Two Murders in Lowell
Two Murders in Lowell
Twenty-three years and two miles apart.
My brother committed suicide in 2000. He was 41. My sister died in 2016 from sepsis after contracting the flu. She was 58. I’ve had moments since their deaths when I wondered if someone cursed our family at some point. I know that’s foolish. I’m not even that superstitious. The thought is a product of sadness, grief, and anger at being born into a universe that is sometimes as ruthless as it is giving and good.
Still, I understand on some level why some might look up and ask, why?
Like the Potter family of Lowell, Massachusetts. I recently learned some of their story, and after waking up today, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Potters. I live in Massachusetts now, but I’m not a native. I don’t know them. I’ve only been to Lowell a handful of times. But I picked up on the Potters’ tragic and perplexing story via Google alerts for general crime-related terms. If you don’t feel some compassion after learning what they’ve been through, there’s not much hope for you.
September 3, 1999
The woman was walking her dog in Lowell’s Shedd Park around 2 p.m. that September afternoon. Shedd, which borders Lowell Cemetery, is a popular destination with residents, with tree-lined access roads and athletic fields. Along the way, the woman and her dog likely passed fluttering flyers stapled to telephone poles for a missing 11-year-old girl, Tabitha Potter. Though the weather in New England often begins to turn noticeably mild by the end of August, that September day was warm — Boston’s recorded high on the third was 87°F.
Newspaper accounts don’t give the woman’s name, but we know her dog wandered off the trail, and she followed. Twenty-five yards into the woods, she found the body of a little girl, partially covered in leaves.
She rushed back to the trail. Then, aided by a jogger, she summoned the police.
The woman who found the body was later quoted as saying she didn’t think she’d ever go back to that park for the rest of her life.
One officer who spoke to the Boston Globe noted that Shedd wasn’t “heavily traveled” and was “relatively crime-free.”
The dead girl in the “relatively crime-free” park was Tabitha Potter. In life, she’d been 5’0” and freckled, with pale red hair and blue eyes. She’d disappeared earlier in the week and was last seen wearing jeans and a gray shirt with pink sleeves.
Two weeks after Tabitha Potter was found, a 32-year-old man named James Howley, described by the Globe as a “drifter with a lengthy police record,” committed suicide. His body was found hanging from a tree a block from Shedd Park. Police noted Howley’s proximity to the crime scene and took blood samples and fingerprints.
His police record went back to 1985. His early crimes mainly were traffic violations, but in 1994 he went to trial for assault and battery on a police officer. In 1997 Howley was jailed for a year for probation violations.
Though investigators initially said Potter wasn’t raped, they later found semen on her clothing. It was a perfect match for James Howley.
The Potter family expressed disappointment Howley wasn’t convicted in a court of law. Still, family spokesperson Denis Teague said Howley had given himself “a sentence that was probably harsher than what the Commonwealth would have given him.”
Dec. 2, 2022
The man’s body was found in a freezer at the house on Coburn Street, about two miles from Shedd Park.
Police were at the home of Michael Burke, 38, and Samantha Perry, also 38, for a welfare check. According to NBC Boston, the body was found while executing a search warrant. Investigators also found evidence that implied the man had been restrained. Burke and Perry were arrested on kidnapping charges.
The man’s body had been in the freezer for a week. He was 37 and the third roommate in the home, John Wayne Potter — Tabitha Potter’s brother.
No one in his family had seen John Wayne Potter since before Thanksgiving. Police issued a missing persons report for him on December 1.
According to Boston’s ABC affiliate, WCVB, Potter had struggled with opioid addiction. It isn’t clear that this was related to his death, but court papers obtained by the station revealed he suffered terribly at the hands of his roommates. Even though Burke and Perry could describe in detail what happened to Potter, they blamed an unnamed third party for his death.
WCVB reported that Burke and Perry told investigators “that on November 23, they attacked the victim — with whom they lived — before binding him to a chair and duct-taping his mouth.”
Then:
"(Perry and Burke) forced (the victim) into a wooden chair and then bound him, binding his arms, body and mouth with wire, a green rope, an orange tie down strap and gray duct tape,” a court document stated.
Perry and Burke told police a third person used the rope to strangle the victim, according to court documents.
“(The other person) attacked the bound (victim), wrapped the green rope around (his) neck and strangled him until he was apparently deceased,” Perry told investigators, according to court documents.
After he died, the couple put Potter in their basement freezer.
Police haven’t officially confirmed the body in the freezer was John Wayne Potter, but his family has put up a GoFundMe which does. GoFundMe is why I decided to write this edition of my true crime newsletter because I find it so profoundly sad that one family has suffered two immense tragedies. Here’s an excerpt from the page:
The Potter's have already been through so much. - Losing a loved one under any circumstances is never easy. - But to have had a child or a sibling murdered in such a horrific way, well there can't be anything worse. - I'm sure most of you have heard in the news recent how John Wayne was kidnapped, restrained in a basement & murdered. To say the family was shocked & devastated in an understatement. John's little sister Tabitha (the youngest of the 5 siblings) was also murdered at the age of 11yrs.
If you feel inclined to help the Potters, here is the URL, which I would urge you to share: https://www.gofundme.com/f/give-john-wayne-the-memorial-he-deserves.
Selected sources for this edition: the Boston Globe archives (paywalled), WCVB, and NBC Boston.