A senior member of a Massachusetts local Hells Angels chapter was charged on Sunday with the murders of three men, including a key witness scheduled to testify against him, prosecutors said. The reputed sergeant-at-arms at the Berkshire Hells Angels motorcycle club was charged with the following crimes: three counts of murder, kidnapping and intimidation of a witness, said Berkshire County District Attorney David Capeless.
Two other men also have been charged with murder, kidnapping, and intimidation of a witness in the triple murder, Capeless said.
After a two week search for the three Pittsfield, Mass., men who had disappeared under suspicious circumstances, the search ended with the recovery of their bodies in the western part of the state. The bodies of David Glasser, 44, Edward Frampton, 58, and Robert Chadwell, 47, were recovered after the men had gone missing on August 28.
Glasser was a key witness set to testify against Hall at a trial on assault, robbery and kidnapping charges scheduled to begin on September 19. Frampton was Glasser’s roommate and Chadwell a friend who spent time with the two men, authorities said. “This had to do with Glasser’s being a witness in a pending criminal case,” said Berkshire District Attorney, David Capeless. “Unfortunately we believe that Frampton and Chadwell were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
In the upcoming trial, prosecutors had planned to present evidence that Hall hit Glasser with a baseball bat in 2009 over a dispute, and then tried to frame Glasser last year for an upstate New York robbery to cast doubt on him as a witness.
All three defendants are scheduled to be arraigned in Central Berkshire District Court in Pittsfield on Monday.
