September 26, 1964 –
Eaton attended Shirley Industrial School, one of the lockups for juvenile offenders at the time. The Shirley Industrial School incubated many future criminal partnerships and plans such as between Walter J. Elliott and John Robichaud. Eaton tried to leave Shirley before his graduation when he fled from there with two others on August 4, 1953. Police apprehended the other two within a week and continued to search for Eaton who had dyed his hair from brown to red. As juveniles they were returned to their “school” to complete their education.
His record dated back to 1948 according to a newspaper. He would only have been eleven years old. At age 16 he was in Shirley. It usually takes a few juvenile offenses before being sent to Shirley. After he left Shirley, Eaton would serve time in the Concord Reformatory and Plymouth County House of Corrections for breaking and entering and kiting checks. He also had been found delinquent for auto theft – the crime that back then seemed to send most of the kids on the way to a criminal career.
I had known a few in Savin Hill. Harry B and Tommy D were driving fancy cars at age 13 or 14. They would drive by the corner and wave at us, sometimes stopping to show us their latest acquisitions. Both spent more time in prison than on the street also starting out at Shirley or Lyman juvenile correctional facilities. Tommy D came to me one day when I was an assistant DA seeking my help with his son who had gotten into a jam. He hoped his kid would go straight even though he had not. It was an interesting experience. I do not recall what the result was, but I figured I would do what I could to help him out. The last time I heard of him was when we did a narcotics raid. The detectives I worked with took photos of the people who were there but not arrested. One of them was Tommy who had given them a false name.
As for Harry, one day I was in court when people were being arraigned on some criminal charges. One of them was called “Henri” with a French last name. I looked over casually and there was Harry being arraigned under a fake name. In my early days as a defense lawyer, Harry called me at about 3:30 a.m. one morning. He told me he had just escaped from custody and wanted my advice on what to do. I suggested he return to his captors.
Harry would hold up a store across the street from an apartment he was renting. The people he held up knew him. He tried the case without a lawyer. He asked such questions as “when I came in with a gun what color shirt was I wearing.” If the witness said orange and that was wrong, he would correct him saying: “It wasn’t orange. It was red.” Harry thought by showing he knew more about the robbery than the victims he was making points with the jury.
I last saw him at a Red Sox baseball game against the Yankees at Fenway park. The tickets for the game were scarcer than a hen’s tooth because it was going to be a match-up between the two best pitchers. It was a chilly night. Coming back from the concession booth I heard my name called. It was Harry. He only had on a T shirt. He had one of the better seats in the house down near the field.
Tommy and Harry were career criminals. They were also guys I grew up with and liked. Society saw one side of them; I knew of another side. Why they went the way they did I often attributed to their juvenile incarcerations where they replaced their old friends with their new friends who had also become juvenile delinquents. Prison eventually held no fear for them because that is where most of their friends were to be found.
Like with them, Eaton most likely could never get the criminal monkey off of his back. Newspaper reports had it that Eaton owed a great deal of money to loan sharks. To pay it off, he worked for them as a strong-arm man collecting money. He had been seen in the company of a known loan shark enforcer a week before he was murdered. He had also been questioned about the deaths of Paul Colicci and Vincent Bisesi.
Eaton was found on September 26, 1964, in Malden in his own 1956 black and silver Cadillac, shot twice through the head while he sat in the passenger seat. The shooter was on the driver’s side of the car. The spent lead of the bullets was found in his car. They had made two holes in the passenger window.
Eaton’s knowledge of something that could compromise others in the Colicci/Bisesi murders would certainly be a good motive for his murder. More likely, though, it looked like he was never going to pay back the money he owed, and he was proving to be a problem as a strong-arm man. He was on probation after being found guilty of passing bad checks. He was a desperate man in a desperate position who perhaps knew a little too much. The Mafia controlled the loan sharking which indicates his killing was a way the Mafia took care of a weak link that may have threatened it.