A Good Man

As a young man in mill-dotted Lawrence (pop. 80,536), Mass., Peter Akulonis had trouble with the police. He was a poor boy. He was deaf in one ear, and a facial paralysis had twisted his mouth. He rebelled against the world by feats of petty crime--once he hung by his fingertips from a third-story roof for ten minutes trying to escape the cops. But back in the 1930s he reformed, got married, grew silent and almost martyr-like in his resolve to lead the humble, uncomplaining life. Peter Akulonis never smiled, but he was good--year after year after year.

Every day after work he stopped at his old mother's house and carried the fuel oil upstairs for her. He scrubbed her floors once a week. He took her to Mass on Sunday mornings and bought her an ice-cream cone on Sunday afternoons. He was a gentle father to his two sons, Michael and Peter Jr., and was often seen taking them to Spot Pond Zoo. In his years as a boilermaker in a little, echoing, dimly lit tank works, he never missed a day of work.

"I Hope You Choke." "The noise in here drives you bugs after a while," said his co-worker Salvatore Recupero, "but he never come off his machine to talk to anybody. He was a bandit for work." But along about last Christmas, Peter Akulonis' inner fiber began to fray and shrivel under the pressures and strains of life. At lunch he sat apart, alone and unhappy. When a friend bought a new car, he asked: "How can you afford that when I drive a pile of junk? All I do is work and go home. . . I'm not getting anything out of life."

"Kid," he asked another man at the shop, "do you think I'm crazy or something?" He went on with the good life--dogged and dazed as a mine mule toiling along the familiar tunnel.

Finally the pressure in Peter Akulonis' head grew too great to be withstood. He sidled around the shop, eyes wild, trying to pick fights. Then he quit. "I hope you choke, you bastards," he shouted, and walked out the door. Last week, after a few days of brooding, he roused himself to go job-hunting, but after one halfhearted attempt, he began drinking instead. One Little Room. Early in the afternoon he went back to his four-room flat, picked up a carpenter's ax, walked into the bedroom and killed his wife (with a single stroke from behind). He turned on four-year-old Michael, left him dead and horribly mutilated. He left quietly and went to his brother Alphonse's house, penned his mother and two small nephews into one little room, and then, swinging madly, hacked them all to death too. The brother was away on an errand; when he walked into the quiet kitchen, Peter sprang at him with his bloody weapon, killed him, and went out to the street again.

His eleven-year-old son, Peter Jr., was still at school. The killer picked him up there and drove him eight miles to the woods. He shot the boy through the face with a .22 rifle, newly purchased at Sears, Roebuck and Co. He got back into the car--which he had borrowed that morning from his remaining brother, Raymond--and drove it to a Cambridge factory where

Raymond worked. Raymond got behind the wheel and Peter climbed into the back seat; to two other workers who rode along part way, he seemed perfectly normal.

The police, summoned by brother Alphonse's widow, were waiting as Raymond stopped the car in front of Peter's house, but the cops were not quick enough. While they were crowding out of the police car, Peter shot Raymond through the head, put the rifle to his own skull and pulled the trigger once more. Both died that evening; all of Peter Akulonis' family had been wiped out. In Peter's pocket was a scrawled note: "I love Michael more than life. I loved Mom, Paul, Jimmy, Sis, Peter, Ray."

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