On Tuesday, authorities announced an arrest of a suspect in a 1971 killing thanks to a 50-year-old fingerprint and a new witness identified in the past few years.
For the murder, 76-year-old Arthur Louis Massei was indicted by a grand jury on a first-degree murder charge.
Massei is charged with killing Natalie Scheublin, 54, of Massachusetts, who was found by her husband bound, stabbed, and beaten in the basement of their Bedford home on June 10, 1971.
On Wednesday, Massei has a scheduled arraignment in Middlesex Superior Court and is being held until then.
The news of the charges was brought by Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan and Bedford Police Chief Ken Fong during a news conference on Tuesday.
"Today, we were able to tell her son and daughter that we were finally able to take the first step in holding the alleged perpetrator accountable for her death," Ryan said.
While officials believe they have their guy, his relationship to the victim is unknown, according to Ryan. As of now, they think the killing was a break-in gone wrong.
The victim's husband, Raymond Scheublin, was a president of the Lexington Trust Bank at the time of the murder and found her body with multiple stab wounds by an unknown object and a blunt force injury to her head, Ryan said.
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The home was not missing anything of value, however, the victim's car, a 1969 Chevy Impala, was missing, according to CBS.
The vehicle was later found in a nearby parking lot of a Veteran's Administration hospital. In the car, investigators collected multiple latent fingerprints, but they didn't lead to any suspects being identified at the time, Ryan said.
Years later, in 1999, the fingerprint was run through the now available FBI Automated Fingerprint Identification System, and it was linked to Massei. But, after being interviewed, he denied knowing anything about the case, Ryan said.
However, in another interview, he claimed he had been solicited to kill the wife of a banker by organized crime but turned down the offer.
In 2019, dust was blown off the cold case, and during the investigation, police found a woman who said she was involved with Massei in schemes to defraud banks in the 1990s when he bragged about killing someone with a knife.
After 50 years, the evidence compiled together was enough to present to the grand jury.
"I'm hopeful that the arrest, in this case, will provide some closure and sense of justice for Natalie Scheublin's family, as well as assurance to all in our community who were shocked by this brutal crime," Fong said.
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