Solved cold cases in Maine
3 documented cases.
Dorothea Burke
Dorothea Burke, 63, a retired sardine-plant worker well known in Stockton Springs, Maine, went to a family wedding reception in Prospect on Saturday, June 23, 1984, while preparing to celebrate her birthday. Prosecutors later said she left around 9:15 that night to go dancing and ended up at a bar in Bucksport, where she was last seen. When she did not come home, her family reported her missing the next day. On June 28, construction workers found her body on Meadow Road in Stockton Springs. She had been beaten to death. State Police interviewed Kirt Damon, then 20, beginning that day, and he denied any part in her death. Police searched his mother's car and found confetti from the wedding and cigarette butts of Burke's brand, but nobody was charged for 36 years. Prosecutors said the case was finally pulled together by Maine State Crime Laboratory work on fibers and confetti and by Damon's former wives coming forward to tell the state what he had told them. A Waldo County grand jury indicted Damon, 57, for murder on September 22, 2020. On February 11, 2022, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 20 years in prison with all but 12 suspended, followed by four years of probation.
Janet Brochu
Janet Brochu, a 20-year-old woman who lived with her parents in Winslow, Maine, vanished after a night out in Waterville on December 23, 1987. Her unclothed body was pulled from the Sebasticook River in Pittsfield on March 19, 1988, identified through dental records and jewelry. The case remained cold for more than three decades until the Maine State Police Unsolved Homicide Unit reexamined the evidence; advances in forensic DNA testing revealed a genetic link to Gerald Goodale, a man who was already serving 75 years for the 1988 murder of another central Maine woman, Geraldine Finn. A Somerset County grand jury indicted Goodale for Brochu's murder on May 13, 2021, and on March 2, 2023 he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 32 and a half years, to run concurrent with his existing term.
Joyce McLain
Joyce McLain, a 16-year-old high school student, went jogging on the evening of August 8, 1980, near Schenck High School in East Millinocket, Maine, and never came home. Two days later her partially clothed body was found behind the school's athletic fields, near a row of power lines; she had been beaten to death, the back of her skull caved in, and her hands tied behind her back with a blue cloth. Heavy rains had washed away crime-scene evidence, no fingerprints were recovered, and no identifiable DNA was ever obtained from her clothing, so the case went cold for decades. The conviction rested not on forensic science but on witnesses who came forward over the years to describe Philip Scott Fournier's own statements: Fournier had confessed to a minister and to his parents in 1981 before recanting, and in 1989 he told a co-worker that he had killed Joyce McLain. The decisive witness was John DeRoche, a Bangor High School janitor who had worked alongside Fournier in 1989; after learning of Fournier's 2016 arrest through a television news report, the 78-year-old DeRoche called investigators and testified about Fournier's incriminating workplace statements. Fournier had been publicly named a person of interest in 2009 by a federal judge during an unrelated child-pornography sentencing, and Maine State Police had relaunched the investigation in 2008 after the victim's mother helped fund a re-examination. Fournier was arrested on March 4, 2016. After a jury-waived trial, Superior Court Justice Ann Murray found him guilty of murder on February 22, 2018, and sentenced him to 45 years in prison. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld the conviction on February 21, 2019.