John Busby Shooting: Ambush, Confession, and Reine Killings

The John Busby shooting was a September 1979 ambush in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in which patrolman John Busby was blasted in the face with a shotgun while driving to his midnight shift. From his hospital bed he named local businessman Melvin Reine as the gunman, but the Falmouth Police Department never interviewed Reine, no arrest was made, and by the time a family member confessed in 2003 the statute of limitations for attempted murder had already expired.

The Ambush

Just before midnight on August 31, 1979, Busby was driving his Volkswagen Beetle to work when a blue sedan pulled alongside him a few miles from his Falmouth home.¹ A shotgun blast tore through the driver’s side window. It shattered his jaw, destroyed most of his teeth, nearly severed his tongue, and left his chin hanging from his chest.

Before he lost consciousness, Busby scrawled a note to the officers who reached him: “Not an Accident — Melvin Reine.”

He survived. What followed was 18 years of reconstructive surgery and permanent damage to his speech.² Busby was medically retired from the department in 1981.³

Who Melvin Reine Was

The man Busby named ran a trash-hauling business called Five Star Enterprises and had a violent record going back more than a decade. Reine had been convicted of arson in connection with seven fires during a 1968 spree.⁴ By 1979 he was also a suspect in three unsolved cases:

His first wife, Wanda Medeiros Reine, vanished on March 12, 1971. He said he had driven her to a bus station; police said the story did not check out. Her remains were never found despite excavations of properties he had worked on.⁵
In 1972, 16-year-old Charles “Jeff” Flanagan was found shot in a cranberry bog across from Reine’s home at 657 East Falmouth Highway. Reine was identified as the last person to see him alive.⁶
In 1977, 17-year-old Reine employee Paul Alwardt was scheduled to testify before a grand jury in an arson case against his boss. The night before his testimony, a Falmouth juvenile officer put Alwardt on a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. He was never seen again.⁷

Reine was never charged in any of those cases.

The Motive

Busby had been in escalating conflict with the Reine family for months. He had arrested Reine’s son, Clyde Pina, in an incident that provoked Melvin Reine to reportedly vow to put “Busby’s head in his lap.”⁸ Then, in July 1979, Melvin’s brother John Reine drove a semi-truck through an accident scene and struck Busby. Busby charged John Reine with assault and battery with a deadly weapon. The shotgun attack came weeks before John Reine was due in court on that charge.² Reine’s sons later told investigators the shooting had been carried out “to punish him for his treatment of Reine family members.”⁴

How the Investigation Failed

Busby had named the shooter. That did not translate into police work. The Falmouth Police Department never formally interviewed Melvin Reine about the ambush. The incident was omitted from the local police log.² Then-Chief John Ferreira rejected offers of assistance from 50 to 100 state troopers, and no investigator questioned Reine in the first 24 hours after the shooting.⁸ Ferreira resigned six weeks later.

Fellow officers later called the investigation “totally botched.” Retired Falmouth officer Rick Smith told CBS that Reine exerted a kind of control over the department, with traffic tickets issued to family members “torn up and erased from the log book.”² A 2005 Cape Cod Times investigation drawing on interviews with 23 former Falmouth officers found that Reine had received “special treatment” from the department both before and after the shooting, including fixed tickets, negated arrests, and a scrubbed driving record.⁴

The corruption allegations focused on Officer Arthur Monteiro. A 2003 police report, based on John Reine’s confession, alleged that Monteiro had given Melvin Reine information about Busby’s work schedule before the shooting and about the investigation afterward. Monteiro allegedly visited the Reine property after the attack and said, “You shot Busby.”⁸ Monteiro had died by the time the confession surfaced.

Other officers came under suspicion. Former patrolman Michael Leighton, known to socialize with Reine, failed a polygraph about the shooting and was seen entering Reine’s trash truck the morning after. Former Chief Paulino Rodriques was reported to have intervened to block citations against Reine’s business.⁴

A Year in Hiding, Then Fifteen More

The Busby family was placed under 24-hour police protection at home. The town installed an eight-foot stockade fence and an alarm system and provided a guard dog named Max.¹ Busby’s daughter Cylin, then nine, later recalled hiding in dark crawl spaces at every knock on the door.⁹

When the town ended the guard detail, the family fled Falmouth entirely. They moved to Tennessee and then spent 14 years in Bar Harbor, Maine, changing locations periodically to stay safe.¹⁰ Busby struggled with PTSD, rage, and a desire for revenge. He planned to kill Reine, then abandoned the idea.²

In 2008, John and Cylin Busby co-authored a memoir, The Year We Disappeared: A Father-Daughter Memoir, published by Bloomsbury.¹¹ CBS News’ 48 Hours aired an episode built on the case, “Live to Tell: The Year We Disappeared,” on July 16, 2010, and re-aired it on December 28, 2013, shortly after Reine’s death.²

The 2003 Confession, and Why It Changed Nothing

In 2002, Melvin Reine’s sons Todd and Melvin Jr. told investigators the shooting had been retaliation for Busby’s treatment of their uncle.¹² In 2003, John Reine went to police and confessed. He said he had driven a station wagon while his brother Melvin sat in the back seat wearing a ski mask and fired three shotgun blasts at Busby. He identified his sister-in-law, Shirley Reine, as a passenger.¹³ Melvin Reine himself was quoted as saying, “I made the call and Busby got his.”¹⁴

None of it mattered legally. The Massachusetts statute of limitations for attempted murder had expired in 1989, 14 years before the confession. No criminal charges could be brought.¹⁵

Busby learned of the confession in 2004 and came out of hiding. He appeared before the Falmouth Board of Selectmen with seven former colleagues, demanding release of the 2003 police report. Because his injuries still made speaking difficult, former officer James Fagan spoke for him. The selectmen declined to intervene. Police Chief David Cusolito and Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe refused to release the report, citing an ongoing investigation into Shirley Reine’s May 2005 murder.¹⁵ The Secretary of State’s office upheld the denial on appeal, though the Cape Cod Times obtained the report from another source.¹³

The Murder of Shirley Reine

Shirley Reine was found shot twice on May 10, 2005, ambushed in the garage of the Reine compound at 657 East Falmouth Highway, the same address across from where Jeff Flanagan’s body had been found in 1972.¹⁶ She died 10 days before she was scheduled to go to trial against her stepsons Todd and Melvin Jr. in a lawsuit over control of the family business and Melvin Sr.’s mental competency.¹⁷

John Rams Jr. was indicted for the murder in December 2011.¹⁶ At trial in 2014 he was acquitted for lack of forensic evidence.¹⁷ The 2003 confession had placed Shirley in the car during the Busby shooting, and investigators had hoped her murder case might open new avenues in the older files. It did not.

Where Things Stand

Melvin Reine Sr. died on November 9, 2013, at age 74. He had spent his final 12 years at Taunton State Hospital after being committed in 2001, when he was found incompetent to stand trial on separate assault charges due to Pick’s disease, a form of dementia. Beyond the 1968 arson conviction, he was never charged with any of the crimes he was suspected of. Told of Reine’s death, Busby said: “I outlived the bastard, thank goodness… He was hell on earth.”¹⁸

For decades Busby lived on an accidental-injury retirement allowance of about $1,700 a month, roughly 72 percent of his 1981 income, with no cost-of-living adjustments. Retired officer Richard Smith led a push to correct it. The effort passed as a home-rule petition and moved through the legislature with State Representative David Vieira as its champion. On January 3, 2017, hours before the session ended, the Massachusetts House and Senate approved setting Busby’s allowance at 80 percent of a current patrolman’s pay, roughly $53,600 a year. The town meeting proposal had asked for 100 percent; legislators cut it to 80 percent because they could find no precedent for a full adjustment. The bill went to Governor Charlie Baker for signature within 10 days.³

On June 21, 2024, the Falmouth Police Department formally honored Busby for his “service, courage, and sacrifice,” 45 years after the ambush.¹⁵ No one was ever prosecuted for the shooting. The disappearances of Wanda Reine and Paul Alwardt remain unsolved. The murder of Jeff Flanagan remains unsolved. The murder of Shirley Reine ended in acquittal. Busby and his wife, Polly, married more than 40 years, live in Maine. He has said he does not feel safe returning to Falmouth.³

1
CBS News. A Family’s Year in Hiding
2
CBS News. Live to Tell: The Year We Disappeared
3
Cape Cod Times. Legislature Boosts Pension for Ambushed Officer
4
Cape Cod Times. Melvin Reine: Selective Falmouth Police
5
Charley Project. Wanda Medeiros Reine
6
Boston Magazine. Murder She Wrought
7
Cape Cod Times. Cape Murder Suspect Melvin Reine
8
Cape Cod Times. Officer Down: John Busby
9
Cape Cod Times. Busby Family Writes of 1979 Murder Attempt
10
Bangor Daily News. 48 Hours to Tell Story of Former MDI Family
11
Publishers Weekly. True Crime Memoir Revives 30-Year-Old Shooting Case
12
Cape Cod Times. Ex-Officer Shot in 1979
13
Cape Cod Times. DA Rejects New Plea
14
Cape Cod Times. Records Missing in Unsolved Falmouth Cases
15
Police1. Cop Shot 26 Years Ago Comes Out of Hiding
16
Cape Cod Times. John Rams Indicted in 2005 Killing
17
CNN. Reine Killing Cape Cod
18
Cape Cod Times. Murder Suspect Melvin Reine Dies