Massachusetts 1972 Cold Case FINALLY Solved After 49 Years 

Massachusetts 1972 Cold Case FINALLY Solved After 49 Years 

A major crackdown in an unsolved murder case that’s kept people guessing now for nearly five decades here in Western Mass. The victim, a 13-year-old altar boy, was found floating in the Chapi River. Good Monday evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I’m Chris Bazano  and I’m Jordan Jagalinser. Now, we’re learning the Hampton District Attorney was preparing to make an arrest in the case last week, a former Catholic priest, but the priest died. Western.

 By tomorrow morning, a 13-year-old boy will be found in the Chapi River, sparking a mystery that will haunt a quiet Massachusetts community for half a century. His pockets are packed with chewing gum. And what investigators later discover in his system defies explanation for a child his age, raising unsettling questions long before he ever reached the water.

 Someone was responsible, yet walked away clean. That same person would spend the next five decades close enough to this family to sit in their living room trusted without question, untouched by authority for nearly 20 years. Right now though, none of that has unfolded yet. It’s Friday, April 14th, 1972 in Springfield.

 A boy is playing kickball in a neighbor’s backyard, laughing at something with no idea this is his final ordinary afternoon. Somewhere close by, someone he trusts completely is about to alter this family’s life forever, setting off a search for answers that would take nearly 50 years to surface. There was no warning bell.

 There was only a Friday evening in a quiet neighborhood. And then suddenly, everything changed. You’re watching Cold Case Narrator. This is the case of Danny Croto. A case that spans nearly five decades, three generations of investigators and one family that simply refused to stop asking the same question. It is not really a mystery about who did it.

Almost everyone involved knew who did it for decades. Detectives knew. Neighbors suspected. His own parents believed it in their bones for the rest of their lives. This is a case about what a powerful institution can bury and how long a grieving family can be made to wait for a truth they already carried inside them.

 His name was Daniel Thomas Croto. Everyone called him Danny. He was born on November 12th, 1958. The fifth of seven children born to Carl and Bernice Croto, who everyone in Springfield knew as Bunny. They were a working class Catholic family, the kind that built entire neighborhoods like 16 acres. In that era where the parish was the center of everything and everybody’s business was a little bit everybody else’s.

 Carl worked more than one job at a time to keep seven children fed and clothed. Bunny ran the household, stretched every dollar, kept the family moving. There was never quite enough money in that house. There was always enough love to make that invisible. Danny loved fishing. He loved ice hockey. He was the kind of boy other kids wanted on their team.

 Not because he was the best athlete on the block, but because he made the games fun. His father would describe him years later in an interview. He clearly did not enjoy giving, as mischievous, but a good kid in the plain, uncomplicated way that phrase is supposed to mean something. He had a strong sense of humor.

 He liked to help people, the small, unglamorous way children help people. Carrying something before you ask, noticing when somebody needed a hand. On the last ordinary night of his life, he came home from school, ate a bowl of Cheerios, and talked with his parents about fishing season, which opened the very next morning. He could not wait.

 It would matter later. It would matter more than anyone could have predicted that the last thing on this boy’s mind, the very last plan he ever made, was something as small and as innocent as going fishing at sunrise. The Croto family attended St. Catherine of Sienna church in the 16 acres section of Springfield.

 And in 1967, a newly ordained priest named Richard Levvenia arrived at that parish. He was young for a priest. He was charismatic. Parishioners who knew him at the time would later describe him as the cool priest, a man who fancied himself, in the words of one person who knew him, as something like the Bobby Kennedy of priests.

 He held countercultural views that were unusual for Catholic clergy in that era. Opposition to the war in Vietnam, sympathy for the civil rights movement, and those views caused real friction with some of the more traditional members of his own congregation. He let boys sip leftover sacramental wine. He kept magazines under the seats of his convertible that had no business being shown to children.

He had, by multiple accounts, a violent and unpredictable temper underneath all of the charm. Here is what almost nobody in Springfield knew about him yet. In 1967, as a teenager in the 1950s, Lavine had been removed from a youth recreation job following serious complaints of inappropriate conduct involving a child.

That accusation was old news by the time he was ordained, quietly buried the way these things so often were in that era, and it followed him into the priesthood without ever following him into a background check that mattered. He quickly made himself part of the Croto family’s life. He came for coffee. He came for dinner.

 He took Dany and his brothers to the pool at the church or to his own father’s shoe store downtown. Because Carl was stretched so thin working several jobs, Lvvenia would bring the family food from the rectory freezer, telling them plainly, “You need this more than we do.” To a Catholic family in 1967 Springfield, a priest who paid this kind of attention to your sons was not a warning sign.

 It was something closer to a blessing, a gift from God delivered through a man in a collar. In 1968, Levvenia transferred to St. Mary’s Parish, but he stayed close with the Crotos and the boys began sleeping over at his new rectory. Carl would say decades later that he never liked the sleeping over the rectory stuff.

 But his sons never complained and Lavine remained in every visible way, generous and kind. So Carl allowed it the way so many fathers in his position allowed it because the alternative was to suspect a priest of something unthinkable. And nothing in 1968 gave a workingclass Catholic father permission to think that thought.

 Here is what Carl Croto did not know. That same year on a camping trip in 1968, the other boys on the trip were teasing Dany. And Dany, frustrated, turned on Lavine’s directly in front of all of them and said, “I’ll tell. I’ll tell. Lavine’s whole temperament changed in that instant. He told the other boys sharply to stop.

 Nobody outside that campsite understood what those words meant. Not for a very long time. Now, back to that Friday, the 14th of April. Danny came home from school in the early afternoon. He ate his Cheerios. He talked with his parents about fishing season. And then he went out to a kickball game in a neighbor’s backyard. When the game ended, he was seen walking through the neighborhood, accompanying a paper boy on part of his route.

 The kind of small, unremarkable errand a friendly kid tags along on without anybody thinking twice. That is the last confirmed sighting of Danny Croto alive. As the afternoon light went gray and dusk settled over 16 acres, Dany did not come home. His mother began making calls, working her way through the short list of people who might know where he was.

 One of those calls went to the rectory to Father Lavine, who told her he had not seen Dany that day. Carl went out and checked the local ponds himself on the theory that his son had simply decided fishing season could not wait one single extra night. There was no sign of him. As true dark came down and the hours kept passing, Bunny called the Springfield police.

 She was told essentially that it was too soon. Too soon to file a missing person’s report on a 13-year-old boy who had never once given his parents a reason to worry like this before. Somewhere in that stretch of night, the family’s world had already narrowed down to a single question. The same question that would define the next five decades of their lives.

 Where is Dany? Not who took him. Not why. just simply desperately, “Where is our son?” Nobody in that house slept. Early the next morning, a Chape Patrolman named Burl Howard was near the Chapi River, close to the Chapi Springfield line, when he found a body floating face down in the water. It was Dany.

 Officers went to the Croto home to deliver the news no parent is ever prepared to receive. Carl was asked to come to the police station to give a statement. And in the fog of that morning, he made one specific request of the officers standing in his living room. He asked them to also bring in Father Lavine so the priest could accompany the family through whatever was about to happen next.

 The police agreed and in one of the coldest, quietest details in this entire case, one that would only make sense to the family decades later after being questioned himself. It was Lavine who was allowed to go and identify Dany<unk>y’s body at the funeral home. Not Carl, not Bunny, the priest. He would go on to recommend gently that the casket remain closed for the funeral so that the family would not have to see their son that way.

 The autopsy findings deserve to be heard plainly. Dany died from severe blunt force trauma to the head caused by a heavy object. His blood alcohol level was measured at.18%, more than double what is legally permitted for an adult driver today. Both his stomach and his pockets were found to be full of chewing gum. There were no physical signs of sexual abuse found in the autopsy.

 That detail is part of the official record, and it deserves to be stated exactly as it is, without embellishment. What the physical evidence could prove that day and what nearly everyone close to Dany came to believe about why he died would turn out to be two very different things. Dany<unk>y’s funeral was held on April 18th.

 Lavvenia visited the family’s home once more afterward. It was the last time he would ever set foot there. 2 weeks later, he telephoned Carl and told him it would be best if he was not around the family anymore. Carl would say plainly years afterward, “We didn’t know what he was talking about.” 10 days after that strange unexplained phone call, a Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant named James Fitzgibbons sat the Crotos down in their own home and told them something that would define the rest of their lives.

 Father Richard Lavine was the prime suspect in their son’s murder. Carl noticed something in that moment that never left him. Lavine had never once, not in the funeral home, not at the house, not on the phone, tried to tell the family he wasn’t responsible. Here is what investigators in 1972 did not have that they would have today.

 Tire tracks found near the riverbank were washed away by rain before anyone could cast them. The only physical evidence that survived the scene was a single drinking straw found nearby. Lavine was given a polygraph examination that same year. It did not clear him of the murder in any meaningful sense. By most later accounts, the results only indicated that he was a closeted gay man.

 And on the strength of that single finding at that time in that era, he was cleared of suspicion and the investigation quietly moved past him. One other individual was briefly looked at as a possible suspect during this period. They were never named publicly and they were later cleared entirely.

 And then for almost 20 years, the case simply went cold. Not forgotten, not exactly. Cold in the specific way a wound goes cold when nobody with power is willing to touch it again. Lavine, meanwhile, continued in active ministry. He continued working with children in parish after parish with the quiet, ordinary trust of Catholic families who had no reason on earth to think twice about it.

 Think about what that means. A man the state police privately believed had murdered a 13-year-old boy was allowed to keep standing at an altar every Sunday morning, keep hearing confessions, keep organizing outings for other people’s sons for nearly two more decades. Nobody with the power to stop that ever did. Within the Dascese of Springfield itself, complaints about Levvenia’s conduct with boys existed on paper for years, filed away in the kind of institutional memory that protects an organization first and the people in its

care second. Decades later, the dascese’s own bishop Thomas Dup prey was himself facing legal indictment for historic misconduct would be accused by clergy inside the church of covering up decades of crimes committed by several priests, Lavine included. That accusation did not surface in 1972. It surfaced only after the whole architecture of silence in the American Catholic Church began to collapse decades later under its own weight as dascese after dascese across Massachusetts and beyond was forced to admit what it had known and for how long

and what it had chosen to do instead of acting on it. This is the part of the story that has nothing to do with rivers or rocks or river banks and everything to do with paperwork transfers and silence. A parish reassignment moved a problem from one neighborhood to the next.

 The way a stain gets pushed around a tablecloth instead of washed out. Nobody in 16 Acres in 1967 was handed a warning label along with their new priest. There wasn’t one to hand out, not officially. Not on any piece of paper a parent could have ever asked to see. In 1991, everything cracked open, though not because of Dany. Richard Lavvenia was formerally charged with multiple counts of felony assault and unlawful physical misconduct against three young victims during the 1980s.

 He pleaded guilty the following year. His sentence was probation and mandated psychiatric treatment. No prison time. He was ordered to register as a sex offender and it would take until 2003 and sustained public pressure before the Vatican finally defrocked him. And here is the uncomfortable truth this case forces you to sit with.

 The moment Lavine’s other crimes became public in 1991, investigators and ordinary people across Springfield immediately connected him back to Dany<unk>y’s murder 19 years earlier. It did not take new evidence to make that connection. It only took the permission finally to say what everyone had quietly suspected all along.

 In the years that followed, witness after witness came forward. People who had carried their silence for two decades. A childhood friend of Danyy’s told police in a 1993 statement that back in 1968, Dany had teased him about a secret involving Lavine. A secret Dany seemed genuinely willing to reveal. That friend said he only understood what the secret meant after he became a victim of Lavine himself.

 Later that same night, three of Dany<unk>y’s own brothers eventually came forward, revealing they had suffered similar mistreatment from the man their family had once considered a close friend. They described Dany coming home sick to his stomach more than once after drinking alcohol with the priest. They described him crying when he was picked up from hockey practice to spend the rest of the day with Lavvenia instead of going home the way he wanted to.

 Some of the victims who came forward during this period described independently of one another. a very specific, very deliberate method that Lavine appeared to use again and again across different boys across different years, as if he had simply refined a working system and kept reusing it. Lvignia would give boys leftover wine from the chalice after mass, then hand them gum afterward.

 The same chewing gum that investigators would later note was found packed into Dany<unk>y’s stomach and pockets the morning his body was recovered. It is the kind of detail that means nothing on its own and everything once you know the pattern it belongs to. None of it proved a murder in a court of law.

 It proved a pattern, a long and documented pattern that made the murder easier to believe and harder to prove. DNA testing was eventually run on the one surviving piece of physical evidence from the scene, the straw recovered from the riverbank in 1972. It did not match Lavine. In October of 1995, that avenue of prosecution was formally closed.

 Between 1994 and 2004, the Dascese of Springfield paid out roughly $9 million combined to 63 known victims of Richard Lavine. Dy’s murder was never among the crimes that money was paid for. There had never been a conviction. There had never even been a trial. For three decades, Carl and Bunny Croto lived with a version of justice that never actually arrived, only kept being promised.

 Investigator after investigator told them quietly off the record that everyone in law enforcement believed Lavine had done it. None of them could tell the Crotos when or if that belief would ever turn into a courtroom. Bunny, in particular, became the family’s steadiest advocate, the one who kept the door open to reporters and detectives alike, long after it might have been easier and less painful to simply stop answering the phone.

 In 2003, a Boston Globe reporter named Kevin Cullen, who had spent months investigating this case and sitting in the Croto’s living room beneath a portrait of their dead son, finally confronted Lavine directly outside his mother’s house in Chapi, where the former priest was painting the sighting. Cullen told him he had new witnesses, new statements.

 He asked Lavine for his side of the story. Lvignia only smirked, wiped his hands on a rag from his back pocket, and said, “My silence has been my salvation.” There’s still a name that needs to be said out loud on the record. Stay with us. For decades after that, the only real path forward on this case was not a laboratory breakthrough.

 It was one investigator willing to sit with a dying man and simply listen patiently for as long as it took. In March of 2020, Hampton District Attorney Anthony Galoon created what his office called the Unresolved Cases Unit, reassigning detectives to take a fresh look at old, unsolved homicides across the county.

Danny Croto’s file was one of the very first cases reopened. By this point, Richard Lavine was in his late 70s and his health was failing badly. In April and May of 2021, Massachusetts State Police Detective Michael McN sat with Lavine in a medical facility across five separate interview sessions that totaled 11 hours. Every session was recorded.

Lavvenia never once said the words, “I killed Danny Croto.” He was cy. He was evasive. Still working to control the story even as his own body was failing around him. But piece by piece, carefully, almost reluctantly, he placed himself exactly where he had spent nearly 50 years denying he had ever been.

 He said he had brought Dany to the riverbank on the day he disappeared. He said he had physically assaulted him there. McN asked him directly, “Why did you hit him when he was down by the riverbank?” Levvenia answered, “I don’t remember hitting him down by the riverbank, but giving him a good shove.” McN asked why he had given that shove. Levvenia said, “Well, for the same reason you probably push your own son.

” He said he left Danny there at the riverbank, came back a short time later and saw the boy floating face down in the water. McN asked what he had done after seeing the body. “I don’t remember telling anyone,” Lvvenia said. “Did you tell the police?” “I don’t believe I did. I don’t believe you did either,” McNally replied.

 “Did you confide in any friends?” “No,” Levvenia said. That’s not something I’d confide in. I just remember being heartbroken when I saw his body going down the river, knowing I was responsible for giving him a good shove. McN asked if he remembered seeing him face down in the water. “To my greatest regret,” Lavine said. “That’s your greatest regret,” McNally asked.

Lavine corrected himself quietly to my great regret. Later in the interviews, Lavine told the detective that people were going to blame him and that they had and that it had been the worst experience of his life. He said he would sooner forget the whole thing, frankly, especially the image of Dany floating face down.

 McN asked if he felt like he had put that image out of his mind. “Yeah,” Lavine said. “Pretty much.” And when McNal asked him almost gently what kind of boy Dany had been, Lavine answered, “He was a nice little kid. Kind of dumb, but charming in a way.” Listen to that sentence again. A man is being asked at the very end of his own life to account for a child he took from the world.

 And the best he can offer is a shrug dressed up as a compliment. There was one more piece of the puzzle, and it had been sitting in an evidence file since 2004. That year, investigators recovered a letter during an unrelated investigation into a different member of the clergy. The letter described terrible compulsions and unbearable torment and referenced a young boy along the Chapi River, the exact location where Dany had died.

Investigators believed Lavini had written it to himself years earlier, as a kind of private confession he could never bring himself to speak aloud to another human being. In the final months before his death, that letter was sent to a forensic linguist who compared its language patterns against verified samples of Lavine’s own writing.

 The linguist concluded to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that Lvvenia could not be excluded as the letter’s author. Combined with the recorded hospital bed admissions, district attorney Guloon believed for the first time in the entire history of this case that there was finally enough evidence to convict Richard Lavine of murder.

 His name had never really been a secret. Everyone in this story already knew it. Investigators knew it in 1972. The Croto family knew it in their bones for almost 50 years. What had never happened, not once in all that time, was an official on there declaration from someone with the actual legal authority to say it.

 That moment finally came on Friday, May 21st, 2021, when Guluni authorized his investigators to bring the accumulated evidence before a magistrate judge and seek a warrant for Richard Lavine’s arrest on a charge of murder. That same day, before the warrant could ever be executed, Richard Lavine died at Bayate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

 He was 80 years old. The cause was respiratory failure brought on by CO 19. He died a free man in a hospital bed, having never spent a single day in prison for what happened on that riverbank in 1972. 3 days later, on May 24th, Galoon held a press conference. He told the assembled reporters that his office had determined Richard Lavine murdered Danny Croto in 1972, striking him with a rock and leaving him at the river where he died.

 He said he believed that had Lavine lived, his office could have proven it in a court of law. He said the case was now officially closed. Dy’s brother, Joe Croto, spoke to reporters that same day. After hearing Lavine’s own recorded words played publicly for the very first time, he said, “I’m awfully glad that my parents will never hear this.

” Springfield’s Bishop, William Byron, released a statement calling the announcement a sad closure to a tragic event that had hung over the community for decades. He said it was incredibly disheartening to learn that a priest, a man ordained to care for God’s people, could commit such an act and never take responsibility for it.

 Think about the particular cruelty of that timeline. Not years too late, not months too late, hours. A warrant was already moving through the system when Richard Lavine’s heart and lungs simply gave out first in a hospital bed on his own terms in his own time. The way he had managed to control nearly everything else about this story for almost 50 years.

 Closed is not the same word as solved. And solved is not the same word as justice. no matter how badly a community wants to believe. Otherwise, once a press conference is over and the cameras go dark, Richard Lavine was never arrested. He was never formally charged. He was never tried in a courtroom, and no jury of his own community ever weighed the evidence against him the way the law says they should.

 What happened instead in the end was a prosecutor’s public statement built on a lifetime of circumstantial evidence and a set of reluctant admissions pulled out of a dying man at the very last edge of his life. Carl Croto died in 2010. Bunny Croto died in 2016. Neither of them lived to hear Richard Lavine’s own voice place himself at that riverbank.

 Neither of them lived to hear a district attorney finally say out loud in public the name they had believed in quietly and without proof for almost half a century. They spent the rest of their lives being told gently by one investigator after another that everyone in law enforcement believed Lavine did it but that there had never been quite enough to charge him.

 That is its own particular kind of grief being right and unheard for 50 years. It is a quieter kind of grief than the loss itself. But it lasts just as long and in some ways it asks even more of the people who carry it because there is no funeral for it. No formal end point. Just decade after decade of the same unanswered phone call. He was 13 years old.

 He was the fifth of seven children. He loved fishing and he loved ice hockey. And on the last night of his life, he sat with his parents and talked about a fishing season that for him would never open. He was funny in the specific unforced way that made other kids want him around. He was kind in the small, unglamorous ways that don’t get written into official records, only remembered by the people who were there.

 Everyone who knew him reached for the same plain word to describe him. Good. He trusted an adult he had been raised his entire short life to trust completely without question the way his whole community had been taught to trust that collar. He never got to grow into a teenager who complained about curfews.

 He never got to graduate or to fail a class and recover from it or to fall in love for the first time and have his heart broken. The ordinary way hearts are supposed to break in classrooms and parking lots, not on river banks. He never got to become an uncle to his own siblings children or to sit at a Thanksgiving table as an adult telling the story of some childhood mischief he’d finally been forgiven for.

He should be 67 years old today. He might have had children of his own by now. He might have taken them fishing on some ordinary Saturday morning, exactly the way his own father once took him and told them the way Carl Croto tried to teach his own son what it looks like when a grown man finally decides to tell the truth.

 For anyone who wants to sit with this case longer than a single video allows, a fulllength book exists called death of an alter boy tracing not just Dy’s murder but the wider culture of abuse and coverup inside the dascese of Springfield that made it possible. This channel does not take payment to mention resources like that.

 We mention it because some families deserve more than 15 minutes. Somewhere inside the Dascese of Springfield’s own records are the complaints that were made about Richard Lavvenia. Some of them reportedly predating his arrival at the Croto family’s parish altogether. What exactly those files say, who exactly they name, and how much of that information was known and sat on before Danny Croto ever climbed into Lavine’s car for the last time has never been fully open to the public.

 Richard Lavine is dead now. And whatever else he knew died with him in a hospital bed on his own schedule, exactly the way he seemed to manage almost everything else about this case for nearly 50 years. The paperwork isn’t dead. It is still sitting somewhere in a filing cabinet or a records room, waiting for someone with the authority and the will to finally open it all the way.

 If this case stayed with you, hit like, subscribe, and tell us which moment landed hardest for you. We’ll see you in the next one. No case stays cold forever.