Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
I'm Kristen Sevey. This is Murder, She Told. This episode contains discussions of sexual assault. Please listen with care.
I know my older sisters remember my father very well, but he had died when I, I want to say when I was seven, eight, but he was not in our lives. I have absolutely no memory of having a father. I had heard stories of him. He was an alcoholic. He was not very nice to the older kids or to my mother. He was extremely abusive. And actually my mother is lucky that she survived that marriage. They
They separated, and he basically was out of our lives. And so my mother was mother and father together. That was Jerry, one of her mother's nine children. She was born in November of 1961, two and a half years after her older sister, Teresa Corley. She's the second youngest. She grew up with Teresa, first in an urban neighborhood in Boston called Mattapan, and then in small-town Bellingham, Massachusetts.
Despite her mother shouldering the entire responsibility of raising nine children, they had a great, loving childhood together. That is, until her sister was murdered and discarded, like trash, on the side of the interstate in December of 1978, when Teresa was just 19 years old.
At this point, I'm 61 years old. I would just like somebody to look at the case, analyze it, you know, and not to point fingers, but just tell me why it can't be solved. Because right from the beginning, you know, in 2015, I've been told this is a solvable case. But here we are. But what happens with these cases is they die with the family.
When I'm dead, when my brother's dead, I'm not seeing my children pursuing any of this. I wouldn't want them to. It dies with me. June 8, 1970. That was the day that Thomas Corley, Teresa and Jerry's father, passed away from cirrhosis of the liver at 49 years old. He left behind a huge family. His youngest son, John, was 7 years old, and the oldest, Mary, was 25.
Thomas was an abusive alcoholic. Jerry escaped his wrath, but many of her older siblings suffered at his hands. He was a Marine who had served during World War II. When he wasn't mistreating his wife, Pauline, he was absent. Jerry's earliest recollection of her dad was him lying in his coffin at his wake. It was the final year of their time in Mattapan.
Teresa's childhood was divided into two halves. The first half, until she was 10 years old, was spent in Boston, and the second half, until her death at 19, was spent in Bellingham. The family lived frugally and survived financially with state assistance.
She wasn't proud of it because a lot of her siblings were better off. I think they criticized her a bit for having so many children. Why would somebody so poor with not a great marriage have children? But she did have older siblings herself, and my mother never really talked about it, but I'm imagining maybe her older siblings helped her out. We got hand-me-downs quite a bit from other relatives.
We knew she sacrificed. She was, for her whole life, skinny as could be, and I can only imagine that's because she gave the food to us and didn't have it for herself. And as soon as she could, as soon as we were all old enough, she trained. She went to become a secretary, and then she actually got a job at Mass General Hospital as a clerk. And, you know, she did her best, and she got off welfare.
And then as the older siblings were getting jobs and still living at home, they contributed. But I did not feel deprived. I knew we recycled things like tea bags. You know, you don't just have one cup of tea. You'll have a couple with the tea bags.
But when things got better, as far as her finances, she did things like plan family vacations. And now along the way, I don't know who contributed, like if the older kids contributed as they were working. But, you know, her faith carried her through a lot of the dark times in her life. She did her best to give us all a great life.
Pauline bought a brown split level at 145 North Main Street in Bellingham, a town that sits in the middle of a triangle formed by Boston, Worcester, and Providence. Bellingham was significantly more rural than Mattapan. The town still had large swaths of farmland and forest, and the Corleys could see their neighbors' horses peeking curiously through the trees behind their house.
Like many small towns, it was situated right on a major highway, I-495. Pauline thought Bellingham would provide a safer environment for her younger children. The oldest, Mary, was born in 1945 at the end of the war. John, the youngest and the only boy, was born in 1963. In between were Diane, Paula, Nancy, Linda, Karen, Teresa, and Jerry. They were all baby boomers.
By the time the family left Boston, at least one of the oldest daughters had married and left home. But many of the elder kids remained in the home. The older kids always pitched in. None of the older kids ever resented ever having to help my mother with anything. I think as a family, we were probably pretty cohesive in taking care of each other. So the workload pretty much was shared.
I recall, like, I'm in high school, and even my mother would be at work, and all of us, you know, if we were home during the day, everybody pitched in to either help clean up the house or mow the lawn. We were a very focused family on doing what we had to do. We didn't have chores, and I can't really say it was quite expected that we were going to do anything. We just pitched in and did things. I think we knew how hard our mother worked to try to raise us in a decent way.
She was strongly Catholic. We went to a small little convenience store, and I pocketed a package of gum when I was like six years old, and she walked me right back to the store. And those things stick with you. Lesson learned, you only did that kind of thing once. And with my mother for discipline, all she had to do was look at us.
Like, give us that look. And we more or less knew to knock it off. But it wasn't a look of, if you do that again, it's more like you're disappointing me. You know, she wasn't a punitive parent whatsoever. We had no real curfews. You know, she just knew we told the line.
Jerry remembers when Teresa and she were younger. I would say in our preteen to early teen years, we were very close at that point in time. We were around each other constantly and a lot, and it wasn't all bickering and fighting. You know, there'd be board games we would play. We would really all interact pretty much as a family, but then kids grow, right? Kids grow. You develop your own interests. But I think in those earlier years, it was like a we're all in this together kind of situation. And
And then I think it's only natural as you grow up and when you get to be more of a teenager, you develop more friendships outside the home and you go down different pathways with your friends. Karen and Teresa, nearest to one another in age, shared a room and a deep bond.
Jerry, two years Teresa's junior, recalled that she and her sister were often at odds. Jerry would point out minor injustices in the family and could be critical of her mother and siblings. Teresa was close to her mother and defensive of her. So,
So I think a lot of that stemmed from, you know, my mother was working. We were bored. I can't even remember what it was, like the things that it was over, but it was just the bickering, like girls bickering. You know, maybe it was over a TV show that she wanted to watch, I didn't want to watch. And, you know, push came to shove, shove came to pull in here, and people feel bad. You know, we would play four squares when we'd go away on the—
In the summertime, I think it's called four square where you have four people. Each one owns a corner of the dock and then the one in the middle. And you go around trying to push one of the other ones off to get a corner. I have to say she targeted me a lot to the point that one time my sister Karen said, Teresa, that's enough. Leave her alone. You know, so I think I was an annoyance to her.
Which right now I'm thinking, I don't know what is driving me to seek this justice for her. And I think even though we had our bickering, I also think there was just a deep sense of love. I believe we had each other's backs in a lot of ways.
In the family, she was always Teresa, or teasingly called Top Cat after the lanky yellow cartoon feline who shared her initials. In school, however, she tried on nicknames like TC and Terry, testing them the same way she explored the aspects of her identity that were developing beyond the Corley household. Where her mother and siblings tended to be reserved, Teresa was outgoing.
I think she was the first one sort of in the family to realize there were activities outside the home and outside of school, meaning like sports, drama club, and all those other things that she did. And...
Things like she was more apt to look for new adventures, I would say. Something like horseback riding. Nobody in my family really had ever done any horseback riding. Of course, we were from the city. We lived on a main road, and like two doors down was called the Circle CG Ranch, and it was actually a campground with horses. And we did go over there maybe once or twice, but it was more like Teresa saying, hey, we should go horseback.
try horseback riding. And then from that, she went to go do lessons. And then she encouraged me to come do lessons. As far as music and stuff, she was more drawn to like my brother, John, and kind of introducing him to new music. And one of my first memories of her in music was she got the Fleetwood Mac Rumors album and would play that endlessly.
At Bellingham High, she played volleyball and got roles in the school plays. Drama Club was Teresa's particular passion. She even directed a production of a play called A Defenseless Creature, based on a short story by Anton Chekhov.
I guess if you use the word free spirit, that's how she was. She just, you know, she was one of these people that wasn't inhibited by, I think, what people thought about her. Like on the bus, she'd get on the bus, you know, joking around with the girls. They were all having just such a great time. And she, I don't think she really cared what other people thought.
thought of her, which at that age, a lot of girls think, well, what will people think if I do X, Y, or Z? They were just having fun. You know, her and the group of girls that she initially hung around with in high school just seemed like a group of just fun girls having a great time living life.
Teresa was a petite girl, just 5 feet 2 inches, with long brown hair and curtain bangs that framed warm brown eyes. She had a heart-shaped face, thin brows, and a wide nose that seemed to accentuate the width of her smile. And Teresa smiled a lot. She had reason to. She was going places.
She loved kids. You know, that's another thing that I followed in her footsteps. She would babysit for three or four different families in town. The kids always seemed to love her. And as she got older, instead of babysitting, I know she first started at McDonald's, you know, as her first job, then went to the Big D as a cashier, which was a grocery store. I got her babysitting jobs after that. And I followed her then to McDonald's, followed her then to the Big D.
But she gravitated toward the kids. And even in our family, we had older sisters. When they started to have children, Teresa was the one that they always wanted to be around because she would take one of my nephews for nature walks. The kids that she babysat, I've heard from them now as adults. They fondly remember her as somebody that was just a fun person to be around and that she just really cared for them. And I think money was...
with type for us and being the first one going to college i'd know she wanted to do something with working with children her ultimate dream was to be a pediatrician and we weren't college geared i i would say even myself in high school i had a guidance counselor that said oh you you really should think of being a secretary and
I don't know what kind of guidance talks Teresa got, but she decided that she wanted to go to Holliston Junior College. I'm not sure how she came up with that decision, but she always said that she wanted to do something with kids and maybe be a pediatrician one day.
Teresa had ambition. After high school, she enrolled in a nearby two-year institution called Holliston Junior College. She continued to live at home and commuted the 20 miles north to school every day. She also worked to put herself through college. She had a job as a cashier at Star Market in the nearby town of Franklin. This is Bob Ward, a TV reporter for WFXT Boston 25. He worked with Teresa at the grocery store.
I worked with Teresa Corley at Star Market. It was my first job here in Franklin. And she was a couple of years older than me, but she was a warm, friendly person and just a great person to be around. Somebody to look forward to seeing, you know, when I went to work. She was just an awesome person.
My last memory of Teresa Corley, it's just a stupid little memory. I was in one of the aisles in the store, stocking some shelves, and she just kind of walked by and loaded down the aisle like she didn't have a care in the world. You know, she's probably on a break, going out on a break, or maybe ending her shift, I don't know. But it was carefree Teresa just walking by. She saw me and said, hey, how are you? That sort of thing, and then just kept walking. Whenever you saw her, she gave you
After Star Market, Teresa found work at another Franklin business, Penthouse Sales. It was a factory that made rope, flip-flops, hammocks, handbags, and other goods, all made of plastic.
Teresa worked in the rug department, typically covering the 3-7 shift. This allowed her time for her classes during the day and a bit of time after her shift to study or socialize. There were other young people working at Penthouse, so it wasn't unusual for her to go out with them in the evenings. Or to meet up with her high school friends or the young man she was seeing, Rick Cogliano, who went by Cog. Because she didn't have a car, she would often hitchhike across town or to and from Franklin.
People would warn her not to do it, but when you're from the city and you're used to being able to hop on a bus or hop on a train to get where you want to go, and then now you're in a little tiny town, and you're this tough girl from the city, in a way. I don't think she thought twice that anybody was going to bother her where we lived. She was pretty trusting, I think.
Teresa likely didn't realize the impact she had on her younger siblings, Jerry and John. To them, Teresa was modeling a version of life that didn't come naturally to them. She opened the doors through which her little siblings would later walk. The sun rose on a crisp, sunny day in Bellingham on Tuesday, December 5th, 1978. Teresa got dressed and went about her usual schedule.
She caught a ride from her home to Holliston College with a friend named Anne. Teresa was a sophomore at the end of her fall term, and Tuesday was when her favorite class, clinical assistance, was held. Teresa's teacher, Joan Metcalf, would later say, Teresa had been distraught over something. Maybe it was just finals coming up, I don't know. But she wasn't the kind of person who was easily upset. She always had the situation under control.
Several of her classmates noticed it too, but attributed it to the upcoming finals. The New England winter sun was already starting to set when Pauline picked up her daughter from school and dropped her off at Penthouse Sales, just in time for her 3 p.m. shift. Teresa worked for a few hours and then called her mom again at 6.45. She said that she was going to work for a little bit longer and then head to a friend's birthday party.
Pauline worried about how she would get home later. She didn't like Teresa hitchhiking. Pauline figured she would probably get a ride from a friend, so she said goodbye to her daughter, not knowing that it would be the final time that she would hear her voice.
Between 7 and 10.30 p.m., Teresa was at a friend's nearby apartment. And at 10.30 p.m., she arrived at a popular bar on Main Street in the center of Franklin called the Train Stop. It was appropriately named as it sat directly across from the actual train station. Every evening, commuters returning from Boston would spill onto Main Street, and many of them would stop by the bar. Tuesday nights were particularly busy because they had cheap drink specials going.
In 1978, the legal drinking age was 18, and the younger crowd turned up for the cheap booze.
The train stop was sort of like a hole-in-the-wall bar right in the center of Franklin. You know, a big old building had pool tables in there, had a long bar. You know, a lot of people could be in there. And there were a lot of people in there. There were a couple of motorcycle bars right in the center of Franklin that we all knew to stay away from. But the train stop was not one of those. It was just kind of a divy neighborhood bar.
At the train stop, Teresa met up with several friends and co-workers, including her boss and her sister. But she wasn't enjoying the evening. For one thing, she spotted her boyfriend, Cog, talking to an ex-girlfriend. The couple got into a heated argument, witnessed by several people. Sometime between 11.30 p.m. and 12.30 a.m., Teresa decided that she had had enough of
She asked one of her friends, Alana, for a ride home. But Alana wasn't ready to leave. It was a decision she would later regret. Impatient, Teresa said that she would walk home. It was a five-mile trek, and temperatures were in the 20s. But fueled by alcohol and anger, Teresa took off.
The hours that followed her departure from the train stop have always been at the heart of this case. Different narratives have emerged about how Teresa may have spent the early morning hours of Wednesday, December 6. We know for sure that after leaving the bar, she ended up at a flat in the Presidential Arms Apartments on Central Street in Franklin, about a mile and a half from the train stop. It was the type of complex given an aspirational name despite its modest construction.
A party was already underway when Teresa arrived around midnight. Some attendees would later claim that Teresa was already intoxicated when she walked in the door. At some point, she asked David, one of the men who lived there, if she could lie down in his bedroom. Teresa fell asleep and stayed in the room for several hours. What happened in that bedroom is the subject of much debate.
According to David, at 4 a.m., a group of four young men entered the bedroom and either sexually assaulted Teresa or attempted to do so. She fought them off, and in the commotion, Teresa slid her feet into two left shoes, one that was hers and one that belonged to one of her alleged attackers. She then fled the apartment. According to David, both he and one of the assailants offered her a ride. The other man followed her out the door.
Understandably, she didn't take them up on this offer. Teresa was on foot, cold and alone. She just wanted to be home. Sometime before dawn, between 4 and 5 a.m., a man on his way to work spotted the petite brunette sitting on a guardrail by the side of Route 140, thumbing for a ride.
It was a cold morning, so he pumped the brakes and offered her a lift. It was a short ride west to his employer, the dairy distributor Gorelick Farms, and she was heading that way. He dropped her off at the entrance to his work. A second man, who was also a driver for Gorelick, agreed to take her a bit further into Bellingham, which was only a mile from home.
Both Gorelick drivers later said that she seemed disheveled, upset, and inebriated. One of them described her as mad as fire. The second driver asked what was the matter, and Teresa told him that she had been sexually assaulted that night. He later told authorities that he had dropped her off in front of the Bellingham police station, then located on Mechanic Street. Teresa never went into the police station. If she had...
Her life may have been saved. Perhaps she worried that the police wouldn't believe her, or maybe she wasn't prepared to recount the ordeal. Jerry thinks that her sister would have been worried about what their mother would have thought. The last sightings of Teresa Corley alive were around 5.15 or 5.30 a.m., when motorists passing through Bellingham saw her hitchhiking north on Route 126, not far from the police station.
Soon after, three men carpooling to work saw her walking near Dairy Queen, just a mile from her house. At the time, it didn't seem remarkable. Just an underdressed traveler trudging home in the pre-dawn darkness. Two days later, at about 5 p.m. on Friday, December 8th, a Bellingham police cruiser sped northbound along I-495.
The faintest drizzle fell on his windshield. In between the swiping of the wipers, he could see long stretches of forest interrupted by the occasional strip mall or commercial park. The officer flashed his lights and pulled to the right-hand shoulder of the highway. If you were trying to get from Providence to Lawrence, Lowell, or even Southern Maine, it was a great way to avoid the urban center and the traffic of Boston.
The officer spotted a green sign that said entering Medway, indicating that he was on the very edge of the town of Bellingham. He was just feet away from the borders of both Medway and Milford. Craning his neck, the officer could see a large corporate facility to the south, on the other side of the highway. This was definitely the right spot.
Just minutes prior, Bellingham PD had received a call from a man who claimed he was from Connecticut and said he had found the body of a young woman on the side of the highway. The man, who identified himself as John Burlington, said that he had been driving north on 495 when his engine overheated just south of exit 48. He pulled over to give it time to cool and used the opportunity to empty his bladder.
He was on the embankment, past the guardrail separating the pavement from the steep drop below, that he spotted the dead girl. When asked why he didn't report it right away, Burlington confessed that he had been frightened and didn't want to get involved in whatever misfortune had befallen her. But sometime during the two-hour drive back to Connecticut, he had a change of heart and made the call.
The location from which he made the call and the timing of it have been reported different ways. Bob Ward said that the police told him that John Burlington pulled off the highway at the next exit, went to a payphone, and made the call right away. The other way it's been reported, first in the Milford Daily News in 1978, is that he drove home and called from Connecticut. The body was located at the confluence of several towns. Franklin, Medway, Milford, and Bellingham.
The signage closest to the location of the body, just a couple hundred feet north, would have indicated Milford. The signage two miles to the south would have indicated Bellingham or Medway. He happened to choose the exact jurisdiction where her body was located: Bellingham. To reach Bellingham PD, he likely dialed 411, a directory assistance, and they would have connected him to the police.
Though 911 was operational at the time, he contacted the PD directly. According to a 2015 article by Joseph Fitzgerald published in The Call, the phone line that rang to the PD was a so-called "inside line" or a "business line."
One that only local residents would know. If you're from the Cape and you're just driving along the highway, you would have no way of knowing what town you're in. You might think it's Medway because of the sign that you might see next. You have no idea. How would you know that's Bellingham, Massachusetts? Who pays attention to what those little entering-leaving signs are on the side of the road? Nobody.
The officer left his lights on and stepped out of the cruiser. At the guardrail, he observed that the slope below was grassy and thick with scrub brush. It eventually ended in a slim ditch filled with cold water and dead leaves. On the other side, a chain-link fence bordered the woods beyond. It was only when he surveyed the embankment again that he saw her.
Pale in the overcast light, the young woman was fully nude and lying face up. He approached and discovered a string of dark bruises circling her neck. You could tell immediately that she was deceased, and likely had been for a while. Around her were scattered a few articles of clothing. A brown corduroy jacket with tan and orange plaid lining, a pair of blue jeans. The officer sighed, glancing at the dimming sky.
This was a tragedy. The crime scene was cordoned off in short order. Franklin and Bellingham PD and fire department vehicles were used to block the rightmost lane of the highway. Wearing rain-slick shiny jackets and holding high-power flashlights, officers combed every inch of the embankment and drainage ditch. Passing cars may have witnessed the flashing of a camera documenting the position of the body and the clothes lying around her.
From the lack of drag marks on her body, investigators concluded that the victim had maybe been thrown or carried. A caption from the photo in the Milford Daily News that was published the next day described her as apparently thrown, a description that they probably got from the police. I suspect that she was carried a short distance from the vehicle parked on the shoulder of the highway and either thrown or placed carefully down the steep embankment.
The distance from the road's edge where her body was located was reported several different ways. The ones most repeated are the larger distances, 25 to 35 feet. They also noted that some of the items of clothing, namely her shoes, shirt, and undergarments, were missing from the scene.
Among the first officers to arrive were Bellingham detective Sergeant Richard Boucher, Franklin County detective sergeant Thomas Curran, and Franklin patrolman Harry Plazzi. The three men surveyed the scene on the hillside. They already knew the identity of the victim. Her mother and sisters had been calling the Franklin station for nearly two days, and her friends and classmates had papered the town with flyers bearing her face.
Sergeant Boucher would later claim that, though they received many reports of the missing teenager, he had had a feeling about this one. He had hoped that Teresa Corley would arrive home in a few days, hungover, clothes wrinkled from sleeping on a friend's couch. Unfortunately, tonight, he would have to tell her mother that she wouldn't be coming home at all.
A few miles away, a man walked into the same police station that Teresa had stood in front of two days before. He asked the dispatcher about the activity on 495 and if it was Teresa Corley who had been found in the ditch. The dispatcher was surprised because the discovery of the body had not been shared over the police radio.
That man was named Ronnie, and he was one of the men who may have assaulted Teresa at the Presidential Arms apartment. On North Main Street, Pauline Corley paced. Her daughter had been missing for nearly two days. She thought back to Wednesday morning, the morning that Teresa went missing.
My mother was getting up to go to work. John and I were getting up to go to school. And she was in the kitchen when I got up and she said, Teresa didn't come home last night.
And right away, she was worried because it was so unusual for Teresa not to come home or not call. It wasn't the type of thing that she often, like, oh, did a sleepover. Like, she didn't do any of that. And I was like, okay, what do we do? And so she called my sister Linda, who was living in Menden at the time. And then we contacted my sister Diane, who lived in Brockton. And then it was like, okay, where is she?
And I know right away people started calling friends, trying to track down where she might be. I don't know whose decision it was to finally call the police. Probably one of my sisters. The police were called and they gave the usual, well, she's 19. Maybe she ran away. She'll be back. Kids do this kind of stuff all the time. And even right from the beginning, my mother would say, no, that wouldn't be my daughter, you know, because she knew we
We knew, we all knew none of us in my family would do that to my mother, not come home and not call. It just wasn't something we did. The day passed and, you know, the longer the day becomes, the more you start to panic because this is not Teresa.
Teresa's friend, Ann, had come by the Corley home that morning to pick Teresa up from school. The Corley family broke the news that she was missing, and when Ann got to class, she let her schoolmates know. Teresa never made it to class, nor to her 3 p.m. shift at Penthouse. In the afternoon, Pauline reported her missing to both the Bellingham and Franklin police.
Initially, the officers urged her to be patient. Most likely, they suggested, Teresa had found herself overwhelmed with school and work and had just taken a few days to blow off steam. They noted that young runaways typically come back after a couple of days, when their money ran out. The Corleys were frustrated with the lack of urgency of the police. The family thought it was impossible that Teresa had left voluntarily. She had just paid tuition on her next term.
Why would she depart before finals and risk failing the term? They were concerned about the cold weather. Teresa was last seen in jeans and a corduroy jacket. If she were injured somewhere, she wouldn't last long. Teresa's friends shared this sentiment.
As Pauline would later recount, I got in touch with all of her friends and they seemed quite worried. They all took time off from school and work to look for her. They knocked on doors, they looked in Bellingham and Milford. Nobody had seen her. Wednesday night passed and on Thursday, there was still no sign of Teresa. Diane, her elder sister, recalled that the whole family tried to get the Bellingham police to organize a formal search without success.
Quote, We tried for two days before they would believe us. They just kept saying that she was a runaway, but she wouldn't do that. I remember Teresa saying, Mom, I would never hurt you like that. The house on North Main Street was full of activity as various friends and siblings came and went, searching haunts and hot spots. The knock on the door came in the evening, and it must have hung in the air like a dark omen.
A stone-faced officer stood before Pauline and told her the news that they had all been dreading. Teresa was gone. Chief Norman McClendon of the Bellingham PD had identified her body from the pictures that the Corleys had been distributing. I wasn't in the room for the conversation, but all I could hear was my mother screaming. And the agony.
the agony in her voice. And at that point, we all lost it. And I can still hear that agony in her voice because no mother should ever have to get that message. But I think then the hardest part was is she had to get into a car and go identify her. And that's what she did. And so that's why to this day, whoever did this, whoever did this, I really do hope that they rot in hell
Just as justice for my mother's agony, you know. No mother should live that. And no family should be living this. To know that somebody willfully took another person's life.
I remember how I found out. I was working a night shift, bagging groceries, and one of my supervisors came over to me, and she was only in college herself, my supervisor, and she was a part-timer. And she came over to me, and she almost whispered it to me. She said, "Hey, do you hear what happened to Theresa Corley? You remember Theresa Corley, right?" And I said, "Sure." And I said, "What happened to her?" And she said, "She's dead."
And it was just a shock. You know, it was a one-on-one with my supervisor and me out on the, you know, by the cash registers. And she told me I could not believe it. And then I started talking to my friends who also look at star and I went to high school with, and we were all just absolutely stunned. I remember there was a company Christmas parties a few days later and it just cast a pall over the whole Christmas party. You know, we were just thinking about it and,
And just couldn't process it. You know, Franklin and Bellingham back then were in the middle of nowhere. They were small communities where everybody knew everybody else. And to think that a high school, just out of high school, 19 years old, was murdered was just shocking. I just could not believe it. Still can't believe it. Still can't believe this happened.
On the afternoon of the following day, December 9th, Teresa's autopsy was performed in Franklin at Jackson Funeral Home by Dr. Harold Schenker, the district's medical examiner and the state pathologist, Dr. Ambrose Keeler. Though the police initially thought that she'd been strangled manually due to the uneven bruising around her neck, the medical examiner determined she had been killed with a ligature.
According to the Middlesex News, state police detective John Butler said that Teresa's body showed no other wounds or signs of a struggle, aside from the bruising around her neck. He also said that the autopsy didn't prove that she had been raped. Due to the cold weather's preservation of the body, no time of death could be determined.
Samples scraped from her body were sent to the state police lab in Boston, along with some of her blood. A pathology report was not finalized and sent to the police until mid-January, a month after her death, and it still remains classified today. Months after Teresa's death, Jerry got curious about some of the papers that her mom had stashed above the fridge. She decided to take a look and discovered a document that she believes was an official report.
In addition to revealing the cause of death, it identified the contents of Teresa's stomach, which included eggs and quaaludes. Jerry said that the reason she still remembers the incident is because she had no idea what a quaalude was at 17. She also tried to research how long it would take for eggs to be digested. Jerry later asked the DA's office about this detail, and they have denied those findings.
Bob has also heard that she had eggs in her system, and he has an idea where those eggs may have come from.
Apparently, they did find something in her system that suggests she was killed not long after she was at the train stop. And I remember at the train stop, they used to have like a big jar of hard-boiled eggs that you could have to eat. It was just a thing back then. They were pickled hard-boiled eggs, and they're just in a big jar. I remember it sitting right there on the bar. It seems to me that, you know, she was killed not long after somebody picked her up outside that dairy queen.
The family held Teresa's wake on Monday, December 11th at Cartier Funeral Home, just down the road from Pauline's house. Teresa lay in an open casket. Some attendees would later comment that it was unnerving to see the marks on her neck, but Jerry believes that they were covered by Teresa's prom dress, which she herself had worn to her sophomore prom.
The following morning, one week from the night Teresa disappeared, a Catholic mass was held at St. Blaise Church at 10 a.m., followed by a funeral procession that moved north to St. Mary's Cemetery in Milford. There, Teresa was laid to rest beneath a pink granite stone bearing her name and a tilted cross overlaid with a rose. She was the first to be interred in the family plot. Her mother and two of her sisters are also buried there now.
The days that followed were a blur for Jerry. She recounted the effort it took to act normal and the bitterness of seeing Teresa's friends' behavior, the same friends who let her walk drunkenly away from the train stop on the night she disappeared. The total disrespect from some of her so-called friends afterwards was just something that, you know, you can't get out of your head.
Her friend Alana claims that she knows nothing about what happened to her after she left the bar. Pam has since died. But there were a lot of just like different things that during the time she was missing, this girl would call and ask for Teresa, say that she was from California. And, you know, I answered the phone probably one or two times. I would say, oh, Teresa's not here. She's dead. And just this maniacal laugh.
After I had said that, you know, there are crazy people in the world and then even more crazy people come out when there's a tragedy. Struggling with her grief, Pauline insisted that the family return to some degree of normalcy. She put up the Christmas tree that year. Their children couldn't have felt less festive.
When I went back to school and
And I'm sure maybe it was the same for my brother. It was almost as if it didn't happen. Nobody said anything to us. There was no school counseling back then. You could feel the stares of people, but for the most part, people didn't know what to say. And I think a lot of people were, you know, younger kids in that age group were probably living in fear because Teresa wasn't like that person that you would think would end up murdered on the side of the road in a small town.
Teresa's death irrevocably changed the entire Corley family. For the older siblings, they had lives and families of their own to maintain and to distract them from their grief. For the younger siblings, there was a hole in the lives that they felt every day, and their mother's insistence on moving forward with their lives may have seemed callous to them.
I remember trying to act normal. Oh, yeah, my sister's dead, but yeah, I'm good. Everything's good. I'm good. And we would have family gatherings and really not talk about her. And I would leave my boyfriend, who's now my husband, we would leave and I'd start to cry. And it was like nobody talked about her. But maybe everybody felt that way. It was
It was tragic, but I think in a sense, my mother said, no, we're going on and we're not going to let this destroy all of us. Somebody could take my sister's life in such a heinous way. I'm not going to let them take mine too. And, you know, and I think that's where I developed strength and determination to live a good life, you know, despite what happened to us. And we went on as a family.
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Pauline, at first, was keeping tabs on the investigation, quietly but consistently applying pressure to the police. But then, she learned that the police had started connecting Teresa's case with the deaths of a number of other women who had been killed, the New Bedford Highway murders.
Because so many of the female victims turning up along the state's highways were picked up from bars or had a history of sex work or substance use disorder, the very Catholic and religious Pauline was worried that her daughter's name would be associated with sex work, so she stopped pressing the police for action and information.
Just a side note, the New Bedford Highway murders are still unsolved. And just like Teresa, these women still need and deserve justice. Linda, the fifth sister and adult Corley child who lived closest to home, became the de facto conduit between the police and the rest of the family. Despite the strength and determination she was modeling for her children, Pauline was struggling inside.
Several years after Teresa's death, Pauline wrote a letter to her daughter Diane. And in beautiful, looping, cursive script, she expressed herself freely. She recounted how she prayed to God for the strength not to fall apart in front of her children. She asked him for the strength not to dwell on the suffering that Teresa endured during her final hours. She confided that her colleagues insisted she see a psychiatrist, which did help her to cope with her grief.
She worried about her youngest children, describing the year following as "hell." She constantly struggled to restrain herself from holding them too closely, writing: "I was so afraid that God was punishing me for wanting too many material things and not being grateful enough for his nine beautiful gifts. I still worry when they go out, but I put my trust in God and thank him for you and for all your brothers and sisters.
She concluded by telling Diane that she saw Teresa frequently in her dreams, but could never speak to her, could never tell her how much she loved her. Instead, she resolved to telling her surviving children how much they meant to her. One by one, she listed their traits. How Nancy loved her too much for her own good. How John shared her own inability to express his feelings.
Of her youngest daughter, Jerry, she wrote, Jerry is so intelligent and wise it frightens me because she knows my faults and she still loves me. Pauline's heartbreaking letter is an attempt to put into words the immensity of her grief and her love for her children. To move forward, she wasn't able to engage with the mystery of what happened to Teresa.
When she passed in 2006, at the age of 82, she still had no answers. As soon as Teresa was identified, the Norfolk County DA's office assigned State Police Detective Lieutenant John Butler to serve as lead investigator on her case. He would work with a group of officers from Franklin, Bellingham, and the State Police to run down leads and gather evidence.
It didn't take long for Butler and his team to learn about the party at the train stop and the fight between Teresa and her boyfriend, Cog. A number of witnesses, including Teresa's friends, had seen the argument. They also learned that Teresa had apparently gotten a ride to the Presidential Arms apartment. Jerry is still not privy to those details, who picked her up and gave her a ride, but she has tried to uncover the truth herself.
According to one rumor, Teresa was walking or hitchhiking home when a van pulled up and offered her a lift. There are conflicting versions of whose vehicle it was and the names of its passengers. In some variations, there are four young men, and in others, only three. One may have even been David, the boy whose bedroom she would later fall asleep in.
It seems that Teresa may have accepted the ride because she knew at least one of the van's occupants. It was a chilly night, and there was a party underway in a warm apartment. The offer probably seemed pretty appealing at the time. She may have still been angry and looking to blow off some steam. Detective Butler and his team interviewed the people who were present at the apartment. The details of those interviews remain shrouded in mystery. Here, again, there are conflicting accounts.
According to Mass Live in 2016, authorities said that she left after an altercation inside the apartment. According to Jerry, the DA's office told her that at some point after Teresa laid down in David's room, a group of guys entered the bedroom and raped her. According to David, many years later, the four guys who came into the room only tried to assault her, but were unable.
According to an informant of Jerry's, one of the four guys would later brag that he had been with Teresa, and the scratches on his face were from her. He said that it was his shoe that she had grabbed in her hurry to leave. The police interviewed and re-interviewed many of the people who were at the train stop in Presidential Arms, as well as the two Gurelik Farm truck drivers who gave Teresa a lift afterward.
The logs of those interviews have been made available to the Corley family via FOIA, but the notes and transcripts from the conversations have not. No one interviewed has ever been publicly named as a suspect.
One month after Teresa's body was discovered, the police seemed to be running out of steam. Detective Butler told the Milford Daily News, anyone who may possess any knowledge of who did see her or who possibly saw her themselves should send it in, anonymously or whatever. At this point, we're just looking for leads.
He also seemed to think that the crime may have happened at random, saying, "...it was just happenstance that she was there hitchhiking at that particular time in Bellingham. She might have been picked up by somebody just passing through. The encounter would have to be accidental." The police explored possible links between Teresa's murder and the deaths of other hitchhiking teenagers in the region from 1978 to 1982.
there were at least eight. Some of the murders shared commonalities with Teresa's death. Karen Lynn Burton, an 18-year-old from Milton, was found strangled in December of 1981. And Roseanne Robinson from nearby Millis, who was just 17, and she was also strangled and left nude by the roadside. Roseanne had been known to frequent the train stop, the bar in Franklin, where Teresa spent her last night.
Even in the late 70s, hitchhiking was considered dangerous. For those without cars and in small towns that lacked public transportation, it was a common means of travel. Everyone did it. William Delahunt, the Norfolk County DA who first presided over Teresa's case, issued a public statement on the topic in 1982.
There's been a long history in Massachusetts dating back to the 1960s where there have been a series of hitchhike murders. He added, quote, All we can say is hitchhiking is an invitation to rape, assault, mayhem, and murder. Please don't.
In the 1977 Bellingham High School yearbook, Teresa was photographed alongside the rest of the Hawks volleyball team. She wore the number 31 and a smile, her long hair loose.
Also in the picture, wearing the number 12 jersey, is Doreen Picard, the reigning homecoming queen. Just a few years after Teresa's death, Doreen was also murdered. She'd wandered into a violent altercation in the laundry room of her apartment building in Woonsocket and was beaten and strangled by a stranger. Two young women from the same town, buried too young and in their prom dresses.
When Teresa's body was recovered from the side of the highway on December 8th, 1978, she became the fifth woman murdered in Massachusetts in the space of two months. It was a particularly violent autumn that year. In the late 1980s, a spree of hitchhiker murders attributed to the New Bedford Highway Killer would rekindle interest in unsolved cases like Teresa's.
But not every victim has a sister like Jerry. Ever since childhood, Jerry has been the type of person who can't stand seeing injustices go unaddressed. And it was that conviction that led her to St. Mary's Cemetery on a brisk day in May of 2017, as a backhoe dug into the grass over her sister's grave. ♪♪
Join me on December 19th for part two of Teresa's story. If you have any information on the murder of Teresa Corley, please contact the Bellingham Police Department tip line at 508-657-2863 or the Franklin Police Department at 508-440-2680.
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