Mr. Reed’s Introduction
In order to gain access to Mr. Paul Driver, Private Investigator; Driver & Associates, Boston, Mass. and conduct an interview, I had to guarantee a few things up front. Regardless of it being nearly thirty years since the incident Mr. Driver covers in this interview, I had to swear in writing, with a witness present—a lawyer of his choosing—that no further action involving any current living relatives would occur, that the case would remain closed, and no new charges be brought against any person(s) involved therein. Mr. Driver maintained that all things in this interview are true and that he would deny ever having done this interview should I break the terms of our agreement. Mr. Driver had one additional demand: That I ask no questions; Mr. Driver spoke and I listened.
I conducted this interview on August 5th, 2007, five months before Mr. Driver died of natural causes at Memorial Hospital in Melbourne, Florida. According to Mr. Driver, I am the only living person who holds this information. I have since honored our agreement and, until now, have remained silent.
These are the interview’s transcripts; they are Mr. Driver’s words entirely.
For those of you who’ve read about, researched, or just heard about the details surrounding Mr. Shannon Reed’s death, rest easy. This isn’t another morbid look into the grim findings. That said, his death woulda been ordinary, like, I mean no one woulda cared. However, since the authorities recovered Mr. Reed from four different geographic areas over the course of a long, hot Independence Day weekend in July of 1982, everyone decided to make it a big deal. You gotta bear with me though, I’m no writer, neither…I’m just tellin’ a story. I’m old now, age has taken its toll on my body, but I remember these things like it all happened yesterday. I can still picture the thick Bostonian accent of the Crime Scene Investigator from Essex…
“Finding a bahhdy is nevah great, finding pahts of a bahhdy is wahse, finding pahts of a bahhdy in sweltrahring heat is just ahhful. Nahh, finding pahts of a bahhdy that have been sittin in the heat of a fuckin sealed cah—that’s shit yah dahhn’t wish ahhn yahr wahst enemy.”
Yeah, sir, I met with the CSI just days after the police discovered Mr. Reed’s bowels and lower extremities in a maroon 1979 Ford Fiesta parked outside some off-market fashion store called Chadwick’s. Authorities found the rest of Mr. Reed in seemingly random areas throughout the greater Boston metropolitan area—all similar scenarios, except his head, which some poor homeless guy found sitting by a dumpster down near Boston Common.
But before I get ahead of myself, there is some preliminary information you need to know. I guess what I am tryin to say is I need to go to the very beginning, so that this whole things makes sense.
I remember it was an early afternoon in April of ’80. I could get the exact date if you let me look through my records, but I remember it was in the beginning of the month. I know that because I hadn’t filed my taxes yet, and of course I owed the government… Fucking nightmare living with the Jimmy Carter mess back then. Of course it isn’t much better now. Anyways, I met with a gentleman named Mr. Jonathan Levingston from a law firm called Rhineman and Levingston. Pretty normal stuff; nothing out of the ordinary about it. Most of our business came from lawyers looking for extra information to beef up their case against, or their defense of somebody somewhere. Believe me; I spent a lot of time looking through bank records trying to find hidden assets or links to anything unusual. Anything that I could give these lawyers to help win them a case. We can’t do illegal things, but let’s just say we got ways to find things out that the state people don’t do or can’t do.
So, going into this thing, I didn’t have any weird feelings or apprehensions. Nothing like that. Mr. Levingston was pretty clear about what he wanted me to do—even if he wasn’t clear about what he needed me to find.
“I need you to get to know this man.” Levingston said as he passed me a picture of who I’d learn was Mr. Shannon Reed, “Anything; everything you can find out—his routines, his family, his financial connections, his girlfriends, his illegitimate kids—how many illegitimate kids, where he vacations, who he goes to lunch with, is he a closet gay, whatever you can find. I want you to really get to know him.”
Mr. Levingston even went as far as to say, “I don’t even know what you’re looking for yet, but you’ll know it when you find it. You’re a P.I.; do your thing.”
The meeting was quick. Mr. Levingston gave me some more information on where to start, told me I would report to him monthly unless something extraordinary happened, and that the period of investigation, at that point, was indefinite. That was the first weird part. P.I.’s don’t come to you and say, “I have found all that there is, I am wasting your money. Please stop paying me…” We work until the money dries up, and that’s what I planned to do for Mr. Levingston.
I was working other cases; we always were. You had to be able to manage a bunch at once, and in my office, there were only two of us. If you wanted to bring home any money at all, you had to balance the work across as many clients as you possibly could while still doing good business—quality investigating, but you had to stretch ‘em out, these things—we’re capitalists right? But with Mr. Reed, I didn’t have to; the thing just kept going. Like I said, for two years nobody was pressuring me to tie anything up. The money didn’t dry up. It was always the same. “Keep on him,” Mr. Levingston’d say, and I’d keep on him. I followed the man; I learned the man. In many ways he was like family to me. Hell, I was with him more than my own, and my wife reminded me of this a thousand times. I’ll tell you, God rest her soul, she’d kill me if she found out that while she was alive I took her out a few times to joints where I knew Mr. Reed would be just so I could get some extra time watching him. I would sit so I could stare over my wife’s shoulder and see Mr. Reed’s table. Just watch him. Just keep an eye on him, ya know?
So that’s how it started. That’s how I came to know Mr. Shannon Reed, a man who to this day I consider one of the most genuinely good people I never actually met.
1 Mr. Reed in the beginning
**Mr. Driver explains his initial tactics for conducting investigations. In his possession at the interview were various articles, financial statements, and credit reports validating his synopsis of events. He offered them to me for examination and I had the opportunity to authenticate all presented facts, figures, and assertions.
One should note that while reading the transcripts, Mr. Driver will refer to any number of the items he has brought with him, which he is actually holding in his hand during the interview. Although they can be confusing at times, l left these references and allusions in the transcription for authenticity. I believe it speaks to the passion that Mr. Driver held for this investigation. To be clear, Mr. Driver rarely spoke “off the cuff.” If Mr. Driver mentioned figures, he had with him evidentiary proof to his claim—the very documents he uncovered during his investigation.
At many times during the interview, Mr. Driver would pause and retrieve from his collection various records, logbooks, or data that would help convey and corroborate his assertions. If he referenced articles, he read the pertinent parts aloud and they are included as he read them. Meticulous record keeping from an investigator is not unusual as often the evidence and processes involved in gaining the evidence became the prey of lawyers seeking to discount findings. However, for Mr. Driver to have retained these records for 30 years, 15 of which he has been retired, speaks to their effect upon him, especially when none of his findings were used in a court of law, and as such courts do not require them to be retained. **
I always started these things the same way. Before I’d enter a subject’s life, you know, the day-to-day activities like following him around, I’d learn about who he is on paper. You could find all kinds of things that tell a story: credit reports, bank statements, telephone records. Hell, news articles, receipts—all kinds of information is floating around out there. I mean, don’t get me wrong, not like today. Nowadays, a person’s life is written in the records they leave on the digital whats-its and whose-its… It was much less so in 1980. Shit, kids can find out more today with this social networking than I could in thirty days in the early ‘80s. Back then you could still find a good amount of shit about somebody, but things took time. Although slower to develop, in many respects, it was better—we were a patient people thirty years ago; today we are all a bunch of ingrates who hoard time like its money, you know? We yell at a computer for taking a second too long to load something. If you took an investigator out of today and put him on a subject in the ‘70s and ‘80s with me, most of ‘em would never make it. Anyways, the way I worked followed the same pattern every time.
I go through a bunch of connections and imbedded in the fee I charge is the money that I send to these connections to help me get what I need. Information is a commodity, and trust you me, there are people just waiting to sail another man down a river for a small fee. I had contacts with creditors, credit agencies, financial institutions, and things of that nature. I used these people over and over again; they did good work and with Mr. Reed it was no exception. What these connections told me about Mr. Reed was pretty revealing about who he was.
Mr. Reed was a pretty normal Joe discounting an insanely high reoccurring monthly phone bill, which I initially attributed to a college-aged kid calling home collect. Mr. Reed had normal debt with normal payments; he was a widower with one son, Shane; he had a three bedroom house with a payment of $450.00 a month; a car note on a 1976 Pontiac Catalina at just over $78.00 a month, which was about to be paid in full. He made bi-monthly deposits into his bank account from Reed Brothers Grocery, which was actually his brother’s business, but they operated it together. According to his pay stubs, he was the VP of Reed Brothers Grocery and brought home a salary of $52,875.00 a year, not including a bonus based off of yearly sales. In 1979, he got $2500.00, which in the late ‘70s was a good chunk of change.
By 1970’s standards, the man was well off—doing great, not rich, but doing just fine. He paid cash for just about everything except the things I have mentioned, which in my opinion is the goal of any good man. All this said Mr. Reed is what we called a “clean sheet” in my world on all accounts except one: his savings. Over the course of four months from August through December 1979 his savings account dwindled from well over $50,000 to nothing. A man like Mr. Reed would keep something in savings—entirely too fiscally responsible not to. Additionally, and after much looking, I couldn’t find any asset or assets that would explain away the money. There were no new cars, no summer homes…nothing that looked like a midlife crisis. The money was there and then it was gone.
According to the account ledger, the withdrawals from savings were wire transfers to a third party account at a separate financial institution. To be fair to me: my thought process at the time wasn’t an overly suspicious one. It could have been a third party account that actually was owned and operated by Mr. Reed himself through a financial manager or investor or something. There are a thousand explanations—money transfer to a broker, payment on a personal debt to another person where no record of sale exists. Shit like that. I guess it could have been as bad as money to another woman with whom he had a child…this type of thing happens all the time. Even while you’re busy here listening to me ramble, people are out there in the world making a bunch of secrets. Trust me, in every saint there’s a hidden sinner fighting to get out. A few of us can beat back the sinner, but mostly we don’t; we fail and hope the failure doesn’t become who we are—but, hell, I don’t care, sinners are good for business.
So what does a 1980’s Private Investigator do? I know what you’re thinking. He and his mustache hop into a Ferrari and drive off to the lawyer’s office to start flipping over tables. I wish. Instead, I got into a 1974 Plymouth Valiant and drove to a fucking library and pulled up microfiche versions of periodicals from the last year and just sat and looked for anything that had anything to do with Mr. Shannon Reed. I know, real sexy right? Nothing screams a good time like sitting in a public library for hours and just scrolling through rolls of film, but it’s what I did, and my search wasn’t completely unfruitful, neither.
The first article I found told a pretty sad story. I got it right here with me. The title says, “Shane Reed Sentenced to Life for Hit and Run.” Beneath the title is a picture of Mr. Reed’s son, Shane. Look, he’s right there. The caption reads, “Shane Reed of Boston seen leaving the courtroom just after the jury returned with a guilty verdict late Friday afternoon.”
The article reads as follows:
Shane Reed, 19 (pictured above) of Burlington, exited the County Court House late Friday in handcuffs and tears. His long fought and often emotional court case concluded with the jury finding him guilty on all counts. Shane Reed was the driver of a car involved in a hit and run on the night of February 24, 1979, which resulted in the death of two teenaged girls, Donna (17) and Whitney Montaigne (14) also of Burlington. The investigation into their deaths lasted four months before evidence and witness’ statements indicated Shane Reed as the driver of the vehicle authorities recovered miles from the scene. Shane Reed was convicted on two counts of Murder in the Second Degree; and one count of Fleeing the Scene of a Crime and Reckless Endangerment. Shane Reed will serve out his life sentence at Massachusetts Correctional Institute (MCI). He will be eligible for parole in 2004.
Prior to sentencing, Shane Reed read a personal statement to the victims’ family conveying his regret and apologies for his actions leading up to the fateful incident on the cold February evening. Reed broke into to tears as he talked very personally to Mrs. Shelby Montaigne. “I would take the place of your daughters right now. I relive the horrible day and my decisions in my head a thousand times a day, and each time I do I wish I was gone in their stead. I deserve this.” Reed became more visibly emotional after turning to his father and telling him, “This is not your fault; you raised me better. You raised me better.” The verdict brings to an end a very trying court case for both families involved.
In a statement following the verdict, Shane Reed’s father, Mr. Shannon Reed, conveyed his deepest sympathies to the victims’ family. “In a moment like this, there is nothing a man in my shoes can say that doesn’t seem petty and contrived when compared to the gravity of the loss involved. The Montaigne’s pain is absolutely unfathomable. No parent should ever have to bury their children. My heart goes out to them the same way it has since the moment this horrible journey began. I pray that one day they will look to my son with forgiving eyes. There are no winners in situations like this; there is only loss—deep, abysmal loss.”
The Montaigne family’s statement was delivered through their lawyer. “This ruling brings to an end a very difficult time for our family. We appreciate the outpouring of support from the community, and we believe that our daughters, Donna and Whitney will live on in the hearts of those they have touched.”
I’ve kept this article for years now and I’m not really sure why. I’m not a nostalgic person. Shit, I’ve seen worse things in my career. When I was still with the Boston PD as an investigator, I once worked a job where a father got hopped up on some concoction of uppers and killed his wife and three kids…mutilated them. I don’t wanna go into specifics about what I had to see, but let me tell you: No man should ever have to walk around carrying those images with him, and I spent two tours in Nam, so it wasn’t my first rodeo. You get the idea; now I am just running on, but they were just kids—just little helpless souls. I wanted to conduct a little vigilante justice if you know what I mean. I think the worst part about it is that by the time the father came out of his high, he had no clue it ever happened—it was like a moment that never occurred. Could you imagine that—killing the most important people in your life? There’s some horrible shit out there, but you kinda grow numb to it, sad as that is…
Once you read an article like this you start to make connections, but they are blurry connections at best, indistinct to say the least. I knew lawyers were expensive, but I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why their payment would go through a random third party account and not just from Mr. Reed straight to the law office in question. Something about it didn’t make any sense and I had to figure it out. I went back to the dates just following the actual occurrence of the hit and run. I was able to dig through it all and pull together some of the details.
Let me know what you think…I have the rest of the story if you want it…
heathwrites 