Editor’s note: Item Senior Writer Steve Krause won a New England Newspaper & Press Association second-place award for a column published in The Item on Dec. 2, 2019. A story on the award and two others won by the paper appears on page A8 in today’s paper. Krause’s column is reprinted below.
It’s over. Andrew MacCormack is on his way to a prison sentence of life without parole. It is a sentence he richly deserves, and the only thing I could add to it is that if there is such a thing as reincarnation, he should spend the next life in jail too.
I might have been happy with just one until MacCormack stood up in Suffolk Superior Court Monday and protested his innocence in a way that is certainly in keeping with his gentle image.
“I sure as hell didn’t kill her,” said MacCormack. Wow. What a way to win hearts and minds in the one instant you had to make yourself at least appear like a human being.
MacCormack even struck out there, too.
I think of this, and think of Vinnie and Karen Masucci, grieving for their daughter, Vanessa, for more than two years since her September 2017 murder. And what it must have been like to hear that this guy, who killed their daughter and then took his daughter, Arianna, with him as he scored a drug deal, claimed he didn’t do it. To call it a gut punch doesn’t even begin to describe it.
And then I think of better days, at so many softball venues on the North Shore, watching games with Vinnie and Karen, and loving it all. I think of Vinnie shouting encouraging words — sometimes firm encouraging words — to Vanessa during Babe Ruth softball games, including a tournament in New Hampshire. Or I think of Vinnie and Karen, and watching four years of St. Mary’s softball, as Vanessa and my niece played together.
Those were almost idyllic days. Sure, there were moments of frustration when the team didn’t do as well. Sure, there were times when feathers were ruffled a little over a coach’s decision. Nothing was ever perfect, nor is it now.
But it was spring, kids were playing softball, adults were over in their own little corner, and reality seemed far, far away. If you’ve seen the “Twilight Zone” episode “A Stop at Willoughby,” it was like that. It just drew you in.
The best part of being sports editor for as long as I was, even more than getting to watch Red Sox and Patriots games for free, was that the real world intruded on my world infrequently.
In September of 2017, that ended with a jolt. I got a phone call from my sister on an otherwise sleepy Sunday morning asking me if I knew anything about what had happened to Vanessa Masucci.
I had no idea. And from the tone of my sister’s voice, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
A few phone calls later, I found out all I wanted to know — though not as much as I’d eventually know. Vanessa had been murdered.
All of us from that time period who knew Vanessa or played softball with her, or saw her play, and sat and laughed and joked with Vinnie and Karen, surely felt as if this was “CSI” or “Law & Order” come to life. And it was horrifying.
All you could do for a few days was close your eyes and try to stop imagining this beautiful woman being stabbed and beaten to death. You couldn’t. And you just wanted Gil Grissom or Lennie Briscoe to put their teams to work and get to the bottom of it.
The Revere Police stepped up, though. They told Vinnie the night Vanessa’s body was discovered that they saw Andrew as the murderer, and later arrested him.
The Masuccis and I aren’t BFFs. We’re people who bonded over a shared experience — them watching their daughter and me watching my niece. Through that experience, I discovered Vinnie and Karen were wonderful people — warm, giving and welcoming. It was fun to sit next to Vinnie and Karen and watch a game.
To say that seeing them in court as the Suffolk County prosecutor outlined the case against MacCormack was heartbreaking doesn’t go far enough. This was something you saw on TV, and if it got too intense you could walk out of the room for a few minutes.
Only it wasn’t. This was/is real. And I daresay that no one who has had the pleasure of knowing the Masucci family, on any level, will ever really recover from it.
