The Bedford Cold Case

Natalie Scheublin was fifty-four, a mother and a cancer survivor, and her husband Raymond ran the Lexington Trust Company. On June 10, 1971, he came home to their Bedford, Massachusetts, house and found her at the foot of the cellar stairs. She had been bound and gagged, stabbed, and struck hard enough to fracture her skull. Bank keys were missing, and so was her blue-and-white 1969 Chevrolet Impala.

The car turned up at the Bedford VA hospital, wiped down except for one latent print on a rear window. In 1971 no one could search a print nationwide. In 1999 Massachusetts State Police ran it through the FBI’s automated system and matched it to the left thumb of Arthur Massei, a career criminal with a record in four states. Interviewed in 2005, he blamed mobsters and a dead cousin and insisted he had turned the job down.

That was not enough to charge him. A cold case unit took up the file in 2019, and investigators found a woman who had run bank frauds with Massei; she testified he once bragged of stabbing someone to death in their home. He was arrested in March 2022, and from jail he offered a thousand dollars for testimony blaming that cousin. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder on May 14, 2024. On June 3, at seventy-eight, he was given life without parole.