Park Predators - The Garden

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Acadia National Park may exist on an island but in the late 1970's a human predator showed up there and started hunting. The identity of the killer has remained unknown for more than four decades and the mystery as to who killed Leslie Spellman is still waiting to be uncovered. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit parkpredators.com  Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and the case I have for you today details the ins and outs of a horrific murder in Maine's Acadia National Park. To this day, the who and the why behind this senseless slaying remains unanswered. It takes place on Mount Desert Island, where the mammoth park sits and spans more than 47,000 acres and includes 26 significant mountain peaks covered in dense forests. If that wasn't isolating enough, it's also bordered by roughly 64 miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline. According to the National Park Service, Acadia's beautiful landscape draws in roughly 3.5 million visitors a year. Most of them are eager to check out hiking trails,

campgrounds, and breathtaking coastal views. For the most part, the local population in the small town of Northeast Harbor stays pretty consistent at about 600 people, but annually, droves of tourists pour into the area each summer. With so many strangers walking around, it kind of makes the island the perfect place for a predator to go unnoticed. And during the summer of 1977, a killer did just that and has never been identified, even after 45 years. This is Park Predators. On the morning of June 19, 1977, just after 9 a.m., Gordon Wheatman, his wife Anne, and their two children pulled into the gravel parking lot of Astakou Azalea Gardens, just on the outskirts of Acadia National Park. The gardens were, and still are, an impeccably designed display of diverse flowers and plants. Think of a botanical garden on steroids.

of a botanical garden on steroids. Though it's technically separate from Acadia National Park, it's often included on visitors' lists of things to do. The spot has a lot of natural floral archways, reflective ponds, and lush greenery that most visitors can't stand to miss out on. The Wheatmans were one of those families who didn't want to miss out. They were in town on vacation from where they lived in New Brunswick. After parking their car, the family got out, wrangled their kids, and set off on their walk. Less than 25 feet down the trail, though, Gordon, the father, stopped abruptly in his tracks. He couldn't believe what he was staring at. There, lying on the side of the walking trail, was a lifeless, bloody body. At first, Gordon couldn't make out

for sure whether it was a man or a woman because the person's face was covered in blood. And to be honest, the family didn't stick around for long to take a closer look. Gordon quickly ushered his wife and kids away from the area and frantically drove a mile down the road to the town of Northeast Harbor to call for help. He found a telephone booth on Main Street and dialed 911. On the other end, a civilian police and fire dispatcher on duty named Ernest Coombs picked up the police station's line. The panic in the caller's voice made it difficult for Ernest to understand what exactly the guy on the other end was saying, but once he got the man to calm down, he told him to hang up and come into the station to explain what was going on in more

detail. Minutes later, Gordon arrived at the Northeast Harbor Police Station and revealed to Ernest what he and his family had found. He told the officer that there was what looked like a man's bloody body in the path near the parking lot of Astakou Azalea Gardens, and somebody should get up there fast to check it out. Now, Ernest knew the spot Gordon was talking about, just 100 yards or so from the main 3 and 198 entrance of Acadia National Park. There were going to be hundreds of people flooding through that area on a Sunday, so Ernest knew his agency needed to act fast.

He immediately phoned one of his colleagues, Sergeant Tyrone Smith, at his home and alerted him of the grisly discovery near the park. According to John F. Cullen and Anson Smith's reporting for the Boston Globe, Ernest first thought at the report of the body, as he later told the newspaper, was, quote, Nope, never thought it was murder. I guess because nobody's ever been murdered here before, end quote. Initially, Ernest stayed at the police station with the Wheatmans, and his sergeant traveled to the scene to check out what they were dealing with. A few minutes after Tyrone arrived on the scene, he chirped over his radio to Ernest to let him know that what they were dealing with was a 1049, short code for

homicide. Ernest couldn't believe it. A murder in the park was the last thing he expected his department to have to handle in the middle of the busiest season for Acadia. Once the officers realized they were dealing with a homicide, it didn't take long for the agency to call the Maine State Police for assistance. Ernest, Tyrone, and their colleagues in the small town were ill-equipped to handle such a big investigation. They needed help from a true homicide detective, and that's what they got when State Police Detective Edward Mandel was assigned to the case. Detective Mandel arrived at the crime scene in the gardens roughly an hour after the body's discovery at approximately 10 15 a.m to begin his investigation. When he took a closer look at the victim's body on the trail the first thing he noticed was that Gordon Wheatman had mistakenly reported the victim

as male. The deceased person was actually a young woman with light brown hair, olive complexion, and gray eyes. From what Mandel could see, she looked to be in her early 20s and was around five feet tall with a slender build. And there was absolutely no question that this woman had been murdered. She had multiple deep cuts on her head and in her hairline, and she appeared to have a severely broken jaw. These were not the type of injuries that the detective and other responders on scene felt had come from some sort of animal attack or freak accident. The woman's wounds appeared to be violently intentional. The other giveaway that she was a murder victim was the fact

that she was partially undressed. Her shoes and pants were missing. The only clothing she had on was a beige-brown sweater, a maroon nylon vest, underwear, and red knee-high socks. To the detective's dismay, the woman had no wallet, purse, or identification on her that could give investigators an idea as to who she was or where she was from. Items like this being missing normally would indicate robbery as a possible motive, but to Detective Mandel, that didn't completely add up, mostly because the victim was still wearing pieces of jewelry when she was killed, and the killer had not taken those items with them. The pieces that were on the body looked unique, like they'd been with the victim for a long time or possibly given

to her as gifts. There was an oval tiger eye ring on one of her fingers and a hand-carved wooden bracelet shaped like a serpent on one of her wrists. There was also something else strange. While the detective and state police techs had been processing the crime scene, they noticed that the ground underneath the victim's body was moist, but her clothing was dry. According to several news reports, the area had gotten a significant amount of rainfall prior to 6 a.m. on that day. Sometime between 5.30 a.m. and 6 a.m.

is when the drizzling let up. So investigators concluded that because the woman's body was sitting on top of damp ground, but she and her clothing were dry, that more than likely meant she had not been on the garden trail long before being found. It's suggested she ended up there after the rain had stopped, so sometime after 6 a.m., but before she was found at 9 a.m., a three-hour window. This helped the investigators narrow down the woman's time of death significantly, or at least pinpoint better when her killer would have been in the area. More than likely, whoever their suspect was had parked in the same public parking lot that the Wheatman family had pulled into.

According to Randy Minotaur's report, Death in Acadia and Other Misadventures in Maine's National Park, Detective Mandel recovered the murder weapon from the crime scene during his initial search. But what it was is information police have never revealed in this case. What I can tell you is that based on the fact that the murder weapon was located near the woman's body and she had significant blood loss on the trail, investigators assumed with a high degree of certainty that she'd been killed there, not killed somewhere else and then dumped there.

After a few hours of processing the scene, investigators transported Jane Doe's body for an autopsy. According to Maureen Williams reporting for the Bangor Daily News, the medical examiner determined that the victim had not been sexually assaulted, despite the fact that she was missing items of clothing. In his report, the medical examiner noted that even though there were no obvious signs a sexual assault had occurred, he warned the detectives that there still could be

a sexual motivation to the crime. The doctor found that Jane Doe had no food or liquid in her stomach, which indicated it had been a while since her last meal. Her toxicology screening came back negative for alcohol. At the time, the ME stated that he could not determine if any drugs were in her system. Now, at first, that information kind of struck me as odd, because it seems like a pretty standard test for MEs to be able to run. But again, we're talking about 1977 here, so I'm not sure if post-mortem blood tests for drugs were even that standard back then.

Anyway, the ME officially ruled the victim's cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head. She had suffered multiple skull fractures as a result of being bludgeoned. Her x-rays and pathology showed that the initial blow that likely incapacitated her was to the side of her head right on her hairline. This injury broke her jaw, and after being knocked unconscious, her attacker landed several more fatal blows. The doctor wrote in his report that based on the angle of the first strike, it appeared it was possible the woman was running from her killer when she was attacked. Other information from the autopsy revealed that

the victim had had some dental work done in her life because she had several fillings that the doctor determined were likely put in during her childhood. Everything else about Jane Doe showed she was in good health and didn't appear to have a history of substance use, trauma, or signs of a transient lifestyle. This gave investigators hope that they would quickly be able to ID Jane Doe. I think their thinking was, if she wasn't someone who lived on the fringes of society, surely she belonged to a family and had loved ones out there who'd noticed she was gone and would be looking for her. and had loved ones out there who'd noticed she was gone and would be looking for her. Authorities released her description to the local media and sent copies of her fingerprints to outside agencies, just in case she might have a criminal record elsewhere in New England.

Within days, hundreds of calls from families of missing young women came into the Northeast Harbor Police Station, and detectives sifted through each one of them, but none of the descriptions matched their victim. So to try and drum up leads, investigators turned to the locals outside of the town of Northeast Harbor and asked people in other towns around the National Park to come forward if they had any information or heard anything that might be linked to the case. Their hope was that perhaps a local resident or maybe even a visitor who'd been in the area shortly before June 19th had seen their Jane Doe and learned her name. During the first week of the investigation,

police interviewed hundreds of people, including employees of Acadia National Park and the Azalea Gardens, but they didn't learn anything new. According to Randy Minotaur's book, not one person seemed to have known the woman or even come across her path. This frustrated investigators because there were very limited options for lodging, restaurants, and shops outside of the National Park boundary. So if their Jane Doe was camping or staying in the area, someone should have seen her or bumped into her at some point.

On the other hand, though, if she wasn't visiting, but instead was brought to Acadia from the mainland, then authorities were up against really tough odds of trying to identify her. Since it seemed like they were hitting a wall, state police had no choice but to bring in a forensic artist to make a sketch of Jane Doe. Once they were satisfied with the drawing's resemblance to the young woman, they released the image to the press and it was published in several regional newspapers, including the Boston Globe. Police also took another gamble

and released detailed information about the type of clothing the woman had been wearing and the pieces of jewelry they found on her. Within a day or so of doing that, police received a promising lead. A gas station attendant on Mount Desert Island came forward and told police that he sold three dollars worth of gasoline to a man driving a dark-colored older model vehicle around 10 p.m. on Saturday, June 18th. The attendant remembered seeing a woman closely resembling Jane Doe's description sitting in the front seat of the car holding a scruffy small dog that was wearing a red bandana instead of a collar. The witness said he was able to recall such specific details about this interaction because he'd been kind of obsessed with how

cute this little terrier was, and he joked with the couple about never having seen a dog wear a bandana like that. Around the same time this witness came forward, another person called into the police station and reported that they'd seen a small, scruffy dog wearing a red bandana being pushed out of a moving car on Route 198, right near Azalea Gardens, around 6.15 a.m. on Sunday, June 19th, the same morning Jane Doe had been found. Unfortunately, this second witness couldn't remember any details about the person they'd seen driving the car.

The only thing they recalled was that after the dog was thrown out, the driver sped off toward an area of the south side of the island known as Seal Harbor. Due to the proximity of the murder scene, the gas station clerk's story, and the location of where the second witness said they'd seen the dog being tossed out of a moving car,

police suspected the dog had some connection to their victim. When authorities announced to the public that they were trying to find the dog, it didn't take them long to locate it, and they learned that it had been found on the afternoon of June 19th, wandering along the nearby highway leading to the gardens. It had suffered a shoulder injury but was going to recover, and by the looks of it, police determined the animal had been well cared for and beloved by someone. Because the dog didn't have a

collar or any identifying tags, this lead kind of went nowhere. Investigators couldn't use it to confirm the identity of their Jane Doe, but they felt certain it was connected to her. For the time being, police had to put the information and the dog aside and continue digging. According to reporting by the Boston Globe, detectives started inspecting their victim's clothing and noticed that her maroon nylon vest was manufactured by a specific clothing company. They contacted that company and were able to trace the vest to a store in Boston where it had been sold. State police investigators went to the store and spoke with a clerk who said they

remembered selling the vest to a young woman in her late 20s, but they couldn't remember her name. On June 26th, eight days into the investigation, a woman living five and a half hours away in Hingham, Massachusetts named Betsy Spellman was at home reading an article in the Boston Globe that was talking about everything that was unfolding in Maine regarding a deceased unidentified Jane Doe and specifically a maroon nylon vest. Betsy had been browsing the report and her eyes froze on the line of copy that was talking about the vest. She frantically turned the page and continued reading, and that's when she saw what no mother should ever have to see. Betsy couldn't believe her eyes.

There on the page of her Sunday newspaper was a sketch of a young woman police were saying was unidentified. But Betsy knew without a shadow of a doubt that the face she was looking at was her daughter, 27-year-old Leslie Spellman. As Betsy continued reading the article, she learned that authorities had been able to trace the manufacturer of a maroon nylon vest to a Boston sporting goods store. A clerk at the store had told police that they remembered selling the vest to a young woman in her late 20s, but didn't remember her name. The next day, Betsy sent her other daughter, Amy, to the town of Northeast Harbor, and Amy took with her her sister Leslie's dental records. Within a matter of hours, the family's horror was realized. Police used those records and confirmed the identity of their Jane Doe as Leslie Spellman.

Detectives learned from speaking with Amy that earlier that summer, she and Leslie had started backpacking a 270-mile trail called the Long Trail that went through the main ridge of the Green Mountains. According to the Green Mountain Club's website, the Green Mountains run from the Massachusetts state line through Vermont and all the way up to the Canadian border. Amy told the authorities that she had parted ways with her sister in Vermont on Saturday, June 18th, one day before Leslie was killed. The night of the 17th,

both of them had stayed at a family friend's house. She said when she last saw her sister, Leslie mentioned she had plans to hitchhike north to Maine to a community that provided lodging and was sort of a communal living village for people who were into yoga and spiritual enlightenment. Amy had decided to head south and make her way to New York to visit her friends, and Leslie went north.

According to Amy, Leslie had worked as a yoga instructor herself back home in Hingham and was a passionate and hardworking person who made her own jewelry and taught herself how to play the mandolin in her spare time. The commune that Leslie was headed to was an ashram community and it was located near Acadia National Park, though it's unclear from the research material if Leslie ever reached her destination.

I have to think she didn't, mostly because she was last seen by Amy on the morning of the 18th and was found dead on the morning of the 19th. Back in 1977, hitchhiking was commonplace for Amy and Leslie, as it was for a lot of people. Amy told the police she'd enjoyed hitchhiking all over the country selling handmade jewelry. She said she and Leslie always hitchiking all over the country selling handmade jewelry. She said she and Leslie always hitched rides when they were backpacking together. It was just their way of getting around. But June 18th was Leslie's first time hitchhiking on her own, according to Amy. In addition to giving all of this helpful information on Leslie's movements to the investigators,

Amy also helped them learn where they may need to start searching to locate areas her sister might have been camping in. Amy explained that Leslie was not the type of person who would set up a campsite in a designated location. Instead, she would just find a good spot off a beaten path and enjoy the tranquility that the woods offered. She didn't like to be crowded by loud visitors and tourists. Amy also provided investigators with another piece of crucial information. She said that

Leslie had been traveling with her dog, a scruffy terrier named Taylor, who always wore a red bandana around his neck instead of a collar. Suddenly to police, that Mount Desert Island gas station attendance account about seeing a woman holding a scruffy dog wearing a red bandana on the night of June 18th became super important. Authorities strongly suspected, even more so now than they had before, that the woman this witness had seen was Leslie. If the detective's hunch was right, that placed Leslie on Mount Desert Island, alive just eight hours before her death, in the company of a stranger. To firm up their suspicions, investigators brought Amy to the kennel where they were keeping little Taylor,

and she positively identified him as her sister's travel buddy and companion. At that point, there was no doubt in the investigators' minds that the woman the gas station clerk had seen with a strange man on the night of June 18th was, in fact, Leslie Spellman. The biggest question they needed to answer, though, was who was the man she was with. They sat him down and had him help an artist come up with a composite sketch, but here's what's weird. Police have never released that image to the public. This always frustrates me. Like, why even make a composite sketch

if you're not going to push it out to people in the hopes of getting someone to ID this guy? To me, it's just as important to release his description to the media as it was to release Leslie's description when she was still a Jane Doe. I mean, back in 1977, police knew that this guy had to be one of the last people to see Leslie alive and may have possibly been her killer.

So not releasing his sketch just seems weird to me. Anyway, despite keeping this valuable information to themselves and working with only a few good leads, the police in 1977 felt a renewed energy kick into their investigation after they spoke with Amy. Investigators learned that when Leslie was hiking, she'd been carrying 60 pounds of camping gear, which included a two-person tent, a red sleeping bag,

plenty of clothes, and a journal she wrote in daily. Police officers and search teams scoured Acadia National Park for days, trying to locate any of those items, but nothing turned up. The searches couldn't cover every square mile of the park, simply because it was too vast, but the areas they targeted were where investigators felt traces of Leslie should and would be. If her killer had tossed her dog out of a moving car on a main road, police assumed that the odds were whoever killed her likely tossed her camping gear and backpack off a roadway near that spot as well. But despite their best efforts, the police came up empty

handed. The best thing they had to work off of was a rough timeline of what they believed Leslie's last movements were before her murder. Police felt confident that sometime on the morning of Saturday, June 18th, Leslie said goodbye to Amy and started hitchhiking on Interstate 95. It would have been a six-hour drive from where she was seen in Vermont for her to get to Acadia National Park in Maine. Because authorities were sure that the Mount Desert Island gas station attendant had seen Leslie at 10 p.m. on Saturday night, that meant she'd arrived there from Vermont thanks to someone. The tricky thing was, though, police had no way of knowing if Leslie had taken

multiple hitchhiking rides from Vermont to Maine or if she'd just ridden with one person. The window of time from 10 p.m. Saturday night to 6 a.m. Sunday morning was a complete mystery to investigators. Their prevailing theory was that the man she'd last been seen riding with had taken her to the Azalea Gardens and decided at some point to rob her or sexually assault her. More than likely, Leslie had fought back, and that's when her attacker killed her.

Despite police having this fairly solid idea of what they thought had happened to her and when, they were still no closer to finding out who was responsible. According to Cullen and Anson's reporting for a Boston Globe article published in July 1977, a few weeks after the murder, the case's lead detective, Edward Mandel, said, quote, I wish that I could say that we had something solid to go on, but the real truth is that we don't have a thing that would help us identify the killer, end quote. In the weeks following Leslie's murder, investigators were desperate for more information and felt confident there were more witnesses out there who saw something,

but for whatever reason, had just not come forward yet. In late July, about a month after the crime, one of the Spellman's friends offered up a $1,000 reward for information, leading to the conviction of Leslie's killer. Police were hopeful that the money would convince someone to come forward with even the smallest piece of information or evidence, but unfortunately, that didn't happen. The reward went untouched and no new leads materialized. But in August, authorities finally got a break, sort of. A horrific murder with nine victims that had occurred seven hours away in Connecticut, not long after Leslie was killed, caught the attention of Maine's investigators. The suspect for that crime had something in his car that police believed could

be directly connected to Leslie. According to the Hartford Courant, on July 22nd, 1977, a 29-year-old mother of seven named Cheryl Bowden, along with all of her children and a niece, were murdered in Waterbury, Connecticut. Within a matter of days, police there arrested a man named Lorne Aquin for the crime. It wasn't hard for investigators to follow a trail of clues that led them to Lorne. Lorne was the troubled foster brother of Cheryl's husband, Frederick. He was out on parole at the time of the brutal murders and was seen with the family just hours before they were killed. Because of his criminal record and witnesses placing him at the victim's home around the time of the crime, he was brought in for questioning.

While searching Lauren's home and car, police discovered bloody clothes outside of his house and bloody shoes in the trunk of his vehicle. After those discoveries, Lauren confessed pretty quickly to the Slangs just one day after committing the crime. At first glance, Cheryl and her family's murders seemed pretty vastly different from Leslie's. The crimes were committed hours away from each other, in different states, under very different circumstances. Leslie's case was a single-victim homicide and possible kidnapping, and the Bowdoin case was a mass murder of an entire family. But while the authorities in Connecticut had been searching Lorne Aquin's car, they were really careful about what evidence samples they removed. According to an FBI lab report in Cheryl's case, police in Connecticut found dog hairs in Lorne's car that were, quote, compatible to Leslie Spellman's dog, end quote. According to John F. Cullen's article for the Boston Globe that was published in October of 1977,

Detective Mandel, who was heading up the investigation into Leslie's murder, said he felt confident the dog hairs found in the Connecticut case could be linked to Leslie's dog, Taylor. With the limited testing law enforcement had at the time, Mandel said the dog hair from Lauren's car was the same color, texture, and chemical composition as that of Taylor. They just couldn't be 100% sure, though, because, coincidentally, a dog had also been present at the Connecticut crime scene. According to news reports, in that case, the Bowdoin family dog had been unharmed and left outside in their backyard during their murders. Even though Detective Mandel for a long time had not specified what the murder weapon was in Leslie's case, he told reporters that Lorne Aquin had used a similar blunt instrument in Cheryl and her family's murders. Investigators also said that in both

cases, the killer had been right-handed. On top of that information, Lorne Aquin's whereabouts were unaccounted for in Connecticut for the time frame police in Maine knew that Leslie had been killed. What was probably most damning of all, though, was that Lorne fit the description of the man the gas station attendant on Mount Desert Island had provided to state police when he told the authorities what the guy looked like. Lorne's car was also a dead ringer for the type of vehicle that the clerk remembered seeing Leslie and her dog sitting in. But as promising as Lorne looked as a potential suspect in Leslie's case, his defense attorney in Connecticut, a guy named John Williams, was having none of it and publicly expressed his outrage

that Maine investigators were trying to pin Leslie's murder on his client. According to reporting by the Bangor Daily News, John Williams went as far as to say that Detective Mandel should have been fired for suggesting a link between the two crimes without evidence to prove it or make an arrest. Williams stated that by suggesting there was a link between the two cases and his client without law enforcement establishing definitive probable cause, Lorne Aquin would never receive a fair trial for the murder charges he was already facing in Connecticut. Williams went on to claim that he had seven witnesses who saw Lorne in Connecticut

during the time that Leslie was killed, which meant his client couldn't possibly have been in Maine murdering Leslie. Up until that point, law enforcement in Maine was under the impression that Lorne was unaccounted for in that time frame. But I guess to Williams' point, that was inaccurate. Because John Williams raised so much fuss about the issue, Detective Mandel and main investigators decided not to question Lorne about Leslie's murder until his trial for the Connecticut murders was over. According to news reports, that trial didn't get underway, though, for another two years. However, in 1979, Lorne was convicted for killing

Cheryl Bowden and her family, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison. By that time, all of the circumstantial links Detective Mandel had hinted to between Lauren and Leslie's murder had completely fallen off everyone's radar, and Lauren was never questioned about Leslie's case. To this day, he's never been named a formal suspect. Leslie's case. To this day, he's never been named a formal suspect. The source material that's out there isn't super clear, but I guess because all of the time that had passed between 1977 and 1979, Maine authorities had found other leads that led them away from Lorne Aquin being their guy. It's hard to know for sure, but either way, the discussion about Lorne and Leslie somehow being connected seemed like the last real activity in the investigation for two decades. Movement in the case literally went radio silent until the year 2000. That year, a man named James Hicks, who was originally from Maine, was arrested in Texas for aggravated robbery.

was arrested in Texas for aggravated robbery. While in custody, James confessed that he was responsible for the deaths of multiple women from Maine who'd been reported missing. He told Texas authorities that, in exchange for being able to serve his prison sentence in Maine, he would lead New England investigators to the remains of his victims. James reportedly confessed to killing a 34-year-old woman named Gerilyn Towers in 1982 and a 40-year-old woman named Lynn Ouellette in 1996. At the time of his confession, James had already spent six years in prison from 1983 to 1990 after being convicted of fourth-degree murder in connection with the disappearance of his wife, Jenny Hicks. Jenny disappeared in 1977 and was presumed to be dead.

According to a case study done by psychologists at Radford University, James was extradited to Maine and led investigators to the remains of all three women, Jenny, Gerilyn, and Lynn. Jenny was dismembered and her remains scattered in the woods near Carmel, Maine, and the other two women's remains were found buried near Jenkins Beach in Bangor, Maine. For reference, Bangor is just about an hour northwest of Acadia National Park. Hicks told investigators that he strangled all three women and dismembered their bodies to dispose of the evidence. Although Leslie was bludgeoned to death and not strangled, I think police felt compelled to investigate anyone as cold-blooded as James, who was in

Maine at the time of Leslie's murder. Authorities announced in 2000 that they would closely examine if James was involved in Leslie's case or staying in the Mount Desert Island area during the summer of 1977. But unfortunately, they didn't find any evidence directly connecting him to Leslie's case. And to this day, law enforcement in Maine has never confirmed if James was or is currently considered a suspect. All we really know is that he targeted women in the same age range as Leslie. He was from Maine, and he confessed to killing during the same year she died. Whether he's connected to Leslie or not,

James was thankfully convicted of both Gerilyn Towers and Lynn Willett's murders in the year 2000. He's still alive and currently serving two life sentences in Maine State Prison. After the James Hicks attention on the case in 2000, there were no more significant updates for a few years. But then in the summer of 2007, 30 years to the day of her murder, Maine State Police held a press conference to bring attention to Leslie's case. And during that conference, they let the public know they had not stopped investigating her death. Police told the media that they hoped advances in DNA and forensic

technology could provide them with new ways to analyze evidence and give them something fresh to go on. But as of the moment, they still have no suspects. According to reporting by Tony Lynn Robbins for the Bangor Daily News, Leslie's sister Amy was present at that police press conference. She said she would never stop seeking justice

for her sister, saying, quote, it's never over. It never goes away. I would like to know who did it and where they are now, end quote. June 2017, the 40th anniversary of Leslie's murder, came and went with seemingly no media attention. If police have utilized new technology to move the case forward like they said they were going to do back in 2007, that information has not been released, and it's not anywhere in the source material I scoured for this episode. I have to think, though, with everything that labs can do now with DNA extraction, there has to be more testing that can be done on Leslie's clothing and possibly even her jewelry.

A reporter for Fox 22 Bangor Online spoke to Lifetime Northeast Harbor residents in 2019 for a memorial piece about Leslie's case. According to that article, residents of the close-knit community have always wondered if Leslie's killer was someone just passing through, or if they could have been someone from their own town who no one knew was capable of such a heinous crime northeast harbor locals had never had a murder happen in their hometown before 1977 and have had very few since it's a place visitors travel to from far and wide to enjoy the outdoors and explore the untouched protected beauty of nature that same allure is what attracted leslie spellman to the area in

the summer of 1977. The things that stick out to me about this case that I just can't shake from my mind are the fact that whoever killed Leslie clearly did not have the heart to let her go unharmed, but they did keep her dog alive. Taylor was only mildly injured from being pushed out of the moving car, and he was released to Amy, Leslie's sister, after she identified him. I think the fact that the killer didn't also kill Taylor in the process of the crime but instead let him go on the side of the road could be an important detail to the

killer's mindset and how they operate. I also have a ton of questions as to why police have never released the sketch they made of the man they think was last seen with Leslie. Obviously, they used that drawing to try and pin this on Lorne Aquin at one point in time, so we know the composite sketch exists, but why it's never been released to the public is a mystery. To be fair though, now that almost 45 years have passed, I doubt the sketch would be of any use because whoever the killer is has aged dramatically or might even be dead. Still, there could be someone alive who could see that old composite sketch of him and recognize his face from when he was younger. The viciousness of Leslie Spellman's murder is just sad, and to add to that is the fact that to this day, it remains unsolved. Her surviving loved ones are still hoping for justice

as they continue to live in perpetual heartbreak. Leslie's murderer didn't abduct her in the cover of night. She more than likely willingly accepted a ride from this person, thinking that they would get her where she was going safely. She never expected to suffer the fate she did and to have her killer go free for so long. The list of unanswered questions swirling around her case are like the miles and miles of shoreline that stretch around Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. You can walk them in a circle forever, looping over and over the same ground, and never be any further from the place you started.

Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?