A 15-YEAR-OLD BOY WENT TO A DANCE AND NEVER RETURNED. HIS TEEN KILLERS KEPT A SECRET FOR 41 YEARS. WILL ONE OF THEM CRACK?

"48 HOURS: THE PACT"

SATURDAY, OCT. 25, 2014 AT 10:00 PM, ET/PT

For more than four decades, Evelyn McCabe wondered who killed her son, John. He was 15 years, six months and two weeks old when she let him attend a Knights of Columbus dance. He never made it to 15 years, six months, two weeks and one day old. After the dance, John was murdered.

Richard Schlesinger and 48 HOURS investigate the murder of John McCabe and his family's decades-long quest to find out what really happened to their son in "The Pact," to be broadcast Saturday, Oct. 25 (10:00 PM, ET/PT)
on the CBS Television Network.

"I don't think I've had a whole night's sleep since it happened," Evelyn McCabe tells 48 HOURS.

Evelyn waited up for John's return on that fateful night in 1969. At midnight, she got in her car and rode down the darkened streets screaming out his name. "No John," says Evelyn, "I began praying at that point."

The day after John McCabe should have been back in his Tewksbury, Mass., home, three young kids cutting through a vacant lot in the neighboring city of Lowell found his body. He'd been tied up, and his mouth and eyes were taped over.

Police launched a massive investigation and talked to dozens of teenagers. From the beginning, there were suspicions that John's schoolmates may be involved. One of them, Walter Shelley, was driving around that night in a car that matched the description of a car spotted near the crime scene. Shelley denied having anything to do with John's death. There was no definitive forensic evidence and no corroborating witnesses, so the case went cold. Years turned into decades without answers, but the family never lost hope. McCabe's father, Bill, began documenting his son's life in a notebook. Bill and Evelyn also kept the heat on police to keep looking for their son's killer.

"I always visualized him as being a big shot somewhere. John Joseph McCabe. 'My son, JJ,' you know?" Evelyn tells 48 HOURS. "And I knew he'd pick the right girl when he decided to get married. But I never got to see any of those things."

In 2000, Bill McCabe got a tip from Jack Ward, a childhood friend of John's. Ward said he'd heard that the motive for killing John was jealousy, that John had been flirting with Shelley's girlfriend, Marla Shiner, and that didn't sit well with Shelley. But again, there was no corroborating evidence, and again the case stalled.

Things began to change in 2007, when Gerry Leone was sworn in as the Middlesex County District Attorney. Members of the Lowell Police Department visited the new D.A. and asked his office to take a hard look at the McCabe case. Investigators went back and found a name that jumped out - Edward Alan Brown. But would it prove to be the break that Bill and Evelyn McCabe spent their lives waiting to surface?

"You go back to the first days of the murder," says Leone, now a partner of the law firm Nixon Peabody. "This might have been a dispute between teenagers, it might've involved a girl, it might've involved drinking. Whoever knew about John's killing kept this secret over 40 years."

Could Leone and his team solve the case that haunted the McCabe family for so long?

Schlesinger and 48 HOURS tell the McCabe story through interviews with his parents, Bill and Evelyn, McCabe's sisters, Debbie and Roberta, Leone, Ward and more. 48 HOURS: "The Pact" is produced by Judy Rybak and Peter Henderson. Mead Stone is the producer-editor. Judy Tygard is the senior producer. Susan Zirinsky is the senior executive producer.

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