Murder Mystery
It was a real-life murder mystery without a satisfying resolution.
It was one of the most frustrating cases in Western Pennsylvania law enforcement history stretching nearly 50 years from its start to its anticlimactic finish.
After Saxonburg Police Chief Gregory Adams was gunned down while making a traffic stop on Dec. 4, 1980, investigators from the Pennsylvania State Police soon had a suspect, Donald Eugene Webb, a career criminal based in New Bedford, Mass.
What they wouldn't have, despite working the case for decades, was an arrest or even a sighting of Webb. It was if he'd vanished like a ghost.
“The Ghost” is what Maureen Boyle titled the book she wrote about the case, which was published earlier this year.
Boyle will be at the South Butler Community Library, 240 W. Main St., Saxonburg, at 1 p.m. July 17 to discuss the case, give readings from “The Ghost,” answer questions and sign copies of her book.
Library Director Michelle Lesniak said those wishing to attend or wanting to pre-order a copy of Boyle's book should call the library at 724-352-4810.
This will make Boyle's third trip to Saxonburg, said the former police reporter who's now the journalism program director at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass.
In researching “The Ghost,” Boyle said she made two week-long trips to Saxonburg in 2018 and 2019. “None of us went anywhere in 2020,”she said.
She said the Greg Adams murder and its ties to New England kindled her reporter's instincts.
“I've worked for newspapers for more years than I would care to admit in Bridgeport, Conn., New Bedford and Brockton, south of Boston,” said Boyle. “I was a police reporter covering cops and courts.”
Her first true-crime book, “Shallow Graves,” about the search for the killer of 11 women whose bodies were found along highways outside of New Bedford, had just come out when she learned of the murder of Adams and the long hunt for Webb.“I knew it here as the Donald Webb case when I came down to New Bedford four years after the murder in Saxonburg,” she said.“I just assumed he had been caught. I was not aware it was an active case,” she said. “ When the FBI raided Webb's widow's home, I thought, 'This is interesting. This would make a wonderful book.'”Initially, she thought of using the case as the basis for a fictional work, but she said, “I've always done things that are more journalistic. I will do it as a true-crime book.”It took her two years to research and write the book beginning at the end of 2018.“The process I have is I write as I go along. I see holes in the story,” said Boyle. “It took two years to write; I was adding more things as I went along.“I got some FBI files toward the end that had some interesting details about the case,” she said.What stands out in the book is the contrast between Saxonburg, a semi-rural small town with a population of 1,300 in 1980 and the trail of clues that led to New Bedford, a former whaling center in Massachusetts with a population of 95,072.The contrast between the two men at the center of the book was even more pronounced.Boyle writes Adams “was determined to always do right: get good grades, play sports, work hard and commit to family and God.” He was the product of large, extended Italian family that settled in South Buffalo Township, Armstrong County.He worked as a policeman in Washington, D.C., before taking the job with the Saxonburg department.Webb was sent to his grandparents when his father deserted the family at his mother's funeral.
A frequent runaway in his teens, he was dishonorably discharged from the Air Force and landed in Taunton, Mass., where he soon became part of a loose group of criminals known as the Fall River Gang.The gang traveled up and down the East Coast breaking into jewelry stores and homes.Webb racked up convictions for burglary, possession of counterfeit money, possession of a weapon and dangerous instruments, breaking and entering, armed bank robbery, grand larceny and car theft.“He was a low-level mobster. He liked to give the impression he was tied into the Rhode Island mob. He wasn't,” said Boyle.Boyle said it was believed Webb was in Saxonburg looking for jewelry stores to target.Boyle said that in 1980 there was a jewelry store on Saxonburg's Main Street. The owner's family lived in the rear of the building.“When you think of it, can you imagine? It's chilling to me; they were breaking in while the family was there,” said Boyle.Whatever Webb's reason for being in Saxonburg, investigators believe Adams was on Water Street when Webb — driving a rented white Mercury Cougar — caught Adams' attention. When Adams caught up with the car, the driver turned into the parking lot of an Agway store.“No one knew why he was pulled over, speeding or running a stop sign or Adams thinking, 'This car doesn't belong here,'” said Boyle. “In Saxonburg, he would know who's who.”Adams used his patrol car to block the exit of the parking lot and approached the driver's side door.Boyle said Webb knew he was wanted for jumping bail for an offense in New York state and didn't want to risk being sent back to prison.
The driver gave Adams a fake driver's license and then shot Adams twice. The man then got out of the car and the chief returned fire, but the shots were not fatal.It's believed Webb then used Adams' gun to pistol-whip the wounded officer and fled the scene, leaving the fake license behind in the parking lot. Adams' weapon was found seven miles away on Cornplanter Road in Winfield Township, and the suspect's rented car was later found in Warwick, R.I.It was the fake driver's license that started state police in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and the FBI to begin unraveling the web of fake names, rented motel rooms and rented cars that Webb and his associates moved in.Boyle said it wasn't easy. In 1980, investigators had to wade through paper trails of canceled checks and voter registration rolls to arrive at a result that today's police have at their fingertips from the computers in their cruisers.In researching the book, Boyle learned Webb's stepson, Stanley Webb, had been a New Bedford police officer until he was either fired or quit the force.“His stepson, right now is under indictment in the largest gaming case in Massachusetts. He's set to go to trial sometime in the fall,” said Boyle.Donald Webb, was placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list in 1981, but was removed from the list in March 2007.For years, there was no movement in the case until July 2017, when Webb's body was found buried in his ex-wife's backyard in Dartmouth, Mass. Investigators believe he died of a stroke in 1999.Massachusetts State Police and the FBI, during a search of Lillian Webb's home in an illegal gambling case, found a hidden room containing a cane and eventually coaxed the truth from Webb's ex-wife: that Webb had shot Adams during the traffic stop, but not before Adams broke Webb's ankle and bit off a part of Webb's bottom lip.
An injured Webb had driven back to Massachusetts. Lillian Webb had gotten him checked into a hospital under a fake name and drove his car to Rhode Island where she abandoned it.It appears Lillian Webb had hidden her ex-husband in her homes since 1980.Lillian Webb told investigators Donald Webb suffered a stroke in 1997 leaving him bedridden until he died in 1999. She buried him in her backyard.Boyle said, “The wife was never charged with anything as part of an agreement she had with the state for her cooperation.”“That was an awful way to get her to cooperate with authorities because otherwise she would not talk,” Boyle said.Boyle said in writing “The Ghost” she realized the difficulties the investigators had. “Remember what police investigating tools were like back then,” she said. “Not every department had computers.“It was a whole different world back then. There wasn't a lot of surveillance cameras, unless it was a bank,” she said.“The investigators worked really hard. It was impressive what they did the old-fashioned way: talking to people, getting in the field, sifting through records.“There was no social media. If it (existed, it) would have been solved quickly. People would have known who Donald Webb was,” said Boyle.She said the people in Saxonburg were “so gracious and wonderful.”“I was really impressed with the town and how they kept the chief's memory alive all these years,” she said.
