Everett "Red" Nelson Delano
He was born on May 20th, 1917 and was living in Orange, Massachusetts, on Route 2 about 15 miles east of Greenfield, in 1940. He joined the U.S. Navy during World War II and stayed in afterward. In 1948 he married a fellow Orange resident, Blanche Forest, of French-Canadian ancestry. They had three children together.
The family moved often while Red was in the Navy. In 1964, after he had put in his 20 years and left the Navy, the couple settled in Wilmot, New Hampshire, just west of Andover. Red had the overnight shift as a security guard at Colby Junior College (today known as Colby-Sawyer College) in New London, New Hampshire, about a five-mile drive from the center of Wilmot.
Red also worked part-time at Sanborn’s Garage.
On September 1st, 1966, 49-year-old Red was working alone at the garage. He was shot three times in the head with a .22-caliber gun, twice while he was upright, and then a third time at close range while he was lying on the floor. There were no witnesses, but a bullet had hit his watch, shattering the glass and stopping it at 9:35.
The perpetrator got away with no more than $100. (That’s worth roughly $600 to $800 in today’s dollars.) The cash register was left open behind the counter, with only pennies left inside. The robber missed a cash box hidden beneath the counter that had $500. (That’s about $3,900 in today’s dollars.)
A half-hour later, two teenage boys arrived. Red was still alive, but they thought he was drunk, passed out on the floor. He was making noises they thought were snoring.
When state troopers got to the gas station they thought Red had been beaten up. It wasn’t until later that anyone realized he had been shot three times in the head. He was taken to the hospital in Hanover. He died the next day.
The water had been left running in the office bathroom when Red was found. Police figured that the killer must have used the sink and left the water on. They lifted latent prints from the sink and soap dispenser.
At the time, police gathered .22-caliber guns from residents who had them in Andover and from people who had recently bought them; they also searched the Blackwater River for the firearm. It was never found.
Despite the evidence left behind, by the end of the year, the case was cold. Police could not identify a single suspect.
Fast forward to 2013. The latent fingerprints that were found had never been entered into the FBI’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). When they were entered into the database, the prints matched Thomas Cass.
Cass was born in 1946 in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, about 25 miles southeast of Red Delano’s hometown of Orange. He then moved with his parents as a small child to northern Vermont. He grew up in an abusive family and his father was an alcoholic. In the early 1960's he joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany. He left in 1966 with a general discharge.
He came back to northern Vermont and got a job as a machine operator. On November 16th, 1966, 76 days after Red Delano was shot, 20-year-old Cass married an 18-year-old girl from Springfield, Massachusetts. Shortly afterward the couple moved to her hometown. While there he robbed a gas station with a sawed-off shotgun.
Cass' marriage didn’t last. He was a very violent person and on multiple occasions he had threatened his wife's life. She obtained a restraining order against Cass and then divorced him.
At some point he returned to Vermont. Sometime later, he got a job in maintenance for Northeast Kingdom Community Action, an anti-poverty agency that tries to improve education, income, and health among poor people.
Through 2000, he was convicted on a variety of crimes, including a couple of robberies, one of which was armed and masked. He was also convicted of escape in 1982 and making drugs in federal prison in 2000.
Cass retired in 2011, when he was 65.
When investigators talked with Cass in October of 2013, they didn't tell him about the fingerprint match. When investigators him if he knew about Delano’s murder, he denied it.
Police interviewed him a second time, in November of 2013. He provided a sample of his DNA but refused to take a lie detector. He then asked for a lawyer. Afterwards, he did visit a lawyer, but it was about drawing up a will naming the woman he was living with, Jane Spainol, (who was not one of his ex-wives) as the beneficiary. The Jane later told detectives that Cass had told her that he had never been to Andover and that he was not involved in the murder. However, he had also once told her in the past, "You never talk about something that has no statute of limitations." She also told investigators that in the past Cass had made comments about never going back to prison. He told her that he would not die in a square box.
On February 20th, 2014, This time investigators told Cass that unspecified forensic evidence linked him to Sanborn’s Garage. He said he may have been in Andover but he doesn’t remember. A search warrant allowed investigators to comb his home for the murder weapon, but no weapons were found there.
Cass must have felt police were getting close to arresting him. His girlfriend told Cass’s sister that if she wanted to see him she should come quick.
He got some cash together and that weekend he bought a Llama .45-caliber handgun from a friend, without telling him why.
On Monday, February 24, 2014, Cass shot himself in the right side of the head with the handgun. In the 911 call, Jane said Cass believed he was going to be arrested in regard to a cold case.
Five years after his death investigators concluded Cass was the suspect and closed the case.
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