NASHUA – David Caplin is scheduled to be arraigned on murder charges Wednesday morning in a courthouse that didn’t even exist when he became a suspect in the stabbing deaths of two Nashua women more than a quarter-century ago.

Nashua police on Tuesday announced that they arrested Caplin, now 54, shortly after he was extradited from Canada and handed over to the custody of the U.S. Marshal’s Service, according to a statement from the office of state Attorney General Joseph Foster.

He is scheduled to be arraigned around 10 a.m. Wednesday in Nashua district court, which is within the Spring Street courthouse that was still in the planning stages when Nashua residents Brenda Warner and Charlene Ranstrom were found stabbed to death in their Mason Street apartment the morning of Oct. 3, 1988.

Police charged Caplin with two counts each of first-degree murder and second-degree murder for “causing the deaths” of Warner and Ranstrom “in concert with Anthony Barnaby,” whom police arrested shortly after the murders.

But Caplin, who was arrested on June 8, 1990, and charged in the killings, never went to trial. Prosecutors dropped charges against him in July 1990 after the state Supreme Court upheld a series of adverse rulings by the trial court, holding that some of the evidence they had could not be used at trial.

Meanwhile, Barnaby, a friend of Caplin’s, reportedly confessed to police that he and Caplin beat Warner and Ranstrom, tied them up and stabbed them after a series of disputes. Barnaby also indicated that the men hated the women because they were lesbians.

Barnaby later recanted his confession but soon went to trial. That trial – and two subsequent trials – all ended in hung juries, and fewer than two years after he was arrested, Barnaby was freed from custody when prosecutors decided against trying him for a fourth time.

Police didn’t address Barnaby’s current status in their Tuesday statement.

Barnaby and Caplin eventually returned to their native Canada and, except for members of the victims’ families and some law enforcement officials, gradually faded from the local spotlight – until 2011.

It was in mid-April 2011 that Nashua police and the state’s Cold Case Squad announced at a hurriedly gathered and well-attended press conference that they had once again charged Barnaby and Caplin after assembling new evidence, much of which they developed through DNA testing that didn’t exist in 1988.

Nashua and state investigators thus issued arrest warrants for Caplin and Barnaby, and began the process of extraditing them to New Hampshire from Canada, where the two had been in custody since 2001 in connection with other charges.

Four years later, on April 23, the Canadian Supreme Court ordered Caplin and Barnaby surrendered to U.S. officials, setting the stage for Caplin’s most recent arrest.

Dean Shalhoup can be reached at 594-6443, dshalhoup@nashua
telegraph.com or @Telegraph_DeanS.