Leonard "The Quahog" Paradiso, a convicted murderer and sex offender whose reputation was so bad that a judge once ruled he was libel-proof, died of cancer yesterday at a Boston hospital
The 65-year-old former Revere shellfish peddler, who was serving a life sentence for killing and raping a woman in 1979 and attempting to rape two others, died just weeks after the release of a new book that implicates him in a series of unsolved slayings.
"I'm glad," said Terry Webster, during a brief telephone interview yesterday from her Pennsylvania home, after learning that Paradiso was dead. Paradiso had been publicly identified in the 1980s as the prime suspect in the murder of her daughter, Joan Webster, a Harvard University graduate student who vanished on Thanksgiving weekend 1981 after stepping off a plane at Logan International Airport in Boston.
"It's very un-Christian," said Webster, "but I can't think of anything better to say."
No one was charged with Webster's slaying, but Terry Webster said that evidence linking Paradiso to the slaying was overwhelming and that she is "absolutely convinced" he killed her daughter.
"I just wish he had a death-bed confession; that would have been good," Webster said. "But he wasn't that kind of person."
Michael Paradiso said that his brother had been unfairly accused of killing Webster and that his brother always insisted that he never killed anyone, including the young woman he was convicted of strangling to death. "Lenny has always maintained his innocence, and we always believed him," he said.
Paradiso, who got his nickname from selling clams, died at 9:35 a.m. at the Lemuel Shattuck Correctional Hospital in Jamaica Plain, said Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Correction. He had been moved to the hospital Feb. 2 from the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, she said.
Paradiso had testicular cancer, which had spread throughout his body, his brother said.
He was convicted of second-degree murder in 1982 for the strangulation and rape three years earlier of Marie Iannuzzi, 20, of East Boston, whose body had been dumped in a Saugus marsh just behind a lobster pound that bought fish from Paradiso. He was sentenced to life in prison, with consecutive sentences for the attempted rapes of two other young women, and would have been eligible for parole in 2028.
Paradiso's notoriety grew around the time of the trial, when the Suffolk prosecutor, Timothy M. Burke, publicly accused him of killing Webster, whose purse and other belongings were discarded in the same area where Iannuzzi's body was found.
An inmate said that Paradiso had confided that he was driving a friend's cab, picked up an unsuspecting Webster at the airport, then brought her to his boat and killed her. Investigators pulled his sunken vessel, the Malafemmena, Italian for evil woman, from Boston Harbor in 1983 in an unsuccessful effort to locate Webster's body. Her remains were discovered in 1990 in an unmarked grave in Hamilton.
Paradiso sued Burke for libel two decades ago, but a judge dismissed the suit in 1987, ruling that Paradiso's reputation was so bad that he was "libel-proof."
This month Burke, who now has a law practice in Needham, published his first book: "The Paradiso Files: Boston's Unknown Serial Killer." He details evidence linking Paradiso to the slaying of Webster and six other women in the 1970s and 1980s.
Michael Paradiso called the book "a bunch of trash" and added that his brother had never been charged with Webster's murder, despite Burke's efforts to link him to the crime.
But Burke said yesterday that overwhelming evidence linked Paradiso to the killing of Webster and other young women.
"I only wish that he had provided some of his victims' families with an acknowledgement of responsibility for the murders of their daughters," Burke said. "Obviously, he's taken a number of secrets to his grave."
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