Live to Tell: The Year We Disappeared

20:35When 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.

20:59And then he saw me sitting there, and he wrote, don't leave me like this.

21:12He didn't want to be on a respirator or be an invalid like that. And if the choice came, I needed to let him go. I needed to let him die. I said, you can't leave me here. You can't leave me with these three kids. I can't be left alone. You have to stay. You have to come back. We'll make it.

21:39He couldn't speak. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't eat. He couldn't even drink water. I mean, he couldn't do anything because they had wired shut what was left of his face. Once I saw him, I thought, wow, they really meant to kill him. And I remember going to bed some nights, and I would just lay in bed and think, my dad? Everybody likes my dad. Who could want to kill my dad?

22:16My father knew the instant that he was shot who was trying to kill him. And he was able to communicate that to the officers who were there on the scene. When I first saw him, he was shaking, shaking like a dog. He was holding the towels up to his face. And I asked him, who did this, John? And he got out a pen and a notebook that he always carried with him, and he wrote, not an accident, Mel Rainey. John did not see who shot him, but he knew exactly who would want him dead.

22:58Melvin Rainey was in the trash hauling business. He had contracts all over Cape Cod, and it was very lucrative. He was a convicted arsonist. He had a reputation of getting even with individuals by sneaking in the night and burning properties.

23:22His favorite saying was, I smell smoke. I smell smoke, which meant, you know, without directly threatening, it meant there's going to be a fire in your future, your house, your car, whatever. I'm going to burn something of yours. Melvin Rainey was also suspected of murder. He was suspected of killing three people. And in two of those cases, the bodies have never been recovered. Melvin Rainey was married to a woman named Wanda Medeiros Rainey and in 1971 she went missing. He claims that he dropped her off at the bus station and she was never seen again.

24:04About a year later a teenage boy in Falmouth named Jeff Flanagan went missing. He was dating a 17 year old girl who had been babysitting for the Rainey family who Melvin was also interested Jeff Flanagan was found shot to death. His body was recovered in a cranberry bog directly across the street from Melvin Rainey's home.

24:33And then a former employee of Melvin Rainey's, a 17-year-old boy named Paul Allwart, was set to testify against Melvin in a grand jury arson investigation. The police promised that he would be protected. They escorted him to the Martha's Vineyard Ferry, where he could go out to where he had some family and stay there until the trial. He got on the ferry. He didn't get off. Melvin Reney basically walked free on all of those accounts. I think because people were afraid to prosecute him. And I'm talking about policemen afraid of him because they had families and they go to bed at night and you don't know if he was going to burn the house down with your kids in the house.

25:19I knew that the police chief's car had burnt in his yard, and everybody assumed that it was, you know, Melvin, but nobody could prove it. I think Melvin Rainey considered himself untouchable, and that extended to his immediate family. So if the police tried to give a ticket to anyone in his family, he would march into the police station and have the ticket torn up and have it erased from the logbook.

25:49Well, my dad was either brave enough to take on Melvin Rainey or he was foolhardy enough to take him on. If you broke the law, he didn't care who you were, who you were connected to. You were going to get a ticket, you were going to go to court. So he had run-ins with them. My dad was conducting traffic at a roadblock at a fatal accident and Melvin Rainey's brother, John Rainey was there in his semi. And instead of waiting for the scene to be cleared, he just decided to drive straight through the accident scene, and he actually hit my father with his truck. He went to his house and arrested him and charged him with assault and battery with a deadly weapon.

26:34And just prior to that court hearing, John Busby was shot.

26:43I thought instantly that Melvin Rainey had shot him. And now we're going to start after Melvin. I think there were a lot of cops on the force who wanted to go straight to Rainey's house and just drag him out. But there were a lot of other people, people who were in positions of power, who were really too scared to do anything about it. I would challenge anyone to go to any police department and ask the question, if one of their officers was shot in the line of duty, what would they do? And I can tell you the response will be, they're not going to stop investigating that crime until an arrest is made.

27:30This did not happen in the town of Falmouth when John Busby was shot.

27:37This is the police log from that night. You know, the local paper does the log of accident, fight in progress, disorderly group, noisy house. At the hour of my dad's shooting, there was nothing. They didn't put it in. They took it out of the police log. I mean, they've got everything else in here. Dog barking, two drunks near Russell and Falmouth Heights. You know, every single teeny thing in town is in here, and for some reason, the police log doesn't state for that night that a police officer was shot. To my knowledge, the Falmouth Police Department never interviewed Melvin Raney regarding the John Busby shooting.

28:23I've often wondered just exactly how this little guy could get away with the stuff that he got away with without even being questioned. It was clear to a lot of us that there was something behind the scenes that was much more powerful than Melvin Reney. Melvin Reney had something on someone, whether he was paying people in envelopes, or whether he had pictures from some sort of sexual act. He clearly had so much control that the police didn't go after him. Nobody was going to do anything about a crime involving Melvin Reney.

29:14Michael John did not want to die. Michael John wanted to live and live to take care of what happened to him. Their biggest mistake was they didn't kill him. That was their biggest mistake.

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31:04My name's John Busby. They didn't think I'd live, but I did. Someone's going to do a voiceover for me. I'm a little hard to understand, but these are my words, and this is my story.

31:30I was on my way into work the midnight shift. The vehicle pulled up behind me. It pulled out as if to pass. It didn't pass. It matched my speed.

32:04I 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 going to be done, and I was going to have to supply it. I was gonna have to get healthy, get out of the hospital, and kill this guy.

32:45We came back from Boston. We drove to our house, and when we pulled into the driveway, there were police cars in the driveway.

32:59The police made it clear that we needed to be protected.

33:05We had at least two guards at our property 24 hours a day, and they were well armed.

33:17Everywhere 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.

34:03Life 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.

34:20We 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. His name was Max. I did not like Max. If I was in the yard without my dad, that dog had to be chained up. If he thought somebody was going to hurt my dad, even if it was me, he would just bite your throat out. Getting him meant that our family dog, Tigger, had to be given away because she was terrified of him. We had gone from a really regular family where my parents were really loving to things being very serious all the time.

35:18We used to go to the beach, do things together as a family, and now we just, I mean, we really just didn't leave our house as a group anymore.

35:29My uncle was very quiet, and you could almost see the turmoil in his thought process. You could see he was thinking, thinking all the time. There was a simmering anger that was building. All physicality between us and him ended because he was injured. You felt like you couldn't get close to him physically or emotionally anymore. His personality was just so different. He just seemed like he was in a different world.

36:04Two or three days would go by and I would just stay in my room. It felt like my head was going to explode.

36:15I started pushing my family away from me. Pushing my wife, the children away from me. We were living in our own prison. And the people who had done that to me were living their normal lives. The only way out of this mess was leaving town, moving my family somewhere safe. By then I would be healthy and strong and able to arm myself with an untraceable weapon.

36:51I was gonna cut through the woods across from the dump and I was gonna wait for Melvin to empty his truck there was no way I could miss him he'd be a sitting duck and that was my plan

37:07put a hole in his head right through the windshield and finish him off

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38:28I would come home from school. Sometimes I would just go into my room and sit on my bunk bed, and I would just stare out the window and wait for it to get dark. I just wanted the day to be over. I just wanted the days to go by. I wanted the waiting to end for whatever was going to happen.

38:50The only place we could think of that no one would ever think that we would live is in the middle of the country. And when we put the names of places that had accepted me as a nurse in a hat and drew out Tennessee, we gave it a go. Once we knew where we were moving, my parents made it very clear to us that we couldn't tell anyone anything. about where we were being relocated.

39:16Max, our killer dog, was sold back to the training center, and the town of Falmouth was kind enough to let us keep the money, and we would need every cent of it. My compensation for getting shot in the line of duty was$200 a week. He was shot twice. He was shot once physically by a shotgun, and he was shot the second time by the town when they gave him the boot, they said, it's easier for you to just go live someplace else than live here, and we'll save money and you'll be on your way.

39:57The town ordered a police escort for us as far as the Bourne Bridge. Goodbye and good riddance. We weren't their problem anymore.

40:11I assumed the so-called investigation into my shooting would end as soon as we cleared the bridge that morning. And I was right.

40:26As we were driving south, it was August when we moved, and it just got hotter and hotter. Every day that we were driving, it felt like we were driving into hell. And I do remember thinking, you know, after everything that we've been through and how crappy our lives had become, and now this is what we get, this is our escape. Our new life was to move to this place, which was in the middle of nowhere. It just felt like, you know, adding insult to injury. It was like, and then after this, here's your prize. Here's what you get, you know?

41:06We had to assume disguises almost to fit in and to not stand out and make ourselves too obvious. I became like the girls at school. I pretended I had a southern accent. I got a perm. I started wearing lip gloss. And I lied. I lied about our past, why we had moved there, what had happened to my father, what was wrong with his face. You know, and you tell a lie for long enough, and it sort of becomes your reality. Those people that lived in Cape Cod, that little girl and my dad and all of us, they really did disappear. I mean, we relocated to Tennessee, but the people that we were are gone forever.

42:06The first couple of years that we lived in Tennessee, we watched very carefully. We lived in a very isolated area. John watched cars that went by the house to see if they slowed down. And that finally wore away. It went away. He kind of looked like the old John except for the fact that he had this huge mountain man beard. I believe that John needed that type of place for a healing process. We lived on a large farm. He did a lot of work on that farm when he was physically able. He split wood we would never need just for the physical smashing of an axe through a piece of something.

42:56From time to time, I had to return to Boston for surgery, and that meant shaving my beard off. And every time I shaved my beard off, I would see what they had done to me, and the anger would just come flooding back.

43:14While I was up in Boston, I visited my uncle. He always called me Nephew. He said, nephew, come down in the cellar. I got something I want to show you.

43:27We went down the cellar. He opened up a gun case, and there was a.22 caliber rifle. It had a scope on it, and on the end of it was a silencer. It was everything I needed.

43:48I looked at the gun my uncle had put together. I wrote a few words in my notebook and showed it to him. Thank you for all your effort. I won't need it.

44:06When John returned from that surgery, he came through the door, and before he said hello or anything else, he looked me straight in the eye and he said, I'm done. I'm done with surgery. I'm done with going back there. I'm really done." And I said, I'm done too. I really felt we had turned a corner, that he was leaving the revenge and his hatred behind, and that he was going to embrace his family and his life. We were heading forward with the person that John grew into to be the man he is today.

44:48In 2003, there was actually a break in my dad's case. There was a confession. The Rainys had started turning on each other, fighting over money. And they'd gone into the police and started spilling family secrets. 24 years after my dad's shooting, John Rainey finally came clean. He placed the entire blame for my dad's shooting on his brother, Melvin Rainey. MELVIN'S BROTHER TOLD THE WHOLE STORY OF THE NIGHT OF JOHN'S SHOOTING. MELVIN SET IN THE BACK SEAT. HE HAD A SKI MASK ON, ACCORDING TO HIS BROTHER. HE HAD A SHOTGUN, WHICH HE PUT OUT THE BACK WINDOW. AS THEY SLOWLY PASSED JOHN'S VOLCEWAGON, HE SHOT A ROUND FROM THE SHOTGUN, WHICH WENT THROUGH JOHN'S FACE.

45:45In a sense, it was vindication. John was right all those years he'd been right. It was Melvin Rainey who wanted him dead. They remain unpunished, and they will remain unpunished, because the statute of limitations... The sad part of this vindication was the fact that it came to light after the statute of limitations, so no legal process would happen. In some ways, Melvin did get punished. Melvin is in a state institution. He has what is reported to be PICS disease, which is a disease that affects the brain. I'm told that he's in a state of dementia. You know, what goes around comes around. He's getting what's rightly his, I guess.

46:39This is the only childhood I had. To have lived through it and be here today, I just feel like it's made me who I am. It's touched every part of my life. I write books for kids. I'm a mom and I'm a wife. I can't think of anything else that I would... Yeah, I have it all.

47:10Quite frequently, I compare what has happened to Melvin and what I'm going through now. There's no doubt in my mind that I won. No question.

47:24We now live in paradise and we are so content with one another. We've come through a storm and now we're at peace.

47:44Melvin Rainey died in 2013, and John Rainey died in 2022. I'm back. I'm really back. School Spirits returns. Why am I here? I'm not dead, right? Disruption on this campus will not be created. If I look crazy, it's because that's how I feel. I don't know how to live in two worlds. Secrets lurk. There are others. Beneath the surface. They're not like us. We need to get out of here. Now. School Spirits new season now streaming only on Paramount+. It is my great honor to welcome you all to Starfleet Academy. There's never been a better time to enroll in Star Trek. It's our job to prepare you for the unimaginable.

48:33To the night, cadet. In high pressure situations, positive reinforcement is crucial to one's success. You're doing a great job. This is what we train for. These friends of mine, they all live for something bigger than themselves. And that's Starfleet. Starfleet Academy. New series now streaming on Paramount+.