For months, Frank Bowen's daughters complained of strange noises and odd happenings in their

Pepporal Massachusetts home.

Frank was sure it was just their imaginations until an intruder took the entire

family hostage one night in December of 1986. When the suspect was released on bail, he was freed to commit even more crimes, eventually

escalating to murder.

I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Priscilla, William, and Abigail Gustafson and the infamous

story of Daniel Lapland on Dark Down East. dark down east. It was just a few minutes past 6 p.m. on December 8, 1986, when the phone started to ring at the police station in Pepprel, Massachusetts.

At the time, the police department was made up of about 10 officers for the roughly 10,000 residents of Pepprel and the village of East

Pepprel, where the most common calls were for domestic disturbances or public intoxication.

Those serious violent crimes happened, no place is immune after all, they were rare.

So when the dispatcher picked up the phone, she never expected the series of events that would unfold from that very first call.

The caller told the dispatcher that a neighbor just ran to their house screaming for help

saying that her family was being held hostage.

She'd escaped through the window and was able to get to the neighbor's house unharmed,

but her father, sister and friend, were still trapped next door with the kidnapper.

Both Pepprel PD and Massachusetts State Police responded to 93 St. Lawrence Street, and a

peprel officer spoke with the neighbors who called in the report and

14 year old Tina Bowen.

Tina was visibly upset and crying as she told the officer what happened.

She explained that when she and her father, Frank Bowen, and her sister Karen and friend Kathleen

walked inside their home around 530 that night, the house wasn't at all the way they left it.

Here's retired Pepperel Police Lieutenant Thomas Lane, who was on the scene that night.

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