The Misery Machine - Mary Catherine Olenchuk: Maine's Oldest Cold Case

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

Join Drewby and Yergy as they discuss the case of Mary Catherine Olenchuk, who has unfortunate the distinction of being Maine's oldest cold case. Was it the work of eco-terrorists? A deranged local? Or a confessed child predator from Massachusetts. Let us know your thoughts! To this date, Mary's case is the oldest cold case in Maine history. If anyone has any information, please contact the Maine State Police at 1-(800)-228-0857. A very special thank you to Levi for supporting our show as our highest tier patron! Join Our Facebook Group to Request a Topic: https://t.co/DeSZIIMgXs?amp=1 Support Our Patreon For More Unreleased Content: https://www.patreon.com/themiserymachine PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/themiserymachine Instagram: miserymachinepodcast Twitter: misery_podcast Discord: https://discord.gg/kCCzjZM #themiserymachine #podcast #truecrime Source Material: http://imgur.com/a/lDmHc https://downeast.com/features/unsolved-crimes-closure/ https://murderpedia.org/male.P/p/pierce-charles.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2000/10/19/gen-peter-olenchuk-munitions-expert-dies/eeea6303-4eaa-4bef-891d-5e39833786e1/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1998/08/29/obituaries/b22db7a4-e4be-4f25-a7fb-aecb2b952dfc/ https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/me-mary-catherine-olenchuk-13-ogunquit-9-aug-1970.295367/ http://justiceforunsolvedinmaine.blogspot.com/2015/03/red-rover-by-alex-ferguson.html  

Kiten. Kiten. You want to be in the video again? I'm the Misery Machine. I'm Yergy. And I'm Drewby and surprise. It's Kiten. Again.

And this week we're doing another case from Maine. It is actually the oldest cold case from Maine. It's about a little girl that went missing in the 1970s. And her name is Mary Catherine Olenchuck. It's a really, really sad case because she was on vacation when this happens and currently there are no leads in her disappearance. Unfortunately. Though if you do know anything, we will have the number you can call below for the main state police. And if you're listening on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe.

We just passed 3,600 subscribers, so thank you everyone for all the help. Thank you so much. But without further ado, the disappearance of Mary Catherine Olenchuck. The quaint resort town of a gunquit was warm and sunny in the 80s on August 9th, 1970. It was almost 4 o'clock in the afternoon where 13-year-old Mary Catherine Olenchuck, the youngest daughter of Brigadier General, Peter Olenchuk, had been on Little Beach with her mother Ruth and her older sister. Little Beach was just down Israel Head Road from the Olenchuk Summer House. The Olenchucks, who were from Joliet, Illinois, owned a seven-room summer cottage in Agunkwit,

where they stayed each summer. At high tide, Mary Catherine left Little Beach, walked up Israel Head Road to their cottage. So I love a gunquit. So for our listeners who are not from Maine, it is a small coastal town. on the coast of Maine, around Kenabunkport. So Kenabunkport is made famous by the bush compound. If you're living in a gunquit, you generally are a little bit more well off. It's not cheap to live there.

It is not cheap to live there. They're beautiful mansions. It's definitely a seasonal town. The population explodes in the summer. A lot of outer-staters have homes. It is very comparable to that of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Yeah. you are familiar with the community there.

Yeah, absolutely. I'd say so. I've never been to Provincetown in the summer, but a gun quit during the summer is pretty crazy and it's expensive, but it's nice there. It's very nice. It's one of the nicer places in Maine. So Mary quickly changed into a pair of faded pink Wrangler shorts and a white T-shirt with Yoko Miko Andrew's Air Force Base,

the name of the military base where her family lived during the winter stenciled on it. So this would make her easily recognizable as, Brigadier General Olenchuk's daughter, and she hung her bathing suit on the line to dry. She then hopped on a neighbor's English racing bicycle and headed into town barefoot to buy some candy at Tower's drugstore, and then a copy of the New York Times, which she would procure from the nearby Norseman Motor Inn, which carried out-of-state newspapers. And I do believe we've confirmed that the Norseman Motor Inn is still in existence to this day. still standing. I believe it's going by another name now, but the building still stands and it still operates as a motel of some sort. At just five foot three inches and 80 pounds, Mary was instantly recognized by many locals. She was a cheerful kid with a face full of freckles and shoulder

length red hair matched the fur of her frequent companion, Kelly, which is the family's Irish setter. Mary Catherine was pretty physically confident, yet carried an air of shyness to her and had a penchant for candy and collecting shells on a Gunquitt's endless shores. She had returned across the Marginal Way footbridge to Wharf Lane by the Marginal Way house, to Shore Road and then on to Israel Head Road. As she reached the brow of Israel Head Road, an elderly woman on the third floor of the lookout hotel saw a man driving a maroon car up the hill behind her. The unknown man leaned out of the car window and hailed Mary Catherine.

The witness described the man as appearing to be in his 30, dressed in dark clothes and showing the signs of the times was not a hippie. That's a direct quote. Direct quote. The car had scratches on the hood and may have been a 1967 Chevrolet. The witness stated that she had turned away for just a moment, and when she looked out of her window again, she saw Mary climbing into the stranger's car.

The bicycle abandoned in an alcove by the motel. Mary's family reports that she was shy and not very trusting and wouldn't have gotten into the car with someone, unless she knew them or had confidence in them. It is currently believed that Mary knew her abductor. Quick note about the Lookout Hotel. That still does exist, but it's now... I believe it's condos.

Yeah, it's a series of condos. And it's called something else with the name Lookout in it, but it still does exist. By 6.30 that Sunday evening, Mary Catherine's mother, Ruth, called the general at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Brigadier General Peter Olenchuck was relieved of duty and made arrangements to fly to Maine immediately. At 7.15, following that conversation, Ruth Olenshuk notified the Agunquit police that Mary was missing and requested the state police be notified. By 11 p.m., the bicycle Mary Road into town had been located in Alcove the lookout hotel. At approximately a quarter of 3 a.m., the provost marshal at Edgewood

Arsenal called the FBI. He advised that although Brigadier General Olenshuk was in charge of Operation Chase, there was no known connection between the missing daughter and the father's assignment, however, the possibility, although remote, had occurred to him. And this is definitely a theory. We'll talk about Operation Chase. On August 7, 1970, two days before Mary Catherine's abduction, Brigadier General Olenshuk had been put in charge of Operation Chase. So Chase is an acronym.

It stands for Cut Holes and Synchum. The army was transporting nerve gas from bases in Alabama and Kentucky to a Liberty ship that was eventually scuttled, 28, miles off Cape Kennedy. Scott Lane's basically when they sink the ship. The governor of Florida, three congressmen from that state, and the mayor of Macon, Georgia, protested the transportation of nerve gas through their states. And on the 8th of August, a Richmond, Kentucky newspaper received a threat to the effect that a group of students would kidnap the families of personnel involved in the operation. You got to think about the time we're living in as well when this is

taking place. There was this big protested. The whole no-nukes phrase that was on everybody's mind. Anything that has to do with the bomb or polluting the environment with these new types of weapons, like nerve gas. This is the grimmest part of the Vietnam era when this is taking place. That's also true, yeah. So we have a lot of young people who are very upset. So the theory of eco-terrorism and kidnapping officials' children is a very likely scenario, although, a bit of a stretch. Yes, but still possible. It is still very possible.

And very much a valid theory in this case. Mary's disappearance was not revealed to the general public for two days, as her family and the police were expecting a ransom call. When no call came, the military, the FBI, and the police all became involved in the search, with thousands of flyers posted as far north as Canada and as far south as Delaware. Two state police detectives and four state police officers headed by state police Sergeant Paul Falconer investigated Mary Catherine's disappearance, along with agents from the FBI, military, and other local police agencies. Chief Cecil Perkins of the Agunquit Police Department

commented that searching for Mary Catherine was like looking for a needle in the haystack. He stated there had been no calls, no notes, nothing. Mary Catherine had just dropped out of sight. However, there would be one call that would leave authorities baffled. A man made a telephone call from a payphone in Biddeford informing the operator that he had Mary Catherine Olenshuk and that the operator should notify the police that he would call later with ransom plans. Although the operator believed the man to be drunk, the state police insinuated that action would be taken to apprehend him if he calls again. At the end of the day on August 13th, a memo from the Boston office of the FBI reported that abandoned vehicles and

unoccupied buildings have been rechecked by local authorities with no results. The army provided a helicopter for searching wooded areas, and the main state police reviewed records of sex offenders who may have owned a maroon vehicle. Like, I should stress the fact that when a brigadier general's daughter is potentially kidnapped like this, they're going to use resources. This is more of a high-profile person, and they're using army resources now for this. this is not something that your normal everyday person would get for resources if their child went missing.

So Brigadier General Olenchuk, his wife and two daughters, Jane and Nancy, remain grief-stricken in their home as local and out-of-state television crews and reporters crowded into the tiny police station in a Gunquit Square. Brigadier General Olenchuk appeared at his front door, but would make no comment to reporters other than to say he was cooperating with the Attorney General's office and with the police. Three shoulder-to-shoulder search parties made up of fire department and police volunteers from Wells, York Village, York Beach, and Agunkwit had combed the area. But by midweek, a gunwit police chief Cecil Perkins and state police sergeants Paul Falconer and Jerry Bootleyer called off the ground search, depending on the helicopter search moving forward, as well as checking out all leads from citizens. By Friday the 14th, the pace of the search had slowed after three days of frantic activity. On August 22nd, 1970, the body of Mary Catherine Olenchuk was found at about one in the afternoon

under a pile of hay and a derelict barn on the grounds of the Parsons Estate in Kennebunk, Maine. Mary Catherine's body was in an advanced state of decomposition and had been removed to the Thayer Hospital in Waterville, Maine for postmortem, which is quite a trip from Kennebunk. An autopsy revealed that Mary had been strangled. Four turns of quarter-inch thick rope, lobster warp, were wrapped around her neck and nodded at the back. She was found clothed, wearing a wristwatch on her left hand that her father purchased for her in Japan. Due to the state of decomposition of Mary Catherine's body, it was unknown for certain the extent of which she had been assaulted. Two caretakers of the Parsons estate, Charles Bellier and Peter Gunn, called Kennebunk Reserve Police Officer

George Labarge to check out an area near the barn that campers had used recently. While checking for smoldering fires, the three men noticed a strong odor in the barn and had found Mary Catherine's remains. It had also been reported that George Labarge had gone to the Parsons' estate on a tip from his daughter. The barn had been checked out once before a few days after August 9th. The caretakers of the Parsons property telephoned the Kennebunk police and said they noticed the barn door was wide open when it should have been closed and asked an officer to help them check for signs of trespassing impossible fire hazards. At the time, the officer noticed an odor, but also saw a scattering of bird feathers and attributed the smell to bird carcasses buried in several feet of

hay covering most of the barn floor. So the week before Mary's body was discovered, a psychic was contacted. Her name was Shirley Harrison, a mother of six from West Buxton. Harrison had consulted on several high-profile murder investigations and once predicted the location and occupation of the Boston Strangler's next victim. On August 15th, Harrison told police to check an unpainted building on an old estate in the Kennebunk area. Richard Cohen, head of the Department of Criminal Investigation for the State Attorney General's office, said there was evidence that campers had been in the area in recent days, and the area was used by fishermen. Stripe bass were running in the title portions of the Musam River, for one local, an evening fishing trip would change his life forever.

So 16-year-old Bob Walsh, a part-time lifeguard in Kennebunk, was among those who volunteered to put posters up. Walsh's family owned the Idales Motel in nearby Kennebunk. On the night Mary Catherine disappeared, Walsh and a friend were drinking beer and fishing for striped bass, more commonly known around here as strippers on the Musom River in Kennebunk. After midnight, it began to rain, so the boys walked back to their hangout, an old barn on the field of the Parsons estate. At about 1.30 a.m. as they approached the barn. The boys heard rustling in the woods nearby.

The sound definitely spooked them, but they figured it was probably a deer, which, you know, probably it could have been. It could have been. The two entered the barn, dropped their fishing poles and sleeping bags, then walked a few hundred yards back to the idlies. When they got back to the motel,

the boys jumped into the pool. Moments later, they had heard a car start in the distance. It was about 2 a.m. So this would be pretty uncommon for 2 a.m. even though this is a resort town. And we did a little bit of Googling to see if the idlies was still standing. It is, but it is called something else now. We're going to definitely put some pictures up on YouTube so you can see what that is.

Based on my understanding of where this was, it's not impossible that a car was starting around 2 a.m., but this wasn't a super frequented place by tourists at this time of night. It seemed to be on a more remote part of Route 9. It wasn't really close to the ocean. Right. So it's surrounded by woods. If you're going to have traffic like that, it's going to be in parts of Kenabunk or Kenabunk port where there might be some bars or restaurants that are open that late. I don't think that you're randomly going to have a car starting up at 2 a.m., specifically where this is located.

Unless it was starting up at the motel. but I'm assuming based on what they said that this was starting up away from the motel. Yes, that's kind of what I gathered. Yeah, so when people are like, why is the car starting up a bad thing? Well, it's just given the remote area of this place in Maine, there's just not a whole lot of people here even during tourist season. So when Mary's body was found in the barn 13 days later, Walsh told his story to Frank Stevens, who was Kennebunk's police chief at the time. He also told Stevens that he had been in the barn a half dozen times since that night. and once smelled something so putrid that he got sick to his stomach.

Stevens, who his sense died, told Walsh to write down everything he could remember about his activities between August 9th and August 22nd. He also told the boy that a Bible from the Idalese motel had been found in the barn. But when word had spread that Walsh had spent time in the barn and that a Bible from his family motel, it was recovered near the body, and the police did determine that the Bible had been there for some time, people in the town had began to talk. Though he was never seriously considered a suspect,

he did not have a car or even a driver's license, and he could easily pass a lie detector test. Walsh, regardless, became a pariah. He'd been elected president of his class at Kennebunk High School the previous spring, but when school started in September, everything was different, and Walsh was dumped by his girlfriends,

and his classmates kept their distance. He became known as Killer Bob, a nickname that still haunts him, and this is not to be confused with Killer Bob from Twin Peaks. Is he still alive? He is still alive, lives in the area, and runs a catering business. It's just sad. I mean, people might say that, oh, well, this is just high school.

Yeah, but just imagine being a senior in high school and just having your life, your social life come crashing down. Everyone thinks you're a murderer. And even to this day, you have to remember Canabunk, Agunquit, Wells, York. all these places are small towns really until you get to the summer months and all the tourists come in or people with summer homes everybody knows each other yeah you only think these places are dense because you see them when it's tourist season year round not as many people live here as you think like for example when we went to province town in the off season nobody was there nobody nobody at all saw maybe eight to ten people other people total people overestimate what office season is like in these tourist areas, even people from Maine, very much overestimate the amount of people living in that area. However, in March of 1981, child killer Charles E. Pierce told investigators that he was responsible for 15 to 20 child murders since 1954. He named several children, including

Mary Catherine Olenchuck of Maine. However, he was never formally charged with her murder. So we're not going to go into too much detail on this because he was never charged. There was not a lot of information on this and I don't want to cause a whole bunch of speculation. Yeah, I don't know where he was at the time, so it's hard to be like, oh, yeah. I believe he was in jail in Massachusetts, so it's possible, but you could say anything. You literally can say anything and people say things sometimes to make themselves more notorious. See, like, Audus Tool and Henry Lee Lucas. I don't give this much credit. And if he was in jail around that time, some people when they're already facing life in prison, will just do this no matter what. So Brigadier General Olenshuk was

promoted to Major General in 1973 and became the Army's director of material acquisition. He retired in 1975 as assistant deputy chief of staff for research development and acquisition. Through the 1990s, he did consulting work in management and national security affairs for the Army and private firms, and he was the board chairman of Timex Defense Products Corporation from 77 until 1981. He was a member of the Army Science and Technology Board of the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council, a scientific advisory panel to Congress. In 1996, the Mary Catherine Olenchuk Endowment Fund

was established to be used for tuition assistance for sacred heart students who faced unexpected financial hardship. This was established by the Olenchuk family in memory of Mary Catherine Olenchuk. On August 22nd, 1998, 28 years after Mary Catherine's body was recovered, Ruth Olenchuk, her mother,

passed away at age 73 from a brain tumor. Her obituary noted that she graduated from Goucher College and that she was a clerk at the Federal Reserve Bank in Baltimore in the mid-1940s, which was very progressive for a woman at the time. After marrying in 1946, she accompanied Peter to his army posts in France and Germany. Later in life, she remained active in church, gardening, and restoring antiques. On October 6, 2000, Major General Peter Olenshuk passed away at his home at a gunwit. was 78 years old. His obituary noted that he was a graduate of Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania.

He had received a master's degree in bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin and a master's degree in business administration from George Washington University. He enlisted the Army Corps of Engineers in 1943 and served in North Africa in the Far East during World War II. He became a commissioned officer in 1945 and his assignments in the 1960s included two tours of Vietnam and the commission. of Fort Detrick near Frederick Maryland. His decorations included the Distinguished Service Medal, four awards of the Legion of Merit,

the Joint Service Commendation Medal and two awards of the Air Medal. Although Mary Catherine was originally buried in Ocean View Cemetery in Wells, Maine, her remains were later moved and interred in a family plot with her parents in Arlington National Cemetery.

Peter and Ruth never got to find closure, but her sisters are still alive and deserve to know what happened to their sister. To this date, Mary's case is the oldest cold case in Maine history. If anyone has any information, please contact the Maine State Police at 800-228-08-08-57, and that will be included in the show notes and the YouTube description. There's something that really makes me feel hopeless about this case, and that's the fact that This was a Brigadier General's daughter that was taken. If they can't solve this case, what cold case in Maine are they going to solve?

Not only that, we have come a long way in DNA evidence. There's got to be something on the body that offers new leads. And I can't find any news article about revisiting this case in the past 20 years. We did hear in another podcast that we did some research on that, that there was some evidence found under her nails, but I couldn't find anything to substantiate that. Neither could I. In my research, but if there is, my goodness, test it.

Yeah, exactly. If there was anything under her fingernails, I doubt they would have destroyed it. There's answers. There has to be answers. I think there's more to this than meets the eye. And this should be stressed. The person that did this,

very likely to be a local. Somebody knew this and had this mapped out pretty well. Why they put her in that barn, I'm not sure. It's almost as if they wanted her to be found. I don't think they put her there because they thought she wasn't going to be found for a while. I think they knew she'd eventually be found, but any evidence might be destroyed based on how they deposited her underneath the hay. I think that was their thought process. Like, there's not to be morbid, but there's deep woods in there, not as much as northern Maine,

there's places where you could theoretically bury a body. My opinion is that the person who did this was looking to make some sort of statement, whether it was some sort of personal grudge or a political one. I don't know. I don't think this was just a random act of violence. I really don't. It doesn't make sense. And the fact that she was strangled with Lobster Warp,

this further makes me feel like it could be a local if you have access to that. And if it was a local who had access to lobstering equipment, it's possible that they had access to deposit her remains in the open sea but didn't. Yeah. So that makes me feel like they want to make some sort of statement in doing this. Exactly. Because you could have gotten to, if you're a lobsterman, you could get into the ocean in the middle of the night. Those places aren't really well frequented. At least they weren't then.

And it's expected that lobster men are going to be in the ocean in the middle of the night. They start their day very early. Exactly. Could he have brought her body out there? Absolutely he could have. So this really signals to me they wanted this to be found. They just didn't want it to be found immediately. And given where it was located, I am surprised this took 13 days for her body to be found. That's, I don't know. I don't know how often this barn was checked or how close it was near other things, but that seems quite strange to me. You would think that curious teenagers might poke around in the hay just to see what was going on. Right. I mean, what else do you do then? You explore things. You go hide in places like that to smoke or drink or what have you.

I mean, that's what they were doing. They're out fishing in the middle of the night, drinking beers. You know, they had their sleeping bags. I'm assuming they had intended to go camp out in the barn or just like camp out under the stars before starting to rain. Exactly. Which is very strange because it was right near the hotel that his family. owns. So why not just go back home? I don't know. I guess it would be fun to go sleep out and sleeping bags. That's what teenagers do. Right. When I was growing up, whether I liked it or not,

you know, my friends and I slept outside in small tents and sleeping bags, sometimes right in people's backyard. So I wouldn't pay too much attention to that. But still, the whole thing is just strange. I don't know where we're at with what's left, the evidence that's there, and what more they can do. I don't know if anyone even knows anything, if the person responsible is even alive anymore, or if people that knew any information about this are still alive. I can't just say the person who knows should come forward because there's a good chance that no people exist anymore that know what happened. And that's the curse of cold cases like this. As more time goes on, the people either involved with the loved ones pass away and then there's less pressure to

solve anything. I don't think this is ever going to be solved. I don't think so either. And even if they do have DNA evidence, there needs to be that press to reprocess it. And I just don't think that is ever going to come about either, unfortunately. And it's very, very sad. It's very sad because today, Mary Catherine would be in her mid-60s. And that would put her older sisters in their late 60s and into their 70s. So time is of the essence for them as well. All right, with that out of the way, if you're listening on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe. I appreciate everyone's help so far. And if you're new here hitting subscribe and hitting the bell notification, especially, ensures that you don't miss any of our episodes.

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