Episode Details

Before Daniel J. LaPlante became a convicted triple murderer, he had already terrified another Massachusetts family in a way that sounds almost impossible.

As a teenager, LaPlante secretly entered the home of a family in Pepperell, Massachusetts, hiding within concealed spaces inside the house while strange noises, missing objects, and disturbing incidents convinced the family that something was terribly wrong. When they finally discovered him, LaPlante’s bizarre behavior earned him lasting notoriety as “the boy in the walls.”

But what came next was far worse.

On December 1, 1987, seventeen-year-old LaPlante broke into the Townsend, Massachusetts, home of 33-year-old Priscilla Gustafson, who was pregnant, and her two young children, five-year-old William and seven-year-old Abigail. According to court records, LaPlante tied Priscilla to her bed, sexually assaulted her, and then shot her twice in the head through a pillow. He drowned William in an upstairs bathtub and Abigail in a downstairs bathtub.

Afterward, LaPlante went home, ate, and attended his niece’s birthday party as though nothing had happened.

Investigators connected him to the murders through stolen property, ballistics, fibers, physical evidence, and a gun LaPlante had obtained during an earlier burglary. When police began closing in, he fled, broke into additional homes, stole another firearm, and forced a woman at gunpoint to drive him before he was finally captured hiding inside a dumpster.

In 1988, Daniel LaPlante was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder. Because he was seventeen when he committed the crimes, later changes in juvenile sentencing law made him eligible for parole after serving 45 years, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld that sentence in 2019.

This is the true crime story of Daniel LaPlante—a teenager who first became infamous for hiding inside another family’s home and terrorizing them from within, then escalated to the brutal murders of a pregnant mother and her two young children.

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