Boston.com, March 2026
Last week, 18-year-old Anthony DeMayo allegedly told police he had “wanted to kill someone for a long time.” After driving around the North Shore, the Bishop Fenwick High School student from Lynn allegedly came upon what appeared to be a random home at a corner lot in Danvers early Thursday morning. Investigators say he broke through a kitchen screen and walked into a bedroom, where he fatally stabbed 68-year-old Janet Swallows as she slept. As charged, it was a brutal, bewildering act — the kind that defies motive. “But sometimes we need to make sense of senseless murder,” says James Alan Fox, a research professor of criminology at Northeastern University.
Adults tend to kill for reasons based on logic, Fox said. Even though it is abhorrent, people understand killings out of jealousy, rage, revenge, and profit. But, teenagers “often kill for no good reason,” he said. DeMayo pleaded not guilty to murder and home invasion charges Friday. He was held without bail and was to undergo further evaluations at Bridgewater State Hospital.
