Dark Downeast - The Murder of James Cassidy, Part 2 (Maine)

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Fifty years after James Cassidy’s death, there is still no simple explanation for his brutal murder. The evidence left behind in the Maine woods raised questions investigators have never fully answe...red. And the deeper the investigation went, the more complicated the picture became. A respected bank executive had vanished, federal authorities were preparing to arrest him, and a burned car was found far from home on a deserted logging road. But the paper trail and the witness accounts pointed in several directions at once – toward financial crimes, toward organized crime figures operating in New England, and toward the surprisingly valuable world of rare stamps. Somewhere among those threads may lie the explanation for what really happened all those years ago in April of 1976. If you have any information about this case, please contact the Maine State Police, Major Crimes Unit – North at (207) 973-3750, or use their toll-free line at 1-800-432-7381. You can also submit information anonymously by using the tip form. View source material and photos for this episode at: darkdowneast.com/jamescassidy-part2   Dark Downeast is an Audiochuck and Kylie Media production hosted by Kylie Low. Follow @darkdowneast on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok To suggest a case visit darkdowneast.com/submit-case Did you know you can listen to Dark Downeast ad-free? Join the Crime Junkie Fan Club! Visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/fanclub/ to view the current membership options and policies. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:03 50 years after James Cassidy's death, there is still no simple explanation for his brutal murder. The evidence left behind in the main woods raised questions investigators have never fully answered. And the deeper the investigation went, the more complicated the picture became. A respected bank executive had vanished. Federal authorities were preparing to arrest him, and a burned car was found far from home on a deserted logging road. But the paper trail and the witness accounts pointed in several different directions at once, toward financial crimes, toward organized crime figures operating in New England, and toward the surprisingly valuable world of rare stamps. Somewhere along those threads may
Starting point is 00:00:53 lie the explanation for what really happened all those years ago in April of 1976. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of James Cassidy Part 2 on Darkdowne East. On April 7, 1976, investigators in eastern Maine received a call about a burned-out station wagon hidden off a remote logging road near De Beck Pond. When they finally located the scene,
Starting point is 00:01:31 they found the badly burned body of 43-year-old James Jim Cassidy of Brookline, Massachusetts, a bank vice president and father of three. The fire has. had been extremely intense, destroying much of the evidence and making it difficult to determine exactly what had happened. The autopsy ultimately concluded that Jim died from burning. Today, Jim's death is considered an unsolved homicide by Maine State Police.
Starting point is 00:01:59 By the time the car was discovered, Jim had already been missing for several days. Federal authorities had also obtained a warrant for his arrest on embezzlement charges connected to his job at Brookline Trust Company. Allegations his sister-in-law, Evelyn Cassidy, still has a hard time believing. We couldn't imagine Jim be involved in anything like that voluntarily. But see, that word voluntarily was in there. We don't know.
Starting point is 00:02:28 Investigators were left trying to reconcile the violent way Jim died with the life he had been living. What was Jim wrapped up in before his death? Was his death the result of risky deal? at the bank, or was it motivated by something much smaller, like stamps? According to reporting by Richard J. Connolly for the Boston Globe, Jim was believed to have been carrying approximately $350,000 worth of rare stamps when he left Massachusetts, and those stamps were unaccounted for at the scene. Rare stamps carry significant value, even today, and the market for those
Starting point is 00:03:07 collectibles has occasionally intersected with criminal activity. Because individual items can be worth large sums of money and are relatively easy to transport or resell, they became targets for theft or trafficking during Jim's era. In 1971, for example, members of Boston's Winter Hill gang stole a stamp collection worth about $500,000 from a Boston stamp business and later moved the stolen collectibles through other stamp dealers. Joseph McDonald was indicted in 1975 for his alleged part in the theft, but failed to appear for trial so a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wounded List in April of 1976
Starting point is 00:03:53 and was classified as armed and extremely dangerous. This guy, with a passion for high-value stamp theft, was on the lamb the same month Jim was killed. And he wasn't the only one. That history raised another possibility in Jim's case. If he had encountered people operating in dark arenas, maybe stamps were the common denominator. Jim's philatelic passion,
Starting point is 00:04:22 the formal term for stamp collecting and the study of stamps, began in his childhood. I always thought it was really cool because he started this when he's really young. And I remember one time at the house, I live in that house now in Canada, where he grew up. I found a thing in the attic, and it was like maybe a three-by-three piece of wood. And anyway, it had little slots in it. And I remember my husband telling me that David said Jim had made that for stamps.
Starting point is 00:04:50 So it would hold stamps so you could see them all. Jim's son Ken Cassidy remembers his father's stamp business fondly. He even got to participate. He was heavily into stamps. One of the things that I enjoyed the most was the fact that he would come home. with envelopes from other people in countries and stuff. My job, any pain, I don't know whether so much per stamp or like that, is to soak them in water and then took the stamp and the stamp and the stamp fell off the envelope,
Starting point is 00:05:20 just take them and put them on newspaper, put them up on the side to dry, and then obviously give them back to them later. The self-named business James A. Cassidy Inc. had started modestly as a mail-order stamp and rare coin company. Jim first ran it out of his home, in Brookline, Massachusetts, but by 1973, he expanded into a Boylston Street office in Newton. The move suggested Grove. Reporting by Jeff Strout for the Bangor Daily News indicated Jim had even purchased a mini-computer
Starting point is 00:05:50 for the operation and employed several people to help run the business. Jim never talked about having valuable stamps or anything like that. He said how he enjoyed getting them from different places and how some were rare and how they'd be worth more money, but he never mentioned. Anything about the value of them? Yet, they were extremely valuable. A single rare stamp could fetch thousands of dollars or more. According to reporting by David Bright and Jeff Strout for the Bangor Daily News,
Starting point is 00:06:22 after Jim died, a friend of Jim's made a payment of more than 10 grand to Jim's stamp and coin business. That friend was reportedly the same man who told investigators he had seen and spoken with Jim at the Portland Jetport on April 5th. The last me and to see my father alive was John Head. I remember that particular name. Reporting in the Rumford Falls Times from December 1976 described someone named John Head as an internationally known stamp collector.
Starting point is 00:06:55 According to an obituary I found for John B. Head from Bethel Main, after he returned from military service in Japan, John started a business dealing in the philatly and postal history of the Far East, specializing in Japan and the Ryukyu's. I wanted to learn more about John Head and just how well-known he was in the stamp world, but I struggled to find any information about him in even the most obscure and super niche sources. I even spoke to the president of the Maine Philotlic Society as part of my reporting for this episode, and he remembers the name John Head, but wasn't sure if they ever met. But Evelyn believes she met John and his wife at least once,
Starting point is 00:07:40 and the tone of that meeting has always struck her as odd. She recalled that she attended a dinner meeting with Jim sometime in the early 70s, maybe four or five years before his death, when she was staying with his family in Brookline one summer. At the time we spoke, she couldn't recall the names of the man and the woman at the table. But based on what she does remember, and after speaking with her nephew Ken, she now is fairly certain the meeting was with John Head. One time the summer in the early 70s when I visited Jim,
Starting point is 00:08:17 he had to go to a meeting with someone at a restaurant and wanted me to come with him. He ate first. And then very strange, uncharacteristic of Jim, he said, Evelyn, he said, well, you excuse us. we need to talk for a bit. So there was a lady with the other gentleman and she was Japanese.
Starting point is 00:08:37 So her and I left the table. And that was not like Jim at all. John Head's wife, Fumiko, was from Japan. They were married in 1960 at the embassy in Tokyo. It's this detail in particular that leads us to believe that the meeting was with John and his wife. But that was just very unlike him.
Starting point is 00:08:58 I'm like to myself, I never asked him, but I'm like, who could you be talking about stamps that I couldn't hear? What would I care? It could have been nothing at all, just a slightly out-of-character moment for Jim asking his sister-in-law for a little space to hold a private conversation with a business contact. But she hasn't forgotten it more than 50 years later, and it keeps surfacing in her mind like it means something more to Jim's case than she can decipher without the full picture. John Head has never been identified as a suspect or person of interest in Jim Cassidy's case.
Starting point is 00:09:35 He is believed to be one of the last known individuals to see him alive, and so no doubt he was a valuable witness, and he may have known much more about Jim's stamp dealings than has ever been publicly shared. John died in 2008, and Famiko passed away in 2025, so I can't talk to either of them for clarity on any of this. for now, we'll leave John Head where he stands. But another thread keeps drawing me back, one that leads further into the peculiar, obsessive world of stamps. The deeper it goes, the more it suggests that Jim's case
Starting point is 00:10:12 may intersect with something much larger and far more dangerous. Around the same time investigators were looking into the stamp business, they were also still trying to identify two men who had been seen in the Bangor area around the time of Jim's death. Though it's not explicitly stated in any of the source material I have access to for this case, it is reasonable to assume that the two men were the same individuals detailed in composite sketches shared with rental car companies during the initial investigation. While no identifying characteristics were shared in 1976, reporting by Richard Connolly for the Boston Globe in 1978, shed some light on who these
Starting point is 00:11:11 people might have been. One of the men was identified in general terms as a former inmate of Walpole State Prison in Massachusetts. I'll refer to him by the fake name, Adam, to make this easier to follow, but I haven't been able to confirm his real name. According to reporting, Adam and the other man were stopped by an Ellsworth, Maine, police. lease officer during a routine highway check on the night of Jim Cassidy's disappearance. When asked what they were doing, the men reportedly said they were visiting a friend in Ellsworth, but they could not remember the friend's name. The men were also reportedly suspects in an unrelated arson case involving a cottage in Maine owned by a man from Revere, Massachusetts.
Starting point is 00:11:56 Now, I asked, but Ellsworth PD doesn't have any traffic stop records from 1976 anymore, and I've tried to get more details on this arson case in an attempt to get my hands-on records and names of the suspects, but to my intense frustration, I have come up empty-handed. Retention schedules for records will never cease to bother me. I can only hope the originals are retained in the main state police file for Jim's murder. Anyway, Richard J. Connolly for the Boston Globe reports that the guy we're calling Adam and the other man were both friends of a guy named Ralph DeLeo. At the time, DeLeo was identified as a bank robber who had escaped from prison in Massachusetts and who had known ties to organized crime in Boston. DeLeo was eventually recaptured in 1978
Starting point is 00:12:50 while attempting to rob another bank in Columbus, Ohio. In an effort to gain favor with authorities, he provided information about a murder case in Columbus, even leading investigators to the murder weapon. DeLeo was also trying to avoid being returned to Massachusetts where he had escaped from, and during those negotiations while in custody, he was questioned about the Cassidy case by Massachusetts investigators due to his reported connections to the two men seen in the area at the time of Jim's death. Like I said, I've been unable to conclusively identify the two men that police were questioning DeLeo about, but I do know who Ralph DeLeo was paling around with after Jim was killed. Ralph DeLeo was arrested on April 12, 1976, within days of Jim's murder,
Starting point is 00:13:43 along with two other men, 32-year-old Franklin M. Goldman and 36-year-old Anthony J. Keote. The trio had robbed a woman at gunpoint and attempted to kidnap her before being apprehended by Revere Police. All three were sentenced for their part in that crime. Now here's where stamps come back into the timeline. According to reporting, the former Walpole inmate, who we're calling Adam, the man believed to have been in the Bangor area around the time of Jim Cassidy's death and connected to Ralph DeLeo, he was known to be a stamp collector while incarcerated at Walpole
Starting point is 00:14:27 state prison. Yeah, so stamp collecting was reportedly common among inmates at Walpole. There was a club at the maximum security prison called the 906 stamp collectors dating back to 1956. For more than a decade during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, stamp collectors at the prison also organized an event known as the Inmate Philotillac Exhibition. The event invited collectors from outside the prison to loan valuable stamp collections, which were displayed in locked cases inside the facility. Members of the public were even allowed to visit the prison to view the exhibits. But the prison stamp world became the target of a major theft. According to the Last Good Heist by Tim White, Randall Richard, and Wayne Worcester, when the 1971 exhibition opened,
Starting point is 00:15:20 and attendees, including several of the collectors who had sent their items in advance for display, noticed that things were missing from the cases. About $20,000 worth of stamps and collectibles valued at over $160,000 today if adjusted for inflation. A prolific criminal named Robert DeSault, who was later linked to the 1975 Bonded Vault heist in Providence, Rhode Island, one of the largest heist in New England history, he was an inmate at Walpole at the time. After weaseling his way into the Stamp Club, he coordinated the heist of those stamps,
Starting point is 00:16:00 secretly packing them into the crates of prison-made license plates that were shipped out of the facility and later intercepted by an associate of his. They were never recovered. When you step back and look at all of this together with a red string from stamps to organize, organized crime to Jim and banking and beyond, the connections start to look strange. Jim Cassidy may have been carrying $350,000 worth of rare stamps when he left Massachusetts.
Starting point is 00:16:33 He ran a stamp and coin business. One of the last people known to see him alive was an internationally known stamp collector. At the same time, investigators were looking for two men who had, who they later determined were likely associates of a Boston organized crime figure, one of whom had been a stamp collector inside Walpole State Prison. And inside that same prison, stamps themselves had become valuable enough at one time to steal in a coordinated heist involving someone later connected to organized crime. Anthony Keote served time at Walpole in the 70s.
Starting point is 00:17:14 Is he, Adam? The stamp collector friend of DeLeyos who was possibly seen in the Bangor area at the time of Jim's death? Who was arrested with Ralph DeLio within days of Jim's death for an unrelated robbery and attempted kidnapping? I can't say for sure. Anthony Keote and Franklin Goldman have never been identified as suspects
Starting point is 00:17:34 or persons of interest in Jim's case and they have not been charged with any crimes relating to his death. None of this proves that Jim Cassidy's death had anything to do with stamps or organized crime, but it does show something important. The world Jim was operating in was a lot more complicated than it might appear at first glance. And if Jim really was carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in stamps the night he disappeared, who knew he had them, and where are they now? The details of Jim Cassidy's life don't seem to line up with the way he died.
Starting point is 00:18:12 Family, friends, and colleagues described him, as a steady, community-minded person. He was involved with his church, volunteered as a Boy Scouts leader, and by most accounts lived what people who knew him described as a perfectly normal life. Nothing in his background seemed to clearly explain the two things investigators were now trying to reconcile,
Starting point is 00:18:34 the violent way he died, and the federal embezzlement charges filed against him shortly before his body was discovered. Plus he had like a good standing in Brookline, running for town council. If I had a plan to rob a bank or embezzle money, I wouldn't be running for town council. And everybody know me, I'd be keeping a low profile.
Starting point is 00:18:56 As the months and years passed, the investigation into his murder appeared to lose momentum. Attention on Jim's case largely disappeared after the 1978 reporting about the questioning of Ralph DeLeo. There were no major updates, no arrests, send no clear answers about who killed him or why. The case went cold, and the Cassidy family was left behind missing the man they loved.
Starting point is 00:19:22 The empty space he left was filled with endless wondering what the truth could be among all the theories. Nothing made sense. It just did not make sense. So say he was, the mafia, did approach him and all that. That's the last place he would have tried to escape to, would be us. I mean, he would have went the opposite direction away from his family, not towards him.
Starting point is 00:19:42 When Ken spoke with now retired Maine State Police Detective J. Pelotier in 2020, he walked away thinking the investigation was primarily focused on the organized crime angle. But as far as him, what I really think, and then listening to the officer, rambling off about nine different Italian names, I believe this might have been he was forced to do what he did. But why? Why Jim? Why was he subjected to such a horrendous death? Could it have been a calling card of sorts? They also say, too, like when the mafia is involved, they always leave a statement, right? Who would you be leaving a statement to? What was the statement? Confusion. It was all confusion.
Starting point is 00:20:33 That doesn't make any sense to me. None of it made sense. April of 2026 marks the 50-year anniversary of Jim's death. Half a century has passed without answers, but some of the people whose names surfaced around the investigation are still alive today. One of them is Ralph DeLeo. Over the years, he has become a major figure in organized crime. Federal authorities later described him as a street boss of the Colombo crime family,
Starting point is 00:21:04 one of the five mafia families that historically controlled organized crime in New York. But DeLeo largely operated out of New England, including Massachusetts. His criminal history stretches back decades. Notably, in 2012, he pleaded guilty to racketeering and firearms charges tied to a criminal enterprise that prosecutor said was involved in crimes like extortion, loan sharking, and drug trafficking. After serving about 15 years in federal prison, DeLeyer's. was released in 2024, but in May of 2025, federal agents arrested him again. According to Aaron Kuterski's reporting for ABC News, prosecutors alleged that DeLeo had been
Starting point is 00:21:47 plotting revenge against the federal agents involved in his earlier conviction. Investigators say he was gathering personal information about them in their families, compiling files on their home addresses, and had even assembled a burglary kit and notes referencing disguises. So, DeLeo is alive and back in custody. If there were questions left unanswered back when investigators spoke with him about his friends and the death of Jim Cassidy back in 1978, this might be their last chance to ask him. Over the year, small details have lingered.
Starting point is 00:22:26 These strange moments and unexplained discoveries that were never fully resolved. On their own, any one of them might seem, insignificant. Together, they form a collection of loose threads. One of those moments came the night of Jim's funeral. After the service, Evelyn and the rest of the family gathered at Jim's house to comfort his wife, Alice, and their three sons. Later that evening, Evelyn and her husband returned to Jim's brother Arthur's house where they had been staying. When they pulled into the driveway, something immediately caught their attention. We looked to me to see all the lights. You look, we could see all the were on our house, but I said, well, David and I must have hit some switches by accident or something, you know.
Starting point is 00:23:09 So we sat in the car and talked for a bit, you know, what we thought, what happened, right? As they talked about Jim and the circumstances of his death, they eventually stepped out of the car and headed towards the house. And we did go in the house, and the door was open. But it was the back door that was open, and we came in the front door. The house had definitely been broken into, and it looked like they just left when we came, probably when our car was open. came in. Arthur took stock of the place. It was clear someone had been inside, looking for something. I remember, like, papers were strewn around, so they had looked through the files. Arthur had brought some of Jim's paperwork home with him. Those documents were among the items that had been disturbed. And they went in the dining room and went through his, Arthur's
Starting point is 00:23:59 attache case, and papers gone through there. You could tell. And they even went into her Jerry's bedroom. You know, and you could tell, and they'd just gotten maybe half the house done. And you could tell, well, they went up this address. And over here and then stopped right here. Like, they didn't finish the job. Evelyn remembers Arthur calling police to report the break-in, but she can't recall whether an officer came to the house
Starting point is 00:24:24 or if anything was officially documented. I requested records from the police department that would have responded to the call, but those records no longer exist due to, retention schedules. Arthur has since passed away, so there's no way to ask him what may have been taken or what he believed someone might have been looking for. Although the specifics have been lost to time, Evelyn remembers exactly how it felt. I'll tell you, we were all scared to death. Was the break-in connected to Jim's death? Who was there rifling through his brother's home, and what were they looking for? Add those to the pile of questions that have stacked up over the
Starting point is 00:25:17 last five decades. And the confusion doesn't end there. Some of the items reportedly found near the burned car in Maine still puzzled Jim's family to this day. Investigators recovered a metal arch at the scene similar to one Jim owned. The device was meant to correct a slight difference in leg length caused by a childhood case of polio. But according to Evelyn, Jim never used it. Jim had bought them, tried them, didn't like it, so he never used it. He just walked on his toe on that short leg. You never had a limp. So you never know it until you, unless you specifically look for it.
Starting point is 00:25:57 So he never had it with him. It was, who knows where it was in the closet somewhere, or I don't know, but he never used it. How did that metal arch end up at the crime scene if Jim never wore it? A watch was also found at the scene, believed to be Jim's watch as far as Evelyn was told. But that same watch was found at home by his wife sometime later, untouched by fire. If Jim's watch was still in the house, then whose watch had been found along that remote logging road? Like his watch was there, it burned, and his lift for his shoe, which he never used. He wouldn't have had it with him, unless he packed it.
Starting point is 00:26:37 It didn't make any sense. Why were all these odd things happening? The location of Jim's car itself deserves a little more discussion here too because the remoteness matters. The burned station wagon wasn't sitting along the shoulder of Route 9 where a passing driver might easily notice it. According to reporting at the time, the vehicle was located about 600 feet off a discontinued section of Route 9 near Debeck
Starting point is 00:27:03 Pine. It was hidden far enough from the road that it couldn't be seen by anyone simply driving by. When the anonymous caller first reported the burning car on the morning of April 7th, deputies began searching the area almost immediately. They spent the better part of the day combing Route 9 and nearby roads looking for smoke or wreckage, but they didn't find anything. It wasn't until the caller phoned back the next day and gave more precise directions that investigators were able to locate the car.
Starting point is 00:27:35 In other words, the person who called knew exactly where the vehicle was. The caller told dispatchers he had been heading out to go fishing beyond Park's pond when he came across the scene. That very well may be true, but I wonder, how did a passerby notice a car hidden hundreds of feet down a discontinued road when trained deputies searching the area couldn't find it after hours of intense searching?
Starting point is 00:28:02 The identity of that caller has never been publicly confirmed. At the time, dispatchers' reports were, reportedly described the man as sounding calm and possibly elderly, though later comments from a Pinobscot County lieutenant suggested the caller may have actually been a man in his 40s. Whether he simply was a witness who happened upon a terrible discovery and didn't want to get any more involved, or he was someone who knew more about what happened on that remote stretch of road remains another unanswered piece of Jim Cassidy's story. Jim probably didn't drive himself to that location.
Starting point is 00:28:39 He was seen in the Bangor Brewer area roughly 20 miles away sometime on April 5th, and investigators were trying to identify two men who had been in that same area around the same time. Evelyn recalls hearing that Jim was actually seen in a vehicle with two men that day. If that citing is accurate
Starting point is 00:28:58 that he was in a car with the guys, she wants to know why he wasn't fighting them. Did he know the people he was with? somebody saw him in a car in the backseat and between two people and they were buying gas and putting it in a can. He wasn't a big rug of man, but they had me in the backseat of a car
Starting point is 00:29:17 and I knew they were going to, what they were doing. It wouldn't have kept me in the backseat. I'd got out or I'd been screaming and hollering and scratching and digging and wouldn't be sitting there just calm. If Jim was really seen at a gas station in Brewer that day, as both reporting and family recollection suggests, maybe in the company of two men, is it possible, Jim ran out of gas on his road trip to Canada, and these men presented themselves
Starting point is 00:29:42 as helpful strangers, only to reveal their true intentions later. It's a stretch. Given everything we know about the circumstances of this case, this doesn't feel like a crime committed by strangers on a whim. And besides, Jim was always prepared. Certain people don't run out of gas. He was one of them. Each of these details sits somewhere between coincidence and clue. Individually, they might be red herrings, or they might be pieces of a larger puzzle that investigators are still assembling. Without the full picture, it's impossible to know which is which. That uncertainty is exactly what has kept Jim Cassidy's story unresolved for half a century.
Starting point is 00:30:29 Jim had a natural curiosity and a knack for figuring things out. He was a man of many talents. He's just one of those guys that doesn't even have to pick up a book. He could just figure things out and whatnot. He's just very good at what he did, whether it be mechanical things or wooden things and whatnot. Well, Jim, he used to play the guitar
Starting point is 00:30:49 and he had a little baracket or something where he could play the motho at the same time. And he would go all around the country playing for dances. And he used this money so he could go to teachers' college. The people closest to him say Jim, never carried himself like he was above anybody else. He was a calm, steady presence, content to be in the background, but who could also bring a group together?
Starting point is 00:31:13 He had a great characteristic about him that everybody was equal. They'd come to Canada. He'd bring his boys, his three boys. And his wife had family in a town nearby, so sometimes he'd drop her off. But the boys, you know, sons always came to the farm. And nobody was the big shot with Jim, right? I was just as important or my daughter as his father. Like everybody just, he could do that somehow.
Starting point is 00:31:40 After Jim died, life for his family changed in ways that can't really be measured. Because we had a mom that did the best she can do to raise three boys on her own and raise a household and keep a roof over our head and keep food in their stomachs and whatnot. Ken went to live in Canada for some time after his dad's death, being there gave him the gift of connecting with his father through the legacy of their family farm. To actually sit there and do the work that my father and my uncles did when they were younger,
Starting point is 00:32:13 washing the cows down, putting the milkers on them, and then within an hour so I'd have to go back in the house, get cleaned up, and then go outside, wait for the school bus to go to Hampton. So I have the experience and some of the knowledge that was actually passed on from living the life of my father did when he was younger. He plans to retire there, on a plot of land overlooking the interval land his father once worked. And my family tells me, your home is here. I like it up there so much that I bought.
Starting point is 00:32:43 I bought a piece of property back in 2019, and it's a five-acre lot. It's only two miles from the farm. But I can actually oversee the farm from my mat. The questions about what happened to his father have never really gone away. There are quiet moments when Ken's mind drifts back to the missing. that has followed his family for decades. I've got my own tractor, and I got my own field, and I cut my field, and I look around in Wanda. It just your mind wanders at time, and I'm an over-the-road truck driver, too.
Starting point is 00:33:13 So when I'm on the road, I have a lot of time to think, and just early morning is when you wake up, and that starts to roaming your head, different things. And like many families connected to unsolved cases, what they want most isn't necessarily punishment. its answers. You wonder, you know, if it would make a difference or not. Maybe it would. And I could be proud, knowing that my father had really nothing to do with this, and he was forced to do it.
Starting point is 00:33:40 So I would probably feel better knowing that somebody else forced him to do it than he did this on his own. Mostly I'd like to know what happened and be able to say, and maybe publicly even, you know, this is what happened. Jim didn't do it. I knew he didn't do it then, and now I can prove it, right? That would be amazing. Justice is another thing that doesn't bring much joy, right?
Starting point is 00:34:04 The joy remains in their memories of when their family was whole. I stayed down in Boston one summer with Jim and Arthur back and forth. And Jim at night, he did work a lot. But like in the day, he let me have his car. I'd go all around Brookline and, you know, a little country punkin driving around Brookline. And always on Sunday we would go for a drive. And we'd go for ice cream at night.
Starting point is 00:34:27 You know, I thought he was great. We had a great wife together. I remember the time, at nighttime, I couldn't wait to kiss my father and to say good night to go to bed. All three of us did. It was just one of us. We loved our father to death. If you have information about this case, no matter how small it may seem, please contact the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit North at 207-9773-3-750, or use their toll-free line at 1-800. 432-7381.
Starting point is 00:35:01 You can also submit information anonymously by using the form linked in the description of this episode. Crime Junkie fan club members got to hear both parts of James Cassidy's story ad-free in the app. And starting next week, you can get all the episodes of Dark Down East in the Crime Junkie fan club app, ad-free, the very same day they go live everywhere else. Find it in the app store and in the show description.
Starting point is 00:35:27 for this episode. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Darkdowneast. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. 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.
Starting point is 00:36:05 Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audio Check. I think Chuck would approve.

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