National exposure of this town’s most infamous crime will begin on Tuesday with the release of The Year We Disappeared, the new book by Cylin Busby and, her father, John Busby.
In Falmouth interest has been especially high. Carol B. Chittenden of Eight Cousins Bookshop has been taking advance orders on the book for more than a month.
The new book is the inside story of the shooting of Falmouth Police Officer John Busby almost 30 years ago. But it is also the first book to begin to tell the story of the power that one man, Melvin J. Reine Sr., had over the Town of Falmouth and the chaos he is alleged to have caused over approximately 30 years.
Mr. Busby was shot in the face on August 31, 1979, as he was driving to work. The crime remains unsolved, and Mr. Busby and his daughter have turned their very different memories of the days leading up to and after the shooting into what advance readers have called a compelling memoir.
Coinciding with the release of the book, staff from the television show, 48 Hours, are in Falmouth shooting a segment on the crime that will air later this year.
In the small, closely-knit town that Falmouth was in 1979, most people in town knew who John Busby was, a self-professed tough no-nonsense cop, and they also knew Melvin Reine, or at least his reputation.
Melvin Reine was, as lifelong resident Adrian C.J. Dufresne of Lucerne Avenue, Falmouth Heights, recalled, “a Jekyll and Hyde” figure, a man who would often be seen smiling and joking, but because of his reputation for revenge, intimidated many in town.
State Representative Eric T. Turkington (D-Falmouth), who served as a Falmouth selectman during the time of the Busby shooting, said the crime had broad reverberations in town.
“Having a police officer injured in this fashion and not having it solved gives rise to a lot of concern about the police department and the justice system,” he said, adding that now, 30 years later, most of the players are long gone.
One-Man Crime Wave
As for Melvin Reine, Mr. Turkington said, “I don’t think anybody could have imagined somebody like that could operate in a town like this. To have this sort of one-man crime wave living among us and affecting so many lives....”
Mr. Reine, now 69 years old, is a convicted arsonist who is suspected of numerous other crimes besides the shooting of Officer Busby. He has been held since 2001 at Taunton State Hospital with dementia.
At the time of the shooting, according to Mr. Busby and confirmed by other longtime Falmouth residents, Mr. Reine exercised quite a lot of influence in town.
In fact, when it came to anything having to do with Mr. Reine or anyone in his circle, it seemed that police looked the other way, Mr. Busby wrote in the book.
Considering the fact that Mr. Reine is thought to have fathered 38 illegitimate children in town, that circle was wide.
The same leniency also held true, some believed, when it came to certain local residents or people who were politically connected.
That, as Mr. Busby tells it in the memoir, was the atmosphere in which Melvin Reine was able to exercise undue power and perhaps even commit multiple murders and other crimes. He was seemingly untouchable.
Of those numerous unsolved crimes, Mr. Dufresne echoes others when he says, “Some of us have suspicions on why they were never solved.” Many believed it was Mr. Reine’s friends in the right places who protected him.
John Busby, who grew up in the Boston area and moved to Falmouth to take the job in the police department, picked up on this disparity right away and he was having none of it.
He had no qualms about issuing tickets to anyone who was speeding or otherwise breaking the law, whether they were connected to Mr. Reine or not. That, Mr. Busby believes, is what made him a target of Mr. Reine, who threatened him to his face at one point in front of other police officers.
The Shooting
In the memoir, Mr. Busby recalls minute by minute the night he was shot.
Within moments, he suspected Mr. Reine of the crime, but it took almost 25 years for Falmouth and state police officers to crack the case, garnering a confession of sorts from Mr. Reine’s brother, John A. Reine Sr. of East Falmouth Highway, who allegedly said he drove the station wagon during the shooting while his brother, Melvin, used a shotgun to fire at Mr. Busby through the car’s back window.
Whether John Reine was telling the truth in the confession is a matter that may remain a mystery. The only other possible witness to the crime, Melvin’s wife, Shirley M. Reine, was found murdered in May 2005, a couple of years after John Reine’s confession.
That murder remains unsolved, though Todd M. Reine, Melvin Reine’s son by his first marriage, is now serving time for robbing Shirley Reine’s home to obtain wills and other paperwork, a crime that was solved in the course of investigating Shirley Reine’s murder.
Even if John Reine’s confession were to stand up in court, there is unlikely to ever be a trial, because the statute of limitation ran out on the crime, attempted murder, almost 15 years ago.
Mr. Turkington introduced a bill to extend the statute of limitations in crimes against police officers, but that bill is stalled, with some legislators fearing it would “open up the floodgates,” as Mr. Turkington put it, on all statutes of limitations.
It was actually John Reine, even more than his brother Melvin, who had the most to gain by getting Mr. Busby out of the way. Two months before the shooting, John Reine was cited for allegedly running his truck through a traffic stop where Officer Busby was stationed, knocking the officer’s clipboard from his hands. If the charge had gone to court, John Reine, a truck driver, was in danger of losing his license and his livelihood.
But he told investigators in 2003 that he was never questioned in the Busby shooting, nor was his brother.
Unsolved Crimes
Mr. Dufresne is among the legions of Falmouth citizens who have long believed Melvin Reine was responsible for not just the Busby shooting but three other unsolved cases: the disappearance of Melvin Reine’s first wife, Wanda Reine in 1971; the murder of 16-year-old C. Jeffrey Flanagan in 1972, and the disappearance of 17-year-old Paul Alwardt in 1977.
Wanda Reine’s brother, Roman A. Medeiros, retired last year after serving for more than 30 years on the Falmouth Police Department, most recently as captain of the detectives division. He said he always wanted to solve the case of his sister’s disappearance while he was on the force. He said he still holds out hope that it will be solved.
“We’re closer than we were before,” he said of the ongoing investigation.
Jeffrey Flanagan’s sister, Donna L. Mendes, said that her brother had told the family shortly before he was killed that he had to get out of town quickly. He was among a group of boys and young men, as was Paul Alwardt, who used to hang around the Reine yard, working for Melvin Reine.
Paul Alwardt disappeared just before he was scheduled to appear before a grand jury on an arson case in which Melvin Reine was a suspect.
Apparently for young men in East Falmouth, hanging around the Reine yard was somewhat of a rite of passage.
John Netto of Brick Kiln Road, East Falmouth, who now works for the Falmouth School Department and has been honored numerous times for his volunteer work, was another one of the young men who used to hang around the Reine yard back then. He did not want to say much about the case besides, “I think it’s a mess.”
He said a lot of young East Falmouth men used to hang around the Reine yard, to pick up some work and have something to do. “It was a place to go,” he said.
As to whether there will be any justice in the crimes, Mr. Netto was philosophical. “He’s the one who’s got to live with it,” he said of Mr. Reine.
Others agree.
“I thought it was a tragic thing that they never pinned it on him years ago,” Mr. Dufresne said of the Busby shooting.
Mr. Turkington said that he and the other selectmen at the time had special meetings with the chief of police, urging that the case be prioritized.
“We made it clear this was a crime that had horrified the community and we wanted all efforts put into it,” Mr. Turkington said.
The board of selectmen went so far as to go to the attorney general’s office to ask that the state step in to take over the investigation. But the attorney general turned the town down, Mr. Turkington said.
“They said the proper chain of command was to let the locals handle it,” he said.
Mr. Dufresne echoes some of Mr. Busby’s comments in the book that the case was bungled by Falmouth police and left virtually untouched for years because of people in the police department and high up in Falmouth’s political circles who had ties to Melvin Reine.
Police Botch Investigation
While Mr. Dufresne did not name names, among the names long associated with the unsolved case were John L. Ferreira, who was the police chief at the time of the Busby shooting and retired soon after, and Paulino P. Rodriques, who served as police chief beginning a few years after the crime.
Mr. Ferreira, who lives in Falmouth Heights and has refused interview requests to talk about the case, was thought to have been intimidated by Mr. Reine, who once was believed to have set fire to a police cruiser in the chief’s front lawn.
Mr. Rodriques, who lives in East Falmouth and has also declined interview requests to talk about the Busby shooting, lived for most of his life across the street from the Reine compound and Melvin Reine is credited for saving his life after an explosion on his property. Mr. Reine was first on the scene and drove Mr. Rodriques to the hospital.
In hindsight, Mr. Turkington said, the investigation into the shooting of John Busby should have been handled differently.
“Looking back, what should have happened was an outside entity should have been able to come in and take over the investigation. The Falmouth police were too close to Melvin and Busby to do it,” he said.
Mr. Dufresne is one of those in town who feels the unsolved cases in which Melvin Reine was long a suspect are a black eye for the town.
But he is quick to point out that things have changed and if the crime happened today, “it would be an entirely different type of investigation.”
In the book, Mr. Busby discusses the way the police did things in Falmouth when he worked for the police department. Basically, if you were a local, you had nothing to worry about.
Mr. Dufresne said that type of selective ticketing can erode the law and order of an entire town.
“It affected the ability of a policeman to do his job. It was accepted as a fact of life in Falmouth and other communities,” Mr. Dufresne said.
Threatened By Reine
As Mr. Busby tells it, when he and another gung ho officer, R. Michael Mangum, joined the local police force, they did things differently. Suddenly, locals were getting tickets for speeding and other infractions, and the locals were not happy about that.
Mr. Mangum eventually left the Falmouth Police Department after writing a lengthy report to selectmen about corruption in the police department.
Mr. Busby, in the book, tells of pursuing relatives of Mr. Reine’s for infractions and being threatened by Mr. Reine in front of other officers.
As for Melvin Reine, Mr. Dufresne said, “He was a sociable man. He could be as nice as can be, but if you crossed him, he was an animal.”
Mr. Dufresne recalled, “When I was a beach commissioner, he did work grading the beaches. He was meticulous. No contractor did a better job.”
Mr. Reine, as owner of Five Star Enterprises, also held the town’s trash contract for many years. That is where Mr. Dufresne had a major run-in with him.
When Mr. Dufresne was a selectman, he and another selectman became aware that Mr. Reine was using the town’s dump for trash from Onset, Bourne, and other towns.
“We terminated his contract. We took the key for the dump away from him,” Mr. Dufresne said.
Mr. Reine and a partner were eventually charged with bid-rigging on the trash contract. The partner went to jail, but Mr. Reine was able to avoid any charges, a great frustration for, among others, James M. Cummings, a former state police investigator who is now Barnstable County Sheriff.
Thumbing His Nose At Police
Mr. Cummings was among the police investigators who had bundled together the unsolved cases and were hoping to some day pin charges on Mr. Reine.
Melvin Reine’s habit of thumbing his nose at investigators was legendary.
Old-timers talk about Mr. Reine setting fires, then reporting the fires to the Falmouth Fire Department. Others remember seeing him on the periphery as firefighters battled flames.
After his first wife disappeared, Melvin Reine was said to have stood nearby laughing as investigators dug up his mother’s front lawn, searching for a body.
When the Busby shooting happened, everyone knew that Melvin Reine was the number one suspect.
One good friend of the Busbys when they lived in Falmouth was C. Veronica Zylinski, whose three children were close in age to the Busbys’ three children back in 1979.
The Zylinski and Busby children used to all wait at the same bus stop and, as Cylin Busby recalls in her sections of the book, the Busby children used to play at the Zylinski farm next door.
Ms. Zylinski said she does not remember exactly when she heard about the shooting, which took place just blocks from her home, but it was probably from someone listening on a police scanner, she said.
But after the shooting, everything changed abruptly.
“It impacted everybody in some way. There were police escorts for the children at the bus stop right in front of our house,” she said. She remembered how the Busbys eventually packed up and left town in the middle of the night, without telling anyone, not even close friends, where they were going.
“It was a sad thing and a scary thing for them to live in fear. Nothing that we felt could ever compare with what they went through. There was no way for us to imagine what they were living like, the fear they were living with,” Ms. Zylinski said.
As for Melvin Reine, Ms. Zylinski, like others, said people in town would smile and wave to him, whether they liked him or not, just trying to keep on his good side.
“If he liked you, he’d do anything for you,” Ms. Zylinski said. Some in town say it was Mr. Busby’s tough-guy demeanor that got him in trouble.
Ms. Zylinski said she knew Mr. Busby was a tough cop, but she said he was fair and, most importantly, he was doing his job.
Remember John Busby?
The repercussions of the crime to Falmouth police officers were particularly powerful.
Mark D. Patton, director of the Falmouth Department of Natural Resources, who worked as a Falmouth police officer for several years beginning in 1980, the year after the shooting, said he recalls bringing suspects to the station who would voice the offhand threat to officers, “Remember John Busby?”
“Melvin had the right people in the right place at the right time,” Ms. Zylinski said.
Ms. Chittenden of Eight Cousins Bookshop, said that one of the interesting things about the Busby book is that so many people have a link to the case.
“Everybody seems to have some connection to the saga. All those personal connections you have in a small town—people are related; they have friendships,” she said.
Michelle Lemay at Inkwell Bookshop said they have had calls from people who used to live in Falmouth who want to reserve copies of the book. Ms. Lemay, who grew up in Falmouth, said she was Cylin’s age when the crime happened and is looking forward to reading her side of the story.
Leslie Baker, manager at Booksmith Bookstore, also said interest in the book is running high, particularly among longtime Falmouth residents. One of those, Marcia Hazelton, who works at Booksmith, said she read an advance copy of the book and was fascinated.
She said it helped her connect the dots on a number of incidents that have happened over the years in Falmouth and answered a number of questions, but not the main question: why wasn’t the crime ever solved.
Questions will always remain, and there can be no closure for the town until someone is convicted of the crime.
“It’s always going to be there,” she said.
Book Reminds Residents Of Busby Shooting
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