Cambridge Police Help Nab Killers

After eluding authorities for nearly a month, two convicted murderers who escaped on Halloween from the Bridgewater, Mass., Correctional Center were captured in East Cambridge on the eve of Thanksgiving.

Robert Dellelo and Joseph Correria had been serving life terms at the medium-security correctional center.

Dellelo killed an off-duty Boston police officer during a jewelry story heist in 1963, and he had escaped from the prison twice previously. Correria shot a guard to death during a bank robbery in 1976.

The Boston Globe reported that the two men, who escaped on Halloween, took advantage of the blind spots in the security system and escaped by "propping a picnic table against the courtyard wall, vaulting onto a walkway and then scaling a fence."

A 30-member team--including a special response, or SWAT, team and Cambridge, Somerville and state police--captured the murderers at their hideout at 46 Spring St., East Cambridge on Wednesday.

The team surrounded the hideout on Spring Street and captured the escapees when they attempted to sneak out from the back door. The hideout was located right across the street from the Middlesex County courthouse.

Police later found materials in the hideout that indicate the two men may have been planning a bank robbery, according to Cambridge Police Det. Frank Pasquarello.

Inside the hideout were a loaded .45 automatic handgun, a .32 revolver, plastic masks, wigs and fake mustaches and beard, burglary devices, ski hats, latex gloves and "a scanner to monitor police transmission and a book to help decode them," according to the Globe report.

Pasquarello said the work of the special response team was vital to the success of the police operation at the hideout.

The team did "an excellent job in containing the situation to prevent injuries," Pasquarello said. "Specially trained and equipped, it was like a special army."

Dellelo and Correria were transported to the state's maximum-security prison at Walpole, where they are being held in isolation.

The two men will likely receive additional sentences and will be permanently transferred to a to a maximum-security prison.