For nearly 40 years, a photograph of Claire Gravel sat on Marblehead resident James Maroney’s desk.
Maroney never met Gravel, the 20-year-old Salem State student murdered in 1986. But he covered her killing as a young reporter, and something about the case never let him go.
“She could have been my sister or my friend,” Maroney told the Current. “She had no voice.”
Over the decades, Maroney produced reports about the unsolved murder, contacted newspapers and television stations, revisited places connected to the crime and even anonymously hung banners and posters asking a question he refused to let disappear: Who murdered Claire?
Now, four decades after he first reported the story, Maroney is part of an ABC News “20/20” report on the Gravel case scheduled to air Friday night. ABC lists “20/20” at 9 p.m.
For Maroney, now 67, the national broadcast marks the end of a story that has followed him through almost his entire career.
A young reporter and an unsolved murder
Maroney was 28 and early in his journalism career when Gravel was killed on June 29, 1986.
At the time, he worked for Continental Cablevision, reporting for North Shore TV News, a biweekly newscast distributed to communities across the region.
Gravel, of North Andover, was a Salem State student who worked at National Braille Press. She had been out with friends in Salem before she was killed. Her body was discovered near Route 128 in Beverly.
Maroney interviewed investigators and Gravel’s parents, Bob and Mary Gravel, for a longer report on his news magazine program, “North Shore Perspectives.”
He gained the family’s trust and became increasingly determined that Claire’s death not simply fade into the files of an unsolved case.
“This story was dead,” Maroney recalled. “So I said, ‘I’m going to generate stories about it.’”
He kept doing exactly that.
Even after moving to Ohio for a time, Maroney continued following the investigation. He estimates that for years, virtually every television piece produced about the case could be traced in some way to his efforts to keep attention focused on it.
Around anniversaries of Gravel’s death, he would travel around the North Shore, returning to locations connected to the case. He posted signs and hung banners — including one over Route 128 — asking who had murdered Claire.
He did much of it anonymously.
“I wanted a resolution for Claire and for her mom and dad,” he said.
A break decades later
The resolution Maroney had hoped for finally came through advances in DNA testing.
John Carey was indicted for Gravel’s murder in 2022. This March, an Essex County Superior Court jury convicted Carey, 66, of first-degree murder. Prosecutors said DNA testing found Carey’s genetic material on the tank top used to strangle Gravel.
Carey had previously been convicted in an unrelated attempted murder case involving the strangulation of another woman, a case that resulted in his DNA entering the system and ultimately helping investigators connect him to Gravel’s killing.
On April 9, Carey, of Glouceseter, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“The family of Claire Gravel has waited 40 long years for justice,” Essex County District Attorney Paul Tucker said after the conviction.
Maroney had waited, too.
His decades of reporting became part of the story itself.
This summer, ABC News called.Producers interviewed Maroney for the “20/20” report airing Friday.
For someone who spent decades trying to persuade other journalists that Gravel’s story still mattered, having it told on a national network carries special meaning.
“No story has ever come close to meaning this much to me,” Maroney said. “I’m finally feeling relief.”
