julia.reischel@exhibitAnews.com
In the summer of 1991, John J. Shea Jr. threw two women off his boat five miles from the coast of Hull — where they nearly died in the frigid waters.
Not surprisingly, the shocking incident spawned more than a few headlines at the time. But, 17 years later, the story is getting another shot at the spotlight due to the efforts of Gene Allen, a local movie producer and avid sailor who has made the chilling episode the basis for "Wake," a motion picture slated to hit the film-festival circuit this spring.
"I've always been involved with boats, and I never forgot this story after I read about it in the papers," Allen says. "It had a pretty profound effect on me."
Indeed, it's hard to forget a tale as dramatic as this one:
According to court documents and lawyers involved in the case, John Shea and his friend James Smith were spending the afternoon of June 15, 1991, on the Charles River aboard Shea's powerboat, Wet Dreams. With a ready supply of beer and marijuana, the only thing missing from this otherwise picture-perfect scene was female company for the men.
When Shea spied two young women sunbathing in bikinis on a dock near Boston's Hatch Shell, he pulled up alongside them.
"They were batting their eyelashes," Shea later told a doctor during a psychiatric evaluation at Bridgewater State Hospital. "I had never seen them before."
According to another woman who was sunning herself nearby, the pair of recent law school graduates (one who declined to be interviewed by Exhibit A and the other who did not return a phone call) acted friendly toward the men.
Shea invited the women aboard, offering them the choice of a ride down the river or a cruise on the open seas. They accepted the offer, telling Shea they didn't care which route he took.
Pulling away from the banks of the Charles, Shea and Smith steered the boat toward the Boston Harbor and headed out to sea with their guests.
'Completely nuts'
Drinking and smoking along the way, the group stopped Wet Dreams off the coast of Hull. According to court documents, Shea and Smith then tried to pair off with the women. While Smith was somewhat successful in his advances, Shea was not so lucky.
"Shea decided to get friendly," says retired attorney John E.D. Conwell, who initially represented Shea after the incident. "She was pushing back a little bit; she just didn't want to do all the nasty things he had in mind. So, Shea loses his temper and goes completely nuts."
While trying to persuade his would-be date to get intimate with him, Shea proceeded to take off his clothes. He then tried to remove hers as well, but his overtures were met with resistance.
"I still recall the fear in first fighting him off from trying to tear my clothes off and attack me," the woman said in a victim impact statement she filed after the episode.
But Shea's lawyers countered that he merely was roughhousing in a playful manner.
What both sides could agree on was that a naked Shea proceeded to throw the woman into the 53-degree water, at which point he lost his balance and fell overboard himself. He then wrestled her in the ocean.
The victim said he held her under the water repeatedly, before he climbed back onto the boat and turned his attention to the other woman.
According to court documents, Shea said: "How about you? You want to go swimming too?" He then picked up the second woman and threw her overboard, ripping off her bikini top in the process.
Meanwhile, the first woman was attempting to climb back onboard. She clung to the awning on top of the boat before Shea eventually forced her off and back into the frigid water alongside her friend.
What happened next depends on whom you talk to. One scenario has Shea immediately starting the boat's engine and taking off; the other has Wet Dreams staying at the scene and circling the women as they treaded water.
Either way, the water-bound women spent anywhere from a few minutes to a half-hour trying to keep themselves afloat, convinced they were going to die.
At some point, the Saltaire, a sailboat that was participating in a race nearby, approached the pair bobbing in the swells. According to accounts, Wet Dreams was gone and one of the women was exhibiting signs of hypothermia.
A marine manhunt launched by the U.S. Coast Guard and state, local and environmental police turned up Wet Dreams a few hours later docked at the Salt Water Club in Hull. Shea and Smith were in the vicinity, and Smith quickly helped turn in Shea to authorities.
Not suspenseful enough?
The sordid details of what transpired that June day already make for a good thriller, but Gene Allen, who spends his days running the advertising and marketing firm Allen Roche Group, decided to embellish them for the big screen.
Relying on newspaper accounts and the recollections of Howard A. Altholtz, a Boston entertainment attorney who was in the victims' class at Suffolk University Law School, Allen reconstructed the incident, hired a screenwriter and spent two years and a dozen drafts fictionalizing the facts of the case to his liking.
"I kind of took the liberty to make the film more suspenseful," he explains.
In Allen's version of the tale, Shea and Smith are from South Boston, and the two women are college students instead of law school graduates.
Allen also invented characters: a prostitute and her ex-con boyfriend and a wealthy couple from Hingham who own the sailboat that rescued the women.
The film's take on the sexual assault at sea is brutal, and its consequences are much grimmer than they were in real life.
As the plot unfolds, it weaves together different perspectives from the four couples involved, and a surprise twist reveals what really happened out on the water.
The result, Allen hopes, is not just a film, but a commentary on society.
"What I kind of wanted to do was create four different views of our society from their perspectives," he says.
Since last summer, Allen and his crew have filmed at the sites where the actual incident occurred. The scene in which the girls board Wet Dreams was shot on the dock near the Hatch Shell, and the scenes at sea were filmed out on the ocean, near Boston Light.
Impressively, all of Allen's local actors, who number more than a dozen, performed their own stunts, including the frigid takes in the Atlantic Ocean.
Sometime this spring, film-festival audiences around the country will be able to view Allen's version of the story.
Assault and battery … with the ocean
Some would argue that the most interesting chapter of this story is not even included in "Wake."
After Shea's arrest, a three-ring-circus of a court battle ensued, complete with plot twists, legal absurdities, intrigue and even death threats.
Almost immediately after he was charged with kidnapping, attempted murder, indecent assault and battery, and assault and battery with "a large body of water," Shea fired Conwell, his first lawyer.
Shea's second attorney, Thomas J. Giblin III, argued that his client was mentally ill. Shea was the child of an alcoholic father, had a history of alcohol abuse and suicide attempts, and at one point claimed he had epilepsy.
But Giblin says his attempts to bring in "a chiropractor" to testify to Shea's mental illness were quashed by Superior Court Judge Cortland A. Mathers.
Meanwhile, Shea and his wife, Donna, had their own theories about what happened, with Donna telling the Brockton Enterprise that the victims had trapped her husband in a "get-rich-quick scheme."
"Sometimes, I wonder if it wasn't a set-up, and things got a little out of hand," Shea told one of his evaluators at Bridgewater State Hospital. "Picking them up was a big mistake. What I did was totally by accident — there was never any intent."
But it turned out the Sheas were the ones with the checkered past.
In 1986, Donna Shea allegedly commissioned a Quincy engineer named Alfred W. Trenkler to build her a bomb that she proceeded to detonate under a truck belonging to the Capeway Fish Market in Weymouth, her former employer. (According to a 1986 Quincy police report, Donna Shea "was fired [from Capeway] for dealing cocaine over the counter." The report goes on to suggest that the bomb was planted in retaliation.)
Trenkler later went on build another bomb in 1991, this one in collaboration with Thomas A. Shay, who mounted it under his father's car. The bomb didn't kill the elder Shay, but it did take the life of a police officer, Jeremiah Hurley, and it maimed another cop when they tried to defuse the device.
As the Wet Dreams trial approached, the two female victims and one of the witnesses in the case allegedly received numerous threatening phone calls, among them, "Testify and die!" The victims reported other harassment, including cars driven by friends of the Sheas following them, and one even received a letter from a funeral home thanking her for her inquiry about headstones.
Shea's week-long trial took place in April 1992. At the conclusion, he was found guilty of kidnapping, attempted murder, indecent assault and battery, and, yes, assault and battery with the ocean — which the court ruled was a dangerous weapon.
Judge Mathers sentenced Shea to eight to 10 years for the kidnapping and 10 to 12 years for the attempted murder. He was subsequently incarcerated at Bridgewater's detention center.
"He didn't do a good job testifying that he didn't leave until he saw the other boat coming," Giblin remembers of his client. "But that guy paid a huge price."
The price ended up somewhat lower, though.
In 1995, the Appeals Court overturned the ruling that Shea had used the ocean as a dangerous weapon, and Shea and his wife used their past dealings with Trenkler, the engineer-turned-bomb-maker, to strike a deal.
In 1993, when Trenkler went on trial for his role in killing the police officer, the Sheas made themselves useful to the prosecution. The information they provided about the 1986 explosion helped implicate Trenkler as a serial bomber and led to his conviction and life sentence.
In exchange for the Sheas' cooperation, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Kelly pushed the court to revise John Shea's sentence.
As a result, Shea was released from jail "probably only three or four years" after he was convicted, Giblin says.
Shea's former lawyers are no longer in contact with him, and Exhibit A was unable to locate him or his wife.
As for Shea's victims, both women went on to pass the bar exam and are practicing law in Boston, but neither expressed interest in resurrecting the past or talking to reporters.
But if "Wake" is well received, the Sheas and their victims will soon be forced to relive the summer of 1991. {EXA}
