People living in Cedar Hill Drive, Prospect, Connecticut, were awoken from their sleep in the early hours of Friday 22 July 1977, by the smell of smoke and the crackling of fire. Looking out, they saw the house occupied by the Beaudoin family was a blazing inferno. The fire brigade were called and doused the flames with their hoses, but despite their best efforts the house was gutted. When fire fighters entered the still smouldering ruins they found the charred remains of human corpses everywhere.

They came upon twenty-nine-year-old Mrs Cheryl Beaudoin dead on the kitchen floor, her clothes burned from her body. The bodies of three children were discovered in a bedroom to the right of the hall and two others in a bedroom to the left. Another child was dead in the master bedroom and two more in the bathroom. Investigators later noticed that Mrs Beaudoin and several of the children had their hands tied behind their backs and the two in the bathroom had their feet bound together; all the children appeared to have head wounds.

The victims, apart from Mrs-Beaudoin, were her own seven children Frederick (twelve), Aaron Lee (ten), Debra Ann (nine), Paul (eight), Roderick six), Holly Lyn (five) and Mary Lou (four). The ninth victim was Mrs Beaudoin’s niece Jennifer Santoro (six), who had been staying with the family.

Police immediately launched the largest murder investigation in Connecticut’s criminal history. Post-mortems established that Mrs Beaudoin died from head injuries and a stab wound in the chest. Paul also died from head injuries, while the others perished from a combination of head injuries and smoke inhalation. Within twenty-four hours detectives had interviewed more than a hundred potential witnesses, including the bereaved husband and his foster brother Lome J. Acquin, who turned out to have been at the house playing with the Beaudoin children on the night before the fire. A witness later confirmed that a man had been seen in the area sitting in his car on the day before the murders.

The police investigation now concentrated on twenty-seven-year-old Acquin, who, according to the criminal records had a previous conviction for burglary plus an additional sentence for an attempted jail break. On Saturday 23 July, Acquin was detained for questioning. On the Sunday morning, he agreed to make a statement in which he admitted attacking his sister-in-law with a tyre lever, after which he did the same to the children before spreading petrol round the house and setting it on fire. Later that day Lome Acquin was charged with nine counts of murder and one of arson.

Acquin eventually went on trial at Waterbury on Monday 16 July 1979, after jury selection had taken more than a month. The prosecution emphasised that in his confession, Acquin said he ‘might’ have sexually molested ten-year-old Sharon Beaudoin but that the post-mortem examinations had confirmed there were signs of sexual injury in her case.

On Friday 19 October 1979, after three days’ deliberation the jury convicted Acquin on all nine counts of murder and the charge of arson. He was subsequently sentenced to twenty-five years to life on each of the murder convictions and twenty for arson.

Taken in it’s entirety from “The Encyclopaedia of Mass Murder,” by Brian Lane and Wilfred Gregg.