Three men were murdered in Waltham, Massachusetts on September 11, 2011 — the tenth anniversary of 9/11, though the question of whether that's relevant or not might be the least interesting part of the story. Their necks were slit, and their corpses were covered in marijuana and five thousand dollars in cash. It was brutal and bizarre enough to make the news, but the cops pretty quickly dropped the investigation, and nothing ever came of it.
…until about a year and a half later, on April 15, 2013, when Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar dropped a pair of bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. As it turned out, Tamerlan had been close friends with the three men who were killed in Waltham that day. They used to box together — Tamerlan had been training for the US Olympic Team, but hit a roadblock with getting his naturalized citizenship. Tamerlan had also been in contact with FBI around this same time that he was falling out with these friends. The Russian FSB had warned them that he had gotten involved with some Islamic Extremists during a trip to the Chechen region where he was born, and, according to this mother, he was allegedly being pressured into informing for the Feds.
Feels like something someone should have noticed or followed-up before the bombing happened, yeah?
In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing, another friend of the group, Ibragim Todashev, told the FBI that he was there with Tamerlan at the house in Waltham on September 11, 2011, and watched as Tamerlan killed the three men. And here's where it gets really weird: just as Todashev was about to sign his written confession on the subject, he "allegedly" jumped up from the table and attacked the FBI agents with a broom, leaving them "no choice" but to conveniently shoot him dead.
Intrigued? Then you should check out The Murders Before the Marathon, a new 3-part documentary series from Hulu/ABC News based on journalist Susan Zalkind's upcoming book The Waltham Murders: An Unsolved Homicide, a National Tragedy, and a Search for the Truth. Zalkind has been covering this bizarre plot from the beginning, so the series is shine some new light on the situation — although whether or not it confirms any actual "truth" may depend on the FBI.
Inside the Mystery Triple Murder Before the Boston Marathon Bombing [Nick Schager / The Daily Beast]
