"48 Hours Mystery" last Saturday was very interesting.

[raccoon]

Imagine being 9 years old and learning that someone wants to kill your family. That’s what happened to Cylin Busby when she was growing up in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Cylin’s father, John, was a cop who refused to be intimidated -- even by a thug suspected of one murder and two disappearances. But one summer night in 1979, John Busby was ambushed and gunned down.

CYLIN: My dad left for work just like normal. He hadn’t gone probably half a mile from our house when a car pulled up behind him, pulled out alongside him and he was shot through the driver’s side window of his car with a shotgun.

The shotgun blast tore through his face and ripped off his lower jaw.

John Busby knew who had shot him: Melvin Reine.

Melvin Reine was also suspected of murder. He was suspected of killing three people and in two of those cases the bodies have never been recovered. Melvin Reine was married to a woman named Wanda Medeiros Reine and in 1971, she went missing. He claims that he dropped her off at the bus station and she was never seen again.

About a year later, a teenage boy in Falmouth, named Jeff Flanagan, went missing. He was dating a 17-year-old girl who had been babysitting for the Reine family who Melvin was also interested in.

RICK SMITH: Jeff Flanagan was found shot to death. His body was recovered in a cranberry bog directly across the street from Melvin Reine's home.

CYLIN: And then, a former employee of Melvin Reine’s, a 17-year-old boy named Paul Alwardt, was set to testify against Melvin in a grand jury arson investigation. The police promised that he would be protected. They escorted him to the Martha’s Vineyard Ferry where he had some family and stay there until the trial. He got on the ferry. He didn’t get off.

RICK SMITH: Melvin Reine basically walked free on all of those accounts I think, because people were afraid to prosecute him. And I'm talking about policemen afraid of him because they had families, and they’d go to bed at night and you don't know if he's gonna burn the house down with your kids in the house.

POLLY: I knew that the police chief’s car had burned in his yard and everybody assumed that it was, you know, Melvin but nobody could prove it.

CYLIN: I think Melvin Reine considered himself untouchable and that extended to his immediate family. So if the police tried to give a ticket to anyone in his family he would march into the police station and have the ticket torn up and have it erased from the log book.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/14/48hours/main4803256_page4.shtml

The family suspected that Reine had something on big shots in Falmouth, and that’s why he considered himself untouchable.

Another poster’s take on what Reine had on the big shots in Falmouth:

Over the years, Shirley (Reine’s second wife) ran the financial end of his trash-hauling business. She also fucked local politicians and law enforcement officials. No wonder Melvin was never convicted of corruption or murder.

…And then there are all those local officials she fucked over the years. See, she videotaped every one of them.

http://www.skcentral.com/forum/viewthread.php?forum_id=6&thread_id=2098

[raccoon]

1. THE YEAR WE DISAPPEARED is a book about this, written by the man who

was shot, and his daughter.

I just finished it. A good read.