Chapter 1: What traumatic event changed John Busby's family's life forever?
Imagine being nine years old and learning that someone wanted to kill you, your dad, your brothers, and your mom. And that's what I found out when I was nine years old. It all began on a perfect summer day It was the end of summer, August. It was hot, sunny, not a cloud in the sky, and we spent all day at the beach. And everything was ideal until that night when everything changed.
My uncle was a police officer, and he worked the midnight shift. My dad left for work just like normal. He hadn't gone probably half a mile from our house when a car pulled up behind him, pulled out alongside him, and he was shot through the driver's side window of his car with a shotgun. The shotgun blast tore through his face and ripped off his lower jaw. before he lost consciousness.
He wrote, not an accident. He realized that they were trying to kill him and he feared for his family's life. On that summer night, my childhood ended. I was never alone again. We were guarded 24 hours a day. Everybody had a gun. We were fenced in. We had an attack dog. We had a sniper on the roof with a long-range rifle. You couldn't go out.
I had hidden a steak knife under my mattress, and I would just lay there and listen. I just knew that the people who shot my father were not going to stop until we were all dead. Next door to our house, there was an old graveyard. It sounds morbid, but it was actually this beautiful place to go and play.
There were these old trees that were perfect for climbing and grassy lawn to play tag and hide and seek. We spent a lot of time over there. Falmouth, Massachusetts was the ideal place to grow up. Every summer day, we'd get up in the morning, my mom would pack a lunch, and we would head out to Old Silver Beach. By the end of the summer, we'd all be brown as berries and just relaxed and happy.
That summer, it was me, my two older brothers, Eric and Sean, my dad, my mom. My mom was studying to be a nurse. and then my cousin Kelly, who was helping out my parents take care of us kids. She was there to have fun, but babysitting was how she earned her rent. My father was a police officer. Dad's first day in uniform. In his uniform, my dad looked incredibly handsome, I thought.
He looked like a movie star to me. He seemed invincible. My Uncle John was a guy that you didn't mess with. He took his job and his position very seriously.
The John Busby I fell in love with was an athlete. He was handsome. He was very self-confident. He was one of the nicest fathers. He was a wrestler on the ground kind dad. and a hold my little girl close kind of dad. John always gave us the sense of safety and that nothing would happen to us as long as he was around. August 31st, 1979 was what changed our lives forever. Nothing was ever the same.
August 31st, 1979. This was the Friday, the start of Labor Day weekend. We were out in the driveway painting my dad's car. This was my mom's way of getting us out of the house that night so that my dad could sleep because he worked the midnight shift. And this is a photo that my mom took of me that night. When I was growing up, it was really hard for me to look at.
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Chapter 2: How did John Busby's family cope with the aftermath of the shooting?
I was scared. I was in great fear that that individual was going to come in and kill whoever was in the house. Get in the back of the house. Get in the back of the house. There was a lot of things going through my mind. To flee was not an option. There was no way out. All I could think of is we need to hide and make it look like there's nobody still at the house. Everything was whispers.
I said, we need to be quiet until they go away. Then we heard someone knock at the door. Knocking louder, knock, knock, knock. Kelly just said, stay quiet, stay quiet. I'm just talking to myself saying, he's going to go away. It's going to be okay. We're going to be okay. Please stop knocking at the door. Please go away. And then it stopped. I took a deep breath thinking, thank God it's over.
He's going away. And suddenly I heard knocks at the back door. It was then that I realized they weren't going away. That's when Kelly said, this is the plan. I want you guys to go into the attic and hide in there. Do not come out of the attic until I come and get you or until your mom comes home. Don't come out for anybody else.
All I could think was, we're going to go up in the attic, and this guy's going to come looking for us. And we have to be so quiet and not move. It was hard to balance on the rafters, and I was in a nightgown, and I didn't wanna fall into the insulation, which was very prickly, so I was just trying to stay still really hard and not move or make a sound.
And we just waited for whoever was gonna, whoever was gonna come up there. The kids are in the attic. guy still knocking at the back door, not going away. And I remember thinking, what am I going to do? The first thing I had to do was protect those children and make it look as though they weren't home.
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Chapter 3: What measures were taken to protect John Busby's family after the attack?
And if there was entry into the house, that I was the only one in the residence. I walked over to the window, which is right beside the door, and at that moment, the guy pulled out a police badge. He said he was a Falmouth police officer and that he was here to watch over John Busby's family. We heard Kelly say, he's a cop, it's okay, you can come down.
And then once we heard that, we were like, okay, it's safe. Throughout the evening, more police officers showed up to watch the home. And at that point, I realized that it just wasn't gonna be okay the next day.
They were trying to get an airway down. They couldn't get it down, so they started giving him morphine. And I heard somebody say, he won't go down. We can't get him to relax and get the airway in. One of the officers behind me, and I think it was Rick Smith, he said, we have somebody at the house with the kids. We've got somebody there and others en route.
And it was like you could see John just relax. He relaxed, he laid back, and they slipped an airway in. I really believe that John overwhelmed the doctors at the Falmouth Hospital. They'd never seen anything like that. They didn't know quite what to do. John looked like a monster. His beautiful, handsome face went right to here, normal.
And then it was like tissue had stretched and stretched and stretched. And right about here on his chest was his chin. There was no jaw. I wondered, how are we gonna repair this? How are we gonna put this back together? From the Falmouth Hospital, they took him by ambulance to Mass General Hospital.
They reassured me that they'd gotten him there in enough time to keep him from bleeding out, but it would depend on how strong he was to come through the surgery.
Police in Falmouth today are looking for suspects who fired into the face of an officer there. 36-year-old John Busby was driving... The morning after the shooting, we left to go stay with my uncle near the hospital where my dad was staying in Boston. No one was told where we were going, and when we got there, we were told not to tell anyone where we were staying or who we were staying with.
This was the beginning of the year that we disappeared.
When John became aware in the recovery room, his eyes fluttered some and then he started going from tube to tube. And then he realized he couldn't talk. And I saw a look in his eyes almost of, you know, I can't talk. And then he saw me sitting there and he wrote, Don't leave me like this. He didn't want to be on a respirator or be an invalid like that.
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Chapter 4: Who was Melvin Rainey and what was his connection to John Busby?
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My name's John Busby. They didn't think I'd live, but I did. Someone's gonna do a voiceover for me. I'm a little hard to understand, but these are my words, and this is my story. I was on my way into work the midnight shift. The vehicle pulled up behind me. Pulled out as if to pass. It didn't pass. It matched my speed.
I got word while I was in the hospital that the investigation had been totally botched. I determined there was only one way that justice was gonna be done, and I was gonna have to supply it. I was gonna have to get healthy, get out of the hospital, and kill this guy.
We came back from Boston, we drove to our house, and when we pulled into the driveway, there were police cars in the driveway.
The police made it clear that we needed to be protected. We had at least two guards at our property 24 hours a day, and they were well armed.
Everywhere I went, there was a cop. I had a police officer follow me to school, wait outside my classroom all day, in the lunchroom, everywhere I went. My first day back to school, we went down to the lunchroom. A boy came over to the table, leaned over to me and said, you know why that cop's here, don't you? Because somebody wanted to kill your dad and somebody's going to come and kill you.
They were thought of as being different at that time, and not in a special way, but in a way of almost like a virus. Kids had been told, don't sit by her. They were transferred out of my classroom, because what parent wants their kid next to, you know, a ticking time bomb, basically? Life was spent speculating who somebody was, who was traveling too close to you.
It didn't matter where you were, you thought about who's beside me and what could they do to you. We had police protection for the first few months when we were home.
When it started costing the town so much money that it was busting the bank, I guess, they decided to protect us in a different way. An eight-foot fence, an alarm system, and a guard dog.
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