Episode 140: Daniel LaPlante
The Gustafson family
Daniel LaPlante was born on May 15th, 1970, in Townsend, Massachusetts, and he lived with his mother and stepfather. His childhood and upbringing was filled with chaos and instability, and he suffered extensive emotional, psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of his father and eventually a psychiatrist that he was referred to as a teenager. He struggled with school and had been diagnosed with dyslexia from an early age.
Daniel attended St. Bernard’s High School in Fitchburg, where he was described by both students and teachers as a loner, not particularly friendly and very odd. Daniel’s psychiatrist diagnosed him with hyperactivity disorder and later took advantage of Daniel’s vulnerability and sexually assaulted him for over a year during their sessions.
This was a major stressor in his life, and Daniel’s odd behavior soon turned into criminal behavior. He began breaking into homes in his neighborhood and across his hometown of Townsend, stealing belongings and just breaking in to prove that he could. By the age of 15 he was arrested multiple times for breaking and entering and burglaries, and he was often found with stolen jewelry and money. He soon escalated to playing mind games with the families who lived in the homes he broke into, moving objects around, intentionally put things out of place and leaving things behind to scare the homeowners.
In 1986, he developed an obsession with 15-year-old Tina Bowen, who went to the same school as him. Daniel had somehow retrieved the Bowen’s home phone number (some speculate that he got it from a phone book during another one of his robberies) and he began calling the house and talking to Tina and her little sister, 9-year-old Karen.
Daniel told them that a friend gave him the phone number and that he was blonde, athletic and good-looking. After calling and talking to Tina a few times, he asked her out and she agreed. When Daniel showed up at the doorstep looking greasy, dirty and disheveled, Tina was shocked. She agreed to go with Daniel to the local fair but maneuvered her way out of the date after about an hour or so after Daniel began asking her disturbing questions about her mother, who had recently died of cancer. Over the course of several weeks in the late fall of 1986, Daniel broke into Tina and her family’s home at 93 Lawrence Street, in Pepperell, Massachusetts, near Townsend. He would hide in a small crawl space no wider than six inches and spy on the family, but mostly Tina. He pretended to be a ghost, banging on the walls, changing the TV channels, moving items around the home and in Tina’s room, and the family would notice that food was disappearing from the fridge and pantry and things like their milk carton was nearly empty at night after it had been full that morning.
After a while, Tina went from being a bit scared and unnerved to being absolutely terrified when messages started being scrawled on the walls in her bedroom that stated “Marry me” and then “I’m in your room. Come and find me” written in mayonnaise and ketchup. When the girls came home on December 8th, 1986, they were alarmed when they realized someone had used their bathroom and it wasn’t either of them or Frank, their father. Frank went around the home searching for anything suspicious and opened a wardrobe to find Daniel hiding inside. Daniel was wearing face paint, a Native American-style jacket and a ninja mask and he was holding a hatchet and a steel wrench. He forced the family into a bedroom before locking them in and running through the house where he hid again. Tina got out of the house through a window and called 911. Two days later, police found Daniel hiding inside the home where he had been living for weeks, using tunnels to move from room to room and look at Tina through peepholes he had cut out.
Daniel was immediately arrested and held in a juvenile detention facility until October of 1987, when his mother remortgaged her house to pay his $10,000 bail. While awaiting trial, now 17-year-old Daniel moved home and only continued with his burglary spree. On October 14th, 1987, Daniel stole two .22 Caliber firearms from a neighboring house. On November 16th, between 11:30 a.m and 3:30 p.m, Daniel burglarized the home of the Gustafson family, stealing multiple items from the home such as a cordless phone, two cable boxes, a cable television remote control device, and some coins from a Liberty silver dollar collection.
On December 1st, 1987, 33-year-old Priscilla Gustafson, a nursery school teacher pregnant with her third child, was last seen picking up her son, 5-year-old William, from a babysitter at around 1 p.m. She returned to her home where she found Daniel. Daniel had walked the half mile through the woods that separated his house from the Gustafson’s and was armed with one of the .22 firearms he had stolen just a few weeks prior. He confronted Priscilla with the gun and forced her and 5-year-old William into the bedroom, where he shoved William into the closet. He then tied Priscilla to the bed using makeshift ligatures before gagging her with one of his socks. He then raped her before shooting her twice in the head at close range through one of the pillows from the bed.
Daniel then pulled William out of the closet, brought him down the hall to the bathroom and drowned him in the bathtub. On his way out the door, 7-year-old Abigail was coming home as she had just gotten off the school bus. He dragged her into a separate bathroom downstairs before beating and drowning her in the bathtub as well. When Priscilla’s husband Andrew arrived home from work and found her body, he immediately called police. They quickly connected the murders to Daniel.
A massive manhunt ensued, and Daniel was caught and arrested two days later. He was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences for the murders in October of 1988. Despite multiple attempts at suing the courts as well as multiple attempts to have his sentence reduced, Daniel remains in prison. At a later hearing, a forensic psychiatrist determined that Daniel should be kept in prison as he lacked empathy and remorse for the murders.
Image sources:
masslive.com - “Daniel Laplante triple homicide case”
bostonglobe.com - “'Is he rehabilitated? In my opinion, absolutely not, psychiatrist says of triple murderer”