Scott Schulte

A Horrible Nightmare - A HORRIBLE NIGHTMARE' LOTTERY WORKER WHO WITNESSED KILLINGS 5 DIE AS CONN. LOTTERY WORKER GOES ON RAMPAGE

NOTE: This article was honored with the Associated Press Headliner Award. I contributed to this piece as part of a team with the Boston Globe staff.


NEWINGTON, Conn. -- He was an accountant who had a chip on his shoulder and a bayonet on his kitchen table. He lived with his parents across from a llama farm in a small beige house with a sign informing visitors: "Trespassers will be shot; survivors will be shot again."

As dawn broke over Ledyard yesterday, Matthew Beck, 35, left his folks' home -- across town from the casino -- got in his car, and drove 1 1/2 hours to his job at Connecticut Lottery headquarters. At some point, he strapped a bandolier of bullets across his chest, over his gray pin-striped shirt but concealed by a brown leather jacket. He carried a 9mm pistol and a knife. At 8:35 a.m., a co-worker at the lottery saw Beck fumbling in a storage closet.

"Why don't you put the light on?" she asked.

"I'm looking for something," he answered.

Five minutes later, Beck opened fire, mowing down four of the lottery's top brass. First was Michael Logan, 33, director of information services, stabbed and shot in a suite of executive offices. Then vice president Frederick Rubelmann III, 40, was shot. Next, Beck burst into a meeting, said "bye-bye" to chief financial officer Linda Mlynarczyk, 38, and shot her three times.

As Beck continued down the corridor, lottery chief Otho Brown, 54, sprinted ahead of him, screaming to his employees, "Run, run, run!" Later, those who survived would call Brown their hero. The lottery's security chief, who was unarmed, also yelled, "Keep running!"

Some workers dived under their desks; about 20 ran into a paint warehouse in the same building as the lottery. "Call 911; he's got a gun," someone cried. Others ran out the door and into nearby woods. One man tried to leap into the back of a truck driving by and smashed his head.

Some jumped into a trench beside the building. As they lay on their stomachs trembling, crying, and praying, Beck chased Brown past the ditch and across the parking lot. About 100 yards across the lot, Brown stumbled and fell. He raised his arms in a position of surrender: "Don't kill me, don't kill me," he pleaded. "Ah, shut up," Beck said, and shot him.

As police closed in, Beck pumped a bullet into his own right temple.

He had spent almost half his life shadow-boxing with depression and suicidal thoughts. A brainy boy brought up in a loving family on the outskirts of Ledyard, Matthew Beck lived in a rustic house set off from neighbors by a split-rail fence. Horses grazed in the back yard.

The family didn't socialize much. Joe Rezendes, who had lived two houses down from them for 19 years, never spoke a word to them. He'd see them and wave.

At Ledyard High School, Beck left few footprints. His yearbook is empty of mischievous inscriptions. Teachers remember him as a fine young man, a good student.

But as Beck entered his 20s, friends thought he had become more paranoid. At age 21, he slit his wrist but survived.

At some point, he graduated from the Florida Institute of Technology. He worked at various times as a security guard and a tax representative for the Internal Revenue Service. He joined the Connecticut Lottery's accounting division in April 1989.

Things seemed fine until the summer of '96. He was galled that his bosses started asking him to do data processing work without increasing his $45,214 salary.

By January 1997, Beck seemed depressed and delusional. He complained to a friend about his parents, his girlfriend, his job.
"Sick of life," is how one friend described Beck's mood. Even his father would later call him troubled.

As Beck rambled on to his friend on the phone, he said he was holding a knife. Afraid that Beck would turn it on himself, the friend called police.

When police arrived at Beck's apartment in Cromwell, they found a large bayonet on the kitchen table.
But Beck was gone. Later, he asked two friends to check his apartment for him. "Something strange is going on there," he said. He eventually surfaced at a friend's house.

Friends said he looked creepy after he grew a goatee and shaved his head about a year ago when his hair began to fall out.

An aficionado of guns and golf, he apparently was able to acquire a pistol permit despite his increasing mental instability.

And his frustration at work continued. Last August, he filed a grievance with the union. Angst continued to corrode him, and in October, he went on a paid leave of absence for work-related stress for four months.

He returned last week, but seemed more moody, even stone-faced.

On Friday of last week, Beck met with his union shop steward, Joseph Mudry, and Mlynarczyk, the chief financial officer, about his grievance. Beck had won the first part of his private labor battle: He wouldn't have to do data processing anymore.

But the question of back pay remained up in the air.

Twice this week he bugged his shop steward, asking him Thursday how much longer the process was going to drag on. Beck already had put out feelers for jobs outside the lottery.

This week, he reportedly was passed over for a promotion and a raise.

In Otho "Otto" Brown's Avon Mountain neighborhood in the upper-class, residential town of Avon northwest of Hartford, houses sit back 100 feet from the road and the front lawns are an expanse of pine trees and sharp shrubbery.

It's an old neighborhood that has been discovered in recent years by young executives with some money and some children. Brown had both.

Brown, a Wilmington, Del., native, was chosen president and chief executive of the Connecticut Lottery in 1993. He made $104,572 a year, and neighbors said he earned it, working long hours and returning late to his wife, Denise, their twin 8-year-old daughters and an older son.

He was looking forward to his girls' 9th birthday party Monday. The Browns were fixtures at the neighborhood association's pool in the summer, and Brown delighted in escorting his children among the crowd of angels and goblins who patroled Avon Mountain each Halloween.

When he wasn't at his desk, Brown preferred the outdoors -- the roar of a motorcycle or the serenity of a sailboat near sunset.
"He was a hands-on, fair administrator," said Frank D. Brown (no relation), deputy director of the Delaware Lottery, which Otho Brown directed before he went to Connecticut. "He liked to show off pictures of the kids. This was a family man."

Early yesterday morning, Brown said goodbye to his family. And then neighbors saw him drive off quickly, a man in a hurry to get to his job running the state lottery in Newington.

The last time Linda Mlynarczyk faced death, love bloomed.

She was Linda A. Blogoslawski then, New Britain's mayor. It was 1993, and she was in a small airplane when it was forced to make an emergency landing in a Middletown cornfield. Next to her sat Peter Mlynarczyk, a former New Britain alderman.

"Facing death side by side brings people closer together," Mlynarczyk told the Hartford Courant in 1994. The couple married -- a union her husband said made him "the luckiest man in the world."

She was a hometown girl who grew up to be mayor in a city where her Polish roots and her attention to detail made her a natural for the job.

"She was young, vibrant, intelligent -- and she had a great smile," said Lucian J. Pawlak, the Democrat who defeated Mlynarczyk for the mayoralty in 1995.

Even as she exchanged one public job for another -- appointed in 1996 to the lottery's $79,500-a-year post of chief financial officer -- residents said she remained dedicated to local causes and the idea of marketing the city of New Britain.

"She had great ideas for this city," said Daniel Hogan, one of many who stood in clusters downtown yesterday, murmuring about the morning's murders.

For Mlynarczyk, home was in New Britain's West End section -- a symbol of attainment in a working-class city. Recently married, her sandy-colored home on a wooded lot provided a bit of remove and seclusion from the busy downtown neighborhoods where she grew up.

Yesterday morning, as Mlynarczyk began her commute to work, she wound her way down Reservoir Road and past the kids piling out of a yellow school bus in front of red-brick Vance Elementary School a short distance away.

And then she continued on to lottery headquarters.

As vice president of the Connecticut Lottery's operations and administration, Frederick Rubelmann III's work life was that of the harried executive.

And his life at home was just as busy.

The father of two young children, Rubelmann was the sort of man who coached the Little League team, plowed neighbors' driveways after a snowfall, and dipped into the savings account to give his children a special vacation on the West Coast.

Rubelmann, whose $84,656 salary kept him financially apace in one of the nation's wealthiest states, lived with his wife, Mary, in a two-story home with tan siding and a porch. It's a quiet street off Route 10 in Southington, where Rubelmann, who studied forestry at the University of Connecticut, balanced the rigors of work with the pleasures of family. "He took care of his kids and had a lot of plans for them," said a neighbor, who asked not to be identified. "What happens now to those plans?"

It sometimes was a crazy morning routine at the Rubelmann household. "Mornings were hectic down there," said a neighbor whose children used to baby-sit for the Rubelmann kids. "Lots of laughter and kidding and joking and trying to find things."

The lottery executive planned to go to the Hartford Wolfpack hockey game last night with his son, a nephew, and a sister-in-law. It was his nephew's birthday.

But first, he had to go to work.

Michael Logan, the lottery's director of information services, lived in a split-level Colonial in a modern development whose backyards are dotted with swing sets, basketball hoops, and plastic toys.

He was married and the father of two children, a neighbor said. "A good father and a good husband," was how she described him. "He loved his family."

Like Rubelmann, Logan thought lottery officials were right to fight Beck's job grievance.

Besides Beck, Logan traveled the farthest yesterday morning to reach his job in Newington, 40 miles away from his Colchester home.

At 8 a.m. yesterday, Matthew Beck walked into his office, hung up his coat, and waited.