Shot in the Back of the Head, Yet He Managed to Hide His Watch First – Why?

In 1948, a dying cab driver deliberately crashed his taxi into a parked car — but the man who shot him in the back of the head walked away into the Boston night and was never seen again.

THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF SAMUEL I. PARIS

On the night of April 3, 1948, Samuel I. Paris kissed his wife Rachel goodbye at their home on Jones Avenue in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He was 39 years old, a taxi driver, and he was heading out for what would turn out to be his final shift. By 10:45 that night, his cab would be wrapped around a parked car on Norfolk Avenue in Roxbury, and Samuel Paris would be slumped over the steering wheel. The police who arrived on scene figured he’d had a heart attack — that’s what it looked like, anyway. A middle-aged cabbie working a Saturday night, his taxi crumpled against someone’s bumper, the driver unresponsive. Heart attack made sense.

The autopsy the next morning told a very different story.

JUST ANOTHER SATURDAY

There was nothing unusual about April 3, 1948, at least not at first. Samuel Paris had been driving a cab in Boston for years, working for the Independent Taxi Cab Operators Association — the ITOA, as locals knew it. The organization had been providing cab service throughout Boston since 1924, and Paris was one of their regulars, assigned to Cab 702. He had a wife named Rachel. They had three kids together. By all accounts, he was a contented family man, the kind of guy who didn’t make enemies.

His widow later described that afternoon in detail. Samuel left home around 3:30, the same as always. Rachel had reminded him to eat a proper dinner during his shift — he worked long hours and she worried about him. She told him to wear his heavy jacket because spring nights in Boston could turn cold without warning. He teased her about it, joking that between her fussing over him and their three children, he was basically the fourth kid in the house. He asked her to kiss the kids for him, then headed out the door.

It was all so ordinary. That’s the thing about cases like this — they start with someone doing exactly what they’ve done a hundred times before. Samuel Paris climbed into Cab 702 and drove off to work his shift, same as any other Saturday.

THE LAST HOURS

Police spent weeks piecing together what Samuel Paris did that night, and they managed to reconstruct most of it through witness interviews and cab records. The timeline they assembled paints a picture of a completely unremarkable evening — right up until it wasn’t.

Around 9:00 PM, Paris picked up a man and a woman at the cab stand on Tremont Street, right in front of the Parker House. The Parker House was one of Boston’s most famous hotels — it had been operating at the corner of Tremont and School streets since 1855, and it was the kind of place where politicians and literary figures gathered. Charles Dickens had stayed there. John F. Kennedy would later announce his congressional candidacy there. On this particular Saturday night, it was just another pickup spot for Samuel Paris. He drove the couple somewhere near North Station, dropped them off, and headed back downtown looking for his next fare.

Around 10:00 PM, he parked at the cab stand at Washington and Neyland Streets. A sailor and a young woman climbed in almost immediately — sailors were common in Boston in those days, with the Navy maintaining a significant presence in the area — and Paris drove them wherever they were going. By about 10:15, he was heading back from that trip when he stopped at a traffic light on Tremont Street at Park.

Another cab pulled up alongside him. This one was driven by Harry Pitchell, a fellow cabbie who lived on Ellington Street in Dorchester. The two men knew each other, at least well enough to chat through their windows while waiting for the light to change. Pitchell later told investigators what they’d talked about — nothing important, really. Just the kind of small talk cab drivers exchange when they cross paths. Pitchell asked Paris how things were going.

Paris said things could be better, could be worse. He wasn’t complaining. He had his health, he was working, Boston still needed cabs. What was there to kick about?

That was it. The light changed. They said goodbye. Pitchell drove off one way, Paris drove off another. It was the last time anyone who actually knew Samuel Paris would see him alive.

THE PASSENGER

Around 10:25 PM, Paris pulled back into the cab stand at Washington and Neyland Streets. He’d been working steadily all night, picking up fares and dropping them off, and there was nothing to suggest this next one would be any different. A man opened the rear door, climbed in, and asked for a ride to Roxbury.

Paris pulled away from the curb and headed south on Neyland to Albany Street, then turned west toward Roxbury. He made his way to Hampton Street, then onto Norfolk Avenue. The meter ticked upward as the cab moved through the Boston streets — the fare would eventually reach $1.60, which was consistent with a trip from downtown to that part of Roxbury.

What happened inside that cab during those twenty minutes or so is something investigators could only piece together from physical evidence and the brief glimpses witnesses caught afterward. The sequence of events that police reconstructed is chilling precisely because of how methodical it seems.

At some point during the ride — maybe on Hampton Street, maybe on Norfolk Avenue, maybe somewhere else entirely — the passenger in the back seat pressed the muzzle of a gun against Samuel Paris’s neck, just below his right ear. Paris kept driving. He didn’t crash immediately, didn’t swerve off the road, didn’t try to jump out. He kept his hands on the wheel and his foot on the gas, moving through the residential streets of Roxbury with a gun pressed to his head.

And then, somewhere around 177 Norfolk Avenue, the gun fired.

THE CRASH

At approximately 10:45 PM, residents along Norfolk Avenue heard the sound of squealing tires followed by the crash of metal on metal. Cab 702 had swerved hard toward the curb, slammed into the rear of a parked car, and jumped onto the sidewalk, where it came to rest with its headlights still on and its engine still running.

The parked car belonged to Barbara Darien, who lived on Rutland Street in the South End but was visiting her brother Fred Lufti that evening. Fred lived at 177 Norfolk Avenue — right where the cab had ended up on the sidewalk. The Luftis had been playing whist that night: Fred, his wife Jean, his mother, and his sister Barbara. When they heard the crash, Barbara’s first thought was about her car. She’d parked it right out front.

Fred went to the window to check. The scene outside was confusing at first — a taxi cab sitting on the sidewalk, headlights blazing, the rear end of his sister’s car crumpled from the impact. And there was someone running. Fred could see a figure moving quickly down the street, turning onto Shirley Street and disappearing into the darkness. The person appeared young and was wearing dark clothes. Fred’s initial assumption was that he was witnessing a hit-and-run — that the cab driver had wrecked into his sister’s car and was now fleeing the scene.

Then Fred went outside to get a closer look at the cab.

The driver was still behind the wheel, slumped forward over the steering column. Fred figured the man must be drunk — that would explain the erratic driving and the crash. He called out to the driver, demanded to know what he thought he was doing, driving like a lunatic through a residential neighborhood. The driver didn’t respond. When Fred got close enough to see the man’s face, he realized something was seriously wrong. He called back to his wife to phone the police.

ACROSS THE STREET

Thomas Del Tolfo lived at 164 Norfolk Avenue, directly across from where the cab had crashed. He’d heard the commotion too, and he’d gone to his window to see what was happening. What Del Tolfo witnessed was slightly different from what Fred Lufti saw — and the difference mattered.

Del Tolfo saw a man get out of the rear of the cab. Not the front, where a driver would sit. The back. The man was wearing what looked like either a sweater or a short coat, and he had on what appeared to be a gray soft hat. He seemed young. Del Tolfo watched him walk away from the wrecked taxi, heading down the street at a quick pace but not quite running — like someone who wanted to get away but didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

At the time, Del Tolfo didn’t fully understand what he was seeing. He assumed the person was a passenger, maybe someone who’d been in the cab when it crashed and was now leaving the scene. It was only later, when the full picture emerged, that the significance of that detail became clear: the killer had been in the back seat.

THE WRONG DIAGNOSIS

Police car 9-0 responded to the scene within minutes. The officers found Samuel Paris still slumped over the wheel, unresponsive. The meter on the dashboard showed $1.60 — a fare that had never been paid — and it was still running. An ambulance rushed Paris to Boston City Hospital, where doctors examined him and pronounced him dead on arrival.

The cause of death, according to the initial assessment, was cardiac failure. A heart attack. It made sense on the surface — a 39-year-old man working a stressful job, his cab crashed, the driver deceased. In 1948, forensic medicine wasn’t as sophisticated as it would later become, and a preliminary examination didn’t always catch everything. The determination was made: natural causes. The body of Samuel Paris was transferred to the Southern Mortuary, an annex of Boston City Hospital, and his widow and three children were notified that he had died of a heart attack while working.

That’s how the story almost ended — as a tragedy, certainly, but not a crime. Just a family man who’d had his heart give out behind the wheel.

THE AUTOPSY

Massachusetts law required an autopsy in cases of sudden death, and the next morning Dr. Richard Ford, the associate medical examiner of Suffolk County, performed the examination. What he found changed everything.

Behind Samuel Paris’s right ear, just below the hairline, was a small wound. It was easy to miss without careful examination — the entry point of a small-caliber bullet. Dr. Ford traced the path of the projectile: it had entered behind the right ear, traveled through Paris’s brain, and lodged beneath his left ear on the opposite side. The bullet was still there, embedded in the tissue.

Samuel Paris had not died of a heart attack. He had been shot in the back of the head at point-blank range while driving his taxi through Roxbury. Someone had murdered him.

Dr. Ford immediately contacted the police. Within hours, Superintendent of Police Edward W. Fallon had ordered an all-out investigation. What had seemed like a routine traffic fatality was now a homicide case — and the killer had a full day’s head start.

THE HIDDEN WATCH

As detectives examined the cab and Samuel Paris’s personal effects, they found something that told them a great deal about what had happened in the final minutes of his life. Paris had been wearing a wristwatch when he left home that afternoon — his wife confirmed it. But when police found him, the watch wasn’t on his wrist where it should have been. It had been pushed far up his left arm, past the wrist, almost all the way to the elbow.

There’s no practical reason to wear a watch like that. It’s awkward and uncomfortable. The only explanation that made sense to investigators was that Paris had deliberately hidden it.

In 1948, a wristwatch was a valuable item — not something most people could easily replace, and definitely something a robber might take. The police concluded that at some point during that final ride, Samuel Paris had realized he was being robbed. With a gun pressed to his neck and no way to escape, he had quietly, carefully slipped his watch up his sleeve, hoping the killer wouldn’t notice it. He was trying to save what little he could.

The gesture is heartbreaking in its futility — a man about to die, thinking about his family, trying to preserve one small thing that might be passed on to his children. But it also told investigators something important: Paris had known what was coming. He’d had time to react, time to think, time to make a decision. He wasn’t taken completely by surprise.

THE DELIBERATE CRASH

That raised a question that investigators spent considerable time thinking about: why had the cab crashed in the first place?

A man shot in the head while driving might lose control of his vehicle — that would be the obvious explanation. But the physical evidence didn’t quite fit that scenario. When police found Paris, his foot was still on the accelerator. Witnesses had described the cab swerving sharply toward the curb before impact, not drifting aimlessly as a dead man’s vehicle might. The crash seemed almost… intentional.

The theory that investigators developed was this: Samuel Paris had deliberately crashed his own taxi.

His situation had been impossible. He was driving through a residential neighborhood late at night. There was a gun pressed against his neck. He had already slipped off his watch because he knew what was about to happen. He couldn’t fight — he was behind the wheel, facing forward, and the killer was behind him with a weapon. He couldn’t run — they were moving. He couldn’t call for help — this was 1948, no cell phones, no radio in the cab that he could use.

But he can crash.

A crash would make noise. It would bring people to their windows. It might alert someone to call the police. In the best-case scenario, it might even trap the killer somehow, or injure him, or at least make it harder for him to escape without being seen.

So Samuel Paris, in the final seconds of his life, floored the accelerator and aimed for a parked car on Norfolk Avenue. It was a dying man’s last act of resistance — a desperate gamble to catch his own killer.

And in a way, it worked. The crash did bring people to their windows. Fred Lufti and Thomas Del Tolfo both saw the killer fleeing. Witnesses were able to provide descriptions. The crime didn’t go unnoticed, didn’t happen in some dark alley where no one would ever know what occurred.

But it wasn’t quite enough. The killer still got away.

THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS

Superintendent Fallon mobilized the full resources of the Boston Police Department. Detectives fanned out across the Norfolk Avenue and Shirley Street area, conducting a house-to-house canvas, knocking on doors, questioning anyone who might have seen or heard anything that night. The investigation was treated as a top priority — a cab driver murdered in cold blood was the kind of crime that rattled a city.

The ballistics report provided one concrete lead to work with. The bullet that killed Samuel Paris was a .22 caliber round, fired from what appeared to be a short shell. Ballistics expert Edward J. Culkin — referred to as “the politician” in some records, though this may have been a transcription error for “ballistician” — determined that the murder weapon was likely either a target pistol (the kind used for recreational shooting at ranges) or an older or foreign-made gun. Either way, it would be distinctive — not a common street weapon. If police could find the gun, they could match it to the bullet.

The descriptions from witnesses gave them something to work with, though the accounts didn’t line up perfectly. Thomas Del Tolfo had seen a young man in a sweater or short coat, wearing what looked like a gray soft hat. Fred Lufti had seen someone running in dark clothes, young-looking, heading toward Shirley Street. The details overlapped but weren’t identical — which is actually common with eyewitness accounts, especially at night, especially during a chaotic moment.

THE BUS PASSENGER

The most promising lead came from James Spillane, a bus driver who lived on Bigson Street in Dorchester. Spillane had been working his route on the night of April 3, and around 10:50 PM — just minutes after the crash on Norfolk Avenue — he’d picked up a passenger at the corner of Shirley Street and Massachusetts Avenue.

That location was significant. Shirley Street was exactly where witnesses had seen the killer heading after he fled the crashed cab. The timing was right. And the passenger Spillane picked up matched the general description: a young man, maybe 19 years old, about 5 feet 8 inches tall, thin build, blonde hair. He was wearing a gabardine coat and no hat. He got off the bus at the Northampton Elevated Station around 11:05 PM.

The description wasn’t a perfect match for what Del Tolfo had seen — Del Tolfo had mentioned a gray soft hat, which this man wasn’t wearing, and a sweater or short coat rather than a gabardine coat. But eyewitness descriptions often vary, especially when people are glimpsing someone briefly in poor lighting. The timing and location were too coincidental to ignore.

Police began an intensive search for the slim, blonde young man in the gabardine coat. His identification seemed like the key to solving the case.

THE WRONG GUN

The day after the murder, police in Dedham — a town near the Westwood line, some distance from Boston — pulled over a car that had been driving erratically, weaving through traffic and nearly causing multiple accidents. Inside were four young men. When officers searched the vehicle, they discovered it had been reported stolen. From Roxbury. From the same neighborhood where Samuel Paris had been killed.

And one of the youths was carrying a .22 caliber pistol.

For investigators, this must have seemed almost too good to be true. A stolen car from the murder scene, a gun of the right caliber, four young suspects who fit the general profile of the killer. The weapon was rushed to the ballistics lab. Detectives interrogated the four men extensively, pressing for details about their whereabouts on the night of April 3.

The results were devastating. The gun wasn’t the murder weapon. The ballistics didn’t match — the bullet that killed Samuel Paris had not been fired from this particular pistol. And after thorough questioning, investigators became convinced that none of the four youths had any connection to the Paris murder. They were criminals, certainly — they’d stolen a car and one of them was carrying a weapon — but they weren’t killers. At least not this time.

The suspects were released on the lesser charges. The murder investigation was back to square one.

THE MAN WHO CAME FORWARD

On April 7, four days after the murder, something unusual happened. A young man walked into Police Station 9 in Roxbury, approached the desk sergeant, and announced that he wanted to talk to someone about the Paris case.

He was the man who had gotten on the bus.

He’d heard about the manhunt, heard the descriptions being circulated, and realized they matched him almost exactly. About 19 years old. Around 5 feet 8 inches. Thin build. Blonde hair. He’d been at Shirley Street and Massachusetts Avenue on the night in question, and he’d boarded James Spillane’s bus. He was the passenger Spillane had described.

And he was terrified that police were going to arrest him for a murder he didn’t commit.

Investigators questioned him for hours. They checked his story against the known facts, verified his account of his movements that night, and tried to find any connection between this man and Samuel Paris. They came up empty.

The blonde bus passenger — whose name was never released to the public — had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d happened to be waiting for a bus on Shirley Street around 10:50 PM on April 3, 1948, just minutes after a killer had fled down that same street. He had nothing to do with the murder. He was cleared and released.

The best lead in the case had just evaporated.

THE SUMMER OF 1948

With the blonde bus passenger eliminated as a suspect, the investigation lost momentum. Detectives continued working the case, following up on tips and leads, but nothing substantial materialized. The murder of Samuel Paris became one of those cases that police couldn’t solve but couldn’t quite let go of either.

Boston was outraged. A working man had been killed in cold blood while doing his job, shot in the back of the head by a passenger he’d picked up in good faith. The city council heard voices of anger and protest. Veterans’ organizations spoke out — Paris himself may have been a veteran, though the records aren’t entirely clear on this point. The cab drivers of Boston had their own way of expressing their feelings: when passengers tried to tip them in the weeks after the murder, many drivers refused the money and asked that it be donated instead to the widow and children of Sammy Paris.

But sympathy didn’t solve the case. Summer turned to fall, and the killer remained at large.

ECHOES IN SEPTEMBER

Then, on September 12, 1948 — five months after the Paris murder — something happened that made investigators wonder if the killer had struck again.

It was 2:00 in the morning. Joseph Murad, a cab driver from Upton Street in the South End, picked up a fare in Andrews Square. The passenger gave him a destination in South Boston and Murad started driving. Then, as the cab approached C and 6th Street, Murad felt something cold and hard press against the back of his neck.

It was a gun.

The man ordered Murad to throw his money on the floor of the cab. Murad complied — he wasn’t in a position to argue. Then the man ordered him to stop the vehicle and get out. Murad did as he was told, and the gunman drove off with the cab.

Twenty minutes later, the same thing happened to Isidore Klein, another Boston cab driver who lived on Howland Street in Roxbury. Klein picked up a man on Washington Street near Bennett, and before long there was a gun at his neck. Same procedure: money on the floor, driver out of the cab, gunman drives away.

The method was strikingly similar to what investigators believed had happened to Samuel Paris. A passenger who climbs in the back of a cab. A gun pressed to the driver’s neck. The element of surprise, the driver helpless, the gunman in complete control.

A special service squad was already on patrol in the area — Sergeant Thomas O’Keefe, along with Detectives Frank Mulvey and John Preston. They’d been alerted to the Murad robbery and were cruising Dorchester Avenue near Columbia when they spotted a taxi being hailed. A man got in alone. The officers decided to check it out.

They pulled the cab over. The passenger was taken to police headquarters, where both Murad and Klein identified him as the man who had robbed them. Detectives Leo Devlin and Arthur O’Shea — who had been working the Paris case since April — conducted the interrogation.

Could this be the same man who had killed Samuel Paris? The method was almost identical. The cab robberies had occurred in the same general area. If Paris had been killed during a robbery gone wrong — if he’d resisted somehow, or if something had spooked the gunman — then maybe this was the break investigators had been waiting for.

It wasn’t.

After extensive questioning, police concluded that the man was responsible for the Murad and Klein robberies but had no connection to the Paris murder. The timing didn’t match. The descriptions didn’t align. Whatever this man was, he wasn’t the person who had shot Samuel Paris in the back of the head five months earlier.

Another suspect cleared. Another dead end.

CLOSING THE INQUEST

On September 20, 1948, Judge Samuel Eisenstadt of the Roxbury Court issued his report on the inquest into the death of Samuel I. Paris. The inquest had been held open since April, waiting for a break in the case that never came.

Judge Eisenstadt’s findings were thorough but ultimately unsatisfying. Samuel Paris, he noted, had been a man of excellent reputation. He was described as a good father and a good husband, a man who had no known enemies. The judge could find no motive for anyone to want to take his life — no personal grudges, no feuds, no debts that might have led to violence. The only plausible motive was robbery.

But without a suspect, there could be no prosecution. Judge Eisenstadt recommended that the case remain open indefinitely, in the event that the killer should someday be apprehended. Beyond that recommendation, there was nothing more the legal system could do.

The case file stayed open. It’s technically still open today.

NATIONAL ATTENTION

Two years passed. The murder of Samuel Paris remained unsolved, one of many cold cases in the files of the Boston Police Department. His widow and children had tried to move on with their lives. The cab drivers who had known him had returned to their routes. The city had largely forgotten.

Then, on August 10, 1950, Samuel Paris’s name was broadcast across the entire country.

The CBS radio program “Somebody Knows” devoted an entire episode to his case that night. The show had debuted earlier that summer as a replacement for the popular suspense series while it took its annual break. Created by James L. Saphier and written by Sidney Marshall, “Somebody Knows” took a different approach than most crime dramas of the era. Instead of fictional murders with tidy solutions, the program presented dramatizations of actual unsolved cases — real crimes, real victims, real names.

And at the end of each episode, the show offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer. In 1950, $5,000 was serious money — equivalent to roughly $60,000 today. Saphier believed in the concept strongly enough that he put up $40,000 of his own money to fund the reward pool for all eight episodes of the series.

The Paris episode walked listeners through everything: the timeline of that Saturday night, the witnesses who had seen the killer flee, the hidden wristwatch, the theory about the deliberate crash. Narrator and director Jack Johnstone — a radio legend who had worked on countless programs — presented the facts in dramatic but accurate detail. At the end, he made a direct appeal to the audience.

THE ANONYMOUS TIP SYSTEM

“Somebody Knows” had developed an elaborate system for submitting tips anonymously — an early recognition that some people might have information but might be afraid to come forward openly.

The process was straightforward: Anyone with information about the Paris murder (or any of the other cases featured on the program) was supposed to write it on a plain sheet of paper. They didn’t sign their name. Instead, they signed it with six numbers — any six numbers they chose, in any arrangement. Then they tore off a corner of that paper, making sure the edge was ragged and distinctive. They wrote the same six numbers on that torn corner and kept it somewhere safe.

The rest of the paper, with the information and the six-number signature, was mailed to “Somebody Knows, Hollywood, California.” The show’s producers would forward any promising tips to the relevant police department.

If the information led to an arrest and conviction, the show would announce that six-number signature on the air. The tipster could then take the torn corner — the one they’d kept — to a lawyer, doctor, priest, minister, or rabbi, and have them present it to any CBS station on their behalf. If the ragged edge matched the original letter, the $5,000 reward was theirs. The tipster’s identity never had to be revealed. They never had to appear in public or testify in court. They could remain completely anonymous.

It was a clever system, designed to encourage people who might otherwise stay silent. And letters did pour in after the Paris episode aired — from across the country, from people who thought they might know something, who had seen something, who had heard something.

None of them solved the case.

THE KILLER WHO VANISHED

So who killed Samuel Paris?

The man who shot him was described by witnesses as young, wearing either a sweater or a short coat, possibly with a gray soft hat. He boarded Cab 702 around 10:25 PM at the cab stand on Washington and Neyland Streets, asked for a ride to Roxbury, and climbed into the back seat. For the next twenty minutes or so, he sat behind Samuel Paris while the cab drove south and west through Boston.

At some point during that ride, he pressed a gun against the back of Paris’s neck. A .22 caliber weapon — probably a target pistol or an older gun, something distinctive enough that ballistics experts could identify it if it were ever recovered.

Paris knew what was happening. He kept driving, but he quietly slid his wristwatch up his sleeve, hiding it from the man who was about to kill him. He had time to think. He had time to plan.

And then the gun fired. The bullet entered behind Paris’s right ear and tore through his brain. He slumped forward, but his foot stayed on the accelerator. The cab surged forward, swerving toward the curb, and crashed into Barbara Darien’s parked car on Norfolk Avenue.

Maybe that crash was just the random movement of a dying man. Or maybe — and this is what investigators came to believe — Samuel Paris used the last seconds of his consciousness to do the only thing he could: create a scene, make noise, bring people to their windows, give someone a chance to see the man who had killed him.

The killer climbed out of the back seat. Thomas Del Tolfo watched from his window across the street. Fred Lufti caught a glimpse of him running toward Shirley Street. Then he turned the corner and disappeared into the Boston night.

He was never seen again.

AN OPEN FILE

The case file for the murder of Samuel I. Paris remains open with the Boston Police Department — Homicide File Number HF12342. The murder weapon was never found. No suspect was ever charged. No one was ever brought to justice.

Samuel Paris left behind a widow named Rachel and three children whose names were never made public. They never learned who killed their father, or why. Whether the motive was robbery, as investigators suspected, or something else entirely, the answer died with the killer — whoever he was, wherever he went after he walked away from that crashed cab on Norfolk Avenue.

The meter was still running when police arrived. One dollar and sixty cents, unpaid. It kept ticking until someone finally thought to turn it off.

References:

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.