Beverly teacher charged in 1988 stabbing

BEVERLY (FOX 25 / MyFoxBoston.com) - A Beverly middle school teacher's past has caught up with her. Elizabeth "Beth" Spoon was a middle school math teacher at Briscoe Middle School until recently, the Salem News reports. She disappeared a few months ago with no explanation.

In 1988, the then-18-year-old woman was charged by state police with stabbing a Danvers man in the back at a Route 1 motel in Peabody.

Spoon was arrested on Dec. 16 at her Beverly home by a team of state troopers, an FBI special agent and Beverly detectives.

The old case came to light when state police Trooper Shawn O'Neil was conducting a search of old warrants and came across one for an Elizabeth Pullino of Peabody. The warrant, issued on June 21, 1988, charged Pullino with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. Pullino never showed up for her arraignment.

O'Neil couldn't find Pullino, but used the Social Security number on the warrant and learned it was Spoon's. He called the Peabody District Court and got a copy of the complaint. The report by the trooper, Edward Downer, is brief, and simply indicates that on June 12, 1988, he was sent to the Belleview Motel on Route 1 north to investigate a stabbing. The victim, Mark Paglia of Danvers, and Alan Pullino, described as Elizabeth's husband, were fighting. "Husband was losing," the trooper noted. Elizabeth Pullino stabbed Paglia in the back, the trooper wrote.

FOX25 spoke with Paglia, who says it felt like he was hit with a tire iron.

School administrators say that Spoon in 1988 is an entirely different person than the Spoon that's teaching at their school.