Home Sweet Homicide

Victims' kin relieved, hopeful justice awaits

The long-suffering kin of loved ones the feds say were brutally murdered at the hands of South Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger found solace in his capture yesterday — an emotionally charged day they never thought they’d see.

“It’s a long time coming. Thank God they have him,” said a tearful Marion Hussey, whose 26-year-old daughter, Deborah, was strangled to death in 1985 allegedly by Bulger and his henchman, Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi.

Hussey, 71, said she doesn’t want to face the cold-blooded Bulger but wants him dead.

“I’d like to see him hanged,” said Hussey, who lives on the South Shore and was Flemmi’s common-law wife until she learned he’d been molesting Deborah.

“I would like to see him pay for what he’s done,” Hussey said of the 81-year-old Bulger, who was arrested Wednesday night in California and is charged with murdering 19 men and women.

“He’s ruined so many people’s lives, so many families,” Hussey said.

Mary Callahan, whose businessman husband, John Callahan, was executed by Bulger hit man John Martorano in 1982, didn’t believe the news when a friend called her at 1 a.m. yesterday.

“I never want to see him,” said Mary Callahan, a 71-year-old grandmother living in Burlington. “The man is evil. The man is mentally crippled. I’m thinking about all the victims and all these terrible crimes that he committed.”

Mary Callahan’s two high-school aged children were in school when a pair of homicide detectives knocked on her door and said her husband of nearly 23 years had been killed.

He was shot in the head in Florida, his body discovered in the trunk of his car.

“When my daughter came home, I told her. She absolutely fell apart,” she recalled. “My son just tore upstairs, went into his bedroom and just wrecked everything.”

Christopher McIntyre, whose younger brother, Quincy fisherman John McIntyre, police say was mercilessly tortured and killed by Bulger and Flemmi in 1984, called Bulger’s arrest a shock.

McIntyre said the mobster’s days of “wine and roses” are over.

“This guy has gotten the best of us for so many years,” said McIntyre, 51, a mechanical engineer. “The guy makes me sick, but I want him to know — John brought you down. He cried out from the grave.

At the Scene of the Crime: There's no place like home...

Home Sweet Homicide is a wonderfully fun movie, and it is a genuine shame that it hasn’t been treated well over time. The print I got a hold of had an inconsistent quality and two or three times, a few seconds of film seemed to be missing… either that, or the director was fond of cutting to black for no reason at all for a few seconds too long. (I get the feeling the first explanation is more plausible.) perfectly cast. And I don’t mean that lightly— they literally are perfect. These may very well be the finest child actors I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching. Connie Marshall and Dean Stockwell were my favourites, as April and Archie respectively. April uses her charms to worm the kids out of embarrassing situations, to get information, or to bedevil the cops. Archie, meanwhile, is the banker of the group— the only member of the family able to save up money. He genuinely loves his sisters but hates showing it publicly. Dinah, meanwhile, likes to think of herself as grown-up, but she isn’t not the Carstairs children. They understand the material so well, and just how it should be played. There’s the right amount of innocence, naiveté, and worldliness (necessitated by their mother’s chronic neglect). When April goes into a fake fit of hysterics, you can see why a man like Bill Smith would be taken in, and why someone like Sgt. O’Hare sees through them as fake. In fact, I would be willing to say that these actors had far more talent at their ages than any child actor today. The other members of the cast are solid as well. Marian Carstairs is played by Lynn Bari, and she comes across as a mother who really loves her kids, but is forced to work hard in order to win the family’s bread and butter. Bill Smith is likeable, charismatic, and genuinely nice. Sgt. O’Hare is cynical, sees through the kids’ tricks, and keeps trying to prove his point that “he oughta know”... But the film makes a mess of the original book’s plot. It deletes plot points seemingly at random to condense the stuff to 90 minutes. You get merely a taste of the original book, with some silliness thrown in about the killer having a phonograph alibi that wouldn’t deceive a five-year old. Also, the Mob, Archie’s gang of friends willing to do anything for the right price, is conspicuously absent. We just get the occasional reference to “my friends” from Archie.

Home sweet homicide

Home Sweet Homicide

Home sweet homicide

Home Sweet Homicide

Home Sweet homicide