Bridgewater Man Attacks Estranged Wife With Hammer

It was late on a cold Monday night in February, 2010 at the Bridgewater police station. And here in this quiet quintessential New England town, the scene looked more like a page out of a Stephen King novel than a Monday night at a small town police station.

A man’s face was smeared with blood, as were his hands. His clothes were drenched a deep crimson. “Do you need medical attention?” The police officers asked him. “No.” The man answered quietly. “The blood is not mine.”

Earlier that night, 41-year old Brian Bellamy smashed a hammer through a window of his estranged wife’s parents home and headed up the stairs possessed with rage. Bellamy’s two year-old son was sleeping next to his wife, but that did not deter him from his evil and dastardly deed. Bellamy started bludgeoning his wife with the hammer. Hard, violent blows to her face and neck. Blood splattered everywhere, dripping from the bed and onto the floor. Next Bellamy took his hands and wrappe them around her small neck and began the squeeze.

When the victim’s father tried to stop him, Bellamy started to strangle his father-in-law as well. That’s when the Bridgewater police arrived, just in time. The victim’s mother had called 911 at the beginning of the crime. Luckily, the woman survived.

This was certainly not the first bludgeoning or crime of passion involving an attack on a family member in Bridgewater, a town that has a dark history of madness and murder. Behind the veils of this beautiful college town, lies a sinister and mysterious history of brutal matricides and parricides: Most involving brutal bludgeonings of a family member or family members.

One of the most famous of these crimes is the murder of Justin Gunn by his son Henry. An argument over potatoes led to a bloody massacre with a screwdriver and a hatchet. The Boston papers reported that the victims “brains were dashed while he slept” with “two hideous wounds to the head.” Justin Gunn was not remorseful for the crime at all when apprehended by Bridgewater police a few weeks after the crime.

In Gunn’s confession to the police, Justin was oddly calm and in complete control when he described the horrific events that occured on September 24, 1879. After his father scolded him over his son’s error in putting wet potatoes in the root cellar, Justin Gunn claimed that his father “knocked him down.” Gunn went on to say in his confession: “I got up, reached to the mantle piece and took a small screwdriver about the size of my finger, but about two feet long and struck him with it but he got the best of me and pounded me good. I was wild for revenge. As he rested on the edge of the bed, I went out of the dining room into the passage way and took a hatchet which I had found there and came back to the room where he was. Holding the hatchet–a heavy one–in my left hand…I went to the front of father and when I got past I turned and struck him the head with it, using both hands and knocking him so that his head fell toward the head of the bed on which he was sitting. I struck him three or four times. He fell off of the bed. I picked him and and laid him on it again, he made not noise at all.”

Another chilling family murder five years prior to the Gunn murder. On February 15, 1874, seven miles from the Bridgewater Depot in nearby Halifax, three elderly people were brutally beaten to death with a sharp cart spike. The crime scene had the even the toughest police officer shaken. The triple murder of two brothers and their housekeeper had locals of the Bridgewater area living in terror–until police arrested the crazed murder, William E Sturtevenant–the very nephew of the victims.

The most recent murder within a Bridgewater family occured on December 15, 2002, when George Nardi, living with his mother, Deborah Buchard killed her in a fit of rage when she refused to make him dinner that night. The murder weapon were Nardi’s bare hands with which he smothered her to death. Immediately after the crime, Nardi left a chilling voice mail for his brother. It was of Nardi laughing insanely, then finally saying, “You’re not going to be able to spend Christmas with mom this year.”

Norman Bates-style, Nardi lived with the rotting corpse of his mother for over two weeks.

Read more at Bridgewater Triangle