After drinking beer with co-workers, he was shot dead in his parents’ driveway in Harvard. His murder was never solved.

In the spring of 1979, Johnny Donaldson was at a crossroads in his young life. He had left Hartwick College in upstate New York and moved back into his parents’ house in Harvard, a quiet suburb about 30 miles northwest of Boston.

He got a job at the Sheraton Boxborough, a hotel in the neighboring town. Without college classes to worry about, he could enjoy life at his own pace, spending time outdoors and hanging out with friends.

On the evening of April 5, 1979, the 20-year-oldworked the night shift at the hotel and afterward drank beer with a couple of his co-workers. He eventually headed home and ended up in the driveway of his parents’ house on Lovers Lane.

In the early hours of April 6, a local patrolman named Ronald Robbins saw Donaldson sitting behind the wheel of his orange Ford Pinto and stopped to check on him. Donaldson said he had worked late and was finishing up a cigarette. Robbins told him to go inside when he was done, and continued on his way.

He was the last known person to see Donaldson alive.

Later that morning, at about 6:45 a.m., Donaldson was found by his brother. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of his Pinto. His hands were in his lap and he was holding a burnt-out cigarette. A trail of blood ran down his face. Six shots had been fired at the car from about 60 feet, and one bullet entered his brain, killing him instantly, according to the Worcester Telegram.

John Reardon, the police chief at the time, said no one reported hearing gunshots on the quiet residential street.

“It’s really strange,” Reardon, 83, said in an interview. “Very, very strange.”

Reardon said .22-caliber shell casings were found at the scene, and rounds from the same caliber weaponwere fired at a gas station near the Sheraton hotel, the front window of a nearby liquor store, and several cars parked about two miles away on Liberty Square Road in Boxborough, according to news reports at the time.

Was it joyriding teenagers who shot up Donaldson’s car for kicks, not knowing he was inside? Or was he targeted for some reason, perhaps because of money he owed or something he knew?

“There were all kinds of theories,” Reardon said.

Reardon said the barrel of a .22 was discovered not far from the scene, “but the firing pin on it had been damaged” so investigators couldn’t determine whether it was used in the shootings.

Reardon said .22-caliber casings were also found on Hillcrest Drive in Harvard, where there was “a little shooting range” in a backyard. But those casings didn’t match those found on Lovers Lane and in Boxborough, Reardon said.

The last night that Donaldson was alive he went to his dishwashing job at the hotel and worked the evening shift with Robert Kurt Allan, 18, and David Packard, 17. Allan and Packard were neighbors on Hillcrest Drive in Harvard.

After their shift ended, Donaldson, Allan, and Packard hung out togetheron Hillcrest Drive.

“We all worked together that night and [were] chilling after work,” Packard said in a recent interview.

After having “one or two beers,” Packard said he called it a nightand went inside his house.

“I myself had to work the next morning so I left them in John’s car at the end of my driveway, approximately 1 a.m.-ish,” Packard recalled.

Packard said he learned Donaldson had been killed when he arrived to work at the hotel that morning and he was questioned by investigators. He said he doesn’t know why anyone would have wanted to kill Donaldson, describing him as a “good kid.”

After Donaldson’s death, Allan was quoted in the Worcester Evening Gazette. “We weren’t really friends, but we worked together a lot and sometimes went out together. He was good to be around,” Allan said. “I have a feeling it just might have been an accident.”

Allan died in 2022. His mother, Mary Allan, still lives in Harvard and recalls Donaldson’s violent death.

“Certainly it touched all of us,” she said in an interview. “It was a terrible tragedy for such a small town, a close town.”

She said her son was questioned by different law enforcement officers, and he told them that Donaldson had given him a ride home from work that night.

“Nobody had any vendetta against him, at least not that I know of,” she said. “I just knew what our son told us, which was very little.”

Reardon, who was the town’s police chief until 1981, described the case as “really, really frustrating” and was surprised that no one ever came forward “because everybody involved in the investigation feels that there was more than one person involved in this.”

Three years after Reardon left the department, there was a major break in the case, or so it seemed.

In February 1984, Robbins, the patrolman who spoke briefly with Donaldson in his parents’ driveway, was arrested and charged with being an accessory after the fact of his murder. Robbins was no longer working for the Harvard Police Department and was serving in the Air Force Reserve. But the case against him went nowhere.

At a court hearing that May, Assistant District Attorney Brian J. Buckley said an informant in the case had “changed his story,” according to the Telegram. “The evidence, as a whole, is insufficient at this time,” he said.

The informant had told police that Robbins confided to him that he knew the identity of Donaldson’s killer, Worcester Magazine reported. But the informant was facing a drug charge and refused to cooperate unless it was dropped. When that didn’t happen, the informant stopped talking. He later told State Police that he never heard Robbins say anything about Donaldson, the magazine reported.

The judge found no probable cause of guilt and Robbins ended up suing the town and members of the police department, alleging that he was falsely charged and arrested. In 1988, the town settled the lawsuit for $40,000, according to media reports.Robbins died in 2022 at the age of 69.

Jim Donaldson, who found his younger brother’s body, believes the investigation was derailed by an unwarranted focus on Robbins.

“They never looked in the other direction,” he said.

Donaldson said he has reviewed police reports and documents from his brother’s case and found potential leads that appeared tohave beenoverlooked. For example, a report stated that a DEA informant who was working at the Sheraton hotel told police that Allan and Packard were upset at Donaldson because he owed them money (in a recent interview with the Globe, Packard denied that Donaldson owed either of them any money).

Donaldson said he believes that once Robbins became a suspect, the investigation narrowed and “all of that got cast aside.”

Donaldson said he’s confident that someone knows something about what transpired that night, something they’ve “kept secret their entire lives.”

“You’re talking about a finite amount of kids” living in a small town, Donaldson said. “It’s pretty hard for anything to happen without somebody knowing about it.”

“At 3 in the morning in Harvard, Mass., the only people rolling around town that time of night live there.”

Jack Izzo, a retired detective who worked for the local police department from 1991 to 2013, said he always wanted to work on the case and finally got the opportunity when he was about to retire.

“Chief [Edward] Denmark knew I was going to retire in a year or two. And he said, ‘What would you like to do before you retire?’” he recalled. “I’d love to work that case. And he says, ‘Well, go ahead and reopen it.’ So that’s what I did.”

Izzo said he looked at everyone he could as a potential suspect, including another young man who lived nearby.

“The woods directly across the street from the Donaldson’s would have given him a clear shot to his home,” he said. “He and John had some kind of relationship. Not sure if good or bad.”

But Izzo didn’t get to work the case as long as he’d hoped.

He said he was supposed to team up with two cold case investigators from the State Police, which had jurisdiction over the case. But they never met him as scheduled, he said.

“Every time they said they were going to be there, they never showed up,” he recalled. “This case has bothered me for so many years. Why was I immediately pulled off of it? Was I asking too many questions?”

Donaldson is among the many unresolved murders listed on Worcester District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr.’s website. A spokesperson for Early declined to comment on the case.

Donaldson’s sister, Susan Donaldson James, a former reporter for ABC and NBC News, has written a memoir about the impact her brother’s death has had on her family.

“Lovers Lane is a very dark, windy, wooded road,” she said. “You have to know where we live. You don’t just sort of stumble upon this house.”

James said she had always believed that her brother’s death was “accidental, joyriding teens with a rifle who had no idea my brother was sitting in his car.”

But after researching the case, she is less certain.

“How is it that in Harvard, a town of 4,000, no one knows anything?” she asked. “Teenagers are not good at keeping secrets, especially for 45 years.”

“We know law enforcement was investigating the Boxborough Sheraton for illegal drugs,” she added. “Did Johnny see something? Could his murder have been intentional or a sting gone wrong?”

“I am hopeful that this article will motivate just one person with a guilty conscience to come forward.”

Anyone with information is urged to contact Massachusetts State Police Detectives assigned to the Worcester County District Attorney’s office at 508-453-7589 or [email protected].

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Emily Sweeney can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @emilysweeney and on Instagram @emilysweeney22.

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