How A 2011 Triple Murder Is Connected To The Boston Marathon Bombing

The tragedy and heroics of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and left hundreds injured, have been well documented. In ABC News and Hulu’s new true-crime docuseries, The Murders Before the Marathon, investigative journalist Susan Zalkind revisits a less publicized triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts, that she believes one of the bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, carried out in 2011. The question Zalkind presents in the series is: “If police investigated this case thoroughly, would they have prevented the Boston Marathon bombing?”

On September 11, 2011 — the ten-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks — Waltham police found three men dead, covered in marijuana and cash. The victims, who were later identified as Brendan Mess, 25, Erik Weissman, 31, and Raphael Teken, 37, had been brutally murdered execution-style with sharp force injuries to their necks. One investigator called the crime scene “the worst bloodbath” he had ever seen, comparing the carnage to “an Al-Qaeda training video,” according to ABC News.

Though no one has ever been charged in the killings, Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan, who acted in concert with his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was an early suspect. (Though Dzhokhar was apprehended and later convicted, police killed Tamerlan during a shootout in the bombing’s aftermath.) Tamerlan trained at the same gym as Mess and had been seen hanging out with the slain trio. Though Tamerlan’s name had been given to police, the Middlesex DA’s office did not question him, per The New York Times. Zalkind further claimed that authorities also didn’t visit the gym, nor did they follow up on leads about Teken having a dispute with a Chechen individual and his apartment getting robbed shortly before the murder.

Because the three victims had been linked to dealing marijuana, authorities reportedly believed that the murders were a result of a drug deal gone bad. As Zalkind, who was good friends with Weissman, explains in the docuseries, the story was in the news for about a week and then “seemed to disappear.” Because she couldn’t shake her belief that “stabbing is personal” and saw police not pursuing crucial leads, she began her own investigation which has spanned more than a decade. “There was no public outreach,” Zalkind told Boston.com “And the people that did come forward were intimidated or harassed.”

After the Boston Marathon bombing, Tamerlan’s friend Ibragim Todashev confessed to federal authorities in May 2013 that they’d both “participated in the Waltham murders.” In an unsealed affidavit, Todashev allegedly said that he and Tamerlan “had agreed initially just to rob the victims, whom they knew to be drug dealers who sold marijuana.” He also detailed how Tamerlan suggested they get rid of the witnesses and how they tried to “remove traces of their fingerprints” at the crime scene. However, an FBI agent shot and killed Todashev during the interrogation when he allegedly became violent.

Ultimately, Zalkind was just looking for answers. “What happened at Waltham has just been a gaping hole in the story of the Boston Marathon bombing,” she recently told The Boston Globe. “My job was to fill that hole. This [series] is not an essay on policing. It’s not my lane to say how law enforcement should be held accountable, though I think there should be some form of accountability here.”