The Sick Legend of Castle Neck Mike

One evening, back in 1995, I was watching the tabloid "news" show Hard Copy from my living room in Waltham, MA. I tuned in just in time to see a report about a young woman named Kristen Lardner who died in 1992 at the hands of an obvious sociopath named Michael Cartier, or as the Boston locals used to refer to him: Castle Neck Mike. Mike had a full neck tattoo (depicting a castle) in the early 90's before getting a tattoo on one's neck became a common bad-assy type thing to do. He was a really sick individual with a history of drug abuse, extreme physical and mental abuse toward women and general violence. The thing that really weirded me out about the Kristen Lardner murder was that she and I traveled on the same footpaths every day.

She was a student at the Museum of Fine Arts school while I attended Massachusetts College of Art. Both less than a block from one another. She met Mike at AXIS, a club that used to be cool. My friends and I frequented that club often between the years 1990 and 1998. She worked at Marty's Liquors in Allston, not 3 blocks from where my college boyfriend lived. Watching the report on television was a surreal experience. It was also very sad, as Kristen Lardner seemed like a wonderful, caring, and promising young woman. She was perfect prey for a psycho like Cartier. After his abuse and manipulation came the stalking. He violated her restraining order, then gunned her down outside Marty's, right there on Comm Ave. He sped back to his apartment building where he shot himself.

I have since read this. It made me sick to my stomach. And really f'n angry.

I lived right in the center of all of this and don't remember hearing about it. I didn't keep up with the news much then, but geez, you'd think this sort of thing would be all over the place. In May of 1992, when the shooting occurred, I was finishing up my junior year. We were on the summer's threshold. I was about to have a mild stroke which would put me in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Still, I can't believe that I hadn't heard a shred of the story until 1995, on Hard Copy.

An old friend of mine, who briefly cohabitated with Mr. Butch, knew and feared Mike. He and his friends were a few years younger. One of his buddies had the fortune of getting one of Mike's combat boots thrown in his general direction.

In 1990, I had a brief encounter with a young man. My friend Kara and I had just moved into our first apartment on Queensberry Street in the Back Bay. It was still warm out, the semester was days away from starting. We met a couple of kids on the street and I remember thinking one of them was sort of cute. We naively invited them up to our wee studio apartment. They weren't there for long before Kara and I started feeling uneasy about the situation. I forget how they left, maybe we made something up. The next day, one of them, the less stable of the two, stood outside our building, shouted my name, and threw rocks at the windows. He eventually left and I never saw him again. I barely remember his face.

R.I.P. Mr. Butch

Mr. Butch in Allston, '83
Photo credit: Bill Swersey

Mr. Butch was a fixture in Kenmore Square back when I worked at the Bruegger's, across the street from what used to be Charlie's. This was the cool Kenmore. The one that claimed The Rathskeller, Pizza Pad, Blaine! Beauty School and Cornwalls (when it was below street level) as its own. Narcissus had just closed down and a "Soup or Salad" had just opened up. The Store 24 used to have a greeting card carousel with cards showing Divine in various John Water movie scenes. Shawmut, the greatest bank in the world, sat on the corner where the Sovereign now resides. It's changed institutional hands a bunch of times over the years since 1990 (I think it was Bay Bank before it was a Shawmut). Mr. Butch used to sleep in a vintage Volkswagen van in the bank parking lot.

I didn't know him personally, but I saw him all the time. My old friend Kenton, who once lived in a bachelor-style apartment in Allston, claimed that Mr. Butch was staying in his living room for a while. He and his 10 or so roommates let him sleep on the couch. One day, as the legend goes, a call came in for one of the dudes and Mr. Butch answered the phone. Evidently, the kid had a sick relative and a concerned family member wanted to alert him to his condition. When the kid came home, Mr. Butch said, "Are you Kenny?" (for the sake of the story, I'm calling the kid "Kenny," as I really don't remember what the guy's name was). "Yeah," the kid said, "Why?" Mr. Butch looked him in the eye, very seriously, then said, "Your uncle died!"

Ah, Mr. Butch, you were one of a kind.

Here's the article on Boston.com. And here is his bio on Wikipedia.