The town where Rachel Fretz grew up has too many memories
By Samantha C. DePoy
Staff Writer

WILTON – Rachel Fretz will pack her family into her Chevy Blazer later today, their belongings into a U-Haul, and head south to Connecticut, leaving behind the town they’ve grown to love but can’t stand to live in.

Fretz can’t go into the Wilton post office without seeing her big brother, “Butchy” Weed.

She can’t drive past the 32 Main St. home where Butchy was found dead just two days before Christmas without wanting to stop by, throw open the door and see him standing there.

She’ll never be able to take her three kids to the town’s annual Blueberry Festival in August, where Butchy flipped pancakes for the Lion’s Club. She doesn’t know even if she’ll ever be able to eat another pancake.

Rachel can barely drive down Main Street. It’s there, she remembers, right near the post office, that Butchy ripped off his shirt to show her the wounds he got playing paintball the day before.

But on Dec. 23, between 5:30 p.m. and 7 p.m., the shot that hit Rachel’s big brother, Raymond E. Weed, 40, the owner of New Horizon Builders, did not come blasting out of a paintball gun.

This time, it was for real.

‘I just can’t stay’

More than three months later and neither a killer nor a motive has been found by investigators. Plenty of names have churned out of the rumor mill, but police have made no arrests.

When Rachel leaves, she’ll be looking for some new horizons of her own.

“I just can’t stay and confront this every day,” says the 36-year-old Rachel, the youngest of the five children born to Raymond E. Weed Jr., who died of lung cancer last April, and Elaine, who still lives in Weld.

Everything here reminds her of Butchy, she says. “If I stay here, I’ll go crazy.”

Another sister, Terry Priest, has also moved from Weld, two hours away to the Bangor area.

One year ago, the parents and four of their five children lived within 15 minutes of each other, either in Wilton or Weld. By the time Rachel pulls out of town on Saturday, only sister Donna Trabucchi and Elaine will remain. Bill Weed lives in Maryland.

“I can’t stay here and have my heart broken every day,” Rachel says. And then the tears, which have become a given part of every hour, start to fall.

“They didn’t just take his life, they took all of ours. We were not only a family. We were all friends and that’s gone now. It’s torn our family apart.”

Since the murder, they barely get together. “It’s hard even to look at each other. We just see the heartbreak in each other’s eyes,” Rachel says.

As the youngest of five in a family that was so tight and so perfect that friends referred to it as “The Brady Bunch”, Rachel saw Butchy, like many of the people who met him, as a superhero.

“He was my big brother, and he was my savior. He always came to my rescue,” she remembers.

Her two sons, Jeremy, 15, and Joel, 11, saw uncle Butchy the same way.

Side by side, there are barely any differences between the baby pictures of Butchy and of Jeremy, who was going to take over Butchy’s business one day. Now he asks his mother whether he should even still want to be a contractor. It breaks her heart.

Rachel’s youngest, Emily, 3, will never know her uncle, though he was there when she was born, holding Rachel’s hand, and rubbed her belly.

Butchy wanted kids of his own in the worst way. Not having any yet, but optimistic even at age 40, he did whatever he could to make a kid’s day, like leaving a quarter in the gumball machine at Mario’s restaurant so that the next kid who passed by would get a free gumball.

“He would have been an amazing father, and somebody robbed him of that,” Rachel says, tears forming again.

Searching for closure

Now that Butchy is gone, Rachel and the rest of the family want to know who killed him.

So would the police working the case. “This has been, and continues to be, a tough case, in part because there are many possible motives. But no one motive is coming to the surface,” said Sgt. Walter Grzyb of the Maine State Police.

Rachel and others in the family have theories of their own and are frustrated. An arrest wouldn’t take away the pain, but it would provide some closure.

Rachel’s heart tells her to never give up. “You pray to God it won’t go unresolved. I couldn’t live with that,” she says. But she wonders.

And until an arrest has been made, she locks her doors, even during the day.

“I don’t know how they can live with themselves,” she says of the killer, her eyes growing fiery. “The way they did it was so disgusting.”

She has heard that time heals all wounds. But it is time, Rachel says, that is the family’s enemy. “Every day that goes by, every hour, makes it harder. The trail gets colder and colder and the hurt just gets deeper.”

Rachel says she is leaving behind a great job, great friends and, although they rip her heart apart, she is also leaving behind those little glimpses of Butchy.

Emily bounces around the room, trying to get her mother to laugh. But there is no laughter.

“It’s not that I want to move,” Rachel says, “it’s just that I can’t stay. And it’s hard because I don’t really think my brother would want me to leave.”

She blots the wet spots under her eyes with an already damp tissue.

“But he didn’t want to get shot, either.”

sdepoy@sunjournal.com

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