Leonard 'The Quahog'' Paradiso, suspected serial killer, dies in prison

By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff

Leonard "The Quahog'' Paradiso, a convicted murderer whose reputation was so bad that a judge once ruled he was libel-proof, died in a prison hospital today after a long illness.

The 65-year-old former Revere fish peddler was serving a life sentence for killing one woman and attempting to rape two others. His death comes a couple of weeks after the release of a new book implicating him in a series of unsolved slayings in the 1970s and 1980s. Paradiso was convicted in 1982 of the murder of 20-year-old Marie Iannuzzi of East Boston. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted three years earlier and dumped in a Saugus marsh.

Paradiso gained notoriety in the 1980s during his highly publicized trial for Iannuzzi's murder when he was also linked to the unsolved slaying of Joan Webster, a Harvard graduate student who vanished on Thanksgiving weekend 1981 after getting off a plane at Logan International Airport. Investigators pulled Paradiso's sunken boat, the Malafemmena -- Italian for "evil woman" -- from Boston Harbor in an unsuccessful bid to locate Webster's remains. In 1990, Webster's remains were found in an unmarked grave in Hamilton.

After learning of Paradiso's death today, Webster's mother, Terry, said, "I'm glad. It's very un-Christian ... but I can't think of anything better to say.''

She said she would have liked a death-bed confession from Paradiso, who was never charged with her daughter's slaying, yet remains convinced he was her killer.

Paradiso died at 9:35 a.m. today at a prison unit at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain, according to Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Correction.
He died of testicular cancer, said his brother, Michael Paradiso.

In his new book, "The Paradiso Files: Boston's Unknown Serial Killer,'' Timothy Burke, the former prosecutor who now has a law practice in Needham, offers evidence linking Paradiso to the slaying of Webster and as many as six other women.

Paradiso sued Burke for libel two decades ago, but a judge dismissed the suit in 1987, ruling Paradiso's reputation was so bad that he was "libel-proof.''

"Obviously, he's taken a number of secrets to his grave,'' Burke said today.

Paradiso's brother, Michael, called Burke's book "a bunch of trash'' and insisted his brother didn't kill anyone.

"Lenny has always maintained his innocence, and we always believed him,'' said Michael Paradiso, adding that Burke has been alleging for more than 25 years that his brother killed Webster, yet could never prove his claims. "So far it's a mass of allegations about Joan Webster and innuendo .. he's been unable to level any charges against him.''

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