CAPE COD – Barnstable County Commissioner Ronald Beaty Jr. has long acknowledged that in 1990 he sent threatening letters to the President of the United States and to other elected officials, and that he spent 14 months in federal prison for the crime.
He has described his conviction as “baggage.” Of those letters, he told Cape Cod Wave Magazine in 2017, “They were graphic letters.”
The basic facts and Beaty’s own account of events to Cape Cod Wave Magazine in a 2017 profile was all that was known of the case – until now.
Cape Cod Wave has obtained, from the National Archives at Boston, court records of the 1991 case including copies of the threatening letters he sent to the politicians under his ex-wife’s name.
He signed the typewritten letters with his ex-wife’s name above the words, “The Moslem Revolution.” The two had had a bitter divorce.
“The content of those letters were supposedly from my ex-wife to these individuals,” Beaty told Cape Cod Wave in 2017. “She was an Iranian citizen. I wanted her gone. My alcohol-soaked mind was so bitter,” he said.
In the letter to President Bush, Beaty wrote under the guise of his ex-wife, “I despise you and everything your imperialist America stand for! For that reason I am going to assassinate you within the next 10 days! GOD IS GREAT.”
In addition, the court records include copies of a series of deeply disturbing and incrementally darker handwritten notes that Beaty had sent to his ex-wife, which were presented as evidence of his threat to the community as a reason to hold him without bail before trial.
In the government’s argument to detain Beaty before trial, U.S Attorney Wayne Budd wrote of Beaty’s letters to his wife, “These threats are vivid declarations of impending violence and pain, including rape and murder. They contain numerous other warnings such as Satanic references and allusions to Jack the Ripper.”
Beaty was held without bail from his arrest in July 1990 until November 1990, when he was released on $10,000 bond. He went to trial and pled guilty in April, 1991.
Two Felons In A Political Race Like No Other
The race for Barnstable County commissioner has four candidates for two seats on the three-member board. Two of the candidates are convicted felons.
