On this day, Nov. 20, in 1986, a Canton, Mass., boy beat a 14-year-old classmate to death with a baseball bat to see what it was like to kill, then showed the corpse to friends who stayed quiet about the killing for weeks.
Rod Matthews planned the murder for a month, sorting out possible victims, before finally choosing new freshman Shaun Ouillette because he would be “the least missed.”
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Matthews, 14, lured Shaun to the woods with the promise of fireworks. He made Shaun walk ahead of him in the snow so he could follow undetected in his footprints, then clubbed Shaun over the head as the classmate set off bottle rockets.
Matthews later described the murder to friends after a snowball fight and took them to the crime scene.
Police found the body after one of the boys sent them an anonymous letter. The boy said he rode on his bicycle to see the body late at night and was having trouble sleeping.
Matthews was sentenced to life in prison.
– Scott McCabe
