‘Get Rid of This Scum’ : Child Murderer Did Go Home Again--to Death Threats

‘I will never forget what I did. I will never stop being sorry for it. There isn’t an April that goes by that I don’t go to the boy’s grave and I don’t apologize to him, and cry and pray.’ -- Albert Thompson

When Albert Thompson went home again after 18 years of lies and tears on the run, he prayed that no one would remember his name. For a while, it seemed as though no one did.

Then one night last November, Thompson showed up early for rehearsal at the local playhouse where he had a bit part in “Guys and Dolls.” He walked into the theater with a smile. Everything seemed to be going well for him at last. He had a good job and a big office at Town Hall and he had found a woman to love.

Thompson’s mood changed when he saw the play’s director holding a brown envelope in her hand and looking at him sadly. “I have bad news,” he remembers her saying. “Someone sent this to the cast.”

Name Was Circled

Thompson pulled the musical’s program from the envelope. His name was circled and next to it was written: “Get Rid of This Scum.” Stapled to the note was a yellowed newspaper article dated May 4, 1967.

“Murder,” read the headline.

“I immediately felt like crying,” recalled Thompson, 31. “I was so afraid I’d lose my friends. I was afraid for my family.”

The newspaper article reported that police had arrested a 12-year-old boy and charged him with killing his 6-year-old neighbor during a game of mumbletypeg in the woods of Wayland. The victim had been stabbed 26 times in the chest and head with a Boy Scout knife.

The letter writer had crossed out “12-year-old boy” and printed “Albert Thompson.”

“At that point, I realized what the issues were. Up until then, I had really ignored them,” said Thompson, a slender man with hazel eyes and a crooked, eager smile. “I assumed people would be forgiving, that juvenile records are sealed, that I had served my time in prison.”

Thompson expected anger from the cast, but he said he heard only words of friendship. He said he remembers thinking they had known all along he was the one who killed Mark Dupuis 18 years ago, and yet they forgave him.

That’s when he decided to stop running.

“Right now, today, I’m so glad it’s out and there to be seen and talked about openly,” he said. “For the first time in my life, I feel like a whole human being.”

Some Resentment Remained

But there are others who bitterly resent Thompson’s return, who question his motives and his sanity. Some send him hate mail or make death threats on the phone. Some plead with him to leave town. They have not forgotten the murder of Mark Dupuis and the innocent lives it shattered.

“I don’t deny that everyone deserves a second chance. He just shouldn’t do it in Wayland,” said John McEnroy, a longtime resident who was a selectman the year of the murder. “It was a terrible thing to the mother of the child who was so cruelly treated. Why did he have to come back to this town?

“It’s hard for me to believe he is rehabilitated. Coming back shows a complete lack of sensitivity.”

On Dec. 5, Mark Dupuis’ 53-year-old mother, Nancy Dupuis Perry, died of a heart attack.

McEnroy said she confided in him two days before she was stricken. “Why did he have to bring it all up again?” he quoted her as saying. “After this terrible ordeal that I’ve been put through, what good will come of it?”

She was buried near her son in the town cemetery.

“Her heart was broken,” said Perry’s cousin, Kathy Mooney.

Thompson, twice divorced and father of three young children, returned to Wayland in June to become executive director of the housing authority in this Boston suburb of 12,500 residents. Thompson oversees 202 low-income apartments, a staff of seven and a $327,000 budget.

Past Was No Secret

Wayland officials say they knew about Thompson’s past when they hired him over 29 other applicants. In one interview, he was questioned about the murder and he spoke at length of his regret and rehabilitation.

“It was the most difficult decision I’ve had to make,” Housing Authority Chairman Linda Thompson (no relation) said afterward. “I feel comfortable with it and don’t regret it for one minute.”

Those who work with Albert Thompson say he has gone a long way to clear up a mess handed down by his predecessor. He is organized and responsive, said one town official.

“I am constantly amazed at his efficiency,” said Robert King, president of the local tenants’ organization.

“At first,” King added, “I felt like the others did. Maybe hiring him was a mistake. But I changed my mind. It takes a lot of courage to come back. He surely knew it was going to surface.”

Thompson thinks about people like Bob King when he answers the phone and hears: “Child killer, you’re going to die,” or when he gets unsigned letters calling him crazy.

He spends a lot of time in his bedroom listening to rock ‘n’ roll music and thinking. His favorite song begins, “How can I convince you what you see is real?”

“I will never forget what I did. I will never stop being sorry for it,” he said in a recent interview. “There isn’t an April that goes by that I don’t go to the boy’s grave and I don’t apologize to him, and cry and pray.

‘Paid My Dues’

“But I feel like I’ve paid my dues for it. I’ve contributed so much good in my life. I’ve helped a lot of individuals.

“I guess it comes down to me believing I am a good person, despite what I did, and trying to live my life like that.”

Thompson lives with his mother in the same small yellow house where he grew up, at the end of a rural dead-end road that slopes toward a swamp. He had been a gawky youth with a severe stutter who tried hard to make friends.

When Thompson was 8, the town condemned the family’s dilapidated house and burned it to the ground. He helped his stepfather build a new one on the same spot.

Thompson said his stepfather, who died in 1983, was a day laborer who drank heavily, sexually abused him and beat him almost every night with a leather strap or wire hanger.

“His famous words were: ‘Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.’ He was just a cruel man,” Thompson said. “By the time I was 12 years old, I was not a normal kid.”

Playing by himself in the woods, he would imagine sticking his Boy Scout knife in his stepfather’s chest or slitting his own wrists. When he was 11, he stole a bottle of Thorazine from the medicine cabinet at a neighbor’s house. He swallowed the pills, ran back to his house, curled up under his bed and waited.

Awakes in Hospital

He awoke in the hospital emergency room, where doctors were pumping his stomach. He was back at school two days later. The suicide attempt was never discussed at home, he said.

Andrea Jones was friends with Thompson then.

“He was very confused, but he was always looking for friends,” she recalled recently. “He always wanted approval from his friends and people in school. He would say his father would beat him and kick him around. But he didn’t have a mean streak in him. He thought a lot more about hurting himself.”

On April 26, 1967, Al Thompson asked his new neighbor if he wanted to play after school. Mark Dupuis said he would.

The boys wandered through the nearby woods and settled in a thicket near a small pond. Thompson started a game of mumbletypeg. He flipped the knife into the damp earth near Mark, who was sitting cross-legged a few feet away.

“I remember reassuring him that I wouldn’t hit him, that I wouldn’t hurt him. He was excited and impressed and the whole bit,” Thompson said.

“It’s like I got over-confident with the knife. I just flicked it one time like I had the previous time and it hit him in the chest. It kind of lingered there for a second, and then the weight of it pulled it out and it fell.

“I was really scared. I could tell it hadn’t gone in very deeply. My first feeling was to get him home, but he was screaming as if I wasn’t there. He wasn’t dying. It would have called for a few stitches, that’s all. I’m sure it was awful painful.

“I kept trying to pull him up, but he wouldn’t budge. He just kept screaming and crying. I don’t remember the thoughts that passed through me. I remember picking up the knife and stabbing him, and throwing the knife away and running away. They say I stabbed him 26 times.

‘Anger and Violence’

“I’ve spent agonizing hours and days going over it in my mind, and all I can think is that every time I cried, my father would beat me up to shut me up. And I think I must have been mimicking what was done to me when I cried. I don’t think I consciously thought that. I was just very scared. I had so much anger and violence, it had to come out somewhere.”

It wasn’t long after Mark’s mother reported him missing that his body was found in the woods, a few feet from Al Thompson’s knife. The police arrested Al that night.

In August, 1967, after a series of court appearances and psychiatric exams, Thompson was found delinquent by reason of manslaughter and sent to a maximum security juvenile prison in Bridgewater.

For the first three years, Thompson cleaned toilets, read comic books and smoked cigarettes.

“It was a joke,” he said. “I saw a counselor daily who gave me mail. I saw a counselor weekly who gave me packs of cigarettes and talked to me about what I was doing there.

“I understood what I did. I’ll tell you something, no one made me understand, no one person or rehabilitation effort or facility. I’m proud of myself, because I’m the one who took the effort always, to ponder it, to worry about it, to regret it and sort it all out.”

Gets New Counselor

Halfway through his stay, he was given a new counselor, a young woman who became his first lover, he said.

“She restored a lot of caring and softness and gentleness in myself because I had never been exposed to that before and all of a sudden, here it was and I liked it,” he said. “Not only did I like it, but I wanted to be that way.”

Thompson was released from prison at 17. He rented a room in Plymouth and started scooping ice cream at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. In the mornings he went to high school, where he studied photography. Before long, he had a part-time job taking pictures for the local newspaper.

When people asked about his past, he told them he had served time in jail forbreaking and entering or assaulting a police officer.

He married at 18, keeping his past a secret. “She was the first woman who liked me in the outside world and paid any attention to me,” he said. They were divorced seven months later.

For the next two years, Thompson said, he bummed around the country. He took a job in a photo lab in Boston, then quit and hitchhiked to California and back. He worked at a Harvard Square clothing store and a Burger King and spent a few months begging for change in Boston Common.

“There are no real friends in that life,” he said. “Pure survival.”

Thompson said his life changed direction when he saw an advertisement for a government job-training program. He signed up the next day, and later got a job as a counselor in a health clinic for the elderly in the Boston suburb of Somerville.

Three years later, he was assistant director of the city’s Council on Aging.

“That’s where I started learning about human services and managing,” Thompson said. “I was very successful at it.”

Thompson married again in 1979 and had three children before another divorce five years later. “A lot of it was me, I admit that,” he said. “Of course, I’m not unscarred. I have a hard time trusting people. I have a hard time communicating at an intimate level.”

The children live with Thompson’s ex-wife and he sees them on weekends.

Records Were Sealed

In 1983, when Thompson was 29, he took a job as a pre-release counselor at a minimum security prison in New Hampshire. Because his juvenile records were sealed, a thorough background check did not disclose his manslaughter conviction, he said.

“I was fascinated by working with felons and treatment and the whole idea of transition for someone in that environment into free society,” he said.

One Sunday afternoon last spring, he spotted the ad for the Wayland housing authority director in a Boston newspaper.

His first weeks at Town Hall went smoothly. Then, in late June, the Wayland-Weston Town Crier newsroom started getting phone calls.

“Some were from the curious--was he the same person? Why was he back?” editor Andrea Haynes later recalled in an editorial. “Some were from angry people. How could the housing authority subject tenants to this? Some were from people who told us that tenants were fearful.”

Haynes and another reporter confronted Thompson in his office. He denied everything and an article was not printed.

“I had no intention of admitting it,” he said. “I had lawyers. I was ready to fight it to the Supreme Court if I had to. My records were sealed.”

But several weeks later, Thompson agreed to talk to a reporter from Boston magazine. He said he was tired of dodging rumors and angry stares.

‘Wanted to Clear It Up’

“I agonized over it. I pictured these headlines like, ‘Housing Authority Director Linked to Child Slaying,’ ” he said. “But I just wanted to clear it up.”

The story, which was published in the December issue, confirmed the gossip in Wayland. Mark Dupuis’ murderer was back, and he worked in Town Hall.

The hate mail and death threats followed. The Town Crier received letters calling for his resignation, and others calling for compassion.

Even before the news came out, Thompson feared its consequences. In early October, a 9-year-old girl named Sarah Pryor vanished from her Wayland home. Thompson went home from work early and waited for the police to arrive.

“That was my one dreaded fear, that a child would disappear,” he said. “I freaked out. I was sure they were going to question me. I had my calendar ready to show where I was all day.”

The police never came.

“He was never a suspect,” officer Stephen Williams said.

‘I Don’t Want to Run’

Today, Thompson is waiting for the scar of his past to fade again from Wayland’s memory. “I’m hanging in,” he said. “I don’t want to run from anything.

“If I lived in this town and grew up in a normal fashion and someone like me moved in, maybe I would have very valid fears and concerns. I understand that side of it.

“On the other hand, there’s the whole argument for people being rehabilitated.

“You read about it in the newspaper every day--a 16-year-old kid kills his father or a 14-year-old does this or that, and you never hear about them again,” he said. “I imagine people think they are put away for the rest of their lives. But they’re not.”