Two lives crashed and burned
on the morning of Wednesday, July 13, 1983.
An elderly woman was raped, beaten, and robbed of what little trust in
the goodness of this world her already confused and diseased brain could muster. From that day until she died 16 years later,
she constantly relived the horrors of having been tortured and violated at the hands of a man whose identity remained a mystery
to her.
In the weeks, months and years following the crime, sensational for its sheer cruelty, Lennice Plante fought
hard to win back a modicum of the smile and laughter she had once readily shared with compatriots at the Herbert Lipton Center,
an out-patient clinic for the mentally ill a few blocks from her apartment in Leominster. After the crime, job one for her
clinicians and helpers, some of whom grew to love the often childlike being they came to know as a fearful shell of her former
self, was to constantly reassure her that she was safe. After all, the man convicted for the crime, Benjamin LaGuer, was behind
bars.
Until recently, when someone who knew Lennice Plante intimately stepped forward to talk about the victim of this
horrible ordeal, little has been known about the person whose life was shredded that day. But Annie DeMartino, a deeply religious
woman who cared for Plante for hours on end in the two years following the crime, now feels compelled to speak out.
DeMartino’s
sense that she could not remain silent began last fall when the heinousness of the crime—juxtaposed against doubts about
the justice of LaGuer’s conviction and prolonged incarceration—became a burning issue in the Massachusetts governor’s
race. DeMartino conversed with her friend Robert Terk, an attorney who once represented LaGuer and who continues to believe
in his innocence. Knowing of my interest in the case, Terk put DeMartino and me in touch. We spoke on the phone. Then she
invited me to Brownie’s Tea and Talk, the down home breakfast and lunch restaurant she owns and operates on a back street
in Fitchburg. Over a bowl of her own chicken soup DeMartino took me on a tour of a swath of her fascinating life, which has
included being interviewed by the late Peter Jennings and then Sam Donaldson on the two occasions that she was named the ABC
Evening News’s Person of the Week for her work in human services.
At the heart of our interview was the
story of how DeMartino, at the time a house mother in the residential facility Plante moved to after the crime, became a sounding
board, a confidant and eventually a loving friend to the severely traumatized 59-year-old. DeMartino devoted herself to gently
coaxing Plante out of the shell she burrowed into as a way of shielding herself from the inner anguish that would never leave
her. Remarkably, Plante was not bitter, DeMartino recalls, but a constant and pathological “fearfulness” layered
itself over her underlying mental illness.
The events of the early morning hours of July 13, 1983 would also forever
change the life of a young man who happened to be staying in his father’s apartment directly next door to the crime.
Twenty years old and discharged from the Army less than three weeks earlier, Benjamin LaGuer was reintegrating himself into
the community after a long absence, most of it serving in Germany. He had lived in Leominster for a year before dropping out
of high school to enlist.
That morning, by his own account, LaGuer awoke, showered, and left the building to see about
enrolling in computer courses at Fitchburg State College. He insists that he didn’t know what had transpired just a
few yards from where he slept. Later that day Raymond Cochran, the superintendent at the Waterway Apartments, a red brick
converted mill complex a little way down the hill from the Leominster business district, named LaGuer to police as a possible
suspect based on his dark complexion and his proximity to the crime.
Two days afterwards, on Friday, July 15, Detective
Ronald Carignan asked the 5’8” Puerto Rican with Afro-Caribbean features to accompany him to the stationhouse
to answer some questions. He complied. Carignan said fingerprints were recovered and that the woman could identify her attacker.
Instead of asking for an attorney, LaGuer volunteered a set of his fingerprints and allowed Carignan to take a Polaroid mug
shot for the victim to review.
When Carignan returned from Leominster Hospital, where Plante was being treated, he
announced that she had picked the suspect out of a photo array. He arrested and arraigned Laguer and shipped him off to the
Worcester House of Corrections. Six months later a jury watched as Plante pointed to the only dark-skinned person in the courtroom
when the prosecutor asked if she could identify her attacker. “That chap right there,” she said.
At the
conclusion of the trial a few days later, the all-white male panel convicted LaGuer. Judge Robert Mulkern imposed a life sentence
with a possibility of parole after 15 years.
Today, 23 and a half years later, LaGuer, who has never wavered in his
professions of innocence even through a plea offer before the trial and three parole hearings when admitting to the crime
could have won his release, is still trying to unravel the tangle of events during that July week many years ago.
In
the intervening decades, LaGuer’s quest for exoneration has been the subject of hundreds of news articles and hours
of television coverage. He became a household name last fall when Kerry Healey, the Republican candidate for governor, featured
him in two widely aired 30-second spots lambasting Deval Patrick, the eventual winner, for having twice written to the parole
board advocating for the inmate’s release.
LaGuer’s life, his character, and his undisputed talent for
attracting attention to his cause, have turned him into an almost mythical figure. Famous writers, Nobel laureates, academicians
and civil rights activists have lauded LaGuer for educating himself and winning writing awards in prison, and for overcoming
its privations with grace and humor.
He was also portrayed as an evil if consummate con artist when a 2002 DNA test
seemed to link him to the crime. Many people following the case thought the biological evidence put the question of his guilt
to rest and that he would finally fade into obscurity. But as it turned out, he attracted elite lawyers to keep his quest
for vindication in the courts. Nationally recognized DNA experts seconded suspicions about the validity of the results of
the tests. Reporters at major media outlets still read his letters and take him seriously.
Little, however, has been
known about the victim of this crime other than that Lennice Plante suffered from mental illness. Schizophrenia was the diagnosis
most often mentioned as the result of statements her daughter, Elizabeth Barry, made to police and hospital personnel soon
after the crime.
But Plante’s psychiatric history was not introduced in court because the trial judge accepted
arguments made by the prosecutor, James Lemire, that to do so would be “demeaning in the eyes of the jury.” Lemire
told Judge Mulkern that Plante’s mental condition was irrelevant to the proceedings, “... because she had for
at least two years prior to this incident not had any psychiatric problems [and] was not on any medication... .” This,
as it turns out, was untrue.
That Lennice Plante was brutalized is beyond question. Details about her life, whom she
associated with, her mental state before and after the crime, and hence the reliability of her identification of LaGuer from
a photo in a hospital room and then in court from the witness stand, have been the subject of much speculation. According
to a police report, her daughter threatened to move into her mother’s apartment as “bait” if Plante didn’t
cooperate in identifying the perpetrator. Only in the last few years has Elizabeth Barry spoken publicly about her mother’s
life. In June, 2003 she told TV talk show host Emily Rooney that Plante’s husband had been highly abusive and that he
kept both his wife and daughter “under lock and key.” But Elizabeth Barry and her husband Robert insisted in 2003
and again in numerous media appearances during the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, which included a press conference with Kerry
Healey, that her mother was “cognitive” and well equipped to identify LaGuer as the assailant.
The Barrys
have steadfastly refused to talk to me about the case despite repeated requests.
DeMartino, who grew to know Plante
intimately in the years following the crime, describes a woman who struggled to regain her trusting nature, but whose demons
manifested themselves in an aggravated form of the paranoid schizophrenia and delusional behavior she had experienced before
the crime. According to DeMartino, Plante had no day-to-day memory to speak of after the crime, and her body would shrivel
in fear at the sight of black and Hispanic men she encountered on supervised outings.
In our discussions, DeMartino
also revealed some startling information never brought forward before about a prior liaison Plante had with a man long thought
to be a likelier candidate for having committed the crime. This information is especially intriguing because the basis of
LaGuer’s most recent appeal, which was recently rejected by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, is a state police
fingerprint report that was hidden from the defense at the trial. It showed that something else happened on the day that Plante,
who at the time was heavily medicated and without her reading glasses, reviewed the Polaroid mug shot in her hospital bed
and purportedly IDed LaGuer. The other thing is that the fingerprints LaGuer provided when he allowed his photo to be taken
were compared to four fingerprints found on the base of the Trimline telephone, the cord of which the attacker used to bind
Plante’s wrists. That fingerprint report, suppressed for more than 18 years, showed that the four prints on the phone
belonged to someone other than LaGuer.
In 1983 DeMartino had already been working as an aid in the Herbert Lipton Center
at 10 Pleasant Street in Fitchburg for several years. It was a residential half-way house for 10 former mental patients who
were unable to live independently. “Very sick people lived there,” said DeMartino. The facility was affiliated
with the outpatient day clinic for the mentally ill in Leominster where Plante was a client before the crime. This network
had been established as a community support for former patients of the state hospital in Gardner, where Plante had once been
confined.
DeMartino remembers seeing Plante at the day program and hearing about her before the crime. “I knew
of Lennice through when I would go over to bring over the paperwork from the house. She would be in the group,” said
DeMartino in her Irish brogue. “Lennice used to smoke and all the smokers used to be in one area.” Asked about
her impressions of Plante before the crime, DeMartino recalled that “Lennice was different than the others... I would
say that Lennice was an educated woman, and delusional of grandeur. She walked tall, she walked well, she had definitely good
breeding... A lot of her delusions were about how President Kennedy was coming to see her, very high-powered people were always
visiting with her, that type of delusions.She would believe the stories.”
DeMartino also described the Lennice
Plante from before the crime as “jovial” and trusting to a fault. But that side of her died on the day she was
sexually assaulted and beaten. “She was very trusting,” said DeMartino. “She never trusted after that. I
got through to her, it was like a friendship, because my heart broke, because what I saw was a broken woman, but I also saw
a woman who definitely had been violated, and you could tell.” Years of therapy and reassurance helped a little, according
to DeMartino, but “... we never actually ever got her back, in the true sense. She started to heal a little, she started
to laugh a little, [but] we never got the whole Lennice back, never.”
Just how trusting Plante had been before
the crime became apparent to DeMartino during long talks the pair had, often when Plante awoke in the middle of the night
from horrendous nightmares that wouldn’t stop coming. DeMartino’s shifts typically began at three in the afternoon
and lasted until seven the next morning. She worked every other week and basically lived at the center when she was on duty.
Her discussions with Plante often turned to the subject of bonding and friendship.
Though she had never been a gregarious
person, Plante often spoke of a relationship she had formed with a man much younger than herself whose mother lived in the
Waterway Apartments. They apparently met on a park bench and she would give him a few dollars to fetch cigarettes for her
from a store nearby. “She was always a chain smoker,” said DeMartino.
Plante never told DeMartino this
man’s name, but she did say that he was “Spanish” and that he possessed keys to the front door of the building
by virtue of the fact that his mother had lived there. She also said that this man would drink alcohol and that his mother
refused him entry into her apartment when he was drunk. On those occasions, according to what DeMartino says Plante told her,
Plante would let him into her apartment to sleep on the couch. He was the only “friend” from before the crime
whom Plante ever talked about, said DeMartino; “She liked him.”
The significance of this revelation can
hardly be overstated in trying to evaluate LaGuer’s unwavering claims of innocence. After he was indicted in early August,
1983, LaGuer spent what little money he had saved for college after being discharged from the army to hire a lawyer, who in
turn hired a pair of private investigators to chase down leads. One of those investigators was Robert Hammack, a former Shrewsbury
detective and former UMass Worcester deputy police chief. Hammack identified a man by the name of Jose Gomez whom he named
in his report as a “likelier suspect.” This assessment was based on several things, including the fact that Gomez’s
mother, Felicita, had lived in the Waterway Apartments. Beyond that, according to Hammack’s report, Gomez had previously
been “confined to Worcester State Hospital” due to a “history of sexual misconduct.”
Gomez
is five years older than LaGuer. He is also Puerto Rican and is of similar build and height. In 1998, 15 years after the crime
against Lennice Plante, Gomez was arrested for rape. The police report in that case, which was settled with a plea bargain,
describes a crime eerily similar to what happened to Plante. The victim, who was living with Gomez, told police that he punched
her and verbally threatened her before proceeding to rape her.
Plante had also spent some time at Worcester State Hospital,
according to what she reportedly told DeMartino. But that never came out in the police reports. One thing she did tell the
police about the attacker is that he threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone who he was. She also said he emitted a
noxious odor and that he asked her repeatedly during the attack whether she liked sex.
Hammack, who to this day believes
the police arrested the wrong man, recalls a meeting in the fall of 1983 with LaGuer’s attorney and sisters where they
were asked to come up with more money in order to continue the independent investigation. When they couldn’t, said Hammack,
the attorney instructed him to cease working on the case, a turn of events he has regretted ever since.
At LaGuer’s
trial, six months after the crime, Plante testified that she didn’t know anyone in the building. This doesn’t
square with what she told DeMartino about her “friend” whose mother lived in the apartment complex. Her testimony
was shaky in other respects. She misidentified the races of several men in the mug shots from which she reportedly picked
out LaGuer’s picture. She also swore that she never told police she had seen the assailant go into the LaGuer apartment,
which didn’t square with information the lead detective gave on an application to search LaGuer’s apartment and
with what he told the grand jury that indicted LaGuer.
DeMartino, as the aide Plante had grown to have the most trust
in, was called upon to accompany her patient to the trial that ended in LaGuer’s conviction. DeMartino recalls a sense
of relief after the trial, which was very hard on Plante. “She was very nervous at the trial. It was a very bad time
for Lennice,” recalls DeMartino, “it was a very emotional time for her.” On the last day she came back to
the residential center, went to her room and closed the door. When she emerged the next morning it was as if nothing of note
had happened. “It was like any other day... just another day,” said DeMartino.
And then there is another
stunning revelation DeMartino is now willing to share about her experiences with Plante. The victim of this horrendous assault
pointed to LaGuer in the courtroom when asked by the prosecutor to identify her attacker. But, according to DeMartino, in
the months before the trial and then again on many occasions after the trial, Plante would point to black and Hispanic men
on the street or in public places and accuse them of having raped her.
“If I went out in public with her,”
DeMartino recalls, “everybody she saw who was either Spanish or black, she would be saying, that’s who did it,
that’s who did it, and of course it wasn’t, because basically they were just people in the street. She was very
paranoid at that time about everybody... she hated anybody dark-skinned. She would absolutely get horribly frightened.”
DeMartino always reported these incidents to the clinicians. “It happened on different days, different times, different
months, different years,” she said.
DeMartino’s job in those instances was to comfort and reassure Plante.
“Each time, I’d say, ‘You’re safe,’ and she said, ‘Are you sure, Annie?’ And I’d
say, ‘Yes.’” Every time this happened, according to DeMartino, it was like the first time, and Plante had
no recollection of the previous incidents. “One day I was there with her and there were a couple of darker-skinned people,”
said DeMartino. “She would sit and she’d curl up and she’d look, and I’d say, ‘Now, what’s
wrong, Lennice?’ I’d say, ‘No, no. No, no, he’s gone, he’s gone away, he can’t hurt you
again.’”
This behavior didn’t surprise DeMartino, based on Plante’s diagnosis. “If you
know anything about delusional people, if they get a person in their delusional system, that person is fixed in there and
they can see them,” said DeMartino, “like she could be looking at this man and she could be seeing who she thought
she was seeing. It’s delusional, it’s never real, it’s delusional... that’s what they call paranoid
schizophrenia.”
It was weeks after the trial before Plante would venture into the common room in the evenings.
One of the residents was a black man and she always avoided him. “Little by little you could see her beginning to smile
again, you could see her beginning to laugh again,” said DeMartino. But “... every time she saw somebody, the
only thing I would say is, ‘No, Lennice, he’s gone away, he’s put away,’ and she would say, ‘You
promise?’ and I would say, ‘I promise.’”
Though she would have some lucid times when she would
share stories about her past as an Army nurse or recount happy visits with her infant granddaughter, Plante was usually “very”
childlike, according to DeMartino, and she didn’t seem to have any insight into her severe mental illness.
DeMartino,
who went on to use the recognition she received by twice being named the ABC Evening News Person of the Week to build
a political career as a member of the Fitchburg City Council, cared for and grew very close to Plante in the two years she
attended to her. She would continue to visit Plante and take her out for coffee when she was later living in a nursing home.
It became an intimate friendship forged over a period of many years.
The last time DeMartino saw Plante was shortly
before Plante died in 1999 at the age of 75. It was a chance meeting in the locked ward of a geriatric nursing facility in
Winchendon where DeMartino was visiting another friend. “She was rambling and raving and talking to herself,”
recalls DeMartino. “I went over but she didn’t know me, so I just kissed her and said goodbye.”
During
the recent gubernatorial campaign, DeMartino said she deeply resented the way Plante’s suffering was used as a political
football by conservatives taunting Deval Patrick for past gestures of support for LaGuer. “I thought it was one of the
most disgusting things in politics that I have ever seen,” she said. Her voice breaking, she added, “I prayed
on the rosary every night and asked God to make her safe, because she went through hell.”
Meanwhile, Benjamin
LaGuer, who will turn 44 on May 1, is still pleading for a new trial nearly 24 years after his incarceration for a crime to
which no physical evidence linked him. The jury convicted LaGuer solely on Lennice Plante’s courtroom identification
of the “chap” sitting at the defendant’s table.
At the end of the interview, once the tape recorder
was off, DeMartino looked at me and said, “You know that word ‘chap’?” I nodded, and she went on to
tell me that it was not part of Plante’s normal vocabulary. But it was a word used often by DeMartino.
