Dark Downeast - The Disappearance of Kim Moreau Part 1 (Maine)

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

MAINE MISSING PERSON, 1986: If you’ve driven through the western counties of Maine anytime over the last 35 years, you’ve likely seen Kimberly Moreau’s face. Each year, her father hangs posters with the photo of his smiling daughter on telephone poles, hoping someday, someone will dial his number with the answers he’s been seeking since the day his 17-year old daughter went missing in 1986.In this two-part series on Dark Downeast, you’ll hear about an investigation plagued by admitted inexperience and oversight, how her family’s pleas were disregarded, and the decades of rumors and tips. You’ll meet her father, Richard Moreau, her two sisters Diane and Karen, and friends of the Moreau family who have become the critical support and boots on the ground, always searching for Kim.This is the Disappearance of Kim Moreau, Part 1.If you have information that could help in the investigation, please contact Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit South at [phone] or leave an anonymous tip.Watch the Dark Downeast mini-documentary, Missing Kim View source material and photos for this episode at darkdowneast.com/kimmoreau-part1Follow @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.

I believe her life ended that night, and that was the last chance I'd get to talk to her. If I thought that that was going to happen, I would have held her home. I would have, I wish I could go back and repeat it and do things different. This whole family, it's not only have we gone through a lot of heartaches, we still have. And it's really changed our lives. If you've driven through the western counties of Maine any time over the last 35 years, you've likely seen Kimberly Moreau's face. Each year, her father hangs posters with a photo of his smiling daughter on telephone poles, hoping someday someone will dial his number with the answers he's been seeking

since the day she went missing in 1986. Kim Moreau was 17 years old when she disappeared from her small hometown of Jay, Maine. 35 years have passed this month since that night in May of 1986 when Kim stepped out the door of her home and into a waiting car to continue her night with friends. Friends who would later deny knowing Kim any more than an acquaintance. Friends whose stories have changed and shifted over the last three and a half decades. Friends who are assumed to be the last people to see Kim alive.

In this two-part series on Dark Down East, you'll hear about an investigation plagued by admitted inexperience and oversight, how her family's pleas were disregarded, and the decades of rumors and tips. You'll meet her father, Richard Moreau, her two sisters, Diane and Karen, and friends of the Moreau family who have become the critical support and boots on the ground, always searching for Kim. I've got a lot more medical issues than I used to have.

Don't know how many more years I can do this. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is The Disappearance of Kim Moreau on Dark Down East. My name's Richard Moreau. I'm Kim Morrow's father. Richard Morrow, also called Dick, greeted me at the front steps of his home as I rang the doorbell. I was admittedly nervous to meet the family that I'd spent so much time reading about. You can't talk about unsolved cases in the state of Maine without the Mo name appearing countless times along the way, and I'd personally spent months since September of 2020 looking into this case. But my nerves were soon dashed as I saw the man step out of the garage bay. He instantly reminded me of my grandfather, and when Dick spoke, he sounded like him too. I joked that I should have known better than to go to the front door,

because every Mainer seems to enter through their garage. Dick's daughter, Diane, and two family friends sat around the table as I stepped inside. They told me his other daughter, Karen, was on her way as well. As I set up my mics and explained what the next few hours would entail, they all chatted openly around me. It was a topic they were used to discussing, a topic they'd been discussing for decades. I took my seat and tested our levels, and a fluffy dog wandered beneath the table and found himself a spot next to my feet. We were all sitting around Dick's dining room table in J. Main as I hit record and he began to introduce me to his daughter, Kim Moreau. I had three daughters and they were

all three years apart. So they were all pretty close, but at the same time, each one had their own individual things, and they would turn around and get into arguments and so forth, and each one were their own people. Kim was very, very neat and proper is the way I'd put it. If her makeup wasn't absolutely perfect, if she wasn't dressed just right, her hair wasn't combed, no way in heck was anybody ever going to get to talk to her or see her. You might talk to her, but you're going to be on one side of the door

and she was on the other. But Kim was very outgoing. She liked people. She was like on a cheerleading squad. She was very statuesque. She was 5'7", weighed 135 pounds, very pretty. She wanted to become a professional model. He remembers life as the father of three girls fondly.

He smiled, reflecting back on those earlier days of fatherhood. It was hectic, but it was really a lot of fun. I spend a lot of time now reflecting back at things that went on back then. One of the things is, believe it or not, is when I used to take the girls and take them all down to dance class and take them all down there. Then we'd come home and they're supposed to practice. Oh, no, no, no, no.

How do you do this? How do you do this? How do you do that? Well, I had to learn how to do the moves to come home and show them what the hell to do. Pardon my language. And I'd come home and, okay, when we get into tap dancing, it was shuffle, ball, change. Shuffle, step, ball, change. Yeah, whatever. Dick now

lives just up the street from the house that they all once shared with Kim. The house is still in the family and he sometimes finds himself lost in the memories he has there. I get to go in the house where they actually grew up, so

my stepdaughter actually lives there now. And I go down there and I sit there and it's almost like I can see everything going on. So I get very mixed emotions when I go there. I mean, I went through two families there, basically. I went through my original family, which, I mean, I still walk in there and I sit down and I can remember what everything was. That Jewel Street house was always filled with kids. Kim was a social butterfly with a big friend group she'd been close with since childhood. She had a very good bunch of friends. They were all loving and caring. They all cared about each other and

I mean we always had kids in the house. I mean that we always had them. Can I go over here and stay there tonight? And I heard that so many doggone times. But sometimes she may have felt stifled by her small-town main life. Kim talked excitedly about the big goals she had for her future. She had absolute aspirations of being out of here. This was way too dull. It was, I'm out here in this hit country and there's nothing to do. She was, she had the attitude of a big city girl. She wanted to be out where things were happening.

And Kim's main focus was, I'm going to be the best down-and-gone model there is in the world. I'm going to hit it big time. I'm going to hit all the runways. I'm going to hit it big time. I'm going to hit all the runways, and I'm going to model everybody's clothes, but you're going to pay me big bucks to do it. She had very big goals that way. In fact, she was supposed to have gone into being entered into the Miss Mame,

and that was only a few weeks out from when she disappeared. And so she was doing all the right things she had to do to go down the road she wanted to. Unfortunately, she met with the wrong people at the wrong time. During the summer of 1985, Kim petitioned her parents for a change of scenery. She'd been working in Farmington, a little over 20 minutes away from Jay, and she wanted to move there for the summer. She'd be closer to work, and it was a chance to just test the waters of a more independent life. They bowed to their daughter's requests.

Kim was headstrong, and really really there was no harm in it. She may have been out of the house, but Kim called home almost every day, and she came back often to hang out with her family. The agreement was that Kim had to return home in the fall to start back up at Jay High School, and she did. Everything seemed normal, at least at first. But as the new school year started and the seasons changed, so did Kim. The friends Kim had for years weren't coming around the house as much. She started drifting away from all her friends. And she started hanging with this one other girl, Rhonda. When she started hanging with Rhonda, Rhonda became the type of a person that was very possessive and push all the others out.

The 80s were the days before texting and social media, but Kim and her new friend Rhonda Breton like to stay in touch swapping notes during school. The handwritten notes to Kim from Rhonda are scrawled on wide-ruled paper. They narrate the days of sitting in class and watching the clock and making plans for when the bell finally rang. There's mentions of parties and the things that went on there. Drinking, drugs. Nothing altogether shocking, though. The notes talk of the boys they were dating, the ups and downs of their teenage relationships. Kim had been going steady with a boy named Mike Staples for quite a while. She wore Mike's class ring around her neck, and he had hers, too.

Rhonda signed some of those notes to Kim, just the four of us. Kim and Mike, Rhonda and Richard. Kim's sister Karen had the distinct impression that Rhonda wanted Kim all to herself. Rhonda isolated Kim, meaning that when you're friends with Rhonda, you can only be friends with Rhonda and all your other friends are supposed to go away. She totally isolated her and people that Kim hung out with from the time that she was in grade school, all of a sudden just weren't in her life so much. And that's when things started to change, and I can see it today. I couldn't see it back then, what really was going on at that time.

And that was the whole different class of people that she was running around with. I seen that she would come home and you would see like she was pondering about something but didn't know what. I found that she was more quiet. Kim had always written poems, and her diary was filled with poetry. It seemed, as the people she spent time with changed, and she turned inward, the tone of her poems changed too. But Kim was also facing other painful challenges. Her mom, Patriciaricia was battling cancer kim wrote a poem titled tears it begins if tears could talk what would they say they'd whisper out i'm sorry they'd cry out i'm hurt tears do talk but they say too much show too much so they are hidden and wiped away. In late April of 1986, Kim's boyfriend Mike Staples entered a treatment facility, a dry-out center as Kim called it in her diary. His absence caused

Kim tremendous heartache. Even though it had only been a few days since she'd last seen him, Kim missed Mike. On the pre-labeled page reserved for April 24, 1986, Kim wrote in her diary that she was planning to go find Mike, hitching a ride with Rhonda, Rhonda's boyfriend, and another man, whose name you'll know later. Kim wrote in her diary about Mike, I care about him more than I have ever cared about anyone. But just two short weeks later, Kim and Mike got into a fight. And that fight changed everything. Not just in their relationship, but maybe the entire course of Kim's life.

May 10th, 1986. It started as a typical day at the Morrow household on Jewel Street in J. Maine. Dick was getting ready to head across the street to the VFW Hall to set up for the big party that night, and Kim was starting her beauty routine. So I saw her that morning and I was ahead of a big party that was gonna go on that day and I was heading across across the street at the VFW but I can remember Kim that morning usual thing she, she'd get up, walked out, I turned around and I kind of giggled at her. Oh, don't look at me, don't look at me, I haven't fixed up yet.

And I started laughing. And the only thing I told her is, have a good day. And she went in the bathroom prepared to do her thing, and that's going to be an hour or more anyway. And I was leaving, and that was the last I saw of Kim. That was the last time I saw her. It would have been junior prom night for Kim, but she wasn't going. Things had been rocky with her boyfriend Mike Staples, and with the big fight the day before, they called off their plans to attend the dance. Instead, Kim was meeting up with Rhonda to see where the night would take them. The timeline of events, the people she was with that night,

those details wouldn't be pieced together until later. The next time any of Kim's family saw her that day was sometime around midnight. Me and Bob were sitting on the couch watching TV. And Kim came in, said that she talked to me for a minute, said that she would be back in an hour. And honestly, that was the last time I talked to my sister. She was not staggering. She was not slurring her words, and she had no fear in her of leaving again.

She's 17 years old. Mom and Dad aren't home. Somebody waiting for her in the driveway. Yeah, we snuck in and out, no problem. And that was a casual, nothing out of the blue thing to happen. She was wearing a white blouse with jeans and white high-top sneakers. She came in, used the bathroom, probably checked her reflection. It would have been Kim's way. And without a jacket,

without her purse, Kim stepped out into the night with just a brief wave goodbye to her sister. And I really thought it was like any other night, that she'd be back in an hour and I'd see her tomorrow and life would go on. But little did I know, I believe her life ended that night and that was the last chance I'd get to talk to her. If I thought that that was going to happen, I would have held her home. I wish I could go back and repeat it and do things different. Kim ducked out of the house after waving goodbye to Karen and Bob on the couch. Kim got into a waiting car, a white Trans Am with 10-day plates. The driver and the destination that evening were unknown to Kim's family at the time. Karen didn't ask Kim as she

walked out the door, but it also didn't seem important to know. Kim said that she'd be back in an hour, and she took nothing with her, not her purse, not a jacket, no makeup. None of the things you'd expect the neat and proper teenager to pack if she planned to be gone for any long stretch of time. Meanwhile, Dick and his wife Pat were just across the street at the VFW party. It was about quarter to two in the morning and we looked in. We'd always check in and see the kids. And looked in, Kim wasn't there. That ain't right.

That right off didn't feel right. So we went into the kitchen area and we sat there for a little bit, waiting. Of course, doing the usual thing that a parent would do, wait till she gets home tonight. and we sat there for a little bit waiting. Of course, doing the usual thing that a parent would do, wait till she gets home tonight. Jeez, it gets to be 3 o'clock. She ain't home. We go and wake her up.

Ask her, she says, Kim ain't here? No. At 5 o'clock in the morning when she wasn't there, then we knew something, something is definitely wrong. The Moreaus waited up all night, expecting Kim to walk back through the door. But it was 5 a.m. and still no Kim. That wasn't normal. That was cause for concern.

And so Dick and Pat went straight to the Jay Police Department. But their urgency wasn't matched by the officer on duty. was quite adamant about it. So my wife and I left and went home. It's the same old story when we hear about missing persons cases from the 70s and 80s, and even through more recent decades. There's a waiting period. Your loved one doesn't return home and you're told you have to wait. I'm sick of hearing it because of what we know now about those first 48 hours after a person goes missing. In the first 48, evidence is fresh. Memories are clearer. Witness statements are more reliable. Today, you don't need to wait 48 or even 24 hours to report a child missing in Maine. But that May morning in 1986, that's what Jay Police told the Moreaus. And that's what the Moreaus did. 48 hours they waited, down to the minute.

We waited to 48, which was five o'clock in the morning, and then we went back. We got there, and at first they didn't even want to take any doggone statement at all. Well, we came in, and we had brought information. We had a picture of her. I mean, we did not know the procedure. And unfortunately, that's where things really started going south. Right from the beginning, the Moros felt like their concern for their daughter was disregarded. They kept saying that she was a runaway, which was a whole crock of bull because she hadn't run away at all. The runaway narrative is a common one for missing people, especially missing teenagers.

In Kim's case, it stemmed from her previous summer living away from home. Police pointed to that as proof of a pattern for Kim. She probably left on her own accord, just as she had the summer before. But Dick knew that wasn't the case, because Kim lived in Farmington that summer before with her parents' permission. And besides, she was always calling home or visiting. And this time, they had no contact from Kim. Kim wouldn't have run away to begin with. But she definitely wouldn't have left home without any of her things. Remember, she didn't even take her purse with her

after stopping home that night. So they weren't buying the theory that Kim took off on her own. The runaway theory persisted through the first critical days and weeks of Kim Moreau's disappearance. With little action taken by police, Dick, Kim's mom Pat, and her sisters Diane and Karen took their own action. What they couldn't have known at the time was that it was the beginning of a long road of leading their own charge to find their missing daughter and sister. You'd think that a missing person, a missing child, in small-town western Maine would have garnered immediate media attention. But according to Dick Moreau's own notes, he and his wife were told not to go to the press. The local police told them that printing her picture in the paper could ruin the investigation. And so it was not until July of 1986 that the name and face of Kimberly Moreau was publicly reported. Jay police officer Ernest Stewart told Morning

Sentinel reporter Dawn Waterhouse in a July 23, 1986 piece, quote, we've followed several leads, but they've only come to dead ends, unquote. The piece reported that the sheriff's department was following up on leads in Farmington, where Kim had spent a summer away, but they learned nothing. Officer Stewart went on to say that there was no indication that Kim was the victim of foul play. The Moros' frustration mounted every day, matched only by their fear that something bad did happen to Kim. With absolutely no contact from Kim whatsoever, they believed that she was a victim of something terrible.

Kim's purse that she left behind that night contained several items of concern for Kim's family. A pillbox containing four small white pills, notes from Kim's friend Rhonda Breton, and other items that seemed potentially important for further investigation. Dick brought the pills to the Jay Police Department for testing. The Morning Sentinel reported the discovery of these pills by Kim's family. But really, they could have been a red herring, a misleading, distracting clue. Kim's sister Karen explained.

Those pills you could go to Jay School and buy for a quarter apiece. It was considered speed. It was a piece. It was considered speed. It was very common. It was everyday stuff. And it wasn't heroin. It wasn't the hardcore drugs that are out there today. The theory that drugs were involved in her disappearance never held much water for the Morrow family.

But they don't argue that it was probably part of the scene that Kim was running in with this new group of friends around her. Kim was classified as a social user. In other words, she'd use enough that people would trust her, but she didn't abuse. When they focused that drugs was the main thing, no, she was 17. She wanted to fit in. She wanted to be one of the crowd. She wanted to be liked. And I will never go for the fact that it was all about drugs. Dick Moreau never did hear from police what their tests revealed about those pills. When he later returned to the police department to discuss the results, he was told they couldn't find the pills. After five weeks and no progress with town authorities, Kim's mom contacted the

state police in Augusta. According to Dick's notes, she was told that because Kim was so close to being of age, there was little they could do. But Kim wasn't of age. She was 17. And again, she had to fight the runaway theory. Pat insisted that Kim was a missing person. Whoever answered the phone that day at the Maine State Police said they'd put Kim on the list. She'd be five or six down the line. It could be a while before they got to her. The first real push forward that Kim's case received was when Dick reached out to a friend of a family member, a Maine State trooper named Jeff Trafton. He asked for his advice. What else could they possibly be doing to get somebody to

take action and find answers in Kim's disappearance? It had been months since they'd last seen Kim. Trafton contacted Jay Police to find out the status of the investigation. And what Trafton relayed to Dick was troubling. Town of Jay finally admitted that it was more than they could do. And here it is once later. Trafton then contacted the sheriff's office to find out what they were doing. He learned that even though Dick and Pat filled out the form for Kim to be listed on the NCIC Index, the National Crime Information Center, it never happened.

Kim did get reported to the sheriff's department to be listed on the NCIC computer, but they never followed up on it. And they were busy at the time. They took it. Yeah. Okay. So forth. Threw it on the desk. It got buried underneath some paperwork and never did get into it. It was becoming painfully evident that Kim's case was falling through the cracks. The family had already lost months of crucial time that they couldn't get back. Finally, with Trafton poking around, the Moreaus got an audience with the state police.

Detective Richard Pickett showed up at their house. Dick and the rest of the Moreau family sat around the table to make their case, Kim's case, to Detective Pickett. So a detective comes in and we go through all the formalities that morning. We sat down and had coffee and so forth, and we started talking. He never was prepared for what he walked into, because I was there, her mother was there, and my sister was there. And we had made pamphlets and kept it by date what was done. He never even looked. He just brushed it to his side.

He showed up 9 o'clock that morning. He never left our house until after 7 o'clock that night. And that's when Kim was finally listed. Months after she disappeared, Kim Moreau was finally listed on the National Crime Information Center index. Months the family fought to have their pleas for help answered, and it seemed like maybe this was progress. Even then, though, Kim's sister Diane recalls the distinct feeling that they still weren't being taken seriously. Not completely.

This detective we've talked to in the past, within the past year, and he will tell you directly to your face, the only reason he came to that house that day was to appease us, because he never thought it was anything more than what. He always said that she was a runaway, so he was only coming to appease us, just to listen to us, to put it out so that we could stop bugging him. But it was something, and they were hopeful for a time. After fighting for four months to get police there, we felt a sense of relief when the

detective took it over. And he did try. I will give him his credit. It seemed like the family finally had a partner in all of this. That they had someone to turn to when they had questions about the investigation. Someone to turn to with the leads that came in to Dick's own phone. He'd started hanging posters with Kim's photo and his phone number around town. The posters that have become an enduring symbol and an ever-present reminder of Kim's case, even decades later. By September of 1986, more than 2,000 of those posters were printed and displayed, not only in Maine, but across the country. The leads were as widespread, too. them putting it in every truckload that went out. So we were getting calls from everywhere in the

country that she had been seen, and some of them got checked all out because supposedly she had been seen in Dallas, Texas. She was supposedly seen in Arizona. Most of those did actually get checked out. But like any other state detective, every time that there is an active, something new that happens, they must, they have got to kick this to a side and go on. And that's what happened. With each day, week, and month that passed,

the less time that was devoted by investigators to Kim's case. Dick began to realize that their best hope of learning the truth about what happened to Kim was to take action themselves. He documented everything, every phone call, with every individual, the time and date is recorded along with all of the topics discussed. The team surrounding the Morrow family, locals with enormous hearts and a shared mission to bring Kim home, they digitized and shared years of documents with me. The information is robust, overwhelming even, and some of it I can't even share

to protect the ongoing 35-year-old investigation. But the amount of work this family has done, the time and money they've spent to uncover answers, it's staggering. And Kim's disappearance didn't happen in a silo. Life rolled on around the Morrow family as they all fought to uncover answers. Kim's mom, Pat, was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, and Karen and Diane walked through the pain and the unknown of their sister's disappearance,

all while coping with the reality of their mother's illness. Something has become abundantly clear to me. This family is strong, determined. I felt it. But as they told me, sitting around Dick Moreau's dining table together on that late April afternoon, they didn't have any other choice. I'll never forget her coming and giving me a hug, giving me a kiss and telling me she loved me.

That's probably the best one. And one thing I've learned to do is I think both of my girls now will turn around and tell you that I do this much, much more is to express to them that I love them and I feel very open about doing that today.

Never did it enough back then. And that's one of the things that I think, if I could go back and change, I'd definitely be doing. Because I think it's so doggone important. So, that's probably the best one that'll always be there. I go down the house and I'll sit there at the house where they grew up. And sometimes I can picture right where the table was back then. And I can remember this one particular time. I was tired.

I had been working a lot and so forth. And she came up to me and just put her arms around me and was standing in back of me. And she says, you know, Dad, I love you. That's probably the one that sticks out the most in my memory. That's my favorite. I can almost feel it today. In the next episode of Darktown East.

We were going around, friend to friend, asking, trying to find out anything weak. Much of what the family knows about that night of May 10th, 1986, has been pieced together and assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Only, they don't know what the final picture will be. They still don't. But they've filled in many blanks of the local and state police investigations with details they've learned through their own conversations with Kim's friends. Interviews they've conducted themselves throughout the years. Leads they've checked out with the help of friends and community members. All of it is coming together to form a

clearer image of what could have played out that night and who may know exactly where to find Kim Moreau today. And it's like, you do know Kim. And his comment to me and Bob was, oh, was that her name? What did the driver of that car, who waited for Kim in the driveway that night, have to say about the last time he saw Kim? No damn way in hell. This idea that they're going to drop her about a half a mile

from the house and that she's going to walk home at one o'clock, that's a crock of bull. No way in heck she'd ever do that. How did the owner of a local arcade, a man with a record of drug charges and violent offenses, end up with Kim's class ring. Calvin ended up with the class ring. Where is Kim? He was talking about two gold mines in Livermore, Maine that not a lot of people knew about. Gold mines, waterways, concrete slabs, land connected to one of the men who last saw Kim alive. The decades of searching continue. We're just trying to get my sister home so people man up and speak up and tell us where she is.

The family is offering a $5,000 reward for verifiable information leading to the location and discovery of Kim Moreau or her remains. Email justwanttofindher at gmail.com or call Richard Moreau 207-320-5997. The 35-year anniversary of Kim's disappearance is next week, May 10, 2021. Nobody should have to live most of their life searching for somebody. You know how hard it is going to say that I've looked for her longer than she was alive? Nobody should have to do this. No family member should have to look for a family member this long. Kim Moreau's story continues in the next episode.

Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. Sources for this episode, including links to individual articles, are listed in the show notes at darkdowneast.com. A special thank you to Richard, Diane, Karen, Jared, and the anonymous individual also sitting at the table that day. Thank you all for sharing Kim's story with me. If you have information about this case or a personal connection to it,

please contact the family or the Maine State Police first. But you can also reach out to me at hello at darkdowneast.com. For photos of Kim and other information relating to this case, visit darkdowneast.com and follow along on Instagram at darkdowneast. Thank you for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do. I'm honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones. And for those like the Moros, who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons 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.