Why a Mom Enlisted Her Daughter’s Help to Kill Her Boyfriend: ‘Having Him Around Was Cramping Her Style’

Beverly McCallum, 63, was found guilty of the 2002 killing of 37-year-old Robert Caraballo.

On the afternoon of May 8, 2002, a blueberry farmer in Michigan was driving on his land when he spotted scorched trees and the charred remains of a man crumpled in an old footlocker.

Police gathered evidence at the site, tried to identify the body with dental records and followed countless leads, but it was to no avail. In a last-ditch effort, in 2004 authorities asked a communications professor to make a documentary, titled Jack in the Box, to help identify the remains and solve the homicide. But the case went cold.

A decade later, Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office detective Robert Donker had finished work for the day when he received a pair of emails.

“The first one said, ‘I’m scarred’ — I believe she meant ‘scared’ — and the one after was, ‘I’ve got information about a case,’” recalls Donker, now retired.

The messages were sent by Dineane Ducharme, who had seen the documentary and told the detective that she thought the remains belonged to 37-year-old Robert Caraballo, her mother Beverly McCallum’s boyfriend. Furthermore, she suspected her mom was also Caraballo’s killer.

After dental records finally confirmed the body to be Caraballo’s, investigators flew to Texas to talk to Ducharme, who was 21 at the time of the killing.

“By the end of the interview, it was clear she was in on it,” says former Eaton County Sheriff’s detective Jim Maltby.

However, it wasn’t until three years later that investigators tracked down Ducharme’s friend Chris McMillan and determined that all three were involved in the plot.

Caraballo, a newspaper delivery man and handyman, had been out of prison for less than a year when he was attacked at the home he shared with McCallum in Charlotte, Mich., on May 7, 2002. McCallum allegedly pushed her boyfriend down a flight of stairs to the basement, where she and Ducharme allegedly beat him with a hammer and put a plastic bag over his head to smother him.

After the murder, the trio drove 90 miles to Ottawa County and set him on fire with gasoline.

In 2018, after Caraballo's DNA was found on a concrete patch on the basement floor of his former home, authorities charged McMillan, Ducharme and McCallum with his murder.

“That email was the start of the downfall for all of them,” says Eaton County prosecuting attorney Doug Lloyd. “If [Ducharme] hadn’t sent that email, he’d still be an unknown body in a cemetery.”

McMillan took a 15 to 40-year plea deal in 2019 and agreed to testify against the others. In 2021, Ducharme was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.

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McCallum, the ringleader, had moved to Pakistan with a man she met online. “I believe she was evading the law,” says Lloyd. “She had five or six aliases that she went under, and she had left when she figured out that her daughter was talking about this case.”

But in 2020, McCallum, who had an Interpol arrest warrant out against her, was taken into custody in Italy after she and her teenaged son checked into a Rome hotel. After a more than two-year legal battle, she was extradited back to Michigan where she went on trial on March 25.

During the six-day trial, Lloyd addressed McCallum’s possible motive for killing Caraballo. He noted that McCallum moved to Jamaica within weeks of Caraballo’s murder to be with a man she would later marry and have a son with: “Robert being around was cramping her lifestyle,” he said.

On the stand, McCallum, 63, denied that she killed Caraballo, placing the blame on her daughter and McMillan. It took the jury less than an hour to find her guilty on April 1. “I didn't see any remorse,” says Maltby. “Just denial. Throwing other people under the bus. Just bad acting up there. I was disappointed in her. I thought she would give a little better performance than that.”

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