New TV crime series revisits brutal Canton murder

Dead of Winter premieres Jan. 16 on ID with an episode about the Shaun Ouillette murder case.

Children don’t disappear. Somebody always knows.

Jeanne Quinn’s words cut like a razor in the opening moments of the teaser trailer for Dead of Winter, a new documentary-style television series that is set to premiere globally next Wednesday evening on Investigation Discovery (ID).

The series, produced by Red Marble Media, will focus each episode on a “haunting true tale” of murder that occurred in winter — when the world is at its “most merciless” — and it begins with an hour-long episode about Canton’s most horrific and senseless crime: the 1986 baseball bat slaying of Quinn’s son, 14-year-old Shaun Reni Ouillette, in a wooded area of town then known as “the pits.”

In a wide-ranging and heart-breaking interview, Quinn will take the viewer into her world as she recounts what it was like to experience every parent’s worst nightmare — from Shaun’s “disappearance” on November 20 to the sleepless nights and desperate searches for a son she feared was somewhere nearby, injured and alone, to the discovery of his lifeless, battered body three weeks later, ravaged by animals and frozen in the snow. In addition to following the case through the victim’s mother’s eyes, the show also features interviews with two former Canton police officers, Chip Callery and the late Tom Keleher Sr., who discuss the mounting suspicion surrounding Rod Matthews, Ouillette’s Canton High School classmate, and the details of the investigation leading up to the discovery of Ouillette’s body and subsequent arrest of Matthews on murder charges.

“I remember walking out of the door and it was complete silence,” Quinn relays in the trailer for the episode. “It was cold and I screamed, ‘This is not true. This cannot be.’ That’s when the nightmare began.”

News of the crime sent shockwaves throughout the community and across the nation, and the case has continued to attract significant public interest in the 30-plus years since, especially whenever Matthews, who is serving a life sentence at MCI Shirley for second degree murder, makes a plea for parole.

But while most longtime residents of the area are familiar with the basic facts of the case, the upcoming ID program promises to delve deeper, uncovering details about the investigation that not even Quinn herself had been aware of.

Jeanne Quinn (Photo courtesy of Red Marble Media)

Quinn, for instance, never knew that it was Keleher who had found her son’s body. “I did not know that for 32 years,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “He just didn’t want any fanfare. He just went about his business and did his job and helped people. I saw him many times after and he never said a word.”

Stephen Dost, producer of Dead of Winter, recalled how Keleher had shared with the show’s creators that he was seriously ill but still insisted on going through with the interview. Taping for the program took place in July in Scituate, and Keleher passed away three months later due to complications from cancer.

“He told us that he really wanted to talk about [the Ouillette case], and he knew he didn’t have too much longer,” recalled Dost. “He ended up reconnecting with Jeanne, and it was a really great moment when the two of them were able to sit down and talk about that.”

Quinn also could not say enough about the dedication and compassion shown to her by Callery — someone who she considers a longtime friend and ally — as well as countless other CPD officers who either worked on the case or offered her support over the years.

Even in times when she felt betrayed and forgotten by other segments of the community in the aftermath of her son’s murder, Quinn had always felt loved and cared for by the Canton police. “I was treated like a sister, I was treated not like a victim,” said Quinn, a former EMT and military veteran. “It was like, ‘We know what you did for a job, but we also know what you’re going through.’”

And Quinn said she received great support from others within the law enforcement community after she successfully fought for tougher state legislation on teenage killers, including a 1996 law that dramatically increased a juvenile’s chances of being tried as an adult. She received numerous cards and letters from people in the criminal justice system who thanked her for her efforts, including one from a state trooper who included a message that has always stuck with her: “Nobody knows how many ships a lighthouse saves.”

And now here it is, more than 30 years later, and the story of her son is still attracting interest and gets to be told to new generations all across the world through the medium of television. For this she credits the program’s producers, who she said did an “amazing” job in asking the right questions and handling the story with sensitivity yet honesty. “Really the professionalism that surrounds it is just unsurpassed,” she said. “Even the commercials and the promo that’s been put out and just how it speaks to what nobody knows.”

Retired CPD Det. Chip Callery (Photo courtesy of Red Marble Media)

Quinn said the difference between other coverage of her son’s case and the upcoming Dead of Winter episode is that the producers of the new show went to the people who were the “boots on the ground.”

“The people that talk about what happened are the people that were there,” she said. “These are the people who looked for Shaun.”

Dost, for his part, believes the real star in this undertaking is Quinn herself. “She’s exactly the kind of person we look for when producing a documentary like this because she is a survivor and a fighter,” Dost said. “I knew after talking to her that this is someone who has a story that needs to be told on ID, someone with that kind of passion. And someone who has survived what she has can be really inspiring. I do a lot of shows from the perspective of people who have gone through traumatic experiences, and I look for people who can not only talk about the painful parts of their life, but how they came through it.”

Dost, who has family in the area and had vague recollections of the Ouillette murder case from when he was a boy, expressed his sincere gratitude to Quinn for agreeing to share her story. “Sitting in front of a camera and talking about this and reliving it 32 years later is incredibly difficult,” he said. “Every time she retells it it’s opening up the wound all over again so it’s not easy.”

While he and his team have produced a number of other true crime programs for ID, Dost said the emotional response from crew members who have watched the first episode of Dead of Winter has been “unlike anything [he has] seen before.”

“From the editors to the people who do the captioning,” said Dost, “these are people who do a lot of TV and they all said it brought them to tears.”

For Quinn, doing such a personal, in-depth interview about the worst days of her life was indeed difficult and emotionally draining. At the same time, she said, losing a child is not simply an event or an experience that one can get past, at least not for her. “It becomes a way of life,” she said. “You’re there and you never, ever become your real self again. It’s a total change of being.”

Quinn said she agreed to do this program in part to honor Shaun’s legacy but also because “people need to know” — not only about who Shaun was and what Matthews did, but also about the part that investigators played in helping to heal a family and bring a killer to justice.

“It’s quite obvious that it’s 32 years later and people still come to me and say, ‘Will you do this,’” she said. “And I say yes because people need to know that there are good people out there who looked our for Shaun and they took care of him and his family.”

Dead of Winter premieres at 11 p.m. on January 16 on Investigation Discovery.

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