to voice those beliefs when they were challenged. She wrote letters about movies that she disagreed with, that she, you know, either wanted, you know, them to get stronger ratings or to make sure that children weren't seeing them. You know, she had a very strong moral compass,

and she would speak out when something violated that. Margaret would speak out even in the face of danger. So she worked at the motel. She worked the night shift. She was robbed several times. And she fought back. She would yell at people who tried to take money from her and tell them that what they were doing was wrong

and they shouldn't be doing it. And she was cautioned by the police to not do that. But I think that was kind of an inherent part of who she was, that she confronted wrongdoing when she saw it. Part of working multiple jobs with an overnight shift at the hotel meant finding child care. Margaret's father, Beth's grandfather, stayed with the kids overnight. It was a routine Beth remembers well. My grandfather would come over at night and then she would go to work. I think we had dinner with my grandfather and then, you know, she would leave and he would stay. And in the morning, if we got up early enough, he would make us breakfast. But if know, she would leave and he would stay. And in the morning, if we got up

early enough, he would make us breakfast. But if not, we would have like cereal or whatever. And then, you know, we would, we were very much free range kids, which was everyone was at the time. And you went outside and you came back when the streetlights came on or when dinner was. That was how the night of August 20, 1979 began. But what was a routine night became an earth-shattering morning. Well, you know, my grandfather came over as usual. He wouldn't be there that long before it was bedtime. And we got up, and I remember the first part of the morning being normal but I believe her shift ended at seven and so by 7 45 there was this weird tension and I don't even know

that I necessarily picked up on it that much at the time. I was like in and out of the house playing in the backyard. But on some level, it was clear to me that my grandfather was agitated. According to 1979 reporting in the Boston Globe, Margaret's shift ended at 7 a.m. The hotel in Seekonk, Massachusetts, was less than six miles away from her home on Holland Avenue in Riverside, Rhode Island. The hands of the clock ticked past 7.45 and then 8 o'clock. Beth isn't exactly sure when the phone call came, but she remembers what it was about. The phone rang, and it was a reporter from a local radio station who wanted to talk to somebody about my mom's murder. I have two older brothers.

The one who's more in the middle, just a year and a half older than me, picked up the phone and then gave it to my grandfather. And I actually remember very clearly, he said, he kept repeating on the phone, and I don't know if the reporter was even still there at that point, but he said, she was so good and so young, why did she have to die? Margaret Pizio's shift began at other, a security guard named Eddie Wright, was a new installment at the hotel to beef up their security in the wake of several incidents. Margaret had been robbed three times in the two years she worked at the Swiss Chalet Motor Inn, and at a sister property, the Hartford Swiss Chalet, the motel clerk was shot to death during a robbery in April of the same year. Also part of the new security procedure at the hotel was a lock on the door to the reception area. The front desk was equipped with a buzzer system so that anyone wanting to enter while the doors were locked had to be buzzed in.

So this was a 24-hour motel. And at the time, it had a door that locked, but it was never locked because anybody could come in at any time. But after a couple of the robberies, they actually started locking that door from like midnight to 6 a.m. or something along those lines. And then she would have to buzz people in from behind the reception desk. After the security guard clocked out at 4.30 a.m., Margaret was the only one working at the hotel. She buzzed in the newspaper delivery man around 4.45 a.m., and by 6 a.m., she was making wake-up calls to guest rooms. Sometime between those wake-up calls and 8 a.m., when the day shift clerk tried to get into the lobby,

Margaret Pizio was brutally attacked. Beth learned that when the day shift hotel clerk showed up to relieve Margaret of her duties sometime around 7 a.m., Margaret didn't respond or answer when she buzzed the door. The woman didn't have keys of her own, so she waited, thinking maybe Margaret had fallen asleep. She buzzed the door again and waited a bit longer, not wanting to get management involved unnecessarily if her co-worker had just dozed off after a long night. But after an hour, she couldn't wait any longer.

Source material indicates that police helped the day shift employee remove the door from its hinges to finally gain access to the hotel lobby. I'm not sure why police were called at that point and not a manager with a key, but regardless, police would soon have to respond to the scene anyway. They found Margaret Pizio behind the desk with multiple injuries. She had bled out in the lobby behind the reception desk. And that's most of what we know. Beth Pizio remembers that morning in pieces. I don't necessarily remember my father arriving, but I remember the house started to fill up with people. And I remember walking in and out of rooms in which people were talking. And then also, I think it was the neighbor that I said, I told her we should go get a newspaper so we can cut out the obituary.

I really wanted to do that. That was like important to me. But I didn't really understand how it worked because it wouldn't have been that same morning. Details of the murder were printed in the papers the same day as police began their investigation. As reported by the Boston Globe, state pathologist Ambrose Keeley performed the autopsy, finding multiple stab wounds in the chest and back, at least two slashes in her neck,

and at least eight wounds to her head, inflicted with a blunt instrument. The attack was brutal and violent. Though about $900 in receipts were missing from the previous night, detectives and the Assistant Attorney General weren't so quick to determine robbery as the only motive. In 1979, Bristol County Assistant DA Lance Garth told the Boston Globe, quote, it was an attack on her, but we don't know why, end quote. In a 2020 piece by David Linton in The Sun Chronicle, Ed Pizio, Margaret's ex-husband, speculated that Margaret's strong beliefs or political views could have made his ex-wife a target. Quote, I think somebody just got mad at what she was doing.

Why the brutality? It seemed like they were out to get her. End quote. A number of detectives worked the initial investigation in 1979, including local Seekonk police and Massachusetts state police troopers. Several of the detectives knew Margaret because of the past robberies. She'd already

testified in two of those trials and was preparing to testify in a third. Though the suspects in the previous robberies sound like a promising lead, two of those suspects were already in jail for other offenses at the time of Margaret's murder. The suspect in the third robbery was apparently eliminated during the investigation, too. I know that they eliminated all the people who had robbed her in the past. The ones that she testified against. At least one of them was in jail and couldn't have done it. And so they eliminated those people. To Beth's knowledge, her father was also ruled out, as is routine in homicide

investigations to look at the people closest to the victim first. I actually spoke with Lieutenant Robertson about this during one of my conversations with her. And the thing was that, you know, my parents had a difficult marriage. There's no question about that. But my dad's life got better after their divorce, and he had already remarried. And it just, you know, at least to me, it didn't seem like he had a motive. Now, the hotel had a silent alarm system, and Margaret had activated that silent alarm

in the three previous robberies she experienced at the Swiss Chalet. But the alarm had not been activated on the morning of August 21st, 1979. And since the door to the reception area was typically locked at the estimated time of the attack, Margaret must have buzzed in her attacker that morning. Was it possible Margaret knew her attacker, unknowingly allowing her killer into the reception area that day? Or was she buzzing in someone who appeared to be just another guest at the hotel? The questions stacked up as police searched for answers. The investigation was at a standstill, but not for lack of want or trying.

She was familiar with the police, and it turned out to be some of the same policemen who were investigating her murder. And they really did want to solve it because she had been so helpful to them. And I remember the lieutenant also told me that, that she could tell from the notes of the case that they had really tried to solve this. They wanted to. Beth Pizio remembers the upheaval of those first days without her mom. We immediately went to stay with my dad. And then he had just bought a house because he had recently gotten remarried and my stepmom had two kids. So there were, it was my brother who was already living there. And then the two daughters of my stepmom were also living there.

And then suddenly there were three more kids. And, you know, so I remember some of that chaos. I remember later going to the house where I had lived and they had a yard sale to get rid of most of the stuff because most of it they didn't need. I went to a totally different school. I went from a private school to a public school. I lost all my friends. We lived 45 minutes away and when you're nine, that might as well be the moon. It was a real upheaval. And of course, I knew my stepmom and I had met my stepsisters, but living with them all the time, it was an adjustment.

You know, I think we did the best we could. It was such a different time that, like, nobody even thought that, like, hey, maybe these kids should talk to a crisis counselor. But it just wasn't done. No one really did that. And so we were all just kind of expected to move on. Beth turned nine years old, her first birthday without the woman who gave birth to her. It actually happened six days before my ninth birthday. And I can remember I was given a cake and probably a present too, although I don't really remember that.

But I can kind of remember the surrealness of celebrating a birthday right after that happened. Being so young, Beth's father and stepmother tried to shelter her from what was happening in her mother's case. But Beth knew. I was really very shielded from the investigation. And in fact, you know, like there was this real idea that like things should have been hidden from me and that, you know, it wasn't something that people talked about, but that didn't mean that I didn't hear things. And in fact, I knew that it had been violent. I knew that she'd been both stabbed and beaten. And, you know, I knew that they didn't really, after a while at least, they didn't really have any leads. After the initial investigation in 1979, Margaret Pizio's case went cold.

It remains unsolved to this day. I always knew that it wasn't solved. And I can say that that was a cloud over my childhood. And at various points, I was afraid he was going to come back. This person was going to come back and do something to me, do something to the rest of my family. And not knowing what the motive was, that made that almost plausible. In the early 2000s, Beth's family heard from Massachusetts state police detectives for the first time in a long time. Police were combing back through long-standing cold cases, looking for opportunities to reinvigorate investigations with new advanced DNA testing. Though Massachusetts State Police would not confirm this detail for me, it seems they

identified a piece of evidence or something in Margaret Pizio's case that could be tested with the new DNA technology. Beth was still more or less separate from the investigation at the time. Her brother and father were in contact with the detectives. We were contacted by the police again, who collected a DNA sample from my brother, my older brother. And I assume the reason for that, although I, again, I didn't speak to anyone about it. I was told by my dad and, you know, told by my brother that they were eliminating her DNA. And if they couldn't, if he wasn't enough of a match for that, they would maybe take DNA from some of the rest of us too.

And so they had something that they believed had DNA on it. It wasn't until the Bristol County District Attorney's Office created a cold case unit that Beth was finally brought into the fold of her mother's case. In late 2020, the DA's office contacted Beth's father, Ed Pizio, to tell him they were reopening Margaret's case as part of an effort to reexamine unsolved homicides with new forensic technology. Detectives finally interviewed Beth to hear what she remembered, and Beth finally got a chance to ask questions and hear firsthand what was happening in her mother's case all these years later. That's when she learned more about the DNA testing they had performed years earlier.

I learned that what they basically tell families is, yes, we have some DNA and you have the option of testing it now and knowing that the sample might be destroyed or waiting because they knew, I think, maybe even in a few years, the technology might be better. They might be able to use a smaller sample. They might be able to, you know, get better results from a more degraded sample, whatever. And the person that I spoke with told me that the families almost always choose to test now. That's what Beth's family chose at the time, to test in the early 2000s. The DNA testing and analysis was inconclusive, and it may have been the only opportunity they had. My understanding is that the DNA that they had was destroyed in the original testing and the results were inconclusive. I reached out to Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant Anne-Marie Robertson to ask her

about Margaret Pizio's case and confirm some of the information that Beth shared with me. I asked Lieutenant Robertson about the timeline of the attack and discovery that morning just to make sure I had it right. I also asked about the DNA testing and if the original sample was destroyed, as Beth believed it to be. And I wanted to know if the investigation ever pointed to any suspects throughout the years. Lieutenant Robertson couldn't answer me directly, but she pointed me to the Bristol County District Attorney's Director of Communications, Greg Milliot. To the first question, Milliot confirmed that the estimated time of the homicidal assault was between 6 and 8 a.m. on the morning of August 21, 1979. Miliot did not comment on whether the DNA testing in the early 2000s resulted in a destroyed sample.

All Gregg would say is, quote, DNA testing has been employed to re-examine evidence in the case, end quote. And then that last question, did the investigation ever point to any suspects? Beth had told me about people that the investigation had eliminated, and I was just looking for the DA's office to confirm this in general terms. But instead, I got a detail that was entirely new information to Beth and to me. Quote, police identified an individual they believed was responsible for the murder, but there was insufficient evidence to charge that person. End quote. Police have a suspect in the case of Margaret Pizio. With the right information and evidence, closure may be possible even more than four decades later. Margaret Pizio's case is still unsolved, but Beth has become an active voice for her mother.

In November 2020, Beth published a long Twitter thread detailing everything she knew about the case. The thread begins, This is the true crime story of the day my mom never came home. I'm not gonna lie, it's a sad story. But with your help, there might be hope too. The thread includes photos of Margaret and of Beth as a child. It's received over 165 retweets and dozens of other mentions, likes, and bookmarks. That thread is how I found Beth and learned about Margaret's case in the first place. Beth writes, hard truth, losing your mom is a shit sandwich on rye. That's a line I can relate to. I think the thing that has been hardest for me in a way is that I never got to know my mom as a person.

When you're that age, your mom's a caretaker, a figure in your life, but you don't necessarily have the emotional tools to understand them as a person. And I was robbed of that, and so were my brothers and sisters. And that's, you know, that's really, that's what I miss the most, and that's what this person really took away from me. Beth Pizio had less than nine years with her mother, but she still remembers the sweeter

times they spent together. You know, I remember really distinctly there was a time when I was in church and I was getting really sleepy, and my mom, you know, let me lay on her lap for the rest of the service. And, you know, she would touch my hair every once in a while. She loved yard sales and she loved shopping. And we would go and look at all the things. And she didn't have a lot of money, but she would sometimes say, you know, you can have anything here you want for a quarter.

And, you know, she herself loved gaudy costume jewelry that was very sparkly and, you know, and so that's, we would go to yard sales and we would also, she loved picking berries by the side of the road. So if we saw like full blueberry bushes, she would pull over and we would all get out and pick blueberries.

If you have information regarding the unsolved 1979 homicide of Margaret Pizio, please contact State Police Lieutenant Anne-Marie Robertson at 508-961-1918 or the Massachusetts State Police Unresolved Cases Tip Line

at 855-MA-SOLVE. You can also text the word Bristol to crimes. That's 274-637 followed by the tip. I have always just wanted to know why. It's never really been about retribution or, you know, or really any or punishment. I just, it's been such a question mark over my entire life, why this happened. And the brutality of, of what happened to my mom doesn't suggest a robbery because that would have been, I think more, even if she'd been killed in the commission of a robbery,

it wouldn't have been such a passionate crime. And that suggests that it might have been somebody that she knew. But on the other hand, I can't imagine anyone would hate my mom that much. So it's really always been extremely puzzling to me and troubling. Yeah, that it doesn't make sense in a way. So that's really the main thing that I would want is to just know why. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. Sources cited and referenced for this episode are listed at darkdowneast.com. Please follow Dark Down East on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening right now.

And if you could, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. I love to hear what you think of the show and what you want to hear next, and reviews are really the best way to of the show and what you want to hear next, and reviews are really the best way to support this show and the cases I cover. If you have a personal connection to a case and you want me to cover it on this podcast, please contact me at hello at darkdowneast.com. Thank you for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do. I'm honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones, and for those who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and homicide cases. 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.