NASHUA, N.H.—Thirty-five years have passed since the nearly naked body of Charlotte Davis’ 12-year-old son was found under the snow in a remote woodland in Hollis, a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his brain.
But for Davis, the pain and horror and grief never go away. On winter nights, especially, she can’t put the scene out of her mind.
“I curl up in bed and the wind is howling, and I see him freezing cold in his underpants trying to run away. I imagine his terror. I imagine him escaping, and then being shot in his right eye. I hear him crying for me,” Davis said in a recent telephone interview.
John Lindovski Jr., a sixth-grade student at the Charlotte Avenue School in Nashua, was walking home from an afternoon square dance Feb. 9, 1973, when he was picked up by Raymond Guay Jr., 25, of Nashua.
Guay drove him to the Lone Pine Hunters Club property in Hollis. When the boy escaped the car and ran into the woods, Guay raced after him, hit him on the head and then shot him in the eye.
After a massive police search that turned up his library card near the scene of the crime, and after the murder weapon was found in his possession, Guay pleaded guilty to second-degree homicide. He is now 60 years old and has already completed his 18 to 25-year sentence for the Lindovski slaying but is serving time in federal prison in Hazelton, W. Va., for a 1990 prison assault with intent to kill. But the odds are against him staying in prison.
Guay has spent virtually all his adult life in prison, and when he killed John Lindovski, court records show, he was on parole for a 1963 crime of assault with intent to kill to which he pleaded guilty when he was 15.
Guay also tried to escape from prison at least three times, and during one brief escape, broke into the home of an elderly couple in Concord, tied them up and robbed them.
Still, he is scheduled for release from the West Virginia penitentiary Sept. 8 when he completes his sentence for the prison assault.
Davis wants him to remain in prison.
“My biggest fear is that this person will be getting out of jail and some other child will be hurt,” said Davis, a piano teacher who was born and raised in Nashua and lived for a time in Milford and in Amherst. She was interviewed by phone from her home in Canon City, Colo., after she contacted the paper.
Members of the Lone Pine Hunters Club found the sixth-grader’s body under the snow as they were clearing land near the Rideout Road club on March 11, 1973, about a month after he disappeared. He was dressed only in socks and undershorts, eyeglasses and a watch.
An initial autopsy showed his death was the result of a blow to the side of the head. During another search of the crime scene, however, a .22-caliber shell casing was found near the body.
Then-New Hampshire Attorney General Warren Rudman ordered a second autopsy that found the bullet in the boy’s brain.
Rudman remembers the murder as a “very vicious crime, obviously by a sexual predator.”
“Had there been a death penalty we would have asked for it,” he said in a recent interview.
And in a 1974 letter to the warden of the New Hampshire state prison asking that Guay never be released on parole, Rudman wrote that John Lindovski was “killed in a brutal, cold-blooded fashion after he had been marched by his assailant, approximately six-tenths of a mile, unattired, in the dark, in below freezing weather.”
Rudman also wrote that Guay “has shown absolutely no remorse” and “at one point attempted to implicate his father as the assailant.”
And, Rudman told the warden, it wasn’t Guay’s first sex assault.
“In an incident for which Guay was never prosecuted,” Rudman wrote, “he attempted to perpetrate unnatural sexual acts on a 15-year-old boy at exactly the same location on the premises of the Lone Pine Hunters Club on Aug. 23, 1968.”
In that 1968 incident, Guay “threatened the boy with a firearm, chased him through the forest and placed a rock on his head and threatened to smash his skull in,” Rudman wrote.
Nashua Police Department records obtained from the state Attorney General’s Office confirm the report of that incident, which also occurred at the Lone Pine Hunters Club, where Guay had helped build a skeet range.
Rudman, a former United States senator, is not the only one who remembers the murder of John Lindovski.
Thomas Rath of Concord was a young lawyer working as an assistant New Hampshire Attorney General in 1974. He and other officials rode out to Lone Pine on a snowmobile to view the body.
“I’ll never forget that ride. It was a cold, cold night,” Rath said. In 1989 he wrote a letter to the New Hampshire Adult Parole Board and called the crime “particularly heinous.”
“Were this crime committed today, Guay would never have the opportunity to be paroled,” he wrote in 1989.
Rath, however, believes that there is no way to prevent Guay’s release from prison. At the time of his conviction there was no sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole and no death penalty.
“If he’s served his time, he is allowed to go free,” he said. “Without evidence of a direct threat, I don’t think (the victim’s mother) can do anything.”
Paul Bosquet was the Hollis Police Chief in 1973 and now works for campus security at Keene State College. He was present when officials exhumed the child’s body for the second autopsy and remembers standing by the casket with John’s mother at the funeral home.
“It was very, very sad,” he said. “The punishment did not fit the crime. I was very disturbed he was allowed a second degree (murder charge). It’s not fair 25 years for killing a person. As a father and a grandfather I want to keep these predators at arm’s length. The sentence was light. He was a convicted felon and he could not afford to let Lindovski get away.”
Charlotte Davis says she will not give up her efforts to keep Guay in jail for the murder of her third child, a fragile boy who was hospitalized for respiratory problems 15 times during his short life and struggled in school with a learning disability.
Charlotte is now 72 and lives in Colorado, 165 miles northeast of another son, Mike, who lives in Durango, Colo. Charlotte’s brother lives in New Hampshire and goes regularly to Edgewood Cemetery in Nashua to care for John’s little grave.
She remembers that school buses brought the fellow students of John and his three siblings (now Robin Pembroke, Randy Zimmerman and Michael Lindovski) to the funeral.
“It just seems so unjust, so unfair, that he could murder my little boy and just walk out. I pray that before I leave this Earth he has justice. I know how important it is to forgive, but this little guy never had a chance,” she said. “I want people to be up in arms. My biggest fear is this person will get out and harm other children.”
So, she wants people to bombard the West Virginia prison warden with letters.
Guay declined a request for an interview, according to a letter to The Telegraph’s sister paper, The Cabinet, from Joe Driver, the warden of Hazelton State Prison.
Despite the fact that John was nearly naked when his body was found, Guay was not accused of attempted rape in 1973 as part of the homicide charge.
Because of that, officials say there is a good possibility he would not have to register as a sex offender if he returns to New Hampshire.
Years ago the sexual aspect of violent crimes were often overlooked, sometimes to spare the feelings of the victim’s family.
“There could be any number of reasons” why a sex-assault charge was not pursued, said Ann Rice, a New Hampshire associate attorney general, “and the laws have substantially changed over the past 25 years.”
“Based on the information you (the paper has) given me, (registration) is not required not because it was so long ago, but because of the charge he was convicted of,” Rice said.
New Hampshire does have a law that allows for civil commitment for sexually violent predators that went into effect in January.
Under RSA 135-E prosecutors could petition the courts and ask for a civil commitment after an evaluation and a trial.
The law is intended for sexually violent predators who generally have antisocial personality features and are likely to repeat their crimes.
“The general court further finds that the prognosis for rehabilitating sexually violent predators in a prison setting is poor, the treatment needs of this population are very long term,” reads the law.
It’s possible that if Guay were to return to New Hampshire, officials could seek his commitment under that law.
But he might not be able to come back. Because he is a federal prisoner, he has to submit an acceptable release plan to the U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services office in Concord.
According to Thomas Tarr, chief probation officer, Guay has submitted a plan to live with a family member in Washington, N.H. that “was not appropriate.”
“We informed him that if he submits an alternative plan we will review it,” Tarr said.
If there is no acceptable alternative plan for release in New Hampshire, Guay will be released in California, where he was sentenced to 168 months in 1990 for assault to commit murder when he was in the Lompoc Federal Corrections Complex in California.
He is currently serving time for that crime in West Virginia.
But if he does come up with an acceptable release plan he will return to New Hampshire.
Under the federal probation system, an inmate can only serve 85 percent of his sentence, and then must be released under supervision for three years, Tarr said.
Guay will have completed that 85 percent of his sentence in September.
