Dark Downeast - The Murder of Shirley Coolen (Maine)

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

MAINE, 1951: When Zenovia Clegg's killer confessed to his crime, he also revealed small scraps of the secrets he’d been keeping throughout the decades.Is Charles E. Terry the serial killer responsible for the murders of two women whose cases are still unsolved decades later? And what really happened to Patricia Wing in the back of that Cadillac?These are the complex, dark, and interwoven stories of Shirley Coolen, Donna Kimmey, Zenovia Clegg, and Patricia Wing. View source material and photos for this episode at darkdowneast.com/charlesterryFollow @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.

On May 20th, 1951, 24-year-old Shirley Coulin retrieved a sheet of her favorite stationery. It was the paper with a red rose embossed in the corner. And she began to write what she hoped would be the message that would bring her childhood sweetheart, her ex-husband, back into her life. The note contained a request. I want you to come down this weekend, she wrote. Saturday night around 10.30. Saturday night would be May 26th, 1951. She couldn't have known that when she penned the letter,

that Saturday night would become the last night anyone saw her alive. The letter she wrote and mailed to her ex-husband was a key piece of evidence in the earliest days of the investigation. But before you jump to conclusions, this isn't a simple case of the husband did it. In fact, none of these four cases are simple. This is the beginning of the complex, dark, interwoven stories of Shirley Kulin, Donna Kimme, Zinovia Clegg, and Patricia Wing. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East. Shirley Kulin called Brunswick, Maine home, and the sprightly, attractive, friendly woman worked as a waitress at the Bowdoin Hotel restaurant.

She was also a mom to a little girl named Doreen. She had gotten pregnant when she was just 17 years old, and she had the baby two months after she married the child's father. He was a Brunswick Air Base repairman named George Doudswell. Their marriage did not last, but Shirley always had eyes for someone else. When Shirley's childhood sweetheart Guy Fletcher Cullen returned from his service overseas, the romance from their younger days rekindled, and on January 24, 1945, they were married. Tragedy would be their undoing. They had a son together, but the baby died five days after he was born. The pain drove a wedge between the parents, both mourning the loss. And two years later, Shirley and Guy divorced.

While the paperwork said it was over, Shirley never truly stopped loving Guy. She'd take him back in an instant. That's what she told her friends. Although he worked at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston, Shirley knew Guy was planning to be in Brunswick the weekend of May 26, 1951, and she wanted to try once more to reconcile their relationship. As she paid the postage due for the special delivery letter written on that red rose embossed stationery. Shirley thought this could be it. The letter read, in part,

I've written to you once and asked about my phonograph and since you didn't answer, this will be the last time. I'm sending this one special delivery in case your mother put the last one in the stove. I know you're not married and if you're not tied and chained to anybody, I want you to come down this weekend. You're working days, so you should be able to be down here Saturday night by 10.30.

I'll go to the last show at the pastime. I'll look for you when I come out. You park a little way up on Park Row. We can find each other easier that way. I'm working days. If I shouldn't be there, go up to the house, but I'm pretty sure I won't be working. Will you please write and tell me if you're coming? If so, tell me if you think it's warm enough to go swimming Sunday. I guess it's not quite. Maybe you can help with the baby's grave this year. Don't show this to anybody. Love, Shirley. That Saturday, May 26th, 1951, Shirley worked her usual 10 to 3 p.m. shift at the Bowdoin Hotel restaurant, and after closing out her tables and folding her apron, she claimed a booth for herself and stayed in the lounge to pass the time with another waitress, her friend, Jean Alice Rideout.

Shirley was clearly unsettled. Jean didn't know about the letter or Shirley's plans that evening, but she could sense that Shirley had some place to be and was just watching the clock tick closer to 10.30 p.m. When Jean went to change into her uniform just after 10 p.m., she came back to find that Shirley had left. The truth was that Shirley actually had two dates that night, one with a college student who she planned to confront about their on-again, off-again relationship, and the other, she hoped, was with her ex-husband, Guy Coulin. Just 200 yards away from the hotel, Shirley paced the railway station platform, keeping her eyes trained on the tracks for the 1059 arrival from Boston. But Shirley being at

the train station, it was a little odd, because according to the letter she'd sent Guy, she'd asked him to park near the pastime movie theater at 10.30 p.m. It was 30 minutes after the time she'd set in her letter, so maybe she assumed or just hoped that if he didn't arrive by car, he'd be on the next train from Boston. Shirley did not return home to her parents' house that night. She'd been living there with her family and her five-year-old daughter, and though Shirley never walked back through the front door, it wasn't odd or even worrisome. Her mother later told police that her daughter was 24 years old, divorced, and inclined to live her own life. The morning of May 29th, 1951, a housekeeper for Mrs. Emma Senter stepped into the Tulip Gardens to assess the blooms for the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. But there at the base of a large elm tree, concealed by dense cedar bush and overgrown grass, there was a body in the garden. Shirley Coulin's body lay in the garden barely 500 yards away from the Bowdoin Hotel where she worked. Shirley had been strangled, and around her neck was a long red scarf knotted three times,

and placed on her chest were three iris leaves. Her purse was found underneath her body. The recent rain eliminated any traces of footprints and other clues. The autopsy revealed evidence of sexual assault before her death, and she had superficial bruises on her eyelids and face. Later testing indicated that some of the blood found on Shirley's clothing was not her blood. The homicide investigation immediately took hold of this tiny mid-coast Maine town. Brunswick is known for its prestigious Bowdoin College, the quaint historic downtown, and for being the one-time home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. But in the summer of 1951, the only thing anyone was

talking about was the murder of the young and beautiful Shirley Cullen. Both the detectives and the media knew who they wanted to speak with first, Guy Cullen, the intended recipient of that special delivery letter. Quote, if I'd seen her Saturday night like she wanted me to, I probably could have prevented this murder. Unquote. That's what Shirley's ex-husband told the papers. In the Daily News, Guy said, quote, she sent me a special delivery letter asking me to meet her Saturday night at 1030 near Park Row and to bring her old record player, but I didn't want to see her because I thought she was just trying to make up to me again and I didn't want to, unquote. Guy confirmed that he was in town and that he did receive the letter, but he ignored

her pleas to meet up at the pastime theater. He said he visited with Shirley's sister, Evelyn Litchfield, and he left a wreath for their baby's grave. Then he went on to visit family in Bath. He never saw Shirley that night, he said. Guy handed over his clothing worn that weekend for testing, and police quizzed him on his alibi. He also submitted to a lie detector test. The results, according to the administrator Dr. Arthur Drew of Providence, Rhode Island, showed, quote, no specific evidence of his lying or of having any connection, unquote. The testing performed on his clothing apparently further cleared him as a suspect, and his alibi satisfied police. But Guy Cullen was arrested for an unrelated charge in the midst of the Maine State Police investigation

of Shirley's murder. The charge was rape of a 14-year-old girl, the daughter of his neighbors in Massachusetts. According to reporting in the Bangor Daily News, Cullen's rape arrest grew out of information gained by Maine police who questioned him yesterday as they sought clues to Mrs. Kulin's slayer, unquote. He was held on $20,000 bail and pleaded innocent to the charge. Shirley's first husband and father to her daughter, George Doudswell, also was cleared from the growing list

of suspects. And what about the other date Shirley had that night, that Bowdoin college student she'd been seeing? It turned out that he'd actually been expelled from Bowdoin for stealing alcohol from the science lab and mixing it with soda and then selling it. He and his friend hadn't been seen since Saturday afternoon. The same day, Shirley had a date with him. Police caught up with the young men at Portland YMCA, where they'd tried to enlist in the Marine Corps under fake names but were rejected. They were cleared as suspects after proving they'd left Brunswick around 1 p.m. and had spent the afternoon at Vinyl Haven Island. At least 20

people were interviewed as suspects in the beginning stages of the investigation, and police cleared all of them. Bath Police Chief Frank Moriarty presented a theory that Shirley was another victim of a, quote, phantom sex fiend, unquote. This phantom attacked five women in the previous five months. This attacker, though, left his victims alive. Some people believed that Shirley knew her killer and went with him willingly. They thought, perhaps, her killer was a prominent man who was stepping out on his marriage. And when he lost interest in her, she threatened to expose him and so he killed her. No one seemed to agree on who this prominent man could be. And then another theory emerged two months later, in late July of 1951,

when a man from Winslow, Maine was arrested for the attack and rape of a woman in Augusta. His name was Charles E. Terry. On June 16, 1935, a warm Maine summer afternoon, the Terry children were outside swimming in Messolonski Lake. Charles Edward Terry was only four years old at the time. When his mother Susie called the kids in for supper, his older sister Frances returned, but Charles did not. His father Frank hurried to the dock where the kids had been playing and found his son lifeless in the water. He had hit his head on a rock. Frank Terry began performing CPR as someone else sent for the doctor whose cottage

was just down the lake. For over 90 minutes, the father and the doctor worked together to save Charles, who'd turned blue but still somehow had a faint pulse. Their persistent efforts saved Charles. He remained unconscious for hours, but he was breathing. By the next day, Monday afternoon, the papers wrote that Charles was as full of life as ever. He'd made what had appeared to be a full recovery from that almost drowning, but that incident is identified as the life-altering, brain-changing moment when the previously loving, happy child known as Charles Terry began to shift into a distant and difficult personality. He dropped out of school in the 10th grade, but before he did, he developed a reputation

for being a loner. Charles was constantly caught stealing from both teachers and students at school. Charles joined the Marine Corps in 1947, but was dishonorably discharged after an arrest and conviction for stealing a car while on leave in 1949. He went to jail on that conviction and was released in 1951. You'll start to identify a trend with Charles Terry. Each time he's given back his freedom is another opportunity for him to strike. The same year he was released, Charles Terry was arrested on rape charges in Kennebec County. The circumstances of that crime and his opportunistic attack, it all put his name on the growing list of suspects for the two months unsolved murder of Shirley Kulin. Terry submitted to questioning in the Shirley Kulin homicide investigation, and according to police, he was very cooperative and forthcoming with his answers.

May 26th, 1951, the day Shirley was last seen alive, was also Charles Terry's birthday. He'd convinced police that because it was a significant date in his life, he remembered everything about that day. Producers from Northern Light Productions shared with me documents they obtained while researching Charles Terry for another podcast back in 2016 called Stranglers. It's excellent, by the way.

Please add it to your list. In the handwritten notes from the detective interrogating Charles Terry at the Kennebec County Jail, it says that Charles went to a show at the State Theater in Waterville that night. It ended at 10.30 p.m. and then Charles went bowling. He was home by 12.30 a.m. That was his alibi.

After the three-hour-long interrogation, police followed up on some of those statements he made about his birthday festivities and whereabouts. On the handwritten list of suspects checked in Shirley's case, Charles Terry's name is on the left. And in the column on the right labeled eliminated by reason of, the field says alibi. Apparently the show and the bowling, it all checked out. Charles went to prison though for the rape conviction in July of 1951 and he was released in 1958. The next year, 1959, Charles attacked another woman in the

Winthrop Lakes region town of Fayette, leaving her with a broken jaw and a cut on her scalp. He went back to prison for that conviction. Almost nine years after Shirley Coulin was found dead among the tulips, in April of 1960, 56-year-old Oren Benson walked up to a patrolman in Scully Square of Boston and without prompting, began confessing to a murder he'd committed in Brunswick, Maine. Authorities in Boston contacted Brunswick PD and the original investigative team of the Shirley Coulin homicide to take a deeper look at Oren Benson. He was described as an itinerant worker, a drifter of sorts. When speaking to the media while awaiting

his lie detector test, he said, quote, I guess I'll spend the night in jail and then move on His confession was later determined to be false. Shirley, her family, they didn't have a single answer as to what happened that night in the Tulip Gardens on Park Row. It's 1963 in New York, New York. In room 1140 of the Hotel Woodstock at 127 West 43rd Street, a woman lay on her bed, legs crossed, face up. The maid who saw her there assumed the temporary tenant must be sleeping, and so she quietly closed the door behind her without cleaning the room. On the second day, when the maid found the woman in her bed, again she appeared to be sleeping. The bustle of Manhattan can be exhausting, and so the maid left the guest to continue her slumber.

By the fourth day, the maid realized her mistake. 62-year-old Zinovia Clegg arrived in New York City on May 21, 1963 and checked into the fashionable hotel Woodstock. It was the final stop on her whirlwind journey marking the end of her marriage. Her divorce was finalized in January of that year. Zinovia was not in great health. Her ongoing battle with cancer wore her down, and she wore scarves around her neck to conceal scars from an operation years ago. But Zenovia was living, traveling the world, indulging in the finest accommodations, mingling with strangers, entertaining new company whenever she pleased, and on the evening of May 29th, 1963, her company became that of a tall, sturdy-built man with a thin mustache. Their paths crossed at 6th and 45th, not two or three blocks from the Hotel

Woodstock. We only have one version of events from that night, and it comes from the signed confession of her murderer, Charles Edward Terry. Charles claimed that Zenovia asked him for help in finding her hotel, and she promised him money in exchange for his assistance. Terry, though, suggested they get a drink. So they bar hopped, drinking wine at a restaurant that didn't serve liquor, then on to two other bars for more beverages. Their final stop outside of the hotel was a deli on 44th. They grabbed a six-pack of beer and some pears. Zinovia and Charles made their way back to the Woodstock and sat in the back of the hotel bar. He, drinking vodka straight, and she had a daiquiri. She paid the tab with a $10 bill,

and the pair went on for a nightcap in room 1140. Their drinking continued on the 11th floor, and as he said in his confession, their interaction advanced to a sexual encounter. Except Charles couldn't perform, and Zenobia teased him for it. His delicate masculinity couldn't handle her chiding, and that's when he snapped. Charles attacked Zenobia, placing his forearm across her throat. He choked Zenobia until she took her final breath. Each day that the chambermaid went into her room, Zenobia was laying just how Charles had left her. And when police responded to her hotel room on June 2, 1963, they found Zenobia laying face up with her legs crossed, the scarf around her neck was tied tightly in a bow, and a pair,

one of those pairs they bought together, it was intentionally placed, just sitting on the bed beside her. She'd also been sexually violated with a liquor bottle. Nine witnesses gave their descriptions of the man they'd seen Zenobia with that night, and the information was compiled with a new technology that the newspapers called an electronic image maker. The descriptions produced an image of what the suspect might look like, and detectives took that printing of the photo to a Greenwich Village bar. A matchbook in Zinovia's hotel room indicated she may have visited that bar with her killer that night. Lieutenant Tom Cavanaugh led the investigation, and ultimately, two detectives on the team encountered Charles Terry at a bar in Sheridan Square, and they arrested him on the spot.

Once in custody, the evidence against him was all too much to deny. In Charles Terry's pockets, Lieutenant Kavanaugh found $600 in traveler's checks and a gold cigarette case, both bearing the name Zenovia Clegg. Kavanaugh interrogated Charles. For three hours, he pressed the man sitting in front of him to reveal every detail of that evening. Charles was no stranger to interrogations, to the law, to getting caught in his crimes, and so, knowing what they had against him, Charles confessed. He was arrested for Zenobia Clegg's murder. And in the state of New York, Terry faced the death penalty.

His arrest for the Zenobia Clegg murder was significant, not only in the pursuit of justice in the brutal killing of Zenobia herself, but it also gave authorities access to a man who had been on their radar for multiple unsolved cases across multiple states. Lieutenant Kavanaugh contacted Boston police. The M.O. fit several cases in Massachusetts, murders they'd attributed to the Boston Strangler. It was the Boston Strangler investigation that would lead to more connections between Charles Terry and other unsolved murders. Tom, along with his son Brian Kavanaugh, a veteran homicide prosecutor, they always believed that Charles could be the, or at least one of, the true perpetrators of the 13 strangulation murders during the early 1960s in Boston, attributed to the Boston Strangler. Through continued interrogations and later-in-life conversations

as part of Tom and Brian's renewed investigation of the Boston Strangler case, Charles Terry revealed a trail of breadcrumbs, small scraps of the secrets that he'd been keeping throughout the decades. It was December 17th, 1962, six months before Zenobia Clegg's body would be found in her Times Square hotel room. 22-year-old Donna Kimme had not shown up for her flight from New Orleans to Little Rock, Arkansas. She was a flight attendant for Trans Texas Airways. And the last time anyone had seen Donna was at her motel room, provided by her employer for overnight stopovers. When coworkers turned up at Donna's door,

she didn't answer. Once inside the room, they found her, bruised and half nude in the bathtub, a piece of her own clothing bound around her neck. The motel room showed signs of a struggle. Donna had fought for her life. The autopsy revealed bruises on her throat, and a bone in her windpipe was fractured. The search for Donna's killer turned up little evidence. A month later, two boys found her wallet by a drainage ditch near the motel where she was staying. That was the last time

there was any new development in the case. I don't know much about Donna Kimme, but I know this. Donna Kimme loved life. She was a friend to whoever she met, wherever she met them during her career in the friendly skies. Charles Terry, he was in Louisiana in December of 1962. He told Tom Cavanaugh that much. And the MO of Donna's killer, it fit. Did Charles Terry do it? It seemed wherever Charles Terry was free, a victim followed in his wake.

Coincidence or not, it is hard to ignore. And yet, Charles E. Terry was never named a suspect in Donna Kimme's case. In 2021, her murder is still unsolved. A report from the Associated Press dated June 8, 1963, read, quote, Maine State Police were checking Friday on a report from New York City that Charles E. Terry, read, quote, New York police reported in a message that Terry talked of a killing in Brunswick and one in Oakland. Major Parker F. Hennessey, deputy chief of the Maine State Police, said, there is no record of any killing in or around Oakland at the time indicated by the report from New York. Mrs. Shirley Cullen, a waitress, was strangled in Brunswick May 27, 1961, and the case has never been solved. Unquote.

The article noted that the state police documents and information from the Attorney General's office didn't have any record of a Charles Terry being questioned in the Shirley Coulin case in Brunswick, but we know he was. I'm looking at a report with my own two eyes. Charles E. Terry submitted to questioning and a lie detector test in July of 1951, after he admitted to raping a woman in Augusta. At the time, that line of questioning revealed nothing of concern, and he was cleared as a suspect in Shirley Coulin's murder. Also noted in that June 1963 article was that there was no record of a killing in or around Oakland. Another piece from the Associated Press out of New York in November of 1963 said that Maine authorities knew of no unsolved killings in Oakland. Well, that might be true,

because Patricia Wing's death, that was considered a solved case. But you and I both know that the circumstances weren't cut and dry. Was it a blow to the head? Was it carbon monoxide poisoning? Or, as this other theory suggests, was she murdered by the serial rapist and confessed killer, Charles Terry? If you listened to the previous episode of Dark Down East,

you know all of the finer details of Patricia's case. You know that even though Everett Savage Jr. went to trial for her murder, he was found guilty of assault and battery only. The defense's theory that she died as the to elevated carbon monoxide inside the car. But an alternative theory of how Patricia died persists to this day, by the surviving members of the same investigative team who reopened the decades-old case files in search of answers and proof that Charles E. Terry might have been one of the Boston Stranglers, and that his killings began in Maine. Patricia Wing died in the backseat of that car in Fairfield on June 3, 1958. Charles E. Terry was released from prison in 1958.

He lived in the Oakland area in 1958, the very same town as Patricia Wing. But knowing what we know about the circumstances of her death, how could Charles be connected? The theory involves a hose rigged to the car by Charles Terry as the couple carried on oblivious inside the car. It involves a beating by Terry to both Everett Savage and Patricia Wing. Now, Charles was living in the area at the time of her death, and during the multiple interrogations after his arrest for the murder of Zenobia Clegg, Charles confessed to murders in Brunswick and Oakland, Maine. It's not difficult to connect the circumstances, but I wanted to hear more about this theory, that hose attached to the car

and the beatings that the team led by Kavanaugh, the father and son duo, believed to be the truth about Patricia's death. I reached out to Brian Kavanaugh by way of his colleague, a named partner at a law firm in Florida. We exchanged several emails back and forth. However, I did not speak to Brian Kavanaugh directly. His colleague told me that Brian had told these stories over and over again, and he'd given his time to productions and television shows and podcasts freely. But to use his words, Brian felt played. It's not the first time I've

heard this from sources who've participated in documentaries and other media projects before. It's really too bad. Yeah, I was bummed out not being able to speak to the man himself who carries with him the theories and precise connections that he feels that he knows are true. But regardless, I guess any beliefs or theories, connections, or even cold hard proof that Charles E. Terry carried out the attacks and murders of Shirley Coulin, Donna Kimme, and Patricia Wing, they could never really be verified with the source himself.

Charles Terry died in prison on April 15, 1981. Pulmonary embolism. He had lung cancer. I can't end Patricia's story without this. A dark down east listener named Tina B. was the first to reach out to me about Patricia Wing and share her story. Tina and Tina's sister Cheryl knew Patricia and her family growing up. In fact, Cheryl used to babysit the wing children and was close with her family. As you can imagine, Patricia's children suffered an immeasurable loss when their mother died, and their childhoods were not the easiest. The grief impacted Patricia's sister, Loretta, enormously. She carried much of

the blame on herself for Patricia's death. You see, it wasn't Patricia having that rumored affair with Everett Savage. It was Loretta. As the family understood, Loretta wanted to break it off with Everett, but was afraid, and so Patricia went instead. They believe the attack on Patricia happened, as police believe it did, and Everett's incoherent state was the result of an attempt to take his own life. Loretta battled the guilt of her sister's death for decades. She passed away last year. Patricia's daughter Jane is still living, and though she herself could not speak about what she remembered of her mother, her husband Roger shared this about the memories Jane had.

Patricia was devoted to her family. Bud taught all the girls to dance in the kitchen, and Patty and Bud loved to go dancing. She was a lot of fun, the heart of the family. They were a close, loving family until that horrible day. It devastated them, and so many people in town. In every case I cover on this podcast, I hope to unveil some glimmer of positivity, some redeeming light at the end of the dark tunnels we walk through together. This story, these intertwined cases, are weighing heavy on us right now.

Patricia Wing's five children grew up without their mother. Shirley Kulin's five-year-old daughter went through life without a mom. Donna Kimmy's life ended just as it was taking off, and Zenobia Clegg's light was dimmed before its time. So what can we learn from the lives of these women who lived and died before so many of us? For me, Zenobia Clegg's spirit of adventure inspires that inner wanderlust, the pull to see the world when the world is once again open. I hope Donna Kimmy's friendly nature softens us all to the smiles of new people. And surely Kulin's story reminds us to love and accept only the love we deserve. And when I think of Patricia, I think of the word legacy. How so

many different versions of events can exist and what her legacy may have been, what it should have been, according to her own family, was of the protective sister, doing what she thought was right in the moment and paying the biggest price for it. Patricia's case reminds me more than anything that we never really know the true story behind any of these cases. Patricia was painted as an adulterer. People wondered how could a devoted mother step out on her husband and five young children. But as I learned from digging deeper, that may not

have been the case. She may have been painted unfairly when really, Patricia was doing what Patricia always did, looking out for her family. I hope her story reminds us not to be quick to judge, and that we may never fully know someone's true, beautiful story. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. Sources for this case and others, including links to all individual articles, are listed in the show notes at darkdowneast.com. I owe a special thank you to Tina B. Tina, thank you for bringing this story to me,

and thank you for your invaluable help in learning more about Patricia Wang. Subscribing and reviewing Dark Down East is free and it not only supports this show, it's the best way to never miss an episode of Maine and New England True Crime Stories. If you liked this episode or any past episode and you haven't left a review yet, I would be so grateful to see your name pop up in the list of reviews on Apple Podcasts. If you need help learning how to do that, send me an email, hello at darkdowneast.com, and I can walk you right through the process. You can also send me your stories. If you, like Tina, have a connection to a local case, please send it my way. Hello at darkdowneast.com and you can Instagram DM me

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 who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and murder cases. I am not about to let those names, the names like Shirley Kulin and Donna Kimme and Patricia Wing and Zenobia Clegg, get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.