William Marvel: A Skeleton Crew

Those who attended Doug Burnell's slide show of his father's photos at the public library four weeks ago saw a newspaper image of a murder victim whose skeleton was unearthed in Conway Village in 1937. While that may have come as a surprise to those who found it, it wasn't the only such discovery in this town. In fact, the remains of another murdered man had been found almost exactly a decade before, only a few hundred yards away. Both bodies represented collateral damage in the darker side of industrial development, which town boosters welcomed at least as enthusiastically a century ago as they do today.

On the afternoon of Sept. 27, 1937, several employees of the Conway Fire Precinct were digging a trench for the village's water system on West Main Street, just beyond the point where Bald Hill Road crossed the Boston & Maine Railroad tracks. That portion of Bald Hill Road was cut off by the construction of the first Conway bypass, decades later, and the amputated segment is now known as Haven Lane. The water line was to pass between the tracks and the then-concrete surface of West Main Street, only yards beyond today's Haven Lane.