SWAMPSCOTT ? Cheryl Bedard-Armas remembers coming home from school and discovering that her missing brother had been killed.
?I remember seeing everybody. My father came over to me and told me, ‘they found your brother. He was shot in the head,'” she said during a phone interview this week. “They thought he had been shot because he had been beaten so badly.”
It has been 36 years today since someone killed 15-year-old Henry Bedard Jr., repeatedly striking him in the head with a baseball bat and leaving his body covered in leaves on a rocky hill called Swampscott View.
Bedard’s killing forever changed the way many people – particularly friends and family of the 15-year-old – thought about the idyllic small town. It has also caused police 36 years of frustration.
Bedard’s killer or killers remain uncharged today and the killing has caused untold harm to the Bedard family, shattering the innocence of many then-teenagers who grew up with the popular student.
?That was kind of the end of our family,” Bedard-Armas said of her brother’s murder. “It was the kind of the end of our lives as we knew it. I think it destroyed my father (Henry Bedard) as a person ? He had high hopes that Henry would take over his business. He lost his junior. My father to this day suppresses it. You say his name and he breaks out crying.”
But Bedard’s older sister – she was 18 and in her first year in college when her little brother was killed – is hopeful someone who knows something will come forward, either to police or to friends and family who have created a Facebook page in her brother’s memory.
Bedard-Armas, who is 54 and manages a law firm in Florida, urges anyone with information to be courageous and come forward so her family can have some type of closure while her parents are still alive.
?If they know something, I’d ask them not to be afraid,” she said. “If they know the truth, please come forward ? ”
Keeping her brother’s memory alive
Bedard-Armas committed herself to keeping the case in the public eye after her brother’s former girlfriend started a Facebook page in his memory.
She is hopeful there will be a break in the case because of that, and often gets calls or e-mails from people who have information.
She has only returned to Swampscott once since the murder – and even visited the murder scene – but still finds it difficult to understand why no one has come forward to tell police what happened.
?That’s the part I’m having a hard time with. That’s the part I’m trying to shake loose and I’m becoming to wonder if I can,” she said.
Like many people close to Bedard, she talked candidly about the impact her brother’s slaying had on her entire family and how it changed the way she looks at the world.
For much more on this story, plus other stories and related articles, check out Thursday’s Daily Item and come back here, www.itemlive.com.
