The Sting: Evenings at a New Britain Nightclub
By Justin Kloczko | Correspondent at December 13, 2023 | 8:00 am | Print
(Part three of a four part series)
As the Sting continued to pack the crowds in on a regular basis, the city around it continued to deteriorate The Clinton years, locally, marked a decline in New Britain.
“The Sting had more edginess because it was in New Britain,” said Katie Blint. “It seemed fresher.”
But one of the more infamous cases that highlighted issues of crime and drugs in the city was the death of Cheri Newman, a relative to the Newman’s and an employee at the Sting, who was killed in the early morning hours of May 25, 1995. That night local tattoo artist Patrick Walsh was supposed to drive her home. He never did. Instead, they ended up at his tattoo parlor, Skin Dance Custom Tattoos.
Cheri Newman was a happy and approachable white woman from a good background.
“She was a sweetheart. She would walk up to me in a bar and be one of the few people who would talk to me,” said Michael Tierney, who worked for the Newman brothers.
Newman was reportedly last scene leaving a socialite club on Broad St.
There she was, not young and not yet old either, wearing a black leather jacket, black jeans, a black leather tank top, and black boots. Her thin blonde hair was hair-sprayed. She had a tattoo of a flower behind her left ear and an orchid on her thigh. Cheri Newman loved animals and was on her way to working at a travel agency.
Family and friends acknowledged Cheri Newman had her ins and outs with drugs-mostly cocaine-it’s up to wild speculation as to whether or not they were involved the night she was killed.
“We want to get her home and get her into treatment,” her uncle Jimmy Newman told the Herald that summer as the anxiety of her sudden disappearance grew. “I hope I’m wrong,” Newman said fearfully, “but I feel she’s in big trouble.”
And even though Cheri seemed to have it all, she could never shake “the demon,” her uncle said.
Walsh met Cheri and her friend Nicole Bolduc that night at the Catholic War Veteran’s Club around 1 a.m., a club that local gangs were trying to take over around this time period. But after they all met there, Bolduc wanted to leave. Before she left she made Walsh promise her that he would get Newman home safely.
Soon it was around 4 a.m., and Cheri Newman and Patrick Walsh have been partying for about four and a half hours when Walsh drives the two of them back to his tattoo parlor down the road.
Inside the two-room business, Walsh began to stab Newman, who tried to flee for the door. Walsh stabbed her in the back of the head and neck repeatedly. She was also struck in the head with a ball pen hammer. One of the blows struck her spinal column, fatally wounding her. Walsh stabbed her 8 times, court documents show. Only those two know how it got to that point, but one acquaintance of Walsh said he told her one time that he had a feeling he was going to kill Cheri Newman that night.
It was in the morning that two employees at the tattoo shop came into work and were immediately turned away. When they came back, what he saw looked like a scene straight out of the movie “American Psycho.”
Walsh, who rarely spoke, ordered them to help clean up the murder.
Once the sun came up that morning, James Walsh started getting distressed phone calls from his brother, Patrick. He sounded frantic, so James visited the parlor, whose shades were drawn and door was locked. Inside, his brother told him what he did.
According to court records, Patrick Walsh asked James to find the handle to the knife that he used and to clean up the large pool of blood in the waiting room of the parlor. James was told that he put Cheri’s body in a wooden box after duct taping it. Walsh reportedly got so angry that there was so much blood in the bag that he punched her dead body out of anger. When two employees came in, each was told to help clean up all the blood.
Newman’s body was found in the backyard of a colonial-style, clapboard house three months later on Aug. 12, 1995 in New Hampshire after she had been missing that summer. She left behind a six-year-old son.
Walsh also called a girlfriend at the time. She became so terrified of Walsh that she contacted his ex-wife and eventually told the police, giving them the lead of the body in New Hampshire. She too saw blood and was forced to clean up part of the mess. When Walsh started getting phone calls from customers, he said they were closed because the pipes had burst.
Walsh didn’t just drop off Newman’s body anywhere. He had a friend who owned property in a small New Hampshire town of about 1,300. That is where she would lay. On the way, the two Walsh brothers stopped in Massachusetts at a friend’s and said they had just killed some guy. The brothers then left with two shovels and a saw.
This city called “New Britain” soon became legend to the locals in the town of Lyndeborough, N.H. When the news of the body broke out, papers sold out that day and the small village wondered about this city where a beautiful and bright woman had been killed.
The Walsh’s dug a hole four feet deep, and in Cohen Brothers-esque fashion, could barely get out of the hole they dug to throw her body in. Newman’s was crammed into the wooden box and covered up, a few hundred feet from the house.
Back in New Britain, Jimmy Newman, who had recently lost his brother, combed the streets of the city searching for his missing niece. He knew Walsh, and considered him a wannabe Hell’s Angel, as well as the first one he was suspicious of. When he confronted Walsh, Walsh insisted that Cheri Newman left that night to go to a crack house with “the Puerto Ricans.” Newman played along.
“Everyone I’ve talked to has said if Ronnie was still alive when all of this happened, Walsh never would have made it to trial,” Tierney said.
“And if Ronnie was alive, Walsh wouldn’t have even touched Cheri because what Ronnie would have done,” Tierney added.
Walsh, a former city firefighter who got fired, had a beard, long ponytail, and stood over 6 feet, weighing close to 270 pounds with tattoos for sleeves. Most people I asked to speak about him told me they did not want to be quoted. Walsh claimed to run with decorated members of the Hell’s Angels that around this particular time in New Britain were trying to take over various clubs and spots around town. Others said he had a “Charles Manson-like following.”
“My friends and I stayed away from him. He was crazy,’ one local said.
Walsh was fired from his job as a firefighter because he got into too much trouble. He abused sick time and got into many fights. He once punched a man in the face and then ripped his clothes off, snap-pants style, at the Coppermine Cafe in Bristol. After his release he and a friend unloaded five shotgun blasts at the victim’s truck, it is said.
When cops surrounded his tattoo parlor to arrest him for the murder of Cheri Newman, they approached with the bomb squad.
But others said Walsh was just a crazy, fake Hell’s Angel who liked to nihilistically cause trouble.
So almost three months after she went missing, Patrick Walsh was charged with first-degree murder by police and had his bond was raised by Superior Court Judge Howard Scheinblum, one of the most hard-headed judges in the state. Police found Cheri Newman’s body, naked from the waist down. They were to identify her in part due to the tattoos on her body that Walsh did. Her family, meanwhile, was frantic trying to find her, going as far as visiting two “psychics” who told them she was dead.
During his testimony, Walsh tried to pass off the murder to other members of the Hell’s Angels, but nobody bought it. He was convicted and sentenced in 1999 after appealing his case.
