The Murders of Cozy Hollow

Prologue - The Beaumont Murders

In the winter of 1971, Thaddeus Beaumont committed the most heinous act a father can commit. Familicide. In less than fifteen minutes, Thaddeus murdered his entire family. He started by strangling his wife, Charlotte, with a silk tie. Thereafter, he methodically smothered each of his four young daughters, Alexandra, Juliet, Gretchen and Emma, with their pillows as they slept. Once he finished, he went to the basement and used a sledgehammer to break through the concrete floor. It took two days, but Thaddeus managed to wrap his wife and daughters in trash bags and bury them in the earth below. After a crude cement job and a heavy rug were put in place, the Beaumont girls were secretly entombed beneath the home that had been in the Beaumont family since it was built in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1732.

Thaddeus Beaumont then vanished without a trace.

Over the fifty plus years since the Beaumont murders, many theories emerged as to why Thaddeus did what he did and what became of him. Benjamin Beaumont was considered a founding father of Cozy Hollow back in the early 1700s. A merchant by trade, Benjamin became the area's largest landowner and eventually mayor of the proud town. The Beaumont name became synonymous with Cozy Hollow. Thaddeus carried over 250 years of Beaumont tradition on his shoulders. Many townsfolk thought he simply couldn't live up to the unrealistic expectations placed on him by his surname. What struck people most after the murders was that no one could believe Thaddeus was capable of committing such horrific acts. He'd always been kind and considerate to a fault. Did he snap? Or were there signs that everyone missed?

One of the largest manhunts in Massachusetts history ensued. The family car had been found abandoned at the edge of the town border but there was never one single sighting or clue as to the whereabouts of the wanted killer. That led to widespread speculation that Thaddeus had killed himself in short order. The surrounding woods were vast. Extensive searches produced nothing. The bodies of the girls were not immediately found. At first, it seemed as if the entire family had simply disappeared. Maybe Thaddeus had convinced his wife that their family needed a fresh start. There were no cellphones or ATMs back then, which made it hard to trace a family that didn't want to be found.

It was not until months later in the spring after the murders occurred, that a young Sheriff's Deputy took a closer look at the basement floor under that old rug. The coloring of the cement differed from the rest of the floor. An excavation of the basement was ordered. That's when the grim discovery was made. The first body to be removed was that of sixteen-year-old Alexandra. Next came eleven-year-old Gretchen. Fourteen-year-old Juliet and nine-year-old Emma were buried together. Finally, at the bottom of the stack of corpses, Charlotte Beaumont was exhumed. The Sheriff of Cozy Hollow did his best to keep the discovery out of the press until the autopsies were conducted and the bodies could be properly identified, but news traveled fast in the small town.

While the Beaumont House was torn to shreds looking for any signs of Thaddeus, not one scintilla of helpful forensic evidence was ever found. In the more than fifty years that followed, the Beaumont House had changed ownership over a dozen times. It became known as the haunted mansion. Owners claimed to hear girls giggling at night. Some swore they saw apparitions of the dead daughters roam the halls. Most of the folks who lived in the house explained that they simply could not get the thought of the murders out of their minds. It drove them mad.

As a result, the Beaumont House remained vacant for over a decade. It was for sale but finding a buyer proved almost impossible. The owners wanted to destroy it but it was protected as a local historical site. As luck would have it, the week the owners agreed to cut the price in half, a family from California decided to move to Cozy Hollow. Ed Stone and his four sons needed a change after Ed's wife, Olivia, had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. Ed had spent twenty years as a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Detective. The small understaffed Sheriff's Department of Cozy Hollow needed a plainclothes detective. Ed Stone answered the online job posting.

Sight unseen, Ed moved his four boys, Kurt, Rex, Joe and Will, across the country to start a new life in Cozy Hollow, Massachusetts, population 10,739.