Dark Downeast - The Disappearance of Robert "Bobby" Desmond (Maine)

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

Robert "Bobby" Desmond's case is the oldest on the Maine State Police Unsolved Missing Persons case list but his story has never been told. Detective Steve Borst of the Kennebunk Police Department is reigniting the decades-old investigation for an 11-year old boy gone missing in 1964 and nearly forgotten.Through interviews with surviving family members, limited archival news sources, and other investigative resources, Detective Borst is learning more about the life of Bobby Desmond and what could have happened to him all those years ago.Someone, somewhere may have that one key piece of information that inches this case closer to closure than it’s ever been.If you have any information on the disappearance of Bobby Desmond, please contact the Kennebunk Police Department at 207-985-6121 or the Maine State Police – Major Crimes Unit – South at 207-624-7076.If you have information regarding this case, please contact the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit - South at [phone] x9 or toll free at 1-800-452-4664. You may also report information about this crime using the leave a tip form.  View source material and photos for this episode at  darkdowneast.com/robertdesmondFollow @darkdowneast on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTokTo suggest a case visit darkdowneast.com/submit-case Dark Downeast is an audiochuck and Kylie Media production hosted by Kylie Low.

The first email I received from Kennebunk Police Detective Steve Borst was brief. Quote, I have a cold case missing child case from 1964. Would appreciate the chance to talk to you about it. End quote. The year and the town got my attention. I've been wanting to cover a specific Kennebunk case from 1964 since I started this podcast. If my assumption was correct, the detective was writing to me about

that very same case, the oldest one on the Maine State Police unsolved missing persons list. I emailed back, would this be the Robert Desmond case by chance? He responded promptly, quote, it would be the Desmond case, end quote. Detective Steve Borst of the Kennebunk Police Department is reigniting the decades-old investigation for a little boy nearly forgotten. 11-year-old Robert Bobby Desmond went missing in 1964, and he is still missing to this day. Through interviews with surviving family members,

limited archival news sources, and other investigative resources, Detective Borst is learning more about the life of Bobby Desmond and what could have happened to him all those years ago. He hopes that by sharing Bobby's story, someone, somewhere, will come forward with the one piece of information that inches this case closer to closure than it's ever been. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Robert Bobby Desmond on Dark Down East. This episode contains descriptions of child abuse. Please listen with care. At the time of this episode's original release date in September of 2022, no one has been charged or convicted of any crimes as it relates to the 1964 disappearance of Robert Desmond.

It was 2018 when a local woman approached Kennebunk Police Chief Robert McKenzie with a faded old newspaper clipping from the 70s. She sent my chief an email, and she said, hey, I was going through a trunk at my house, and I found an old newspaper article about my father and about how he was really well known for athletics at Kennebunk High School when he was a kid. And on the reverse side of that newspaper article, there was a headline about more or less whatever happened to the missing kid from Kennebunk.

And she didn't know anything about it. And she read about it through that article and then reached out to the chief and just said, hey, there's not a lot of people that talk about this in town. Maybe with the advancement of technology and things like that today, and then reached out to the chief and just said, hey, there's not a lot of people that talk about this in town. Maybe with the advancement of technology and things like that today, maybe you guys should take a fresh look at it. That's Detective Steve Borst. He's worked in investigations for the bulk of his 27 years in law enforcement. He started his career as a summer cop during college in 1991, and knew it was exactly what he wanted to do with his life. He's investigated burglaries and assaults, worked with the Maine State Police Drug Enforcement

Agency on narcotics investigations, and most recently, Detective Borst was tapped for a Secret Service task force that looks into cyber fraud and related crimes. Though he'd been in law enforcement for nearly three decades and spent that time in Kennebunk and surrounding communities, Steve was not immediately familiar with the case of Robert Desmond. But he wasn't alone in that. My chief didn't know about it. I mean, we have two other cold or unsolved cases here in town

that do have a lot more notoriety or a lot more awareness on it. And those are Mary Olin Chuck and Mary Ellen Tanner. But nobody in town really seemed to know about Bobby Desmond. The chief asked me to take a look at it. So when the chief asks you to take a look at something, that's what you do. With that, Detective Borst dove into the case, beginning just like he would on any other. Normally, I think when you get a request like that, if you were to ask to take a fresh look at some other case, the first stop would be, okay, get that case file from whoever did it,

whether it be in your own agency, outside agency, state agency, and look to see what was done, what wasn't done, what could we do differently today. And I reached out to somebody from the AG's office only to find out, I mean, it kind of crushed me when she said that the case had been closed, archived, and destroyed. So we virtually started behind the eight ball. There was no case file to go over. There were no notes, no interviews, no idea of what they had or didn't have for evidence. So it was starting from square one for sure. I kept finding that less was known than anybody really had a good grasp on. There was nothing. Nothing. It's frustrating to hear,

but it's also not unheard of for case files to be destroyed after an investigation has been closed. Low solvability, low chance of prosecution, key parties deceased. Whatever the reason, the files were gone. So when you have nothing, you have nothing to look at, nothing to review, nothing to give a fresh look, you start from scratch. So it would be almost like if it happened today so it was you know who is he who are his parents who were his siblings who were his neighbors and the things that you would normally the steps that you would normally take today I'm trying to take that for something that happened in the 60s so it was extremely

discouraging because there was nothing to help me, you know, from the past. One of Detective Borst's first objectives was to assemble a family tree in hopes of understanding who was in the home when Bobby lived there, and if any of those family members are still alive today. Speaking with family would be key to understanding what the home life was like, and if anyone remembered anything, that could set the renewed investigation off in any strong direction. Detective Borst sent me the stack of newspaper clippings that served as the sole information source at the beginning of his investigation. There are a handful of stories printed in the Biddeford Sacco Journal and Portsmouth Herald, among other publications, a majority of which were from 1976, 12 years after Bobby apparently disappeared without a trace.

Although the articles were limited in detail and largely repeated the same few case facts, they did provide Detective Borst with the first key names in Bobby's family tree, his mother, Alice Martin, and stepfather, Chester Martin, called Chet. With those two names, Detective Borst was able to identify several siblings of Bobby Desmond's who were still alive. He found their contact information, and he picked up the phone. That first phone call was challenging. I could not begin to understand what that might have been like for the sibling on the other end of the line, picking up a call to hear a detective speaking the name of your brother,

missing some 55 years at that point. Steve told me he knew that the call struck a nerve and possibly resurfaced trauma that had long since been filed away. The sibling gave Detective Borst his first clues as to what life was like for Bobby and the other kids in the home. How his sibling enlisted in the Air Force as soon as she was able and moved far away from the house in the chaos there, never to look back. After that first connection, Bobby's sibling connected Detective Borst to another of Bobby's relatives, a sister living in New England. She has a different name now, but I'll be using her birth name at her request. Her name was Dawn Martin.

I was born in 1961 in Exeter, New Hampshire, and we came to live in Kennebunk. Sometime after that, I don't know when. And my mother was married prior to the man that I grew up with, believing was my father, and Bobby was her son through that marriage. That makes Don and Bobby Desmond half siblings. They share the same mother. Bobby had previously lived with his father outside of Maine until sometime in 1963 or 1964, when he came to live with Alice and Chet and the other kids in their home on Hovey Street in Kennebunk. Don told me she has limited memories of Bobby and what he was like. She would have been just three or four years old when he disappeared.

But her memories of childhood and what it was like in that house, those memories are vivid. And it was very common in my family for there to be a lot of chaos. My father was a drinker, and when he got drunk, he got angry and violent. And so furniture being broken and family members being beaten and, you know, the police coming to our house, that was pretty common stuff throughout my childhood. I could not independently verify reports of child abuse by Dawn and Bobby's parents through any public records, but that could be because it was never reported or investigated. According to my research, any child protective service agencies or similar were still a few years off nationally and in Maine. However, every surviving family member Detective Borst was able to speak to as part of his investigative efforts shared their experiences of beatings, starvation, containment, and other traumas inside the Hovey Street home.

Whenever this kind of stuff would happen in my bedroom on Hovey Street, there was this closet that was underneath the roof, right? It was like this slanted roof. And there was this little closet that if you went inside, you could close and lock the closet door from the inside using this little piece of wood to close the door. My older sister would hide me in that closet when my father would go on his drunken binges. And I would hide in there. And lots of nights I remember screaming and crying and things being broken. And so it was a very common thing to be hid in the closet. By 1964, five children and two adults were living in the Hovey Street home. Alice and Chet Martin, Alice's 11-year-old son Bobby Desmond, his half-sister Dawn, and three other siblings. Then one day in August of 1964,

the occupancy dropped by one. Bobby was gone. That was that. There was a culture in our family that children are to be seen and not heard, and you don't ask questions about things you don't know anything about. And so it's none of your business was a very common response every time we asked questions. It wasn't until Dawn was a teenager that she was finally able to ask the questions that had swirled in her brain for years and talk to her sister about the hazy recurring dreams she had, the images that surfaced in her mind's eye from a scary night in August of 1964

when she was just three or four years old, the night that she believes something happened to her brother Bobby. Dawn has sought therapy for many years for the trauma she's endured throughout her life, both at home with her parents and elsewhere at the hands of others. Her memories of the evening in August and the morning after she believed something happened to her brother Bobby were recovered through Dawn's work in therapy. She may have been just a toddler at the time, but Dawn is firm in what she remembers, and hers is the only first-hand story of that night

that is part of Detective Borst's investigation. At this time, Dawn's recollections are not verified through other evidence. However, I asked Detective Borst if I should share it in this episode, and he gave his approval. For the record again, no one has been charged or convicted of any crimes as it relates to the missing persons case of Robert Bobby Desmond. Don's father's chat was particular about certain things around the house, and if the children didn't mind his preferences, it could trigger an outburst, she told me. When she was 17 years old, some 13 or 14 years after the fact, Don had a conversation with her older sister about one night and one outburst in particular during

August of 1964. And at that time, she told me that she was terrified because she was the oldest child in the house at that time. And she was terrified that she would be targeted. And so when this night happened and he had given an order for beds to be made a certain way, fearing for her life, actually sabotaged the bed making. And that supposedly was the thing that set him off. As she did whenever things got scary in their house, Dawn's older sister hid Dawn in the bedroom closet. My sister put me in there and she said, stay in here and don't come out until you hear absolute quiet. So I stayed in there and I believe I probably fell asleep. And at some point I listened and it was quiet and I opened the door and I came out. The first thing I saw when I came out were bed sheets tied from the bottom of the bed frame going out the window. And my sister was gone.

And I looked out the window and I saw dark footprints in the grass running away from the house. So I knew that my sister had run away the next thing I did was I went into what is known as my brother's bedroom and when I went in there Bobby was laying on the floor in his white underwear and he was wearing nothing else and he was not moving and so just like was done for me, whenever this kind of stuff went down in our house, the violence and everything, I tried to drag him into the closet to hide him

because that's what my sister did for me. He was very heavy. And so I wasn't making very good progress, but I got him right to where the door is. And I looked down the stairs and here comes my mother and she is angry. And so I drop his foot and I dive underneath the bed and she comes up and she's screaming and she's grabbing at me under the bed. And I'm just scooting from side to side to try to avoid her. And she finally catches me and she drags me by the foot down the upstairs stairs through the kitchen

and down into the basement stairs. And when she got me downstairs in the basement, she locked me in this wooden box that was used for transporting hunting dogs. I was locked in there overnight. And I fought, I screamed, I cried. I tried to smash the box. I listened. I have very strong memories of that night in the box.

And the next morning I woke up in my bed. And I sat up in my bed and I thought it all had been a bad dream. What happened next has stuck with Dawn throughout the decades. It was when, Dawn says, her mother introduced one possible theory about what happened to Bobby. I just, I got up, I went to the head of the stairs, and my mother was at the foot of the stairs, and she said, come down here, come down here and see this. Look, Mommy's purse is on the stairs.

Look, Mommy's purse is open. Look, there's money missing from Mommy's wallet. Look, oh, the front purse is open look there's money missing from money mommy's wallet look oh the front door is open oh my goodness bobby's gone bobby must have stolen money from mommy's purse and run away bobby's gone and of course we went downstairs and we were upset and alerted and and she said now go have your breakfast and that was as much as I ever heard any time from my mother. That was the story she told. And that's how it was. And you did not ask questions. Sometime after Bobby disappeared, the family moved away from Kennebunk and the Hovey Street home to Kittery Point. Dawn remembers that photos of Bobby,

just like her brother himself, started to disappear from their walls. No one talked about him, not for many, many years. According to Dawn's memories, her mother Alice made a display of an open purse and missing money and the front door left ajar. Bobby must have disappeared into the main summer night on his own accord without any other sign of him since. That was the story that was perpetuated. But the question arises, if an 11-year-old boy runs away, or is otherwise just gone one morning, wouldn't someone, a family member, his parents, report him missing? From what I could find out was that when Bobby went missing, nobody ever reported him missing.

So the only thing that triggered it was when the school started wondering, why is this student not here in class? Where is he? And the information kind of indicated that the school made an inquiry, you know, a formal inquiry. And that's probably what got the police department involved back then as to where is this kid and why is he in school? Though there's no case file to prove it, that phone call from Bobby's school was possibly the first flag raised in the boy's disappearance. It's assumed that police started asking questions about Bobby's disappearance after the school noted his absence. Another sibling of Bobby's told Detective Borst that she remembers a police officer in their house sometime after Bobby went missing. After that, the case warranted

Maine State Police and the Attorney General's involvement. Newspaper archives indicate as much. Detective Borst, when and why would the Maine State Police and Attorney General's office be brought into a case? In today's day and age, it would be like the death of a child under two. It would be a homicide. There are only a select few agencies in the state that do their own homicides. The state police do all of them. So when you hear something gets handed off to the state police or the AG's office, it kind of automatically triggers, well, it probably was one of these instances.

Obviously, he was older than two, so it wouldn't have triggered an automatic response from them then. But when they got word of a missing kid who was never reported missing, and under suspicious circumstances, I think that's when the locals probably asked the state police to take a look at it. And at some point, I'm sure they took over as the primary. Still, when Steve was asked to take another look at the case, there was no record that Bobby Desmond was ever reported missing. You might expect to see a missing persons report, a listing on a national database, something to document that Robert Desmond was, in fact, missing as of August 1964. But no matter where Detective Bst looked, he found nothing.

Bobby wasn't even listed on the National Crime Information Center database, the NCIC. That was one of the first things Steve wanted to fix. He jumped through the many hoops to get Bobby's name listed on the NCIC over five decades after the fact. Detective Borst also had him listed in NAMIS, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. He got the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to open a case file for Bobby, and they developed an age progression sketch of what he could look like today, if he's still alive. Locally, Bobby was added to the Maine State Police unsolved missing persons list, and his case was assigned to a major crimes detective. At this time, Robert Desmond's

case is the oldest on the Maine State Police unsolved missing persons list. As part of getting Bobby listed on NamUs, Detective Borst also wanted to see what could be done about having a DNA profile added to the case. What if human remains were found and had no identification? Perhaps Bobby was found in the past, but was waiting for new technology to catch up and give him his identity back. Making Bobby's DNA profile searchable was an important step, but again, not without hoops to jump through.

Thankfully, though, Detective Borst was able to collect a DNA sample from a surviving family member, and he had the profile added to Bobby's listing. Maybe it was a long shot, but each new effort by Detective Borst, supported by the Kennebunk Police Department, was more of a chance than Bobby's case ever had before. The case of the missing 11-year-old boy remained stagnant for over a decade after the initial investigation in 1964. It wasn't until 1976 when the Maine Attorney General's Office decided to systematically review 12 unsolved cases, possibly involving foul play, along with a new tip in Bobby Desmond's case, that the investigation was reignited.

When I started to review the information that I could find, a lot of it was in the form of newspaper articles, like I said, because there was no case file. But there was an indication in one of the newspaper articles that I read where information came forward. I think they used the word from an informant, but the way that the article was written, it almost, you could almost read between the lines. It was probably a family member, perhaps one of the surviving siblings that said something either to a family member or one of the investigators that gave rise to, listen, we've searched that house. He's not in the house. Could he be buried in the house or under the house? Back then, not uncommon to have a dirt floor. So they enlisted, the AG's

office enlisted a local excavating company to come in here and they dug up the basement. The excavation was covered in local newspapers at the time. Peter Kingsley reported for the Biddeford Socko Journal on July 14, 1976, that state police, town highway work crews, and officials from the state attorney general's office would dig up the entire cellar in search of any signs of the young boy. According to Kingsley's reporting, the cement cellar floor was poured in 1968, four years after Bobby disappeared and after Bobby's family moved out of the house. Crews used a nuclear density probe to determine if any areas of the cellar had been dug up or disturbed since the foundation of the home was built. Kingsley explained in his reporting that if soil density drastically changes in one

section of the basement, it could indicate a disturbance in the soil and point to a possible burial site. However, the AG's office ultimately decided to excavate the entire basement floor regardless, leaving no stone unturned. Little was known about Bobby Desmond, even then. The only physical description given by police to the newspaper was that Bobby was, quote, not husky, end quote. A former neighbor on the street told Kingsley that Bobby appeared much younger than he was. Dawn was 15 years old at the time. She remembers the day in 1976 when the officers showed up at their house. Things were crazy. My father was sick. He had cancer by then. And so my mother was pretty much running the house on her own. He wasn't working.

I believe he was in a nursing home at that time, dying of cancer. And the police came to the house on her own. He wasn't working. I believe he was in a nursing home at that time dying of cancer. And the police came to the house. I remember them walking into our house in Kittery Point and talking to my mother. Of course, we were all sent off to rooms, but we all listened intently for what was going on. And I heard that they were going to reopen Bobby's case. And so they told my mother that they were going to dig in the basement. Although then-Deputy Attorney General Richard Cohen declined to identify the tipster who triggered the basement search, Dawn knows who it was. And this was directly as a result of my older sister telling them that she believed that Bobby was buried in the basement.

Cohen also stressed that at the time, there were no suspects in the investigation of Bobby's disappearance, and that the basement tip, quote, Still, the AG's office determined it was at least possible a child had been concealed in the home, and so they had to run the lead out. Crews used jackhammers and shovels to dig at least seven inches deep in areas, while the state medical examiner stood by in case he needed to identify any objects unearthed there. The excavation and search lasted an entire month. Reopening Bobby's case with the basement search

was apparently upsetting for his mother, Alice Martin. In a July 14, 1976 article by Larry Staines for the Biddeford-Sacco Journal, Alice said, quote, I feel, although nobody else does, that my boy will show up someday, end quote. As for the search, Alice told the reporter, quote, I'm positive they're not going to find anything. This may be killing my husband. He doesn't have long to live anyway. End quote. I know that it was very disrupting to my mother, very disruptive to her. And I know that she pretty much went on this quest to discredit my sister for making those accusations. But I know that they didn't find

anything. They did find something, but it wasn't helpful or related to Bobby's case. There were some bones that were found, and they were determined to be animal bones. And I think there was a pair of glasses that might have been in the basement. And through all reports, I could find Bobby didn't wear eyeglasses. When the search concluded, Assistant Attorney General at the time, Arthur Stilfen, said that the case was otherwise open. But if anything else surfaced in the open investigation since 1976, that nothing else happened with the case until he was tasked with taking a closer look in 2018, 42 years later. According to multiple 1976 sources in print, homicide is suspected in the case of Robert Bobby Desmond. That's one theory as to why he hasn't been seen or heard from since 1964.

But the 11-year-old boy, or his remains, have never been found. The basement excavation revealed no trace of the boy there, and any other evidence or clues as to what may have happened to Bobby inside the Hovey Street home, if there ever were any, they're unknown, given the lack of case file. The home has since changed hands multiple times. There is another theory in Bobby's case, the one that his mother and stepfather claimed to be true at the time. Did Bobby run away? Did he in fact escape his allegedly abusive home all on his own, braving the world as an 11-year-old? Or did he have help from someone who knew the treatment

he endured at his home? Could Robert Desmond still be out there somewhere? Is it probable? It's hard to say, really. But it is possible. Would Bobby run away? I would run away if I could have. I mean, I had years of my mother telling me things like, promise me you'll never run away. Promise me you won't leave me alone. Promise me, you know, if you do that, I'll die. And so her biggest fear was her children running away. And yet that's what we all wanted to do because it was such chaos all the time. Maine State Police suspected foul play in the case of Robert Desmond all the way back in 1964 when he first disappeared. Though there's no body or other evidence to prove homicide conclusively, with a seasoned

investigator's mind, Detective Borst has sussed out possible scenarios of how Bobby could have been removed from the house and disposed of. To protect the investigation and to prevent any distracting rumors or speculation, I won't share what those scenarios are, but know that Detective Borst is prepared to exhaust any viable leads. In my experience, Steve, it's rare to see a case with little chance of prosecution get any attention at all. So why pursue this case? Great question. But it kind of boils down, for me anyway, for a pretty simple answer. It's worth pursuing because no one, especially no child, should ever just be forgotten about.

Bobby was a real person. He really existed. He lived here in Kennebunk, and he had real siblings that loved him and that I was able to speak with. He had a family like everybody else, and he seems to have fallen off the face of the earth, and nobody really kept an accurate record of what happened and what work was done on the case. And when I was asked to give it a fresh look, that's what I'm trying to do.

I try to do everything I can to hopefully get some sort of semblance of a closure for them. It's been a long time. I'm sure that his siblings have an idea or a thought of what could have happened to Bobby. But I kind of want to make sure we do what we can for them. Since the last major publicized development in Robert Desmond's disappearance, the dig at the Hovey Street house in 1976, key sources have passed away. Bobby's stepfather, Chester Martin, died just a short time after the basement excavation. Bobby's mother, Alice Martin, died in 2016, two years before Detective Borst took up the case. As every year goes by, you know,

the detectives from the state police who worked on that case have since passed away. The attorney general's office spokesperson who made comments in the newspaper about that case has since passed away. The neighbors that I could identify that would have lived on Hovey Street around that time in the area of the Desmond and Martin house have, a lot of them have passed away. But maybe, hopefully, by saying Bobby Desmond's name and getting his story out there for the first time in decades, it will ring a bell in the mind of someone who could put all the pieces together. Maybe a long-ago admission made in confidence, a whispered discussion filed away in the back of someone's mind. Overheard details by relatives of Hovey Street residents in the 1960s.

If someone still alive out there might have knowledge of Bobby's disappearance, Detective Borst wants to speak with that person. And a lot of times, you know, those people don't come forward. They expect or they sit and they hope or they wait for law enforcement to come knock on the door someday and say, what can you tell me about this case? A lot of times they don't come forward themselves. So I'm hoping that by doing this spot on your podcast and giving hopefully some renewed attention and maybe somebody will say, hey, you know, to their grandparents,

didn't you live on Hubby Street, you know, in the 60s? Do you remember anything about this case? Does this name do anything for you? Somebody out there must have some information. It's been such a cold case for such a long time that a lot of people in this town don't remember it. And I'm hoping that working with you, just to put a spotlight on this,

that hopefully somebody will ask the right questions. You just never know what information could be out there. Information that could be the first step towards real closure for Bobby and his family. That's all his sister Dawn wants. I just want closure on this. And if he's okay and he doesn't want to speak to me, I will totally respect that. But I really feel like I need closure for this because I've been chasing this all these years. And the thing that I would want Bobby to know is that I never forgot him. There were many people who didn't want to talk about him, didn't want to answer any questions,

didn't want to tell the truth, but I kept searching because I wanted him to know that I never forgot and that I believe that he deserved better and that if I could do anything to help him or be there for him in any way, I would want to do that. If you have any information on the disappearance of Robert Bobby Desmond, please contact the Kennebunk Police Department at 207-985-6121 or the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit South at 207-624-7076.

You can also leave an anonymous tip via the form linked in the show notes of this episode. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. Sources cited in this episode, along with additional sources referenced, are linked at darkdowneast.com so you can do some digging of your own. Thank you to Detective Steve Borst of the Kennebunk Police Department and Dawn, Bobby's sister, for trusting me with Robert Desmond's story. If you have a personal connection to a Maine or New England case that you would like me to cover on this podcast, send me an email at hello at darkdowneast.com. 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 who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and homicide 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.