The murder of Joyce McLain

The killing of Joyce McLain was solved, in the end, not by physical evidence but by people who carried what they had heard for years and eventually told it to the right person. From the very beginning the forensic path was closed: powerful thunderstorms had swept across the scene behind Schenck High School before Joyce's body was found on August 10, 1980, washing away potential evidence, and investigators recovered no fingerprints from the scene and no identifiable DNA from her clothing. What the case did have, accumulating slowly over nearly four decades, was a series of statements that Philip Scott Fournier had made about the crime. In 1981 Fournier confessed to his minister, Rev. Vinal Thomas, and to his parents, and made statements to police, before recanting all of them. The most damaging account came not from a confession booth but from a workplace. In 1989, Fournier worked alongside John DeRoche, a janitor; when DeRoche, after the case was featured that year on the television program Unsolved Mysteries, asked Fournier what he knew about the McLain killing, Fournier indicated he was responsible, telling DeRoche he had been able to beat the police. For years that statement sat unexamined. The investigation was reinvigorated in 2008, when Joyce's mother, Pamela McLain, and a Justice for Joyce committee raised money to have the body exhumed and re-examined by forensic experts, prompting Maine State Police to restart the case and re-interview witnesses. In 2009, while sentencing Fournier on an unrelated federal child-pornography conviction, U.S. District Judge John Woodcock publicly named him as a person of interest in McLain's death. Detectives, led by Detective Sgt. Darryl Peary, secured permission to interview out-of-state witnesses, including Rev. Thomas, who had moved to Florida, and presented the strengths and weaknesses of the case to the Maine Attorney General's office in November 2014. Fournier was arrested on March 4, 2016. The pivotal moment came days later: on or about March 7, 2016, John DeRoche, then 78, saw a television news report about the arrest and telephoned investigators, volunteering his account of Fournier's 1989 statements. He had not been a criminal informant or an accomplice; he was simply a former co-worker who had heard a confession and finally came forward. Fournier waived his right to a jury, and the case was tried before Superior Court Justice Ann Murray. Fournier did not take the stand to rebut DeRoche's testimony. In finding him guilty on February 22, 2018, Justice Murray gave great weight to the witness accounts, reasoning that Fournier's 1989 statement to DeRoche confirmed his recanted 1981 confessions to his minister and parents. She also pointed to details Fournier appeared to know that had not been public, including his recitation that Joyce had an injury to the left side of her face when, she noted, the left side of Joyce's face was not visible as the body had been found. Murray further cited Fournier's crash of a stolen fuel truck in the hours after the killing as consistent with guilt. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison. On February 21, 2019, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court unanimously upheld the conviction, with Justice Joseph Jabar's opinion holding that Fournier had waived any religious privilege over the minister's confession because he had disclosed a significant part of the same matter to his parents. No DNA or fingerprint evidence was reported in the solving of the case; the conviction rested on the testimony of witnesses who recounted Fournier's own admissions across the years.