The First Wife of the Falmouth Fox: The Disappearance of Wanda Medeiros Reine

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

April 5, 2021

Wanda Medeiros Reine was twenty five years old in March 1971, living in East Falmouth, Massachusetts, with brown hair and brown eyes, and by some accounts she wore eyeglasses. She was married to a local man named Melvin J. Reine Sr., a man who, by the time Wanda vanished, had already built a reputation around town as someone people preferred not to cross. On March 12, 1971, Melvin told people that he had driven Wanda to a bus station so she could travel to visit a cousin in nearby Wareham, Massachusetts. Wanda never arrived at her cousin's home. She was never heard from again. Melvin did not report her missing until five days had passed, an unusually long delay for a husband whose wife had simply failed to arrive somewhere and never called.

A Story That Didn't Check Out

When investigators eventually looked into Melvin's account of that day, they found it fell apart under scrutiny. Nothing corroborated the idea that Wanda had ever actually boarded a bus at the station Melvin described, and detectives came to believe she never set foot on that bus at all. Over the years, investigators dug up multiple locations connected to Melvin, including the ground around the Reine family home itself, searching specifically for Wanda's remains. None of those searches ever turned up any physical evidence. Wanda has been presumed dead for decades, but she has never been found, and Melvin Reine was never charged in connection with her disappearance.

What made investigators so quick to suspect Melvin, beyond his shifting and unconvincing account of the day Wanda vanished, was the man's broader reputation in Falmouth, one that had already been forming for years before Wanda ever disappeared and would only grow darker in the years after.

The Falmouth Fox

Melvin Reine had earned a nickname around Cape Cod that stuck with him for the rest of his life: the Falmouth Fox, sometimes rendered as the Wolfman, a reference to his uncanny ability to slip away from law enforcement scrutiny again and again despite an accumulating list of suspicions attached to his name. His first serious brush with the law came in 1968, when he was convicted of arson alongside two other men, tied to a string of fires that had swept through the town, and was sentenced to a term of five to eight years at Walpole State Prison. Throughout the 1960s, before that conviction, Reine had already developed a reputation as the town's resident arsonist, a reputation he reportedly leaned into deliberately at times, using the fear of fire as a way to intimidate people who crossed him.

Wanda's disappearance in 1971 was only the first entry in what would become a genuinely disturbing pattern connected to Melvin Reine over the following decade. In 1972, a teenager named Jeffrey Flanagan, reportedly interested in the same seventeen year old girl Melvin had also taken an interest in, was murdered, and suspicion for that killing settled on Melvin as well. In 1977, a teenager named Paul Alwardt disappeared entirely, never to be found, in circumstances that once again pointed investigators back toward Melvin. In 1979, a Falmouth police officer named John Busby was ambushed and shot with a sawed off shotgun, an attack he survived, and once more Melvin's name surfaced as the person investigators believed was most likely responsible. Across every one of these incidents, spanning nearly a decade, Melvin Reine was suspected, questioned, and scrutinized, and in every single case, he was never formally indicted.

Trash Contracts and a Second Marriage

Despite a criminal reputation that would have made most towns keep their distance, Melvin Reine continued operating in plain sight in Falmouth for years, at one point securing lucrative trash hauling contracts with the town itself, an almost surreal detail given how openly he was suspected of violence by that same community. That trash hauling business became a family operation, and it eventually became the center of Melvin's second marriage as well, one that would end in violence just as his first marriage to Wanda had.

Melvin remarried a woman named Shirley, and the two of them stayed together for years, with the family's lucrative trash hauling company forming the financial backbone of their household. In the early hours of May 10, 2005, Shirley Reine, then fifty one years old, was found dead in the garage of the family home, shot the previous evening after returning from dinner with her sister. Her death came just ten days before she was scheduled to face off in court against her own stepsons, Melvin's sons from an earlier relationship, over control of that same trash hauling business. A Wareham man named John Rams Jr., who had a lengthy criminal record of his own, eventually went to trial for Shirley's killing and was acquitted in 2014. In a later interview with CNN, Rams claimed that one of Melvin's sons, Todd Reine, had approached him and asked him to kill Shirley, a request Rams said he turned down. Todd Reine never spoke publicly about the accusation, and neither he nor any of his brothers has ever faced charges connected to Shirley's death. Her murder, like Wanda's disappearance thirty four years earlier, remains unsolved, drawing renewed national attention decades later to the entire Reine family history and the trail of suspicious deaths connected to Melvin stretching all the way back to Wanda in 1971.

Author Michele R. McPhee eventually documented the full sweep of Melvin Reine's history in a book titled When Evil Rules: A True Story of Vengeance and Murder on Cape Cod, laying out in detail the decades long pattern connecting Wanda's disappearance, Jeffrey Flanagan's murder, Paul Alwardt's disappearance, the shooting of Officer Busby, and the eventual killing of Melvin's second wife, all of it circling back to a single man whom investigators repeatedly suspected but could never quite manage to convict of anything beyond his original arson charge.

Secrets Taken to the Grave

Melvin Reine spent the final twelve years of his life as a patient at Taunton State Hospital, suffering from Pick's disease, a form of dementia marked by significant personality changes, impaired judgment, memory loss, and social dysfunction. He died in November 2013 at the age of seventy four and was buried at St. Anthony's Catholic Church cemetery in East Falmouth. Local coverage of his death captured the strange, unresolved nature of the legacy he left behind, with the Cape Cod Times running a piece titled Cape murder suspect Melvin Reine takes secrets to grave, a headline that summed up, as plainly as anything could, the frustration of a community that had spent more than four decades certain of who was responsible for so much local violence and grief, without ever managing to hold him legally accountable for any of it.

Wanda Medeiros Reine, twenty five years old when she vanished in March 1971, remains missing to this day, one name among several connected to Melvin Reine whose fates were never formally resolved in a courtroom. She would be in her late seventies now had she lived. Instead, she is remembered as the first entry in a string of Falmouth tragedies that stretched across decades, all tied back to a man local reporters and true crime authors alike would eventually simply call one of Cape Cod's most infamous criminals, a man who managed, across an entire lifetime of suspicion, to die without ever facing a jury for any of it.

Anyone with information about Wanda Medeiros Reine's disappearance is asked to contact the Falmouth Police Department at 508-457-2527.

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