Dark Downeast - The Disappearance of Cathy Marie Moulton Part 2 (Maine)

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

MAINE'S OLDEST MISSING PERSON CASE, 1971: Nearly 25 years after Cathy Marie Moulton's disappearance, a new detective was assigned to the case, and he uncovered new details that no one bothered to look into when the 16-year old girl first disappeared on her way home from a shopping trip in Portland, Maine.The narrative of Cathy’s story for over two decades would be that she simply disappeared, that no one had any idea where she might be. Kevin Cady and his investigative partner changed that narrative.Kevin Cady shares what he knows about the longest standing missing persons case in the state of Maine, and what happened to her after she stepped out onto Forest Avenue that September evening in 1971.This is the Cathy Marie Moulton Disappearance, Part II.If you have information regarding the disappearance of Cathy Moulton, please contact the Portland Police Department at 207-874-8479. Cathy Moulton Missing Endangered by Kevin Cady, Available on AmazonView source material and photos for this episode at darkdowneast.com/cathymoulton2/Follow @darkdowneast on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTokTo suggest a case visit darkdowneast.com/submit-caseDark Downeast is an audiochuck and Kylie Media production hosted by Kylie Low.

When Kathy was just 16 years old, she seemingly vanished while walking home from a quick shopping trip in downtown Portland, Maine. If you haven't listened to part one yet, go back and do that first because it covers everything that happened on September 24th, 1971, the day Kathy's father dropped her off to do some shopping before the much-anticipated dance at the YWCA, and the last day the Moulton family would ever see Kathy again. You see, the narrative of Kathy's story for over two decades would be that she simply disappeared, that no one had any idea where she might be.

Her case received minimal attention by law enforcement in the years immediately following her disappearance. In 1988, 17 years after the fact, the detective assigned to the case even went to her parents' home to apologize for his predecessor's lack of investigative effort. In that same meeting, he asked for Kathy's dental records. There was an unidentified female with the approximate characteristics of their daughter in British Columbia, Canada. The dental records might help positively identify this victim as Kathy. But the response from the coroner of British Columbia would state simply and regretfully that the remains were not of Kathy Moulton.

That response was placed inside the case file in 1988, and once again, Kathy's case went cold. when a new detective just six months into his new position in the Tactical Enforcement Unit, also known as the Detective Bureau at the Portland Police Department, cracked open his newest assignment. PPD 71-60141. Moulton, Kathy Marie, missing, endangered. That new detective was Kevin Cady. Kevin Cady literally wrote the book on this case. The leads and timelines and connections he uncovered alongside Detective Sergeant Thomas P. Joyce Jr. in his many years of working this case are detailed in that book. I read it front to back in 24 hours because after sending Kevin Cady a

Facebook message and a friend request asking about the case and this podcast, he graciously agreed to join me for part two. There was one thing clear after reading his book. Kathy did not disappear without a trace. Kevin Cady is on Dark Down East to share what he knows from the longest-standing missing persons case in the state of Maine and one of the oldest in the country. He'll answer the question,

what happened to Kathy after she stepped out onto Forest Avenue that September evening in 1971? This is the case of Kathy Marie Moulton, part two. A few days before this interview, I found Kevin on Facebook and set up a time to chat with him on the phone just to explain what I was hoping to do with this episode. Plus, it's always good podcasting practice to get to know your guest before you actually sit down to record. But I almost wish I would have hit record on that first conversation too, just so you could have heard my authentic first reaction to some of the cases he'd worked

on in his long career, both as a detective for Portland Police Department and as a professional private investigator. Did you always grow up wanting to go into law enforcement? Actually not. I wanted to be a firefighter from when I was young. And when I took the police exam back in late 1984, I had also taken the firefighter exam. And I was actually hired by the police department first. The interesting aspect of that is at the time I was working for the Philadelphia Flyers in the NHL as an equipment manager with them. And I had been working for the organization since 1977. And when I graduated from high school, I worked full time with the Old May Mariners and then went on to work in Philadelphia with the Flyers. So I left my time, a great job, a fun job, but not a job that I would do for the rest of my life,

with the Flyers to become a police officer, and I don't regret that. So that's kind of how I got to the police side. So one thing I really appreciate about Kevin Cady is his view of law enforcement. Whether it was as a detective for the Portland PD, later as part of the Internal Affairs Department, or on the other side as a private investigator looking into cases for the Portland PD, later as part of the Internal Affairs Department, or on the other side as a private investigator looking into cases for the defense, Kevin Cady believes in holding law enforcement accountable. I felt that there was one way to do the job of law enforcement, and that was through hard work and being honest and ensuring that all relevant evidence that was gathered during

an investigation was put forward and the DA's office would be aware of it. And, you know, and that would include exculpatory evidence that sometimes is sort of shuffled off to the side because when a law enforcement officer is doing a case, once in a great, great while, you will see that, well, we'll let that, uh, just sit off to the side and not bring, bring it forward and let the defense try to find it, which would be, uh, evidence that may be helpful to the defendant, which, uh, I always felt was not our position to, to do it. Our position as law enforcement as was,, especially detectives, was to bring the evidence, gather it, present it, and let the judicial system do its job.

In 1995, Kevin Cady was promoted to detective, and that's when he first heard the name Kathy Marie Moulton. The detective sergeant at the time, so my boss was Tom Joyce, and Tom pulled me aside and he said, and I'd been in the detective bureau for maybe six months, maybe less. And he said, hey, listen, every detective up here gets either a cold case homicide that's unsolved or a major crime or a missing person. He said, this is going to you. It had been with Detective Bill Deachin, who had retired a couple of years earlier, and Tom had the case technically assigned. So these cases are actually assigned to a detective, so it's in their case file, case load, and they're supposed to be working on it. So every unsolved homicide in Portland right now is assigned to somebody.

It doesn't just go into a file and people are supposed to forget about it. So so I was given that case and it was literally maybe five to six pages of information. And and I was floored. I said, so this this girl's been missing for how long? And 1971. And where's the rest of the file? He said, literally, that's it. You're a detective now. Detectives detect. Go investigate this. The good thing about that was that wasn't just a push off of go and do this. Tom Joyce and I became the co-investigators on this from day one. And we both put all that time into it. So what we accomplished was he and I together, you know, brought all this information to the forefront. So daunting to say the least

when I saw how little information there was. Daunting, but work and effort that was long overdue. Katie got to work, looking into Kathy's inner circle at the time of her disappearance, and starting with her best friend, Nancy Barlow. No one had ever thought to talk to Nancy Barlow before. Nancy was our first, my first phone call on the case. So I learned that she was best friend, supposed to go to the YWCA dance on Spring Street. And so I called her and she was, I think in South Carolina, North Carolina, somewhere like that. And we had a good conversation, and she shed light on a few things. One was that they were supposed to go to that dance, but she'd never showed up.

And two, that they had met up with a local photographer at the gate, which was on Congress Street at the time, a local, you know, kind of a place where poets went, drank coffee and musicians and things like that. And Kathy and Nancy had been going to that to the gate. And that was kind of an interesting place and became interesting as part of the case, even down the road. But one thing that still sticks in my mind about Nancy Barlow is that she asked me if I had an email address and she would email me like pictures and things like that. And I actually had to say, I have no idea what you're talking about. What email? 1995, huh? It was 95. And I said, I don't know what email is and I don't have it.

This local photographer, Chris Church, isn't a throwaway detail, but he's not our guy, as you might want to conclude. That would make for a very short episode. But he is an older guy hanging out with younger teenage girls, so seems like someone to look into. Yeah. Kevin said after that interview, they felt confident he wasn't involved in Kathy's disappearance.

However, Chris Church did give them something that could have been lost with time had no one sought him out for an interview. Never before seen photos of Kathy. We ended up asking Chris Church to meet us for an interview. We ended up with many of the pictures that went in the book and many of the pictures that parents had never seen that Chris had taken of Kathy during a photo shoot. Ultimately, he was just great for giving us information and background about Kathy that, you know, when we had talked to the parents first, it was, it was like, you know, Hey, she's straight laced. There's, she's done nothing wrong. She never does anything wrong. And we're finding out that she's in a, in a photo shoot, hanging around at the gate and smoking cigarettes and, you know, things like that.

So we were getting this inkling that, well, maybe the parents don't know everything that she's involved with. Not that it's bad. It's like I heard you say it was like, hey, she's 16 and she doesn't want to be, you know, under her parents' thumb and wants to spread her wings a little bit. So normal stuff. So Chris Church turned out to be nothing more than background information on Kathy. Just a little more proof that maybe Kathy wasn't the rule follower her parents knew her to be. But Nancy Barlow gave Kevin and Tom another name that wasn't really on their radar before. And that name was Lester

Everett. Kevin started digging. Kevin describes in his book the extensive and tedious background investigation into Lester Everett, searching for anything that would tie him to the case. The eureka moment, as he put it, was when Kevin turned up an old report that Lester was a suspect in a September 1971 vehicle theft in Falmouth, Maine. He says in the book, quote, a true coincidence rarely, if ever, takes place. Even the perception of a coincidence dictates that a thorough investigation needs to take place before allowing investigators to move past it as being irrelevant, end quote. The next detail Kevin uncovered was the credit card charges, which brings us to that gas station in Fort Fairfield, where Kathy was spotted with two men, one who led her to the bathroom and back

to a big blue Cadillac with a firm grip on her neck. Lester, Kathy, a third passenger, and then there's that stolen car. They were all placed together, but not until 25 years later. Still, it was the beginning of a useful working hypothesis, Kevin says, and more than they had to go on in the last two and a half decades. We know that there's that connection with Fort Fairfield. So Tom Joyce and I, and then there were two deputy U.S. Marshals that assisted us, Mike Rand and Dave Drake from the Portland office. The four of us went up to Fort Fairfield and we went to the police department and asked to look through their records. There was no Kathy or Lester. But at the time, we talked to the police chief, and he'd been there for a long time. And he had said, you might want to go over across

the border into Canada and at Perth Andover, or just by Perth Andover, New Brunswick is the Maliseet First Nation at Tobit Point. I contacted the RCMP, there's a detachment at Perth Andover and talked with Sergeant Mazerol, Norm Mazerol at the time, who actually played for the Winnipeg Jets in the NHL. He was a hockey player and knew one of the coaches, Tom McPhee, that I had worked for in Portland with the Mariners. So we had an instant connection. Hockey is always the way to go. Hey, Canadians and hockey, right? Yeah. Kevin Cady may have left hockey to pursue a career in law enforcement, but it's clear that he left a piece of his heart on the ice. One thing that was important to Kevin in writing this book about Kathy's case, beyond sharing the details of the disappearance that still takes up space in his mind, was showcasing the synergy between law enforcement across both state and national borders.

Moving the investigation along meant collaboration with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMP, and numerous local and regional departments and agencies. And once in Canada, they also relied on the relationship between the RCMP and the Tobik Band police constables on the Maliseet First Nation Reservation. What we did is we brought pictures of Lester Everett, who we knew had been most likely with Kathy, and pictures of Kathy. So Gary Sapier was one of the Maliseet police officers, and they would just go out and come back with people. They'd grab them out of their house and bring them in to talk to us. And we're like, we don't do this.

As Kevin said in his book, quote, I was becoming educated on the nuanced differences between tribal and traditional policing, end quote. During one of those, so Tony Barsalas is brought to us, and Tony was terrified. But he looked at first the picture of Lester Everett and said, he said, Hey, I know him. That's Lester Everett from Portland, Maine. And we went, Whoa. Okay. And picture of Kathy Moulton. And he said that, uh, that looks like,

uh, Reed Purley. Reed Purley had made quite the name for himself among law enforcement, spanning the furthest corners of North America from California to Canada to the county and to Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's been so long since I looked at his rap sheet, but it was long, long, long, and it was, you know, some violent crimes and robberies and things like that.

But one of the most riveting parts of Reed Purley, he had been arrested in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1973 on suspicion of murder. And so Tom Joyce and I went down and we met with a detective at Cambridge PD. And when we showed him Kathy's picture, literally his face went white. He said, he goes, I got to get a picture of this girl, Judy Campbell. What the detective tells us is Reed Purley had been in a bar where she was, had been talking with her.

The investigation shows that she rebuffs his advances and tries to get away from him. And when she leaves, Reed Purley follows her out the door and then moments later, her throat slashed from someone from behind. Reed Pearly is taken into custody and is interrogated. And ultimately they, for whatever reason, couldn't find evidence to link him to the actual murder. And he was never charged with it. But, you know, to this day, or at least when we interviewed him, the detective said, he says, listen, there's, there's no doubt in my mind he did it. We just couldn't prove it. And then, of course, there's always a twist.

Judy Campbell's boyfriend was a knife salesman. So they said, well, maybe he did it, but he wasn't around. No one saw him. And there were no video cameras back then on the street. We just found that Reed Purley, based on his clear, violent history, that's public knowledge. And this is the kind of person we're dealing with. Reed Purley's reputation is public knowledge, and law enforcement in the area knew his name. But they couldn't just bring him in for questioning right then and there. This is where I would have liked to have done things a bit differently, but we knew now that there was Reed Purley, who we'd never heard of, and that he's now connected to those two. And now we're going back to, we have the Native American from Dorsey's in Fort Fairfield,

and young kid, same description, if it, he was a young kid at the time. So what Sergeant Maserell said to us was, well, we kind of have a problem because Ronald Reed Purley, was his name, was currently out on bail for home invasion, sex crimes involving someone on the reservation. So he was out on bail pending trial. It sort of was a sticky situation where we couldn't just go out and grab him and bring him in and question him. It would have been nice to do. And probably we should have, we should have pressed for that, but the RCMP chose to, to look, he's got to commit, he's got to check in every Friday at say 10 o'clock in the morning

with us, or we can go arrest him. He's got to check in. So he said, let me wait and see when he comes in, catch him off guard and see if, you know, see what he says. And so we said, all right. So we pack up and left and went back to Portland. So he called me on that Friday and he said, well, I met with Ronald Reaperley and well, he knows Lester Everett. And the reason he knows Lester Everett is because back in like 1971, he had been hitchhiking in Portland. And Lester picked him up and told him he would give him a ride back to the reservation in Perth, Andover, New Brunswick. So Sergeant Mazeroll slides the picture of Kathy over to him. And he immediately pushed it back and wouldn't look at it and said, I don't know her.

And he said, well, was she in the car when you you came up and he said, I don't know her. It was just Lester. So he refused to admit that Kathy was in the vehicle. So that's a problem because we were pretty sure it was him over in Fort Fairfield. And now he said that he knows Lester Everett. And one of the things that we put in the book, and I like Norm Masarol, I've talked to him, he went on to become like a deputy superintendent of the whole RCMP in Ottawa, which is a huge organization and has done well. But one of the things that he did say during that interview with Reed Purley was, well, Lester's dead. Lester is dead. That right there was a tip of their hand. Let me read you this direct quote from Kevin Cady's book.

Said by RCMP Sergeant Mazerol, quote, Reed Purley asked me in a mocking tone, You mean she never made it home? Her parents haven't seen her since then? That's an interesting statement because he had just told me he didn't know who she was. End quote. And what about that home invasion and rape charge? Ultimately, he went to prison on that charge for eight years. So nefarious at best, let's put it that way.

So where to next? Reed wasn't going to talk. But with the help of RCMP Sergeant Mazeroll, the investigation continued. Norm Mazeroll did a good, real good job. He did a lot of digging for us and really looked into this, knowing that probably at this point, this long, 25 years, that she was either off living somewhere happily ever after and doesn't want to talk to anybody or she's dead. So he called us and said, I have a person in Big Cove, New Brunswick. Her name is Millie Augustine. And Millie Augustine has some information that would be helpful. Millie Augustine and her sister Donna were back in 1971, had every fall gone to McBride's. So they were at McBride's in Aroostook County. So at the potato farm. And what she said

was in the fall of 1971, she knew Lester. So what she knew the name Lester, she said, Lester Everett confirms the 1963 stolen Cadillac. And she also confirms and confirms by photo and description, Kathy being on the potato farm. It was Millie, Donna, her sister, and her father were on, were there on that, working that potato field. And then they would go back home after. Donna, when she was speaking to us was, you know, a pillar of the community. She's an attorney. You know, it's very believable, very credible, no question that what she's telling us to us was true. So she said that Kathy, but she went by Candy, was a runaway from Portland and stayed in the Cadillac in the backseat,

slept in the backseat of the Cadillac and wouldn't eat with anybody else, would just stay there, stay in the car and comb her hair. But one thing that Millie was adamant about was that Kathy wanted to go home and she kept wanting to go home and they wanted Lester to bring her home. But Lester said he needed to make money on the potato field to fill the gas tank and that stuff, even though he had stolen a credit card. But anyway, so what Millie tells us is that Lester leaves one afternoon, late in the afternoon or right after dinner with Kathy, and he comes back the next day and he doesn't have Kathy.

When Millie asked Lester where Kathy, or Candy, was, Lester told them he dropped her off at another camp. He'd apparently gotten tired of her nagging to go home and he handed her off. But what Kevin Cady would later find out was that another camp actually meant the Purley family home. Later through investigation, we determined by people on the Tobik Point, Maliseet First Nation Reservation, that Kathy was there, was at Reed Purley's house, you know, the big house with all his brothers and sisters and his Ivan the Rapist uncle next door is what they called him. Ivan the Rapist. That moniker gave me pause when I first read it in Kevin's book, and I was again taken aback hearing it in our conversation.

But that's the title that Reed Purley's uncle was known by. He died during the late 1980s. Part of the investigation that revealed that Kathy was staying at the Purley home was a conversation Kevin Cady had with the Purley sister, Jacqueline. Jacqueline remembered a girl named Candy staying at their home between Halloween and Thanksgiving in 1971.

The girl was with her brother Reed, and he brought her back to the reservation from Portland. That was the story. Meanwhile, Lester Everett, who was now going by his alias David, was back at McBride's making a plan with Millie Augustine, her sister Donna, and another person, Emmett Peters. Lester told them, hey, you know, the potatoes are all picked up. You guys were going to go home. But how about if you jump in the car and we drive down to Florida? I have jobs lined up picking oranges. So the three, the four of them jump in the car and they all head down to Florida and they cross the line into right above Jacksonville at Fernandina Beach. And then Lester pulls up in

the Cadillac onto the beach, actually drives on the beach and says, we're here. And he doesn't have jobs lined up. He'd never been there before. And they were kind of miffed that he had done that. And they stay for three or four months and they decide they're going to get on a bus and head back. Lester decides he's going to stay in Florida, which he does. So Lester David Everett had left the potato picking gig to chase new employment in Florida. Meanwhile, Kathy still hadn't returned home to her parents in Portland. Suspicion and rumors and stories have swirled for decades around what happened to Kathy after Lester drove her off the potato farm. Now maybe you're yelling in your car or at your phone or you're in your shower.

Wait, does anyone else listen to podcasts in the shower or is that just me? But maybe you're yelling, talk to Lester. And yeah, that would have been nice, but remember, Lester passed away from cancer in the 80s, so anything he knew about Kathy and their trip to the county was lost. But Kevin Cady was able to connect with a friend of Lester's, John Wayne Aceto, who shared what he knew about Lester and Kathy. When Lester came back to Portland three years later, and he ends up meeting with, you know, his, his brother, Mark and Larry Lair is his other brother and stepbrother and John Wayne Aceto. And they start talking about Kathy and he realizes that Kathy had never come,

come back. So John Wayne Aceto and Lester decide they're going to go up and find, find her and bring her back home. So they drove up there, according to John Aceto, and went on the reservation and they went to Reed Purley's house and pulled up. And what John Wayne Aceto says is the Purley boys, who are known for violence, had been in a shootout with the RCMP. They're violent. There was a lot of violence. What Lester and Wayne did is they ended up confronting Reed Purley and his brothers, and Lester got beaten up. They stole his leather jacket and his cowboy boots and sent them packing quickly. What John Wayne Aceto surmised from that was that whatever happened to Kathy, they did not want anybody to know or talk about, and they certainly weren't going to tell them, which kind of tells us that Lester more than likely did not do anything to

Kathy to cause her demise. He more than likely did drop her off, and we can prove that through eyewitnesses, right? They tell us she was over there after the fact when Lester's already down in Florida. There was still a loose end to tie up when it came to Lester David Everett. The big, blue, stolen Cadillac. That was the car he drove Kathy to the county in. The car we can assume he drove to drop her off at the Purley house. And the car he took on his impromptu trip to Florida. If they couldn't talk to Lester, maybe the car would speak volumes in his absence.

So where was that car? Lester had died of cancer in like 1986 and had married Darlene Dixon. What was her name? How's that for pulling a name out of my memory? That's pretty good. Darlene Dixon Everett had moved to Georgia and Dave Drake, the deputy U.S. marshal, interviewed her in Georgia where she was living and tried to find the car, the Cadillac. And this is probably 1998 or so. The car had been on blocks in Georgia for like 10 years, rusted out, no tires. And she junked it. She had someone come and take it for scrap. So we ran down the car as far as we could. It was crushed and sold for scrap. God, that must have been a frustrating dead end.

Well, more frustrating was that Lester Everett was dead. Couldn't interview him. Sorry he would have spoken to us about, at that point, what he had recalled. So with no Lester to speak to, no car to look at for point, what he had recalled. So with no Lester to speak to, no car to look at for answers, and still no Kathy, Kevin Cady turned to the stories. He was known to be working on the case and people, sources,

reached out with what they had seen and heard through the years. Those whispers that get perpetuated around a community, Kevin turned to the task of either substantiating or negating those whispers. There's always been a rumor around that Ivan, the rapist, had her at his house and there was a snowstorm and she was last seen running nude in the snowstorm and no one saw her ever again. So as an investigator, you want to prove facts. So if I can go back to the National Weather Service and they say, hey, in 1971, there wasn't a snowstorm.

First snow never fell until after Christmas. Well, you'd say, well, I don't know. But if it had turned out that it was true and we could prove that, you know, someone committed a murder and there's no statute of limitations, that's a piece of evidence that would be key to a jury to hear that, hey, not only, you know, was this the rumor that there was a snowstorm, we can prove it. Here's the National Weather Service archives that says it happened. And then there was that rumor about a girl buried in the basement of a home on the reservation. I only quickly referenced this in part one of this story, and I wanted Kevin Cady to take me through that rumor. At face value, it sounded like one of those cruel, dark legends or a piece of local folklore that kids like to pass around the neighborhood to freak each other out.

But this rumor was coming from a source more reliable than a neighborhood kid. We got a call from the deputy police chief in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, which is pretty close to Tobik Point. His name was Boulay, and he said, hey, I just, you know, I grew up here. I don't know if you guys down in Portland have heard this, but there's always been a rumor on that reservation that one of the Purley sisters from that family was killed and is buried in the basement of the Purley home. And we were like, wow, well, okay, do you know anymore? And he said, I'm telling you, that's always been the rumor. I always find with rumors, especially something as far back as that was, that if it was a rumor, there's some semblance of truth somewhere in that rumor.

So we went back to Norm Azarol, the RCMP sergeant, and said, hey, this is what we're hearing. And he said, oh, this is what we're hearing. And he said, he says, oh, that's interesting. He said, I can confirm for sure that none of the Purley's sisters or anyone that resembles their cousins was killed or died, especially back in 1971. He checked, you know, he had his connections and he was talking to some of the elders that would talk to him. And they said, no, no, no, that never happened. But you had the aspect of buried in their basement.

It was a dirt basement at the time in 71. Could she have been buried in there? Well, sure enough, she could. Getting in there never happened. What they did say was, well, hey, you know, in 1978, the house burned down and the house has been completely rebuilt. Not only that, you know, they put a cement slab down and built up over the cement slab after the fire. So now there's a cement slab there. I go back to Pearl Bruns, the Pearl Bruns murder in South Portland, where the husband killed Pearl and she was missing for months and months and months.

And turns out that the husband had killed her, buried her in the dirt floor basement and then put a cement subfloor over that. And they ended up finding her with like a sonar type equipment. They excavated her. He was convicted. It's quite possible that's where she is. It's quite possible that's where she is. There's even more to Kathy's case, and it's all detailed in Kevin Cady's book titled Kathy Moulton, Missing and Endangered. You can find it on Amazon. I read it on my Kindle. There are stories of a small skull carried to a doorstep by someone's dog on the reservation. There are searches in the deep Maine woods. There are recovered memories from neighbors watching through the window blinds

as a girl was dragged, kicking and screaming down the road, never to be seen again. But to this day, there's still no sign of Kathy. No body, no confession, no official suspects because there's no official murder. Kevin, Katie, and Tom Joyce remained objective in investigating her case, even keeping the parallel theory open

that maybe Kathy returned to Portland and maybe a family member was responsible for her disappearance. Because of that parallel theory, many of the details about Kathy's case weren't shared with her parents until 2014. The parallel investigation, believe it or not, was did she come home, and her father was really upset with her because she had been gone for so long? And did something happen to her? I mean, we had to keep that that that line open.

And we of course, we couldn't tell the parents that we wouldn't tell the parents that because there was always that parallel that, you know, did that murder? Was she murdered in Portland because she was gone for so long? And, you know, God forbid, right, that,, the, the father was the perpetrator of it, but based on all this information that we came up with, we were able to debunk all that and say, you know, you know what, she never came home. The good part was, and I talked to Kathy's sister about this before I did it was let's, let me sit down and talk to her parents and let her, let them know everything they want to know about this. And 2014 was the first time they heard all this stuff. We kept a lot of that from them. I mean, we would kind of keep them advised, like, yeah, we're working up there. It looks promising.

But we always, in the back of our minds, were worried that maybe you have to be objective and say, maybe she did come home, but that's debunked. We've been able to refute that. His last activity on the case with the Portland PD included a search of the woods in Aroostook County. One of the things that happened right before I retired is we learned that there was female skeletal remains were found or seen in Smyrna Mills, but it was from like back in 1983 or 84. So we ended up going up there and with the warden service, and we did a big search of that area way, way after the fact to see if we could get back to those skeletal remains. Of course, animals scatter, you know, the bones and they go everywhere, but we weren't able to find that. So I worked on this officially with the Portland Police Department until, that was like 2004.

I had 20 years with the city of Portland in 2005 and moved on to Falmouth for a few years and then Elliott, and then I finally retired. Retired or not, this case has not left Kevin Cady's mind. I mean, clearly, he spoke with me on the 49th anniversary of her disappearance. This case still means a lot to him. And even as recently as September 2020, Kevin received tips from his known sources in Canada. He is forever connected to the Kathy Marie Moulton story. And he believes he might know where the truth lies. The answer will always be on that reservation. It's a deep, dark secret with that

family. And will we ever find out? Boy, today's year 50. We're all getting older. When it comes to my feelings about the case, this is what I think we should be doing as law enforcement officers. It's easy to put a case aside, put it in a drawer and say, yep, there's no leads. There's nothing to do because it's too much work. And I just, I just want people to know that there are law enforcement officers like me that care about missing people and missing kids. And the police department in Portland expended a lot of money to let us do what we were doing. We tried to move heaven and earth at the end of the day with this case.

And the best we can do is tell the story about what we know now from facts. And we're bringing her back to life, which we can't do this. You know, this is the best we can do for the Moten family that, you know, we tried. I mean, we tried our best and this is what we have to report. So what we ever know, maybe, maybe not. I'm so grateful that I was able to connect with you and learn more about this case.

I think I shared with you that I didn't find your name until the very end of my research to tell the first part of this story. And I was like, there's no way that in 50 years, it was just, well, she's gone without a trace. There's got to be more. And then I saw your name and I was like, I think this guy might be able to fill in the blanks for me. So I'm so grateful that you did that here and for my listeners. Thank you. It's great to be here. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Kevin.

The details of this case and names of sources shared by Kevin Cady are published in his book, Kathy Moulton, Missing and Endangered. Ronald Reed Purley has not been named a suspect or a person of interest in this case. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. Sources for this case and others, including all links to individual articles, are listed in the show notes at darkdowneast.com so you can do some more reading and digging of your own. I've also linked Kevin Cady's book all about Kathy Marie Moulton's case in the show notes. Subscribing and reviewing Dark Down East is free and it not only supports the show, it's the best way to ensure you never miss an episode of Maine and New England true crime stories. If you have a story or a case I should cover, please send it to me at darkdowneast at gmail.com. Follow along with the show at

darkdowneast.com and on Instagram at darkdowneast. Thank you for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do. I am honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and murder cases. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.