Joyce McLain

[unsolvedmysteriesfan]

In Maine, hope for answers in haunting death

Tania deluzuriaga, Boston Globe

Sunday, September 7, 2008

(09-07) 04:00 PDT East Millinocket, Maine -- This quiet mill town on the edge of Maine's northern wilderness has not been the same since it buried Joyce McLain 28 years ago.

A promising and beautiful 16-year-old, McLain went out for a jog one summer night in 1980 and never returned. Two days later, her partially clothed body was discovered in a clearing on the edge of town, badly beaten.

The brutality of the slaying horrified residents in this close-knit hamlet of 1,800, where only one other homicide has been recorded since it was incorporated in 1907. Worse, a killer was never found, and something seeped into the consciousness of the town. Mothers like Frances York started locking their doors. Kids like Ritchie Barnett avoided the wooded back roads of the town. For decades, lifelong neighbors and friends have nurtured suspicions about one another.

"You just don't know, is that person still here?" said York, who is now a 60-year-old grandmother. "You could be passing by them any time of day. You could be talking to the person in the grocery store. You just don't know."

"That's something that's stuck with us for 30 years," said Barnett, now 43, who runs a convenience store on Main Street. "Everyone's got their own suspect in the back of their minds."

Now, the people of East Millinocket may be on their way to getting answers. Late last month, four men with shovels dug up McLain's casket and put it in the back of a hearse bound for the state crime lab in Augusta. There, two of the world's top forensic scientists, paid with money raised from spaghetti dinners and other fund drives in town, examined the remains for new evidence that could lead to a suspect.

"The technology is so much greater now," said Joyce's mother, Pamela McLain, who has been petitioning Maine officials for 20 years to exhume her daughter's body and look for DNA evidence.

Before the hearse embarked on its 2 1/2-hour journey, Pamela McLain gave the driver a framed picture of her daughter. "So they know that's not just a box of bones they're working on, but a real person," she said.

The shadow the slaying cast in East Millinocket is, in some ways, a measure of the close-knit community and its lack of serious crime. A middle-class town that was born with northern Maine's paper industry at the turn of the 20th century, East Millinocket has five churches, two bars and two traffic lights. Residents give phone numbers by the last four digits because all of them before that are the same.

"It's the kind of place where everyone knows your business, and if they don't, they make it up," joked Clint Linscott, a former selectman who owns an auto body shop on Main Street.

The date of Joyce's murder - Aug. 8, 1980 - is so ingrained that most residents can say without hesitation where they were when it happened. It had been an unusually hot and humid summer day, so Joyce waited until dusk to go for her run. Her mother recalls sitting on the front steps and watching her jog away.

"I wasn't worried," Pamela McLain said. "It made me sick afterwards. ... I sat on the steps and watched her go."

She was found in a power line clearing just a short walk through the woods from an athletic field where she'd played soccer for Schenck High School. Her head and neck had been struck repeatedly with a blunt object. Her hands were bound behind her back. Residents recall an eerie silence that fell on the town in the days that followed.

"Dark used to be fun," said York, the grandmother who grew up in nearby Millinocket and still lives there. "The kids would go outside and play kick the can or hide and seek. Suddenly, not even the daylight was safe."

From the beginning, the case was tough to crack. A torrential storm the night of the killing washed away footprints and other physical evidence that might have been left by the killer. East Millinocket had experienced an influx of strangers that night. A softball tournament took place that weekend, and about 700 construction workers were finishing a new paper mill on the south side of town.

"They were ideal conditions for a very hard case," Police Chief Garold Cramp said.

Suspects were interviewed, but no one was arrested. Some witnesses were hypnotized in the hope that they'd remember more. A psychic was brought in. Residents still call the town's Police Department with possible leads.

The case appeared to be at a dead end in March, when Deputy Attorney General William Stokes declined McLain's request to exhume her daughter's body to look for foreign DNA, saying in a letter that the chance of obtaining material relevant to the case was "virtually nonexistent."

"Given the fact that 27 years have now passed since your daughter's death and burial, the amount of bacterial degradation would be significant and would destroy any foreign DNA that might exist," Stokes wrote in a letter to McLain, according to the Bangor Daily News.

But McLain refused to back down. Even after all this time, she aches for closure.

"There's a lot of years that I've wondered if there was something buried with her," she said recently, sitting on her front porch. In a porch window, an electric hope candle burned. Photographs of her daughter face the street. She hopes they are reminders to the person who killed her daughter.

McLain and a group of other residents calling themselves "Justice for Joyce" reached out to the community to pay for the autopsy. Local restaurants and clubs had fundraisers, and people near and far mailed in donations. A high school student gave a dollar. An anonymous donor gave $1,000. By July the group had raised the $18,000 they needed.

"It has been a Herculean effort," said Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Stephen McCausland. "What Pam has done has been remarkable; she's worked extremely hard to get to this point."

Investigators who performed the autopsy Aug. 29 said Joyce McLain's remains were in remarkable shape, and they collected several pieces of physical evidence that will be tested for DNA, the Bangor Daily News reported.

On Aug. 30, Pamela McLain gathered with friends and family at Joyce's headstone for a small ceremony to re-bury her.

"It'll be more of a resting place now," she said.

The autopsy results aren't expected for several months. With them, Pamela McLain hopes that she, too, will finally find peace.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...MNDC12MNSU.DTL