ATTLEBORO — The 74-year-old man who was struck and killed on Pleasant Street last Saturday murdered his wife in his North Chelmsford home in 1987, police say.
According to Attleboro’s Chief of Police, Kyle Heagney, Basil Bletsis, aged 74, admitted to murdering his 29-year-old wife, Panagiota Bletsis in 1987 at their residence in North Chelmsford. The murder took place when Basil was 37 years old.
Basil was struck by a vehicle near 149 Pleasant Street at about 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 2, 2024. The driver of the vehicle that struck Bletsis remained on scene and collaborated with investigators.
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A news article from the Daily News in New York, dated Sept. 6, 1987, reported that Panagiota’s “savagely beaten body” was found in the trunk of Basil’s car at Kennedy International Airport in New York on Sept. 5, 1987. Panagiota was a mother of two.
“The murder case started in her Massachusetts bedroom and ended with her husband’s arrest in California,” the Daily News article states. It is unclear whether he spent any time in prison.
“Acting on a call from Massachusetts police, Port Authority cops hammered open the trunk of a silver-gray four-door Mitsubishi sedan around 6:30 p.m. and found the nightgown-clad body of Panagiota Bletsis, 29, of North Chelmsford, Mass.,” the Daily News article reported. “Severely beaten on the head, the woman was wrapped in a blanket, her hands and neck bound.”
The article added that it was unclear that the children were home at the time Panagiota was killed. According to the Daily News article, investigators at the time “found the Bletsis bedroom in disarray and splattered with blood. A broken chair leg was found, and a phone cord had been torn from the wall.”
The article said the Bletsis’ home was in a “mixed blue-collar, white-shirt neighborhood of mostly single-family Victorian cottages.”
According to the Daily News article, authorities at the time said that Basil departed from Chelmsford just before 4 a.m., and made his way to Kennedy International Airport, where he arrived shortly before 8 a.m. He then boarded a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles, and upon landing, caught another flight to Santa Barbara to visit his brother.
It is reported in the article that Basil confessed the murder to his brother. Following this confession, his brother contacted relatives in Chelmsford, who then alerted local police, as stated by investigators at the time. Basil subsequently turned himself in to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department.
According to a United Press International article dated September 6, 1987, Massachusetts authorities issued a murder warrant for Basil, leading to his arrest by detectives from the sheriff’s office. He was detained in the Santa Barbara County Jail.
WJAR reported that individuals who shared a living space with Basil at a rest home on Pleasant Street in Attleboro said his history was seldom discussed.
“He was very quiet and smiled a lot and he had dimples,” Brenda Cuellar, a resident of the rest home, told the news outlet.
