Salem man found guilty in 1971 cold case killing of Bedford woman

Arthur Massei, 78, was convicted of first degree murder.

A Salem man was convicted Tuesday in the 1971 cold case killing of Natalie Scheublin in her Bedford home, authorities announced.

Arthur Massei, 78, was found guilty by a jury on charges of first degree murder and solicitation to suborn perjury in the trial of a capital indictment, the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office announced.

“Natalie Scheublin was a wife, a mother and a cancer survivor who loved gardening and painting. She was brutally murdered by a stranger in her own home,” Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said in a statement. “For more than fifty years this case went unsolved. Today’s verdict is the culmination of years of investigative work and exemplifies the core mission of my Cold Case Unit – providing answers to families,”

Raymon Scheublin, president of the Lexington Trust Bank, returned home from work on June 10, 1971 to find his wife, 54-year-old Natalie Scheublin, dead in the basement of their Bedford home, her ankles bound and a makeshift gag on her neck. She had been stabbed multiple times and struck in the head causing massive injury, according to authorities.

According to the DA’s office, during the investigation it was found that a set of bank keys were missing and that Natalie’s car had been stolen. While the vehicle was later found in a parking lot and police were able to collect several latent fingerprints, no suspect would be identified for decades.

Using new fingerprint technology in 1999, investigators identified Massei as a potential suspect.

“Police interviewed Massei in 2000, but he denied ever having been in Bedford or having any knowledge of the murder,” the DA’s office said. “In 2005, when police re-interviewed Massei, he changed his story, claiming that he had been solicited by an organized crime associate to murder the wife of a banker and to make the murder look like a break-in, but that he had refused the solicitation.”

The DA’s Cold Case Unit began to re-examine the case in 2019 and identified a woman who told investigators that Massei told her while they were involved in the 90s that he had organized crime connections and he’d once stabbed a person to death in their home, prosecutors said.

According to the DA’s office, while in custody on the murder charge, Massei attempted to bring forward a witness to give false testimony at his trial, offering a $1,000 if the person would claim he’d been framed for the murder.

Massei will be sentenced on May 31 in Middlesex Superior Court.