A Salem, Massachusetts, man has been convicted of first-degree murder for the 1971 stabbing death of a woman inside her Bedford home.
Arthur Massei, 78, was arrested in March 2022, more than 50 years after the death of Natalie Scheublin, according to the Middlesex District Attorney's Office. On Tuesday, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder in her death, as well as an additional charge tied to an attempt to pay a witness to offer false testimony in his case.
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Scheublin, a 54-year-old mother of two, was found dead in the basement of her home on June 10, 1971, by her husband, Raymond Scheublin, who at the time was president of the Lexington Trust Bank. She was face down on the floor with her ankles tied, a makeshift gag around her neck and multiple stab wounds, prosecutors have said.
Nothing of significant value was taken from the home except her car, a 1969 Chevrolet Impala, which was later found a short distance away at the Bedford VA Hospital, and a set of bank keys. The car appeared to have been wiped, but investigators were able to recover a fingerprint from the window. Massei was later connected to the case in 1999 by new fingerprinting technology that wasn't available at the time of the initial investigation.
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Massei was interviewed in 2000 but he denied any involvement in the murder or of being in Bedford at all. In 2005 he was interviewed again and changed his story, according to the DA, claiming he had been solicited by an organized crime group to murder Scheublin but he refused.
In 2019 investigations in the Middlesex District Attorney's Office Cold Case Unit reexamined the case and found a new witness, a woman who admitted she had been involved in schemes to defraud banks with Massei. She told investigators that he spoke of his connections with organized crime, and that he once told her he stabbed someone to death in their home. It was that information, paired with the previous details of the investigation, that finally gave prosecutors enough for the indictment on first-degree murder.
When Massei was being held on the murder charge, he attempted to find someone to give false testimony in the case, according to prosecutors. From inside the Middlesex Sheriff's Office in Billerica, Massei wrote to a woman to recruit someone to testify that Massei had been framed, using a story he made up, prosecutors said. The accused killer allegedly offered $1,000 for the testimony.
Massei's letters included escalating threats, including that he would order someone to hurt her and that he would get to the woman "like a bullet," according to the announcement.
Investigators also found that the man told people outside the jails to collect on illegal loansharking debts, prosecutors said.
He was charged with solicitation to suborn perjury in the trial of a capital indictment.
Prosecutors noted that Massei has a long record of criminal convictions and prison sentences, has assaulted corrections officers, has twice been convicted of escape and, as recently as 2016, was convicted of violating court orders involving harassment and abuse.
“Natalie Scheublin was a wife, a mother and a cancer survivor who loved gardening and painting. She was brutally murdered by a stranger in her own home,” said Middlesex District Attorney Ryan. “For more than fifty years this case went unsolved. Today’s verdict is the culmination of years of investigative work and exemplifies the core mission of my Cold Case Unit – providing answers to families,” said District Attorney Ryan
Massei is scheduled to be sentenced on May 31.
