Seventeen-year-old Deanna Cremin lived with her parents and five siblings in Somerville, Massachusetts; she was a petite, attractive girl who volunteered for a local cable access station, worked part-time at the Star Market, and planned to go into teaching or social work after her graduation.
On the evening of Wednesday, March 29th, 1995, Deanna had walked to the home of her boyfriend Tommy LeBlanc, as she normally did on weeknights. She had a ten o’clock curfew, but on this particular night, Deanna phoned her mother and said that she and Tommy were watching a program on television, and said she might be a little late. Her mother assented, and then fell asleep on the sofa.
Two hours later, at around midnight, Deanna’s mother awoke and realized that her daughter had not come home. She attempted to contact her pager, but got no reply, and when she called Tommy, he claimed that he had walked Deanna halfway home and then returned to his own house. This struck Deanna’s mother as strange, since Tommy was usually in the habit of walking Deanna all the way home, then calling to check on her when he arrived back at his own residence.
At around eight a.m. on the following morning, two school girls who Deanna had previously babysat for were taking a shortcut behind a senior housing complex on Jaques Street when they discovered the nearly-nude body of Deanna Cremin, lying only a block from her own home. She had been raped and strangled.
The investigation immediately focused on three promising suspects. The first of these was Tommy LeBlanc, who alleged that he had parted from Deanna halfway to her house, a site only about four-hundred yards from the spot where her body would ultimately be found. LeBlanc was said to be uncooperative under questioning, never showed his face at any of the subsequent memorials for Deanna, and even had a restraining order placed against him by his own mother only a few months after the slaying; LeBlanc’s mother asserted that he had become bad-tempered and experienced wild mood swings since the murder occurred.
Though Deanna’s family remain convinced that Tommy was the killer, there were two other prospects being looked into. One of these was an unnamed older man, a local firefighter more than twice Deanna’s age who was said to be obsessed with her.
The other was a man who had been spotted lurking around the area where Deanna’s body had been found in the very early morning hours of March 30th. Though this man has likewise never been named, authorities confirm that he was later imprisoned for a separate crime at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Cedar Junction.
The Cremin family maintains a billboard offering a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for information, and though new evidence supposedly came to light in 2005, no arrests have yet been made.
Crime Immemorial 