Finding Amy (10 page)

Probably the most disturbing example of a reluctant witness was Ryan Campbell, a young man who at the time served as a reserve
⁷
police officer in Old Orchard Beach, worked at his sister's day care, and longed to become a full-time police officer. Police initially contacted Campbell when they learned that he was missing a gun, a Glock 9 mm. Matt Despins had told police that Campbell had last seen his gun between October 7 and 10 after an evening with Russ Gorman and that Campbell believed Gorman might have taken it.

When they contacted the Westbrook police about Campbell's missing gun, Portland detectives learned that, on the Wednesday following Amy St. Laurent's disappearance, Campbell had filed a report stating that his weapon was missing from his lockbox and that Gorman had been the last person to see it.

Interviewed by Detective Young and Sergeant Joyce, Campbell insisted that he had had his gun on the Thursday before Amy disappeared and denied that he believed Gorman had taken it. Campbell told them that he had left the gun in a lockbox in his room when he went away with his family for the weekend cruise on the
Scotia Prince
. Campbell said that the key to his lockbox was with his car keys and that Matt Despins had had the car for the weekend but probably didn't know the key was there. The only other key was in another lockbox in his uncle's room.

Campbell stated: “I remember, point blank, up close and personal, that I took it [the gun] out of that car … and it's, every night I take that thing out of my car and put [it] in that box and it's not, it's just not there this time. I remember.” Asked why he had said Gorman was the last person to see the gun, Campbell became befuddled and was unable to give a coherent answer. Detectives made a note to confirm that Campbell had actually been on the
Scotia Prince
.

Detectives then asked Campbell about Gorman's conduct with girls. Campbell told them Russ would have a girlfriend and also go out and pick up girls on the side. Asked by Detective Young: “So it wouldn't be unusual for him … just to go home thinking he might get a quick piece and that's the end of it?”

Campbell replied: “Right, you know, it's almost like his goal every night … I'm serious, this is what he looks forward to every night, he wants to go out and get a new girl every single night.”

Asked about places Gorman might take a girl, Campbell said: “Oh, well, we meet girls on their terms. Whatever it takes to, you know, get that piece of ass.”

In a subsequent interview, Young and Westbrook detective John DesJardins tried to pin Campbell down about the timeline of the missing gun. Campbell was unable to recall what he had done that Sunday when he returned from the cruise. First he told them he knew he looked for the gun when he got home because he usually went out shooting on Sunday afternoon. When pressed, he acknowledged that the boat hadn't gotten in until evening and, because of the increased post-9/11 security, he and his family hadn't cleared customs until 9:30 or 10:00.

Despite the fact that he had a steady girlfriend, Campbell said he was supposed to meet a high school girl named Megan at the Game Room, the pool hall in Westbrook where he and Gorman hung out. He was unable to tell the detectives whether he had gone home or directly to the Game Room after returning from the cruise. Then he said he went to the lockbox to get some money and that's when he discovered the gun was missing. Then he said he didn't. He said that it was Sunday night when he found the gun missing and he had looked for it immediately after returning from the cruise because his sister ran a day care in the house and he didn't want a loose gun around.

Then he said it wasn't Sunday and his mother, who had told the police he went crazy when he found it was missing and she had helped him tear the house apart looking for it, must have been wrong. He said he didn't tell his father the gun was gone until Tuesday, and it was only after that that he told his mother. Asked by DesJardins why, if he had known the gun was missing on Sunday, he waited until Wednesday to report it missing and why, if Campbell had put the gun in a lockbox, he reported that Russ Gorman was the last person to see him with his gun, Campbell had no good answers.

It seemed improbable to both detectives that a police officer could be so careless about a missing firearm unless he was hiding something, so they pressed him. Detective Young: “Do you remember you said your gun's missing and it was in your car not in the lockbox in your frigging house, and that you think Russ might have it … Do you remember telling that to Matt Despins?”

Campbell: “I seriously don't.”

DesJardins, interrupting: “You told me that you believe that Russ took your gun. What made you feel that? When did you form the opinion in your mind that Russ Gorman took your gun?”

At another point, exasperated with Campbell's stories and perhaps hoping to appeal to his conscience, Young told Campbell: “This has gone on for a long time … All I'm trying to do is find Amy. Right now, finding her is the first thing on my mind. I pray for it every Sunday when I go to church. I'm hoping to bring her back so she can have a good Christian burial with her family. That's what they're looking for. They know that somewhere, she's dead.”

Despite Young's appeal, it took three interviews (all by Detective Young, with three different co-investigators) before Campbell, in an interview with Young and MSP detective Scott Harakles, finally admitted that, sometime a week or so before the cruise, he had been out for an evening with Gorman. That they had picked up some girls from Munjoy Hill and brought one of them back to Campbell's room. Campbell said he had worn his gun that evening although he was just out for a casual night on the town, eventually taking it off and putting it under the seat of the car. When they got out of the car back at his house, Campbell forgot the gun. Gorman reached under the seat and handed it to him.
⁸

Campbell told them he had dropped off to sleep, leaving the gun lying around in his room. Later, Gorman came in, mumbled something, and went out again. When Campbell woke in the morning, the gun was gone. Gorman probably took the gun, Campbell surmised, because he had so many people after him.

There was more. The detectives had been told by Kristin Langmeier, Campbell's longtime girlfriend, that she was in his room on the Monday night after the cruise, the day after Amy St. Laurent disappeared, and Campbell's gun was there. It was lying on the floor, she said, and Campbell picked it up, said, “That's odd,” and set it on the bookcase. Campbell claimed to have no memory of this but agreed that Kristin was a truthful girl. Eventually, Campbell admitted that he believed the gun disappeared— a second time?—when he was in his apartment on Tuesday night with Gorman, researching polygraphs. He said that Gorman was in the room alone for a while and that he hadn't seen the gun since.

It took nearly eighteen hours of various detectives' time trying to get Ryan Campbell, himself a part-time police officer, to tell the truth.
⁹
In the end, maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. Maybe he himself had something to do with the gun's ultimate disappearance.
¹⁰

Sometimes it was loyalty. Sometimes it was fear. Through it all, the police persisted. Asking, checking, comparing stories, and asking again. As the weeks went by, Gorman and his pals roamed the Old Port, drinking, drugging, and looking for girls. And Amy was still missing.

E
arly in the second week, Sergeant Stewart came to a meeting with the Portland detectives and brought along Scott Harakles, a young state police detective who had been away at a training the previous week. Until that meeting, Harakles was unfamiliar with Portland, having patrolled over near the state's western border in Kezar Falls. Nor had he ever met Danny Young, but on the drive to Portland, Stewart told Harakles, “I know that we're going into enemy territory, but you're going to love this guy, Danny Young.”

Detective Harakles came into the meeting not knowing much about the case. The first time he'd heard of a missing woman had been from his wife, Rachel, who'd seen one of the “Missing” posters, been concerned, and asked if he knew anything about it. Beyond that, he hadn't heard much more than the public had—a young South Berwick woman named Amy St. Laurent had disappeared after a night of dancing in the Old Port. She had left the dance club with a man other than the one she'd come with and never been seen again.

Hearing only that part of the story, it looked to Harakles like this was a case of an easygoing young woman out for a good time who'd ditched one date and picked up another. Not that that made her any less a victim if something bad had happened to her—the police care about all their homicide victims—but going into the meeting in Portland, Harakles had no idea how wrong he was, nor how deeply attached he would become to Amy St. Laurent.

By the end of the meeting, Sergeant Stewart could see that Danny Young and Scott Harakles would be a good match, and he assigned Harakles to be Young's counterpart, the primary case detective on the state police side.

It was an inspired decision. In pairing detectives, it is valuable to choose people who will get along and who have complementary skills or attributes. Danny Young was, in Stewart's words, an exceptional, old-fashioned investigator who had great people skills, tremendous insight, knew his city and its people, and wasn't burdened with ego or his own agenda. He was compulsive about keeping orderly case files. He had an uncanny ability to memorize and recall the facts of a case. Harakles had been a detective for three years and was the age of Young's sons, with extremely deft skills as an interviewer.

Physically, they were both wide-shouldered men with deceptively pleasant looks and styles. Young's comfortable manner made him easy to talk to. Harakles, with his youthful looks and boyish energy and enthusiasm, didn't seem like a thirty-two-year-old with eight years as a highway trooper and three as a detective. Both were adept at gathering information from a particularly difficult group—the community of young adults and teenagers scattered throughout the cities and towns surrounding Portland who frequented the pool halls, bars, and clubs of the Old Port.

What made Young and Harakles the perfect team to pursue the disappearance of Amy St. Laurent was that they shared some of the most essential traits of a successful detective: passionate commitment to securing justice for victims, stamina, intelligence, creativity, and incredible stubbornness. They were the type of investigators who, once they had their teeth into something, didn't care how long it took or how hard they had to work—eventually it was going to go down.

Almost from the start, the two detectives, in the words of a coworker, “married up.” Despite the age gap, a strong bond arose from the value they placed on family. Danny Young had married his high school sweetheart and raised three children, one of whom was a police officer and another of whom was married to an officer. He was enjoying being a grandfather. Scott Harakles was just starting out with two young children. His family, and the special time they spent together, were central to his life.

The strength of that bond would prove a critical factor in solving the case. While the intra- and interagency conflicts inevitable in such a complex case swirled around them, Young and Harakles ignored such distractions and kept their broad shoulders to the wheel. They were such a dedicated and effective team that their superiors were repeatedly motivated to set the usual conflicts aside in order to give the two detectives as much support as possible.

Harakles quickly learned that his earlier impression of Amy St. Laurent was all wrong. From her diary, from interviews, and from information supplied by her family, he began to see what an innocent person and nice girl Amy was. Far from being someone who would casually leave with a man she'd just met, Amy St. Laurent was the kind of girl who wouldn't kiss on a first date. He repeats a story from Eric Rubright in which Rubright, having taken Amy for a ride on his motorcycle, suggests a kiss to Amy. Her response was, “Don't even think about it, and take me home right now.”

In their meetings, the detectives would share and argue over their theories about what had happened the night Amy disappeared.

“Ahh, shit, Danny! You've been married too long. Whaddaya think? He's on a leisurely drive to take her back? No way! He's got a plan after he leaves Brighton Avenue. He's probably hit her with a roofie. She's somewhat relaxed and as he drives down the industrial part of Douglas Street, he pulls into a lot. It's there where he puts the moves on her and guess what? Wrong girl.”

They're waiting to jump in, so I push ahead with my theory, knowing we've each got our own, that everyone's driving those routes and checking those places.

“Yeah, so it goes bad in the car and he what? Beats her, strangles her, maybe even shoots her …”

“If he shot her, it wasn't in the car,” someone interrupts.

“So maybe that's after he drags her out of the car. Then what? Then he's gotta get rid of the body. But where? Is she in the water by Merrill Transport? Hobo jungle? Dumped along the highway? We know something bad happened in the car, 'cuz he cleaned it. Then how about the thing you told me he says about some weirdo in a yellow raincoat might have got her?”

“Yellow suit, Joe. Suit.”

“Suit. Okay, Dan, so maybe he was trying to get her over to Campbell's. I'd go for that. But where's the girl?”

As ghosts and witches were replaced by turkeys and pilgrims, and then the red and green of Christmas, Harakles would make the daily drive to Portland to meet up with Young. Two or three times a week, Sergeant Stewart might go, too, and the two primaries and their sergeants would go into the conference room, alone or with other detectives who'd been working on the case. Sergeant Joyce would make notes on the dryboard as they shared newly collected information and strategized about the next steps to take.

After the meeting, or right away if there was no meeting, the two primary detectives would drive off together, usually taking Young's car because Danny had his bomb dog, Karla. Karla would ride along in the backseat. Some days they would meet Young's wife, Linda, at the end of the day and hand off the dog before they headed on into an evening of interviews.

The pain of Amy's family weighed heavily on the detectives. It was hard to keep repeating, “We're working on it, we're doing our best, we're going to find her,” even though they meant it. They were doing everything they could do and constantly asking themselves, Where else can I look? What am I missing here? Everyone working closely with the investigation became obsessed with it, stopping their cars at likely woods roads or along the highway and getting out to search. Scott Harakles said he'd never had a case like it, where they would search and search and never come up with anything, and yet, each time he stopped somewhere and got out of his car, he was filled with a sense that yes, this time I'm going to find her!

There was pressure from the media, looking for fresh information in a story that had riveted public attention. Detectives had to be constantly alert to avoid revealing the details of their investigation or the identity of their suspect. Chief Chitwood and Lieutenant Loughlin gave frequent press conferences, responding to pressure from a community horrified at the disappearance of a lovely young girl and fearful for the safety of themselves and their daughters, fears that didn't diminish as weeks passed without a resolution.

Detectives were also under pressure within the Portland Police Department. The case consumed a great deal of CID's resources, leading to grumbling from detectives who felt they should be more involved or should have had the case. There was a fair amount of quarterbacking from detectives who thought the investigation should be conducted differently, details assigned different priorities, different avenues followed. There were arguments about how the case should be staffed, complaints from detectives who had to pick up more work. Wounded pride, short tempers, the weary impatience of exhaustion. Subtle pressure from higher up the food chain to produce some results that could be used to calm the public.

In our own house, things were tough. Vernon Geberth's advice on interagency cooperation is laudable. But I think, yeah, okay, Vern, sounds good but apply it to reality and the dynamics of human beings. Forget about other agencies. How about in our own unit? Our own backyard?

1900. Thorpe lumbers in from a job. Rybeck follows. Both slam their shit down on their desks as I happen to walk by. There's so much going on I don't even know what they're working on.

“Hey, Gary. Karl. What's up?”

“Ahh, these fuckin'people keep dying,” Thorpe grunts. “And you might get a call about a complaint. Guy shot himself and I got into it with the landlord who, by the way, is a dink.”

“Okay, what do I need to know about the call I'll get?”

I already know it's inbound, owing to Gary's gruffness. He tells me. “Yesterday, I call over to the next town for them to do a note [death notification] and they screwed it all up. So get this, I'm on the phone with the mom, telling her that her son is at Hay and Peabody funeral home and those idiots didn't even tell her that her son is dead. They just handed the phone to her. So the mother goes, ‘My son is where? Where?' So now I realize that she doesn't even know her son is dead yet. She screams and howls and drops the receiver and falls to the floor in their police station. Only me, Lieutenant. Only me. So … you're gonna get a call on that.”

Rybeck's on the phone with a family member, trying to calm that poor person down. Tommy, Dan, and others are in a conference room discussing the St. Laurent case. The property crimes people are out on a job.

I start telling Gary about the case on Amy St. Laurent and he starts with, “Whatever, Lieutenant,” as I hear a scream and a sob through Karl's receiver.

“Whaddya mean, Gary?”

“I mean, it's fucked up, that's what I mean. Danny is running around like a lunatic. Tommy is this and that. Bruce is …”

I listen, because Gary Thorpe, despite his thorny personality, is a great investigator. The six-foot Thorpe has a heavy, athletic build, thick graying hair, and bright eyes that can also look right through you. He's got a gruff, truculent affect that says you don't want to piss him off. He's adept at crime scenes and reconstructing the days of the dead. You'd never know he loves birds and paints watercolors.

Karl hangs up and hears us talking. “Don't get me involved in this. I have enough problems,” he states. Rybeck, who we sometimes tell kids is one of Santa's elves, is a short, stocky German with gentle eyes and great people skills who is fascinated by the Civil War.

When I roll up at a bad crime scene and observe either one there, I'm relieved, although inevitably I'll get a complaint on the methodical Thorpe telling someone to “get the fuck out of my crime scene.”

We go around about Gary's screwed-up notification and other things. Then I look dead at this seasoned pair. “What about the St. Laurent case?”

Both detectives stop what they're doing and start in on me. Did those guys do this? That? Check this? How come Danny … ? These guys are good so I listen to their insights, theories, and conjecture. They have good points and I end up getting Tommy into it with us.

At the center of the case, however, the greatest pressure came from two sources within the detectives themselves. First was their deep affection for Amy St. Laurent. Danny Young kept her picture on his desk. Every morning when he woke, it was with the feeling that something might have happened in the night, something Gorman had done, that might have helped them break the case if only he'd been awake and out there. It was the same if he took any time off.

Asked why the case mattered so much, detectives would say, “because she was such a nice girl. Because she was a real victim.” Scott Harakles explained it this way: “Every homicide investigator doesn't like to lose. That's part of who they are, but every now and then, along comes a case that you let in. The Amy St. Laurent case was like that … because of who she was, your conscience tells you that you just can't let it go. Amy St. Laurent,” Harakles said, “was the kind of girl you'd want to raise, and the men sitting around the table evaluating her case were a bunch of dads.” From the beginning of the case, Harakles said he was haunted. He had a pit in his stomach every single day. It never left him, but constantly reminded him: We
have
to get this done. If we can't get justice for this victim, we shouldn't be doing the job.

Then there was Gorman—his arrogance, his deception, his freedom. The more the detectives learned about him— about his early family life, prior criminal acts, his attitude toward women, and his goal of having sex with as many women as possible—the more certain they were that they were looking at a serial sexual predator whose need to “score” depersonalized his victims, reducing them to numbers on his scorecard. Now, he had moved on to sexual homicide. Having killed once, they believed, he would eventually do it again. Even to experienced police investigators, it was a chilling prospect.

So, they slogged through the bleak chill of November with two goals driving them—to find Amy and to build their case against Gorman.