Cape Fear

Automobile supersalesman Ernie Boch's Cape Cod radio operation spews hate toward everyone from gays to teenage mothers. Boch says he's just giving listeners what they want. Come on down!

by Dan Kennedy

To get to Heidi Thatcher's cramped, modest North Falmouth home, you have to bump down a long dirt driveway, past the horse pen, and step carefully through a back yard filled with goats and chickens. Amid this vacationland of luxury houses and brand-new golf courses, the Thatchers evoke Cape Cod as it was many decades ago: simpler, more rural, and considerably less affluent.

Eighteen months ago, life in the Thatcher home, always a struggle, became considerably more difficult. Thatcher's daughter, Mariah, gave birth to a son, Thomas. Mariah, then just 16 years old, was a junior at Falmouth High School. The father was not part of the picture.

Mariah was determined not to let the mistake she'd made ruin her and her son's lives. She returned to school. She got a job. And she spoke out. In the Cape Cod Times last year, she warned other teenagers not to do what she'd done. "Now that I'm a parent, I can say it's never easy," she wrote in an essay that accompanied an article on teenage pregnancy. "Waking up every three hours and getting up early is never fun."

As it turned out, going public was her second mistake. For lying in wait was WXTK Radio (95.1 FM), a 50,000-watt station in West Yarmouth owned by Norwood auto magnate Ernie Boch -- famed for his $10 million Martha's Vineyard spread and for his omnipresent TV commercials in which he pleads with viewers, in a high-pitched, nasal Boston accent, to "come on down!"

According to the Thatchers and to a lawsuit their lawyer, Maureen O'Reilly, filed recently in Barnstable Superior Court, morning hosts Ed Lambert and Don McKeag read a good part of that day's Times package on the air and then began raking Mariah Thatcher and her family through the muck. McKeag allegedly called Mariah "peanut-butter legs"; when Lambert asked what he meant, McKeag's answer reportedly pertained to the ease with which her legs were spread. Soon the calls were pouring in, and it's unclear who said what (there is no complete tape of the show, or of a follow-up show). But before the morning was over, Mariah had allegedly been called a "slut," a "whore," a "bitch," and "promiscuous," and her son had been called a "bastard."

Not content to have hung a scarlet letter upon a vulnerable teenager, Lambert and McKeag were back for more five days later -- this time armed with what's been described as an anonymous fax, though station officials and their lawyers decline to endorse that characterization. Reading from the document, they claimed that members of the Thatcher family had a criminal record, and that there was an extensive family history of drug and alcohol abuse. Nearly all of it, the Thatchers assert, was a lie -- and the only part that was true was so private and painful it never should have been read over the air.

"They judged me and they degraded me," says Mariah, who hopes to become a pediatric nurse. "They don't even know who I am."

Adds Gary Lopez, a Barnstable resident who filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, which declined to act: "It was gross. This is a hard-working family. It was an attempt to ruin their character."

On to part 2

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.