In a startling turn of events, court documents have disclosed that the New Jersey lawyer accused in a heinous 15-year-old Boston rape spree was cunningly lured to his arrest alongside his fiancée through a fabricated package report. The Boston rapist Matthew Nilo, 35, was apprehended on May 30 in the lobby of his Weekhawken apartment building, with his newly engaged partner Laura Griffin as an unsuspecting witness.
The FBI and local police orchestrated the couple’s arrival at the lobby by instructing the front desk to call their apartment, falsely claiming that an oversized package awaited them. Nilo, who appeared in Suffolk Superior Court on Monday, pleaded not guilty to charges including aggravated rape, kidnapping, assault with attempt to rape, and indecent assault and battery. During the court proceedings, Griffin, clutching rosary beads, was present alongside him.
Recently deleted social media posts indicated that Nilo, formerly a resident of Boston’s North End, proposed to Griffin shortly before his arrest in connection with the disturbing series of rapes that occurred in the city’s Terminal Street area between August 2007 and December 2008. Nilo, then aged between 19 and 20, may have been on a break from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he had earned his bachelor’s degree.
The identities of the four alleged victims, aged between 23 and 44 at the time of the assaults, have not been publicly disclosed. In a press conference last week, investigators revealed that they employed genetic genealogy, a combination of DNA technology and historical record searches, to identify Nilo as a suspect in these unsolved cases.
Prosecutors claim that Nilo offered rides to three women and subsequently drove them to remote areas of Boston. In each instance, he allegedly intimidated the women by claiming to possess a weapon before subjecting them to sexual assault. Reports suggest that Nilo brandished a knife during one encounter and showed a gun to another victim. Despite at least one victim mistaking him for a taxi driver, all three willingly accepted his offer of transportation.
In the fourth case, Nilo allegedly attacked a woman while she was jogging on Terminal Street and sexually assaulted her. Despite her courageous resistance, Nilo persistently screamed, “I have a gun.”
During the reopened investigation last year, FBI agents obtained utensils and drinking glasses that Nilo had used at a corporate event. Genetic material extracted from one of the glasses was subsequently matched to the suspect’s profile.
At the time of his arrest, Nilo worked as a cyber claims attorney for the Cowbell insurance firm. His employment has been suspended pending the ongoing rape investigation.
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Following his plea of not guilty, Nilo has been ordered to be held on $500,000 bail. If he manages to post bail, he will be subjected to GPS monitoring and must maintain distance from both the alleged victims and Terminal Street. He is expected to appear in court again in July, and the trial is set for June 2024.
