Ep 17 The Haunting Crimes of Daniel LaPlante

True Crime with Lux Podcast

Hey everyone, I'm Lux, and this is True Crime with Lux. Today I'm going to be discussing Daniel LaPlante, born May 15, 1970, in Townsend, Massachusetts. He didn't have a great childhood. It's alleged that he was sexually and mentally abused by his father when he was a young boy, and when he entered his teen years, his psychiatrist also abused him. His family home was said to look like a junkyard with old cars and trash all over the property.

In school, he was a quiet person and a bit of a loner, but if someone did try to talk to him or even be friendly, he was not friendly back. He spent a lot of time by himself in the woods. By the time he was 15, Daniel started breaking into people's homes. He would break in and steal things of value, but soon realized he could also mess with their minds. He started to move little things here and there, then would leave things that didn't belong to get into the heads of the people he was burglarizing.

This all took a terrifying turn in 1986 when Daniel became obsessed with 15-year-old Tina Bowen. They had gone on one date together, but students started telling Tina that Daniel was a troubled kid, and she realized he was a little odd because the date consisted of him asking about how her mother died. When her father, Frank, learned that Tina was seeing him, he told her she was not allowed to anymore because he knew the rumors around town about Daniel. The family thought that would be the end of things. Unfortunately, they were wrong.

The Bowen family lived on Lawrence Street in Pepperell, not far from Townsend, for several weeks. Strange things started happening in the home. Things started showing up in places the family knew they didn't put there. The TV would change channels on its own, food and drinks would disappear. Tina and her sister had lost their mom and had used a Ouija board to contact her. So they thought the strange things happening were a ghost they had accidentally let into the house when they were trying to talk to their mom. When they brought this concern to their father, he dismissed it. He said it's no such thing as ghost and the girls were just imagining things.

What he couldn't know was that the girls weren't imagining things, but it wasn't a ghost. Daniel had found a six-inch crawlspace that led straight into the Bowen home, and he used it to mess with the family after being rejected by Tina. He started with moving items but soon took a scary turn. He would write things on the walls like, marry me and I'm in your room, come and find me. He even used a knife to pin up one of the family photos to the wall. Frank still thought the girls were imagining things and even thought they had done some of the things to mess with him. That was until December 8th when the girls found that someone had used their bathroom.

Frank searched the house and found Daniel in a closet with his face painted and a ninja mask, holding a hatchet. He forced the family into a bedroom where he locked them in. Tina was able to escape through a window and call for help. Police found Daniel two days later in the family's cellar. They discovered a small space between the walls that looked like he had been living there for quite a while. They arrested him and held him at a juvenile facility until October of 1987, when his mother was able to make the $10,000 bail.

Once home and waiting for his trial, he went back to his old ways of breaking into people's homes, and on October 14th, he stole two .22 caliber firearms. On November 16th of 1987, he broke into the home of the Gustafsson family. Pregnant Priscilla, who was a nursery school teacher, her husband Andrew, and their two kids, five-year-old William and seven-year-old Abigail. A few weeks later, on December 1st, Daniel went back to their home, armed with the guns he had stolen. He tried to claim later that he didn't expect them to be home.

When he got there and realized that there were people there, he confronted Priscilla with the gun and forced her and her son into a bedroom. He put William in the closet while he tied Priscilla to the bed and shoved a sock in her mouth. He raped her before shooting her twice in the head. When he was done, he took little William into the bathroom where he drowned him in the tub. When Daniel went to leave the house, he saw Abigail had just gotten home. He led her to the other bathroom and drowned her as well. He then left and went home like nothing had happened and attended his niece's birthday party.

Back at the Gustafsson home, Andrew had been trying to reach his wife on the phone, but no one was answering, so he went home to check on them. When he returned, he said the house was quiet and all the lights were off, and he had a really bad feeling, so he started to search the house. He found his wife first, but she was face down on the bed covered in blood. He ran outside and called for help. He told police he was too afraid to look for his children because he didn't want to find them dead as well.

Police very easily figured out who was responsible. Daniel had left DNA at the scene, and his clothes and gloves were behind the house, still wet from drowning the children. The tracking dogs used the shirt and led investigators to Daniel's home. Police took him in for questioning, but he denied it, and with the DNA results not back yet, they didn't have enough to hold him, so they let him go. They had planned to arrest him the next day, believing the results would prove him guilty. However, Daniel fled. A massive manhunt began to find him. While on the run, he continued to burglarize homes and was soon found on December 3rd, hiding in a dumpster.

His trial began October 1988. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to three life sentences. He tried to appeal his sentence in 2017, but the judge denied his request, saying he was not remorseful for his actions. He will not be eligible for parole until 2062.

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, please like and share it with your friends. Stay safe, and I'll be talking to you next week.