The light in the upstairs bedroom

Their new home was ready to be shown off.

The furniture had arrived and Rachel and Neil were throwing their first Saturday night dinner party for their friends.

But when Rachel's friend Joanna Gately and her sister pulled up to #6 Cubs Path on Jan. 21, 2006, a Saturday, the house was strangely quiet. Just a light on in the upstairs master bedroom.

McPhee: They're ringing the doorbell.  They peer in the window. They see no sign of Rachel.  No sign of the baby.  And no sign of Neil.

Dennis Murphy:  Did she have the wrong night maybe? Had there been a miscommunication?

On the front door she found a handwritten note.  It was from Rachel's mother, Priscilla Materazzo -- she'd been by earlier that same day for a lunch invitation with her daughter, but didn't find anyone at home.

Joanna the friend immediately called Rachel's mother on her cell. Neither knew what was going on. Where could Rachel, Neil and the baby be?

It was all unsettling enough that friend and mother agreed they should call the police.

The Middlesex County District Attorney, Gerry Leone:

Gerry Leone: The officers were doing a well-being check based upon people who asked they check on Rachel and Neil .. The police officers when they entered the house were not expecting anything all that unusual they were their in the interest to determine that everyone was there and safe.

Dennis Murphy: And they went room to room and didn’t find anything, right?

Leone: No. In fact when you went through house it was as if things were disrupted in way that would cause you to believe in a cursory pass through that there was anything amiss.

Their BMW was not in the garage, but the garage door was closed.  The TV was on, music was playing in the baby's room. The master bedroom had a rumpled, fluffy comforter on it as if the bed was unmade. 

McPhee: They started to think all kinds of scenarios.  Car accident.  Where are they?  Joanna said, "I’m not leaving until they get home."  And in an astonishing show of friendship, she slept there in the driveway all night long on a cold New England night, waiting for the Entwistles to come home.

But come the dawn, there were still no Entwistles. And now everyone was frantic. By that evening they went to the Hopkinton police department to fill out a missing persons report.

About this time, Rachel's stepfather, Joe Matterrazo, put a call into a friend, retired State Trooper, Joseph Flaherty, hoping he could help expedite an investigation.

Flaherty: I said to Joe, "There aren't, without being an alarmist, there aren't a lot of good scenarios here. And I told him that I would do my best to get somebody from the state police to call the Hopkinton Police to get a detective to start working on the case.

The police agreed to make a second sweep of the house. Though it was only a day later, they knew as soon as they walked in that this time, something wasn't right.

McPhee: This overwhelming stench of death.  Which all too many police officers are familiar with.  And no one will ever forget.

They followed the sickly-sweet scent to the master bedroom, to the unmade rumpled bed itself. 

Gerry: They did a little more than a cursory search that time around, and the unfortunate reality is lifting a puff comforter off of the bed they found the tragic consequences.

Dennis Murphy:  What did they find when they looked in the bed?

Gerry: Rachel and Lillian who had been killed.

Dennis Murphy:  Almost in an embrace?

Gerry: Yes, very close together. Almost as if they had been sleeping together or resting together.

The officers radioed for help, and went looking for the third name on their missing person report, the husband, Neil Entwistle.

McPhee: They saw no sign of him.  They looked in closets.  They looked everywhere in the house.  I mean, they did an up and down search of this four-bedroom house and they found nothing. 

As Massachusetts state forensic teams descended on the house to begin the painstaking work of processing the home, now a crime scene, police issued a be-on-the-lookout alert for the family's missing white BMW SUV.

Then came the awful task of breaking the news to Rachel's mom and stepdad. The medical examiner had done his work and found that both Rachel and Lillian had been shot to death with a small-calibre weapon. The baby shot through the torso, the bullet exiting into the mother's breast. Rachel had been shot once in the head.

The investigators' question now was: Where was the son-in-law, Neil?

Flaherty: I did tell Joe that, "Let's wait until we find out where Neil Entwistle is.  He could be expired in the trunk of a car." We didn't know.  But I said, "You know, we have to get somebody to find the car.  And find out where he is."

It was about then--with tragedy engulfing them--that the Matterazzos began to realize how little they actually knew about their daughter's English husband. In the months that he'd lived with Rachel at her parents' as they settled into their new life in Massachusetts, Priscilla and her husband Joe never could get a handle on exactly what it was that Neil did for a living. Something to do with computers. He was vague about it when they started the conversation.

Something else was a little funny: No one had ever seen him use cash -- only credit cards.

McPhee: Neil, would always reassure Rachel.  And he would reassure the Mattarazzos,  "Well, my money--we're fine.  We’re okay.  We have money.  It’s just tied up in offshore accounts."

Two days after the mother and daughter were found beneath the comforter, the "Where's Neil?" question was answered.

McPhee: Clifford Entwistle, Neil Entwistle's dad, called Joe Matterazzo, and said, "We don't know what's going on. I’m very sorry to hear about the deaths. Neil’s here. What’s happening?" 

What happened next would be even more remarkable. The parents of Rachel Entwistle were about to hear from Neil himself.

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