Needham attorney and former prosecutor publishes book on murderer

It was early on Christmas morning in 1981: Tim Burke was watching workers hoist a new upright piano into his Needham home as a news anchor on the family TV told the sad story of Joan Webster, a pretty college student then missing for almost a month.

As the men pushed the piano up a ramp to the family's front door, Burke's curious 2-year-old son turned toward the TV pointed to the young face on the screen. Burke explained that she was lost, but would be found soon.

Little did the young lawyer know that he would spend the rest his life wondering what happened to the woman on the TV screen that morning.

Now a private lawyer living and practicing in Needham, the former prosecutor has written a 350-page novel about his long struggle to prosecute Lenny Paradiso, the man he believes kidnapped and killed Joan Webster.

Paradiso, who died last month from testicular cancer while serving a life sentence, was convicted for only one murder, but Burke believes he was guilty of many more.

He calls him "Boston's unknown serial killer."

"No matter how bad it is, he doesn't stop," Burke as he sat behind a cluttered desk in his Gould Street office. "He's got this intense rage that's just cooking."

Part fact and part literary invention, "The Paradiso Files" tells the story of Lenny Paradiso as documented in police records, grand jury minutes, parole records and newspapers articles spanning three decades.

"It really is the Paradiso files, involving all the cases other cases he's been linked to," Burke said.

But the novel reads nothing like the manila dossier of documents pictured on its dust jacket. Rather than list the evidence against Paradiso, Burke has compiled a gruesome narrative of violence and detective work - complete with detailed descriptions of what people ate, said and listened to more than two decades ago.

Burke admits to some literary license. The songs, which appear in nearly every chapter, were chosen to put the novel in its period, he said, and some of Paridiso's quotes were constructed based on who Burke knew the man to be.

In fact, during all his years investigating Paradiso, Burke spoke with him only once, when the two men first met outside a Suffolk County courtroom. Paradiso only said two sentences, and both were laced with profanity.

Burke himself is almost a faceless character in his book, referred to only in the third person and rarely even by name. Except for on the cover page, the word "Burke" appears in the book only when other characters address the young lawyer by name.

As a young assistant district attorney, Burke's path intersected with Paradiso's when he was neck-deep in a gruesome triple homicide involving a mother and two children. When the Boston Globe ran an article about his work on the murder, a young woman called Burke in his office and pleaded with him to look into the case of her sister, Marie Iannuzzi, whose body was found, strangled and raped, on the rocky shore of a river in Saugus.

Iannuzzi's case led Burke to Joan Webster, a young Harvard student who disappeared from Logan without a trace, and six other girls Burke believes died at the hands of Leonard Paradiso.

Working in a time before DNA evidence, Burke was able to connect Paradiso only to the death of Marie Iannuzzi. But during his trial, other women allegedly raped by Paradiso began to come forward, and he was eventually convicted for attempted rape as well.

Though he never connected Paradiso to her murder, Burke has remained friends with the family of Joan Webster through the 26 years since she disappeared.

It was after the Websters visited his Marshfield summer home in 2005 and talked about the void that Joan's death had left that Burke decided to write his first book. After hearing the family talk, the former prosecutor decided they deserved to know everything he did about their daughter's death.

Since reading the novel, Joan's mother has called Burke to thank him.

"She said it keep the memory of their daughter alive," he said. "Which is very important to them."

But Burke said he also wrote the book for possible victims he doesn't know about yet. He worries about the months Paradiso spent driving around the country, supposedly looking for business contacts he never seemed to find.

"I'm hoping that what the book does is spur on other investigations across the country," he said.

As for Burke, the lawyer-turned-writer is already several chapters in a second book about other murder cases.

Neal Simpson can be reached at nsimspon@cnc.com.