![]() But where he had been, not to mention what compelled him to leave in the first place, is no clearer today than it was the day he roared across the Connecticut border. And then Buckley, too, crumpled slightly as he dabbed a handkerchief at his nose.Īfter seven weeks, Buckley had returned as astonishingly as he had disappeared, surrendering to police on a Monday morning in April, tanned and 40 pounds lighter. As he pointed to one of his client's oldest boxing friends, the lawyer's voice cracked and tears spilled from his eyes. Just look at his family, his wife and five daughters, even two of his three grandchildren, and all those friends, the lawyer declared, nodding at the crowded wood benches behind him. This client, certainly, was going nowhere. His lawyer, equally downcast, asked that Buckley be confined to a locked psychiatric facility and his bond reduced. But this time it was Buckley himself in the defendant's hard-backed chair. The defendant sat meekly before the judge in Hartford's windowless Superior Court, his ruddy face creased with torment. Ufdropp,2Mac Buckley could not have orchestrated a better moment himself in all his three decades of practicing law. The much larger issue was this: If Mac Buckley could run away, if Mac Buckley could disappear with your money and live a secret life, then whom could you trust? What could possibly happen that would more deeply shatter your faith in the legal system, in your fellow man, even? But many paid little mind to such technicalities. Buckley had taken his Walt Disney stock certificate for safekeeping but had never returned it.Ī few weeks after he went missing, Buckley was charged with first-degree larceny and forgery and declared a federal fugitive. And then there was Dane, Williamson's 5-year-old grandson. Several said they had given him retainers of thousands of dollars and never heard from Buckley again. One said Buckley had taken off with his life savings of $237,600. Not long afterward, the angry and tearful clients began stepping forward. Buckley, 57, was on his way to a court hearing when he vanished in his teal Lincoln Navigator. So when Mac Buckley disappeared a month and a half later into the fog on an overcast day last March, it shook people to their core. And when Buckley passed through the metal detector and triggered the alarm, a pair of court officers waved him on, as one nodded and said, ``Hey, Mac.'' And at last, nearly an hour late, Buckley was there, striding through the doorway in a dark suit, briefcase in hand, running a hand through his wavy reddish hair. ![]() Even the state police who interviewed him about his daughter, Heather, had said that Buckley was, well, a hotshot. A lawyer friend described him as a big deal, arrogant, but first-rate. Williamson, who runs a direct-mail business outside Detroit, had already heard about Buckley in the few days that he had been in Hartford. ``The personnel in the court were all excited.'' ``We kept hearing, `Buckley is coming! Buckley is coming!' It was like a rock concert,'' recalled Williamson, 66. As word passed among the courtroom personnel, harried clerks glanced up expectantly from their files. Buckley! Not just another slick-as-butter defense lawyer, but a man of heart, a man of substance. Buckley - the famously flamboyant Hartford defense lawyer who was regarded by some as among the best in the business, the former political candidate and television commentator, the strawberry-complexioned storyteller and champion of city-strapped youths, an eclectic social migrant who was as comfortable in Hartford's seediest boxing gyms as at its white-glove soirees, a man, in short, who was about as close as one comes to a local hero outside the movie theater - was coming here, right here, to this cramped little courthouse. The other reason is that as he and his family sat waiting for Buckley in the jammed Willimantic Juvenile Court nine days after his daughter's death, Williamson kept hearing the buzz. Part of the reason he remembers is that Buckley would play a role in his life that no father could forget: Buckley would be the lawyer defending the man charged with beating Williamson's daughter to death with a fire poker while her young son watched. Now he's back, facing criminal charges, but the mystery lingers on.ĭan Williamson remembers precisely the first time he saw F. Mac Buckley vanished for seven weeks, mystifing friends and colleagues. ![]() Mail can be sent to Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe, P.O. Click here for past issues of the Globe Magazine, dating back to June 22, 1997
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