Perfectly Innocent: The Wrongful Conviction of Alfred Trenkler

By Morrison Bonpasse

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A WRONGFUL CONVICTION OF AN INNOCENT MAN - WHO MUST BE EXONERATED.
On 28 October 1991, Boston Police officer, Jeremiah Hurley, Jr. was killed, and his partner, Francis X. Foley, was maimed, by a dynamite bomb which they were attempting to disarm at the home of Thomas L. Shay of Roslindale, Boston. Their losses were terrible and intolerable, and those responsible must be apprehended and punished.
In the subsequent investigation, Alfred Trenkler was targeted because he had met Shay's son, Thomas A. Shay, (referenced in many government and court papers as "Tom" and "Shay, Jr.") within five months of the October bombing, and because five years earlier he had assembled a harmless noisemaking prank device in Quincy in 1986 for a friend. Alfred was convicted in Boston Federal Court in 1993 and sentenced to two life terms.
Alfred W. Trenkler had nothing to do with the Roslindale Bomb. He had no motive to harm anyone. At the time of the bombing, he was successfully operating a high tech communications business consulting, designing, installing and servicing terrestrial and satellite microwave studio transmitter links for television, public service two way radio trunking and paging systems, had no debts, and had no need for additional money, and knew nothing about Tom Shay's father who was in the middle of a $400,000 lawsuit.
Alfred was convicted because of a "perfect storm" of mistakes by investigators, prosecutors, Alfred's defense counsel and a few lies in court. Alfred filed a motion for a new trial before the United States Appeals Court as a result of the recent discovery of evidence withheld by the government, but the motion was denied. He is simultaneously seeking a re-investigation of the case by the Boston Police Department, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and explosives (BATFE) and/or the U.S. Attorney's office.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morrison Bonpasse
• Release date: Jan 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311277374

Morrison Bonpasse

Morrison M. Bonpasse, is the founder and president of the Single Global Currency Association (www.singleglobalcurrency.org) and the founder and Executive Director of BonPasse Exoneration Services (www.bonpasseexonerationservices.com). After childhood in Duxbury, Massachusetts, he was educated at Phillips Academy, Andover, and Yale University and was trained as a lawyer at Boston University Law School (JD), a public administrator at Northeastern University (MPA) and a businessperson at Babson College (MBA). He lives with his wife in Newcastle, Maine, USA, not far from his two stepchildren and five grandchildren, and predicts that all will live to see the implementation of the Single Global Currency and the exoneration of his clients, and many more wrongfully convicted innocent people.

Book preview

ALFRED TRENKLER INNOCENT COMMITTEE

P.O. Box 870111, Milton Village, MA 02187-0111

www.alfredtrenklerinnocent.org

10 October 2007

Dear Reader of Version 9 of the Manuscript Edition of Perfectly Innocent:

Thank you for reading this book, which is one small step in the effort to find and publicize the truth about the Roslindale Bomb case. This version is available online, until the next version is created and an few copies will be printed in looseleaf manuscript form because we need more time and help to find and present additional facts and truth in this case. Its format emphasizes our ability to make changes in the book. It is not bound and sealed. One hundred copies of Version 8 were printed.

The manuscript is the latest version of copies which are being sent to people affected by, or involved in, the Roslindale Bomb case, including the trials of Tom Shay and Alfred Trenkler. They are being brought or sent to the families of Jeremiah Hurley and Francis Foley and to the judges, prosecutors, witnesses and investigators. To the extent possible, they are being brought or sent to the jurors in both trials. As is noted in Chapter 13, Campaign for Justice for Alfred Trenkler, we believe that everyone can help secure justice in this case and that includes especially those who contributed mistakenly and unknowingly to the wrongful convictions. In other professions, mistakes are corrected, as they should be here.

The book was written primarily using public documents and newspaper articles, most of which are available on Alfred’s website. As we already had a strong point of view when the writing began, that Alfred Trenkler was perfectly innocent and Tom Shay, too, it was decided to complete the manuscript first so that there would be no surprise about the book’s perspective. With manuscript in electronic or hard copy print, we hope that you, the readers, will now provide feedback which will include additional facts and viewpoints, corrections and criticisms, too. As much as possible, and unless requested otherwise, that feedback will be posted on the website verbatim, and then included as faithfully as possible in the book. We will incorporate that feedback, regardless of where it leads, into the final edition which will hopefully be published as a commercial book. It is our belief that the truth will set Alfred Trenkler free, and will clean Tom Shay’s record, and we welcome any and all efforts to present the truth in this case.

Sincerely,

Morrison Bonpasse

Newcastle, ME 04553-0390

207-586-6078

[e-mail]

Alfred Trenkler

USP Allenwood

P.O. Box 3000

White Deer, PA 17887

This book is dedicated to those who gave

their lives in the pursuit of truth and justice.

PREFACE

Justice is but Truth in Action[1]

Louis D. Brandeis

On 8 March 1994, Alfred Trenkler[2] was sentenced to two life terms in Federal prison for building a bomb in 1991 that killed a Boston policeman and severely wounded another. The prosecution’s theory was that the bomb was intended for the father of Tom Shay, an acquaintance of Alfred’s. Through a series of tragic mistakes and some lies, Alfred and Tom Shay were wrongly convicted.

On Friday, 24 March 2006, Alfred’s half-brother, David Wallace, called me to ask me to establish a website for Alfred, who, David said, had been wrongly convicted of building a bomb which killed a Boston police officer. David called me because I had built a website for Maine’s best known wrongfully convicted person, Dennis Dechaine. David didn’t know about my other work for Dennis, and my philosophy that efforts on behalf of a wrongfully convicted person should be pursued as a combined educational, legal, political and public relations campaign. Among the corollaries to that philosophy is the view that every citizen, including the friends and families of victims, and each former member of a jury, has an obligation to pursue justice and, when necessary, to correct injustice. I presume, unless proven otherwise, that everyone, especially members of the law enforcement community, seeks to fulfill that obligation. It’s the work of a campaign for a wrongfully convicted person to bring to the public’s attention the need to correct an injustice; for if the people do not know about a wrongful conviction, it is less likely to be corrected. We live in a democracy, and the police, prosecutors and judges do pay attention to the views of the people. The ever increasing number of exonerations, most clearly achieved through DNA testing, shows that for too long the police, prosecutors and judges thought that the public was more interested in punishment than in justice. With 2 million Americans behind bars, a 1% wrongful conviction rate would mean that 20,000 innocent people are in U.S. prisons and jails.

David and I met shortly after our telephone call at a restaurant in Bath, Maine, halfway between our homes, and I began to absorb his vast knowledge about Alfred’s case. It didn’t take long to suspect that a gross miscarriage of justice had occurred and after five weeks, I was 99.9% convinced that Alfred Trenkler was totally innocent of any involvement in the crimes for which he was wrongfully convicted.

But what about that .1%? Everyone who works on behalf of a person s/he believes to be wrongly convicted must wonder, But what about that .1%? Sometimes I think, but what about what ‘X’ said, as compared to what Alfred said? And following that comes the question, "Could Alfred have done it?" Well, it’s possible, which is why the 99.9% is not 100% - but still very unlikely. Anyway, that’s not the standard to use. For a person to be found guilty and sent to prison, there must be a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and not whether he could have done it. He didn’t, and there is no piece of convincing evidence that he did.

Soon, I came to believe that Thomas A. Shay[3] is entirely innocent, too, of any involvement in the building of the 1991 bomb. Given what’s related in this book, it’s very hard to conceive how Thomas A. Shay could have built and placed the bomb by himself or worked with anyone else. Not impossible, but highly improbable.

However, he was a free man shortly after I started on this road, and the need to fully explore his case was less pressing than for Alfred. Tom Shay is now back in prison for 33 months for violating the terms of his probation. He was excoriated in the newspapers for his conduct while on probation, but the government’s conviction of an innocent man trumps those mistakes. Were there no wrongful conviction, there would have been no probation and no probation violations. He has read this manuscript and provided helpful clarifications and careful proofreading edits, and has completed his Testimony in Appendix B.

The website, www.alfredtrenklerinnocent.org, was initiated in early April, 2006, about the same time as began my weekly one or two fifteen-minute phone calls with Alfred. Although neither of us noted the milestone at the time, the total time of our conversations passed the 8.5 hour mark some time in September. That was longer than the total length of time Alfred Trenkler was in the presence of Tom Shay, in the summer of 1991, and twice as long as the total length of their conversational time.

Fortunately for me, and hopefully Alfred too, my relationship with Alfred has gone forward and we have become close friends. Alfred’s acquaintance with Tom Shay did not go further than those few hours, mostly spent listening to music on the car radio, and that is one of the core facts of this book that the jury did not understand. The acquaintance was short and short-lived.

Until Alfred’s 4 April 2007 resentencing I had not had the privilege of meeting him face-to-face because of a Bureau of Prisons rule which forbids visits to inmates by friends if such friendships did not precede the inmate’s incarceration. The irrationality of the rule becomes apparent when one considers the likely circles of friends of most inmates before their incarceration. The Allenwood warden, Jonathan Miner, is permitted by the Rule to allow exceptions to the friends’ visitation prohibition when consistent with the security and good order of the prison, but he has chosen, so far, and without further explanation, to affirm his subordinates’ decisions. As this book is being written, the denial stands, despite my and Alfred’s efforts.

This isn’t the place to present a detailed chronology of my efforts since then, which have included requests to my Congressman, Tom Allen. Suffice to say that our efforts have been unsuccessful so far. The effect of the denial of visits has been to impair the search for truth, and to frustrate the Bureau of Prisons’ own stated goals for visits to inmates which include the maintenance of ties to the outside community.

Two significant changes in April may persuade Warden Miner to allow me to visit Alfred. First, he was resentenced to 37 years instead of his previous double-life term. As it is now probable that Alfred will live to see his release, he now has more of a need for friends on the outside. Second, while Alfred was in the custody of the U.S. Marshal Service after his 4 April resentencing, I visited him seven times at the Donald Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, Rhode Island.

Around the world, Amnesty International fights for the ability to obtain access to forgotten prisoners, and here in the U.S. I’m unable to visit Alfred Trenkler who currently gets between two to three visits a year by his family and none, so far, from any of his friends. No reason for the denial has been given so far, other than that the Bureau of Prisons has the power to deny my visits, so visits it will deny. This book is part of the effort to speak truth to power in general, and the effort to visit Alfred is a rightful part of that effort.

Is it a coincidence that it’s been so difficult for me to visit a man who has claimed his innocence from the beginning? Or does it mean something more intentional is at work? Generally, as this book shows, in the absence of clear evidence, I try to see only mistakes and errors where others may see intent and conspiracy; but it would be naive not to wonder, sometimes.

Coincidence is a phenomenon that’s much referenced in this book, as you, the reader, will be asked rhetorically, or will ask yourself, whether the simultaneity of two or more events was a coincidence, i.e. happening entirely by chance, or whether there was some human intent involved. I’ve long been intrigued by the concept of coincidence and once wrote an essay for a local newspaper in Maine to capture the coincidences at play upon our purchase of a home in Maine. For example, it was a coincidence that a family friend from Duxbury, Mass. lived five houses down the road in Maine from us, and that another neighbor went to college with my mother. During the writing of this book, we learned that a friend here in Maine is writing a book about her daughter’s correspondence with the Pakistani who killed a randomly selected motorist who was driving to work in Virginia’s Washington, D.C. suburbs in 1993. The killer was executed and the daughter’s correspondence morphed into a long term correspondence between her mother and the widow of the Pakistani. The man he killed was a friend of my parents in Duxbury, where he was a general practitioner M.D. until joining the State Department and then the CIA.

Sometimes, such coincidences are known as small world stories. After Alfred’s resentencing on 4 April 2007, he was in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York where he met a recently sentenced Ponzi Scheme operator, Blake Prater. Alfred soon discovered that Prater was a supporter of a single global currency, after having read my book, "The Single Global Currency - Common Cents for the World."

Prior to this year’s involvement, I did know two other participants in this story. At Boston University Law School, I took a legal writing course from Nancy Gertner from which I remember her positive personality, her dramatic hand gestures, and the beautiful moonrises over the Charles River basin. She was Tom Shay’s attorney and is now a Federal District Court judge.

I also know my prep school and college classmate, Judge Doug Woodlook, who was the judge of the David Lindholm case, and who reduced Lindholm’s sentence by 55 months after his incriminating testimony against Alfred Trenkler. At that time, Doug could not have known the full background of the U.S. Government’s request for a reduced sentence, and I haven’t yet determined the best way to bring it to his attention. Maybe he will read this book. Another prep school classmate once did a state-funded psychological examination of one of Tom Shay’s sisters. Other acquaintances include a judge at one of Tom Shay’s municipal hearings, a lawyer who participated in Tom Shay’s deposition in his father’s civil suit, the first lawyer for Alfred, the art dealer for David Lindholm in the 1980s, and one of the U.S. Attorneys for Massachusetts whose name is in several of the appellate filings in the case. There are not many degrees of separation among the people of Boston and the people involved in the case, as listed in Who’s Who? in Appendix C. It’s safe to say that everyone in Boston knows someone who knows at least one one of those people in Appendix C.

I spent my childhood in Duxbury, and there I and my family knew many friends of the Wallace family, but we never met until David’s call. One family friend of the Wallaces grew up in Winchester where his parents were the closest friends of my grandparents, and where it was hoped he or his brother would marry my mother or one of her sisters. I’ve since visited his home which previously had been visited by Alfred and his parents and my mother and her parents.

One coincidental connection that did not occur was that both Alfred and I could have used the auto body repair services of Thomas L. Shay and his brother Arthur. The condition of Alfred’s 1979 Toyota Celica is described in the book. When Arthur Shay saw in 2007 the condition of my 1993 Honda Accord with its 579,000 miles, he said, "I’d like to do some work on your car."

The campaign for the exoneration of Dennis Dechaine began immediately after his 1989 conviction in Maine for murder. Years of efforts by his dedicated support group, Trial and Error, came up short and the campaign languished until the publication of the book, Human Sacrifice, by James Moore in 2002. A retired ATF agent, Moore began investigating the Dechaine case as an unpaid volunteer in June 1992. He began his investigation with the assumption, arising from his ATF work, that the legal system usually arrests and correctly convicts criminals. However, he soon realized that the case was badly investigated and prosecuted, and that Dechaine was very likely innocent. Further investigation into the time of the victim’s death revealed that it likely occurred when Dechaine was being questioned and in the custody of, or under surveillance by, the police. The realization confirmed his views about Dechaine’s inncoence. Moore relentlessly sought to obtain the government’s documents about the case and every time that unseen documents were found, and almost literally unearthed, they supported Dechaine’s claims of innocence. Now, Moore and thousands of others are 99.9% certain of Dennis’s total innocence of any involvement in that horrible crime. Still, Dennis awaits justice in Maine.

I had became involved in Trial and Error upon reading Human Sacrifice at the urging of a friend, Bill Bunting, in early 2002 and have been convinced ever since of the power of a book to present a coherent view of injustice and to motivate people to join or support a campaign to correct that injustice.

Thus came the awareness that the campaign for Alfred Trenkler also needed a book. After the failure of several efforts to find an author for this book, and after Dennis’ encouragement, I decided to start writing it myself.

This edition is called the Manuscript Edition, meaning that it’s the test, or even trial, edition. It was limited by time and resources, and thus does not show the benefits of interviews with participants and observers. Instead, it relies almost entirely upon the written legal record and media reports, and upon correspondence and short conversations with Alfred. The one or two weekly phone calls with Alfred are limited to 15 minutes each, so there has not been much opportunity for extended interviews. As I came to the writing after I had formed most of my opinions of the case, interviewees would have been cautious to share with me their views. Now, however, with the publication of this Manuscript Edition, potential interviewees will see what’s been written so far and they can contribute to the search for the truth as they wish. The packaging as looseleaf pages bound in string should reinforce the perspective that it’s a work-in-progress.

There is no hidden agenda. When Joseph McGuiness was asked to write what became his book about the Jeffrey McDonald case, Fatal Vision, there was an assumption that he would conclude that McDonald was innocent. However, the book presented the other view. That will not be the case here unless new evidence points in that direction, and in the 14 years since Alfred’s conviction, the new or rediscovered evidence has all pointed toward his innocence.

I believe that everything stated in this book as fact is true. Any reader who finds an inaccuracy, or gap in information, or a need to provide any other feedback, is welcome to let me know and a correction will be posted on Alfred’s website at www.alfredtrenklerinnocent.org, where the entire Manuscript Edition also will be posted. Changes will be made in the book as soon as possible. After several months, it’s hoped that a more polished and accurate paperback edition will be published and distributed through normal channels with a planned publication date of 28 October 2007, 16 years after the Roslindale Bomb explosion.

Corrections are especially welcome, as a major goal of Alfred’s campaign for justice is truth. In my work with Alfred, nothing that I have read by him or that he has told me has been shown to be false by reference to other reliable sources, such as documents. Where there are assumptions or deductions, readers are welcome to weigh them against his/her own, and send me email or U.S. mail.

Copies will be sent to most of the people named in Appendix C, to the extent that their addresses can be found. Hopefully, some will accept email copies to keep costs down. Hopefully, too, some people will purchase a Manuscript Edition copy, to assist our efforts. All proceeds from the sale of this manuscript, and subsequent editions, will go initially to pay for printing costs, with any remaining balances to go to the Alfred Trenkler Innocent Committee, and its campaign for the exoneration of Alfred Trenkler and Tom Shay.

Also, it’s hoped by circulating these Manuscript Edition copies to as many people as possible, including those who believe that justice already has been done, that communications can be opened among members of the law enforcement community, and Alfred’s supporters and members of the victims’ families. Every member of each group has a common interest in truth and justice, and the correction of injustice when they see it.

One of the themes of this book is that the adversarial criminal trial process is not a good method for determining truth. It is hoped that the writing of this book, and its subsequent editions, will be more effective in determining that truth, or possible truths.

The title, Perfectly Innocent, comes from a statement made to the press by Alfred’s lawyer, Terry Segal, in 1992 at Alfred’s bizarre arraignment on a bounced check charge from Rhode Island. He said in reference to the Roslindale Bomb case, "My client maintains he is perfectly innocent in that matter."[4]

Of course, many people will find it hard to believe Alfred Trenkler and the conclusions of this book, but that’s not the same as proving that anything written here is false. Remember that Alfred was convicted by a jury of twelve people who believed the charges and a set of claimed facts to be true beyond a reasonable doubt. The minimum goal for this book is to convince readers to doubt, or even strongly doubt, the truth of the charges against Alfred Trenkler, for that should be enough to support the effort to set him free, or obtain a new trial. No one should be in prison unless there are crimes correctly attributed to them beyond a reasonable doubt. Raising substantial doubt, not to mention total innocence, should be available to every convicted inmate. The State of North Carolina has recently established a non-judicial Actual Innocence Commission where such claims can be made. Every state, and the Federal Government, should have such a commission.

Realistically, reaching that minimum goal of raising doubt is not enough to swing the prison doors open, so this book aims to present the truth, and that truth turns the jury’s verdict on its head and shows Alfred’s innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. It is the truth which should and shall set him free.[5]

This book focuses on the evidence presented at the trials of Thomas A. Shay and Alfred Trenkler. During the investigation of both men, there were many twists and turns that were interesting examples of truth and deception, generosity and greed, and honor and dishonor; but their presentation will do little to explain why two juries of twelve convicted Thomas A. Shay and Alfred W. Trenkler.

The best example of Alfred’s stated views is his Pre-Sentencing Statement which he presented orally to Judge Rya Zobel and attending visitors to her court on 8 March 1994. Unfortunately, his attorney had advised Alfred not to take the stand in his own defense, but when given the chance to proclaim his total innocence, he did so. Everything he said on that day was true then, and remains true now. It was too late for the jury to hear or consider, but it could be considered the beginning of the campaign for public support for the exoneration of Alfred Trenkler.

Almost all of the source documents for this book are posted on Alfred’s website. Thus, the endnotes for chapters are abbreviated, but they give enough information to get interested readers to the correct document in the website, www.aftredtrenklerinnocent.org. References to the transcripts of the trial of Thomas A. Shay will have a T for transcript and S for Shay, and the page number, e.g. (TS 2-24), and similarly for the Trenkler trial, e.g. (TT 2-25). When sources other than the website are utilized, they are cited where appropriate with standard references.

Graphically, the main text of the book is set in Bookman Old Style. Alfred’s documents and statements are presented in Verdana Italic, and the prosecutors’ and ATF and police documents and statements are in Verdana. All other quotes are in Bookman Old Style Italic.

Perhaps more than in other similar books, the original documents and statements are quoted extensively here, as this book is intended to be both a narrative story and a collection of the important documents or references to them. Original documents, rather than hearsay, should be more effective than my own prose or opinion. I’ve used many of Alfred Trenkler’s own written statements so the reader can get as good a sense as possible of his character and dilemma. This book seeks to add to his voice, so it can be heard for the first comprehensive time. He wasn’t heard by the grand jury, or at the detention hearing, the suppression hearings, or Tom Shay’s trial, or even at his own trial. He was defined by others in the courtroom and by the media outside the courtroom with whom he was forbidden to communicate.

One difficulty in the writing of this book, especially during Chapters 5 and 7 about the two trials, is that it was difficult to separate my own observations from those of the witnesses and the lawyers. Hopefully, the reader will recognize the difference.

Another difficulty was that the book is arranged relentlessly chronologically, but sometimes it made for a better narrative to present a fact out of order, such as when that fact was revealed to the jury through a witness’s testimony rather then when it occurred. Thus, because of that practice and my own comments, the book doesn’t show exactly what the members of the jury knew when they went into their deliberations; but it hopefully comes close. The point of the book is not just to explain why two juries mistakenly convicted Thomas A. Shay and Alfred W. Trenkler, but also to show that the two men are completely innocent. Sometimes, not guilty and actual innocence are not the same thing.

The two cases present webs of lies that were spun, puzzles created to be solved, and games set up to be played. The result was a tight web that left puzzles unsolved and the losers of the games to pay the price.

The public Campaign for Alfred Trenkler accelerated in April 2006 with the creation of a website and the establishment of the Alfred Trenkler Innocent Committee. It is time for the public to become involved in correcting at least one severe injustice. Even members of each jury can help as their public voices of doubt or concern would be very powerful. At the end of the Thomas A. Shay trial, Judge Rya Zobel said to the jurors, "You are now free to talk about this case if you choose to do so." (TS 21-6) Even though she then urged jurors not to discuss the case for unspecified reasons, their rights to do so are undiminished. What is the problem with talking about truth and justice?

Jurors are like temporary employees as they are hired to do a job for a short period of time, with no experience necessary. Indeed, jurors are paid on a daily basis for their work at trials. If we can question the work done by other short term temporary workers, why not that of jurors?

Readers will ask themselves ask themselves during their reading whether Alfred Trenkler is guilty or innocent....and Tom Shay, too. To find someone guilty of a crime, it’s not enough to think that someone might have done something; a jury must be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. Below are two charts showing the range of innocence to guilt in numbers and words.

The first is a scale of involvement in the Roslindale Bomb, or innocence expressed as a percentage.

Percent (%) of certainty of involvement

0--.1--1--10---20---30---40---50---60---70---80---90--99--99.9--100

|-------------------------NOT GUILTY------------------------------||GTY|

The second uses words to go with the percentages. Lawyers and judges and legal writers are reluctant to affix a number to the phrase beyond a reasonable doubt. They seem to prefer maintaining a level of mystery, which also makes a jury verdict less appealable. Below are explanations of the percentages of non-involvement expressed as the completed segment of the sentence beginning with: Alfred Trenkler.....

0% - did not build the Roslindale Bomb with total certainty. NOT GUILTY

.1% - did not build the Roslindale Bomb w/ near total certainty. NOT GUILTY

1.0% - did not build the Roslindale Bomb with much certainty. NOT GUILTY

10% - very likely did not build the Roslindale Bomb. NOT GUILTY

20% - probably did not build the Roslindale Bomb. NOT GUILTY

30% - might not have built the Roslindale Bomb. NOT GUILTY

40% - possibly did not build the Roslindale Bomb. NOT GUILTY

50% - undecided. Don’t have an opinion. NOT GUILTY

60% - possibly did build the Roslindale Bomb. NOT GUILTY

70% - might have built the Roslindale Bomb. NOT GUILTY

80% - probably did build the Roslindale Bomb. NOT GUILTY

90% - very likely did build the Roslindale Bomb. NOT GUILTY

99% - did build the Roslindale Bomb, with much certainty. NOT GUILTY

99.9% - did build the Roslindale Bomb, beyond a reasonable doubt. GUILTY

100% - did build the Roslindale Bomb, absolutely, with total certainty. GUILTY

Where are you, the reader, on this chart as you start this book, and where will you be throughout your reading and at the end? Please keep asking the same question.

Someday, the Campaign for Alfred will be able to "melt [the] bars"[6] which imprison him, to use his uncle William Barnum’s words, and emerge a free man.

Morrison Bonpasse

Vice-President

Alfred Trenkler Innocent Committee

P.O. Box 870111

Milton Village, MA 02187-0111

home

P.O. Box 390

Newcastle, ME 04553-0390

[e-mail]

END NOTES

[1]. Louis D. Brandeis. 1914. This quote is set in stone in the lobby of the United States John Moakley Courthouse in Boston.

[2]. Alfred W. Trenkler is referenced here as Alfred W. Trenkler or Alfred Trenkler or Alfred or Trenkler. His friends since childhood have called him Al, but his family calls him Alfred. He was 35 years old when the 1991 Roslindale Bomb exploded, and is called Alfred here.

[3]. Thomas Arthur Shay is referenced in this book as either Thomas A. Shay or Tom/Tommy Shay. His father is Thomas Leroy Shay who is referenced as either Thomas L. Shay or Mr. Shay. During the investigation, the shorthand was used of calling Tom Shay, Shay, Jr., and Thomas L. Shay, Shay, Sr. However, Thomas L. Shay named his only son Thomas Arthur Shay, and not Thomas Leroy Shay, Jr. Arthur was his father’s as well as his brother’s name. In any case, Thomas A. Shay was never a Jr., and his father never a Sr. The only Jr. in this tragic story is Jeremiah J. Hurley, Jr., whose proud father was also a Boston policeman.

[4]. Lawyer for Milton man denies link to bombing, by John Ellement, Boston Globe, 23 April 1992.

[5]. The expression ,"The truth shall set you free comes from the Bible. The full expression from the Book of John, Chapter 8, Verse 32 is You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."

[6]. William J. Barnum, Of Rare Design, A collection of Poetry. Natick, Mass., 1999.

INTRODUCTION

"Tt is thus essential in this science-related area

that the courts administer the Federal Rules...

so that the truth may be ascertained."[1]

Justice Stephen Breyer

On 28 October 1991 a bomb exploded at the home of Thomas L. Shay of 39 Eastbourne Street[2], Roslindale, a neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts. [For a map of metropolitan Boston with case-related sites, see Appendix D.] The explosion killed not the apparent target, Thomas L. Shay, but a Boston Policeman, Jeremiah J. Hurley, Jr., and severely injured his partner, Francis X. Foley. The Boston Police Department immediately began its investigation and pursued several theories about the identity of the person called in this book, the Bomb Maker. One possibility was that the defendants in a civil suit filed by Thomas L. Shay may have sought to either intimidate Shay or kill him. Another was that Shay may have had the bomb built by someone he knew, perhaps his brother, Arthur, and then had it planted underneath his car to make it appear that someone else was trying to intimidate or kill him. A third theory was that someone was sending a message to Mr. Shay about the need to pay his gambling debts. A fourth theory was that Thomas L. Shay’s 19 year old son, Thomas A. Shay, sought to kill his father in revenge for his institutionalized upbringing and/or to gain through inheritance his share of his father’s expected windfall from the civil lawsuit.

Alfred Trenkler had never met Mr. Thomas L. Shay, but he did meet his son, Thomas A. Shay, in June 1991 when Shay was asking passersby for a ride home to Roslindale from a 24-hour convenience store in Back Bay, Boston. Alfred gave him a ride, and subsequently met him, by chance, on five other occasions, and gave him rides four of those five times during June and July. The last contact was a final chance meeting in August 1991. None of those contacts was planned beforehand by Alfred Trenkler. There has been no contact since, except voice contact when they were placed in neighboring jail cells, on both sides of a cell adjoining each of their cells, in the Federal Court lockup on 25 June 1993, just prior to Tom Shay’s trial. Alfred did not plan that contact either.

Thomas A. Shay was openly gay, or bisexual, and he recorded the names of some people he knew in an address book, but there were heterosexuals in that address book, too, such as his father and his father’s lawyer, Alan Pransky. He added Alfred’s name to that list without any indication of sexual preference. The phone number came from Alfred’s business card which Tom Shay tricked Alfred into giving to him. When Tom Shay was arrested on other charges, after the 28 October 1991 bomb explosion, called the Roslindale Bomb here, the police began contacting everyone in that address book. Whether assuming it from the appearance in the address book, or whether from other sources, the investigators soon guessed that Alfred Trenkler was also gay, and that it was somehow relevant and important; but they never asked him. Not once. If they had, he would have said that his sexual preference was a private matter and was none of their business.

Immediately after the explosion, the Quincy, Massachusetts Police Dept. contacted the Boston Police Department with the independent information that Alfred Trenkler had detonated a military artillery simulator on a truck in Quincy in 1986 and that the similarity with the circumstances of the Roslindale Bomb explosion might warrant further investigation. It was a long shot, but....

When the Boston Police came upon a receipt from a purchase by a Mr. S A H Y at a Boston Radio Shack store for items that might have been included in the Roslindale Bomb, it appeared to them that Thomas A. Shay and Alfred Trenkler were the sources of the bomb.

However, the meager evidence developed by the Boston Police was not enough for a successful prosecution, or, in the view of one Boston detective for even getting an indictment. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) felt it could do better and took over the investigation. Also, the Boston-based U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts assumed a significant role in the case, including pre-trial investigative interviews. Together, they focused on Alfred Trenkler and Thomas A. Shay and paid scant attention to other theories about the case.

The two men were indicted on 16 December 1992, and in early 1993, the U.S. Attorney’s office notified Trenkler’s attorney that a witness had come forward with a claim that Alfred Trenkler had admitted to him during pre-trial incarceration that Alfred had admitted his involvement in the bombing.

Thomas A. Shay’s trial was held in July, 1993. He was found guilty on two of the three counts, and sentenced to 15 years 8 months in Federal prison.

Alfred Trenkler’s trial was held in November 1993 and he was found guilty on all three counts on 29 November. He was sentenced on 9 March 1994 to two concurrent life terms in prison, and he has so far, through 26 August 2007, served 13 years, 9 months of that sentence. When his 231 days of pretrial incarceration is added, the total is a 14 years and 5 months. Alfred Trenkler has always maintained his innocence to all who would listen.

On 4 April 2007 Alfred Trenkler was returned to Boston to be resentenced, after he had successfully shown the court that his original sentence did not comply with the jury-recommention requirements of the law at that time. He was resentenced to 37 years, which was his approximate life expectancy when originally sentenced in 1994. With time off for good behavior, he can expect to be released in 2025 at the age of 69, unless he is exonerated beforehand.

The conviction of Thomas A. Shay was reversed on appeal on 8 April 1998 because of the judge’s error in declining to admit the testimony of an expert witness who was expected to testify that Shay had a psychological disorder of a strong propensity to lie. His conviction was vacated, and a retrial was anticipated. The prosecution had publicly announced it was ready to retry the case, but behind the scenes the victims’ families were very reluctant to go through a third trial.

Thus, a plea-bargain agreement was struck. By that agreement Shay was resentenced on 29 October 1998 to 12 years in prison, including the six years already served, and including the pre-trial confinement in 1992-93. He was released on 30 August 2002 and into five years of supervised release. In 2005, he was returned to prison for six months for violating his supervised release, and on 24 July 2007 he was sentenced to an additional 33 months in prison for again violating the terms of his supervised release.

END NOTES

[1]. Justice Stephen Breyer, concurring opinion in General Electric v. Joiner, 118 S.Ct. 512, 520 (1997), citing Federal Rule of Evidence 102.

[2]. Coincidenally, in the Summer of 2006 the author met the mother of Tom Hunt, the author of Cliffs of Despair, which is the story of suicides from the English Channel cliffs in Eastbourne. The site is among the most popular suicide locations in the world. In September, the author leaned that his cousin’s husband worked in Eastbourne as a druggist for a number of years.

Chapter 1.

Explosion-1991

Because one of the main sources of our national unity is our belief in equal justice ... we need to make doubly sure no person is held to account for a crime he or she did not commit....

George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2 February 2005.

On 28 October 1991 shortly after noon, in a residential driveway in the Roslindale section of Boston, Massachusetts, Francis X. Foley said to his Boston Police Dept. Bomb Disposal Unit partner, Jeremiah J. Hurley, Jr., "Jerry, is that a servo?" They were examining a mysterious black box, and a servo is an arm of a remote control device, as Foley knew from his training in explosives. (TS 16-88) As Foley spoke, and he saw the servo moving, both he and Jeremiah Hurley knew, for a few desperate, fear-stricken moments, what would likely come - and it did: an explosion of two or three sticks worth, or 2-4 pounds, of dynamite, which tore off much of Officer Hurley’s left hand, broke his right knee, and left a large 10 inch laceration in his left leg. The explosion left Officer Foley with a mangled face. Incredibly, both men survived the initial blast, but they both thought they were dying, and told the other officers nearby to tell their families and their wives that they loved them. They also selflessly told the others to be careful because there may still be in the vicinity unexploded and dangerous remnants of the bomb.

Emergency vehicles arrived shortly and took the still-conscious men away to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, draped in household towels to absorb the blood. In the effort to save him at the hospital, Jeremiah Hurley’s left hand was amputated; but it was to no avail. He died at 7:22 that evening. Most of Frank Foley’s body recovered, except for his left eye which was replaced with a prosthesis. He was unable to return to work, and retired on disability.

At that explosive instant the lives of six men intersected forever: Francis X. Foley, Jeremiah Hurley, Jr., the Bomb Maker, Thomas A. Shay, Thomas L. Shay and Alfred W. Trenkler.

Officers Foley and Hurley had been called at about 11:50 a.m. to go to 39 Eastbourne Street, Roslindale to investigate a possible bomb. (For two ATF and Boston Police drawings of the neighborhood and the Shay lot with the locations of the cars and bomb, see Appendix D.)

Nineteen ninety-one was the 5th year the two policemen had been together in the Boston Bomb Disposal Unit, nicknamed the Bomb Squad. The year began with the world knowing that the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, a result of a series of mistaken calculations, would be corrected in some way. On 12 January 1991, the U.S. Congress authorized military action by the United States and its U.N.-authorized international coalition, and on 16 January the war began. By 27 February it was over. Correcting the mistakes of the Roslindale Bomb investigation and prosecution would take much longer.

On 4 March 1991, the earliest version of the World Wide Web was launched and on 17 April, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 3,000 for the first time.

In August, Bruce Nelson became the fourth man to be exonerated by DNA, as listed by the Innocence Project. He had been convicted in 1982 of rape and murder, with the primary evidence in the case being the confession of a co-defendant in a botched robbery. Nelson was also claimed by the prosecution to have confessed when he confronted the already confessed partner, "What did you tell them?"[1] The overeager prosecution mistook, intentionally or unintentionally, the apparently admitted role in the robbery for the denied role in the rape and murder of the unexpected female intruder.

On 12 June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was elected the President of the Russian Republic and by the end of August, the Soviet Union was no more. During those last 80 days of the Soviet Union, an acquaintance between two of the six men, Tom Shay and Alfred Trenkler, started, stalled and stopped in Boston.

Francis X. Foley

The first of the six men, alphabetically, was Francis X. Foley, who was 49 years old on 28 October and the divorced father of three daughters and a son. He joined the Boston Police Department in 1967 after four years in the U.S. Air Force. He spent ten years Boston’s well-regarded horse-mounted unit before joining the Bomb Squad in 1986. In 1987, he went to the FBI explosives school in Huntsville, Alabama and was certified as an explosives technician.

In his 5-6 years on the 13-member Bomb Squad, he had investigated 50-60 bomb cases, or about ten per year, which was about one-tenth of the entire Squad’s work. None of Foley’s cases ever involved a remote control detonation system, but he had been trained to know how they worked.

Foley and his partner had a system to alternate the responsibility of directly handling the device by agreeing that the driver of their Ford Bronco for the day would be the officer to handle the suspected device on that day. If there was more than one suspected device during one day, the other officer would handle the next device. This practice ensured fair sharing of the deadly responsibility and risks.

Frank Foley and Jerry Hurley had been paired as team members since Foley joined the Squad. Every week, two of his four work days were with Jeremiah Hurley.

Jeremiah J. Hurley, Jr.

Officer Jeremiah Hurley, Badge number 1772, was a handsome, hazel-eyed, 240 pound, 6 foot 3 inch, 50 year-old man. He had just reached that half-century mark only a month before the explosion, and 28 October was his first day back at work after a week’s vacation in the Caribbean with his wife, Cynthia. He had joined the Boston Police Dept. in 1968 and had been in the horse-mounted unit before Frank Foley. Hurley joined the Bomb Squad in 1985. Jeremiah Hurley was known for his wit according to a long-time friend, Angelo Scaccia, who said in a newspaper article, "He was a raconteur, and he had the ability to make one laugh so hard tears rolled down your face. Mayor Raymond Flynn met with members of the Hurley family on the night of the explosion and later said to the media, The City of Boston has lost one of its finest sons tonight." Reporting on the funeral, the Worcester Telegram reported that Governor Weld had attended Hurley’s wake the previous night. The article continued, "Police Commissioner Francis Roache, his voice breaking several times throughout the eulogy, remembered Hurley as a man ‘slow to anger, quick to be kind and forgiving.’ The Rev. Arthur Driscoll, the former pastor of St. Anne’s, recalled seeing Hurley at many church functions. ‘Often he was still there after everyone else had left, with a broom cleaning up,’ Driscoll recalled. ‘When you thanked him, the response was always same, ‘Someone has do it.’ Likewise, when Driscoll asked Hurley why a man with a wife and four children would join the bomb squad, the officer replied: ‘Someone has to do it.’ ‘ "

Jeremiah Hurley left his wife, Cynthia, and two stepsons and two daughters. One stepson, David Powell, was a Boston Police officer, the first of the third generation of Hurley’s family to serve in the Boston Police Department. Later, one of Hurley’s daughters, Leanne, would also join, and by 2007, three of his children were serving in the Boston Police Dept.

Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law presided at Jeremiah’s Hurley’s funeral, which was held at St. Anne’s Church on West Milton Drive in Readville, Boston. Three thousand policemen from 125 police departments attended the ceremony. Flags on all Boston Police Dept. buildings continued to fly at half-mast until 28 November.

The Bomb Maker

We can surmise that he was male, as there have been few women bomb builders. After that, we can surmise little. Probably he was from Boston. Maybe he knew Mr. Thomas L. Shay, maybe not. He had some knowledge of how to handle explosives, as he removed the brown and identifiable paper covering before placing the equivalent of 2-3 sticks of dynamite into the carefully crafted wooden box. Showing that he was a better woodworker than electrician, he carefully drew ballpoint penned straight edging lines for his power saw cuts. This craftsmanship made more sense than his wiring the six 9-volt batteries in a series. The resulting wiring produced a 45 volt charge instead of the necessary 1.5 volts. One 9-volt battery, or even one 1.5 volt D battery would have been sufficient. Such wiring showed that the Bomb Maker was almost certainly not an electrical engineer. The Bomb Maker did have one exclusive piece of knowledge, however. As Alfred Trenkler wrote in 2007, "There are two parties on this earth that know for a fact that I had nothing whatsoever to do with this bombing, me and the actual Bomb Builder(s)."

If the Bomb Maker intended that the bomb actually explode, and harm Mr. Thomas L. Shay, he failed. If the detonation was planned to be triggered by a Futaba transmitter, that, too must have failed because it’s unlikely that someone would have intentionally sent a radio signal while a policeman was holding the device, unless the person holding a transmitter was not able to see that the officers were with the Bomb when it was detonated. They may have been obscured by the parked cars or by other objects. Alternatively, it may have been ignited by a stray radio signal, perhaps amplified by Jeremiah Hurley acting as a human antenna, or by a foreign-made radio with a radio frequency not authorized by the FCC or by some other mishap. One problem with theories of how the explosion occurred is the need to explain why the bomb did not explode during the period since its discovery by Mr. Thomas L. Shay on Sunday, 27 October.

Thomas A. Shay (Tom)

When Thomas A. Shay met Alfred Trenkler, he was an articulate but troubled and emotionally wounded 19-year-old survivor of a dysfunctional family, government social service agencies and foster homes since he was five years old. The son of Thomas Leroy Shay and Nancy Peters Shay, Thomas Arthur Shay was born on 3 November 1971, about two months after Alfred Trenkler began his ninth grade year at Thayer Academy in Braintree, Massachusetts. Tom’s middle name came from his grandfather, Arthur Shay, or his uncle, Arthur James Shay, or both. The grandfather Arthur died in 1969, before Tom was born, and his grandmother, Rose, was still alive in 1991. Tom’s mother, Nancy, had two daughters, Jeanne(1963) and Amy (1965) by previous husbands, and she and Thomas L. Shay had their first child, Nancy, in 1967 and Paula followed in 1968. Tom was born on 3 November 1971.

In February 1977, when Tom was five and one-half and shortly after his parents’ separation, he had 15 teeth removed due to periodontal infection. Mrs. Shay and her children were living in a two floor apartment in the Alston public housing projects. On 26 March 1977 Tom caused a destructive fire when playing with matches upstairs in his room while attempting to set afire his Teddy Bear. He was missing for several minutes and was later found hiding in the refrigerator room of the local variety store.

The family was forced to seek temporary housing and government assistance. Seeking psychological help for Tom’s behavior, his mother, Nancy Shay, took him to Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham for what was expected to be a 10-day evaluation. At the expiration of that period, the doctors would not release him for another five months, as they insisted that he required considerable psychological care. That was the beginning of approximately 30 years of state-provided care and institutionalization for Tom Shay. His sisters, Nancy and Paula, also received services from the Massachusetts Dept. of Social Services (DSS).

After his Met State evaluation, Tom Shay was in and out of special residential schools, and was referred to many psychologists. One characteristic behavior was lying, perhaps to get attention. At one school he charged a teacher with sexual abuse, and at another, Tom told the teachers, and then the police, that there was a handgun at his residential school.

From time to time, he would come home to live with his mother at 26 Belvoir Road in Milton, only 1.5 miles from Whitelawn Ave. home of the Wallaces, the mother and stepfather of Alfred Trenkler. That wasn’t far geographically, but they were on different sides of the proverbial railroad tracks and no member of either family had met a member of the other, until June 1991. There are never too many degrees of separation, however, and one social link between the families was that a close male friend of Alfred was a friend of one of Tom Shay’s older half-sisters in the late 1970’s.

In May 1979, Tom’s mother took him to the Milton Police Dept. to seek help for his firesetting behavior, and in September 1980, the nine year-old Tommy Shay was arrested for pulling fire alarms in the Blue Hills Reservation area of Milton. The next month, while at the Wollaston Bowladrome, he notified police that a person was drowning at Wollaston Beach in Quincy. After many hours of searching with boats and a helicopter, the police were informed that Tom Shay sometimes made up stories. It was on the television news, which was an attraction for Tommy. In November, he was knocked unconscious in a rock fight with other boys and required hospitalization.

Trouble at home was a source of Tom Shay’s difficulties. His father’s beatings of his mother led her to seek a temporary restraining order on 12 November 1981, and the father, Thomas L. Shay, was ordered to vacate the family home on 17 November 1979.

In December 1981, Tommy Shay claimed to be the victim of a robbery at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. A subsequent Milton Police visit to his home found that no parents were living with Tommy, age 10 and his teen-aged sisters. In January, 1982, he stole jewelry and other items from the neighbors in the downstairs apartment, and later that month he was admitted for residential care at the Nazareth Child Care Center in Jamaica Plain. Once, he took his half-sister’s MBTA cap and, while she was looking for it in order to get to work, he was outside directing traffic as if he were a policeman. When Tom was at home, his life could sometimes seem quite normal. He set up a lemonade stand, and had a short stint with a newspaper route. His oldest half-sister, Jeanne, took him camping and other trips. At the age of 11, he had a crush on a girl named Elizabeth and purchased a Valentine’s Day gift for her.

At Nazareth his problems with the staff involved his telling of lies, which seemed to result from his saying what he thought people wanted to hear. He often asked, "Do you still like me?" At Nazareth, Tom contracted gonnorhea and/or syphillis among other effects of sexual abuse, and that was not a lie from Tommy. The lies in that instance came when DSS persuaded Thomas L. and Nancy Shay not to file a complaint or otherwise press charges arising from the sexual abuse. It wasn’t only the Boston Archdiocese that was covering up sexual abuse of children in Boston.

In May 1984, he was admitted to Bournewood Hospital in Brookline and stayed until discharged in October into the custody of his father. In November, Tommy Shay was placed with the secure Spaulding Youth Center in Tilton, New Hampshire. Patriotism joined his menu of emotions as he painted an authorized mural-sized American flag on the wall of his residential Colcord Cottage, and led an effort to raise money to replace the school’s tattered outdoor flag. He lived there for almost two years until his discharge on 25 July 1986, which followed an arrest in Concord, New Hampshire in a stolen Jeep. While noting his emotional growth during his stay, Spaulding nonetheless recommended that he be placed in a more secure locked facility.

Next, Tom Shay was evaluated at the Gaebler Unit for children at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, and was then placed in August 1986 at the Fuller Memorial Hospital in South Attleboro for another evaluation. Finally in October, he was placed at the Baird Center in Plymouth where he stayed for a year, until October, 1987, when his father regained custody. There, among other lies, he once reported that he had seen a gun, which led to a police investigation. On another occasion, he reported that a staff member had inappropriately touched him.

The good news at Baird was that Tom’s father "has been very involved with Tommy’s program," which led to his subsequent placement at his father’s home. Also in October 1987, Tom was visiting his father at his auto body shop at the Dedham Service Center in Dedham when someone threw a large firecracker into a barrel making a loud noise. Both Mr. Shay and his son, Tom, were nearby.

While living at home with his father, in Hyde Park, he attended an alternative high school, the Compass School in Jamaica Plain, from December 1987 through June 1988, which overlapped his moving with his father to 39 Eastbourne Street, Roslindale.

In late May 1988 Thomas L. Shay and Tom moved to the home of Mr. Shay’s woman friend, Mary Alice Flanagan, 27. Mary’s mother, who owned and lived in the house with Mary and Kristen, died in April, and Mr. Shay’s divorce from Nancy Shay became final on 5 May. Unhappy with having to share his father with Mary, who was about the same age as his oldest half-sister, and unhappy with the rules of his new home after only a few days, Tom stole $300 in June from the home. Later, that theft was forgiven and he returned for one day. Then he stole his father’s coin collection, and bars of silver and many items of Mary Flanagan’s jewelry that she had inherited from her mother. He fled to Florida with $6-10,000 in cash and valuables, and was discharged from the Compass School program. Upon his return in September, he was admitted for an evaluation to the Psychiatric Center at the University of Mass. Medical Center in Westboro. That led to placement in the Boston Cluster Program of the New England Home for Little Wanderers, a quaintly named organization providing help for disturbed children. There, he earned his GED, or equivalency high school diploma. In November, Tom was arrested in Manchester, New Hampshire for auto theft.

After the summer of 1988, Tom lived away from home and was actively gay, sometimes working as a male prostitute. In December 1988, Tom’s social worker and legal guardian, Ron Payne, reported to the Boston Police that Tom was missing.

During the years 1989 through 1991, Tom traveled the country and was believed to be at times in Florida and the State of Washington. He sometimes earned legitimate money, even if under-the-table, by doing massage work. In February 1989, he was arrested in Boston for prostitution, and in March Ron Payne applied, on Tom’s behalf, for a placement with the U.S. Job Corps. That application was unsuccessful.

In May 1989 the 17 year-old Tom Shay was arrested for auto theft in Milton and was sent to the Norfolk County Jail in Dedham. There, a psychologist recommended a commitment to the Bridgewater State Hospital because of Shay’s suicidal tendencies, stating that he attempted to open door on airplane and jump out, and that he is a danger to himself and others. The Jail’s medical director confirmed the recommendation saying, This man is seriously depressed and a psychiatric examination is of paramount importance. On 25 May, the Quincy District Court ordered Tom Shay to be committed to Bridgewater State Hospital for a 30-day mental health evaluation.

On 20 June 1989, Dr. Charles Forbes, completed his evaluation of Tom Shay. He noted that it was Shay’s first such evaluation at Bridgewater and that Shay had not received any psychiatric medications while at the hospital. Forbes interviewed Shay for a total of three hours, and also discussed his case with members of the Bridgewater staff and with Ronald Payne, Shay’s legal guardian at the DSS. There were two in-house incident reports in Shay’s file considered by Dr. Forbes. One stated that on 10 June, Patient was very upset and acted as if he did not know what was going on. Patient was placed in four point restraints per Dr. Patel for the safety of patient Shay and the Safety of medical unit.... No use of force. On 20 June, one staffer reported, that Tom Shay, became aggressive and threatening towards the staff, stating, ‘I don’t have to listen to any of you.’ Repeated attempts to get Shay to comply with ward officer directives were fruitless. At this point it was determined that Shay was a danger to himself and others on Medical. He was at this point escorted to ITU by CO Medeiros and myself without incident, injury or use of force. Without referring to these incident reports, Dr. Forbes found Shay to be generally pleasant, appropriate and cooperative. His thought processes are coherent and goal directed....Mood and affect are appropriate to the situation... is showing no evidence of major mental illness... he presents, however,... gender identity issues of longstanding duration... His behavior may at times also appear to be provocative to others. This may make him vulnerable to ridicule or abuse by others. He has, however, experienced no major difficulties in this regard while at Bridgewater State Hospital. At this time, he is requesting to be returned to the Dedham House of Correction for adjudication of his charges. Regarding criminal responsibility, Dr. Forbes concluded that, Mr. Shay can be returned to the Dedham House of Correction to await trial on the charges against him.

On 2 July 1989 Shay was arrested in Boston for being a common nightwalker, and again on 5 July.