Finding Amy (13 page)

When the media ask about “the male,” I respond, “He's one of many people we're looking at.”

So now it's out and we're hoping that Gorman will start a tailspin. We shall see.

Suspicion about Gorman's involvement had been growing over the weeks since Amy disappeared. Increasingly, when he went out in the Old Port, he found himself not the center of an admiring and friendly crowd but the object of questions and hostile behavior. When newspaper articles suggested that this “male” was the primary focus of the investigation, the revelation confirmed in the minds of many of Gorman's friends and acquaintances what they had suspected.

At one point, he was assaulted in the Old Port by members of a gang called FSU who demanded to know, “What did you do to that girl?” Getting beaten up really shook him. Friends reported that he was drinking heavily and using more drugs. He was jittery, aggressive, and unstable, his conversation frequently rambling and incoherent.

As life in the Portland area grew more uncomfortable for Gorman, the detectives learned that he was planning to leave the state. Where he was going was uncertain. He'd mentioned Alabama and Florida, where he still had friends and relatives, but also California and Mexico. He'd talked of making some quick money growing mushrooms and selling club drugs. Gorman planned to travel south with a friend named Sean Littlefield, using Littlefield's car.

The detectives believed that if he got away from Portland to a place where he felt more comfortable, he was likely to let down his guard and confide in someone about his crime. They expected that Gorman would stay in touch with his mother and that Littlefield would be in touch with friends and family in Maine so they probably wouldn't lose sight of Gorman. And, because he was on probation and required to report regularly to his probation officer, he needed Probation's permission to leave the state. Leaving without permission would be a probation violation and make him subject to arrest. Therefore, they could always arrest him and return him to Maine. Still, they were considering letting their prime suspect, a dangerous man and one they believed had committed a murder, out of their sight. It was not an idea they were comfortable with.

“Well … shit, Tom! You know the consequences as well as I do. What if this freak hurts someone? It will be me being asked in some federal lawsuit, Who was in charge of day-to-day ops? Can you hear it?”

“Yes, Lieutenant, I hear it, but it's worth the risk. He's nervous. Hot. And he knows it. He will talk. We both know that. We gotta let the line out.”

“Tom, will ya just sit for a minute and stop pacing! You're making me dizzy.”

“Joe, he's already saying stuff. You know he'll open to relatives down in Alabama and to this kid, Sean.”

“Yeah, yeah. What about Matt [Stewart]?”

“He's worried. It's risky.”

I look at the wall, at a painting of Back Bay, and think for a minute.

Tommy doesn't stop talking. “Do you want this guy?”

I look at Tom's piercing blue eyes, glaring under his unruly dark hair. We lock eyes. “Okay,” I sigh. “Let the line out, Tom. Let him go. Keep it tight 'til I tell the chief the plan in the a.m.”

Like a kid who's gotten his way, Tommy flies out of my room, the door vibrating off the wall.

The detectives knew that if they did let Gorman run, they could always bring him back on a probation violation. But arresting him for a probation violation would only put him in jail temporarily, and when he got out it might trigger him to run farther away. What they all wanted was for Gorman to be in jail on a murder charge. But they needed more than they had so far.

Before he left, Gorman had a conversation with a friend named Brent Plummer that Plummer recorded, using the message function on his cell phone and laying it casually on the table as they talked.

G
ORMAN:
I don't want to leave on bad terms, and I do want you to know and I want everyone to know, no matter what the outcome is, I've got letters typed up at my house, at Mom's house, but I can't go back there right now. Uh …

P
LUMMER:
You've got letters typed to who? What kind of letters?

G
ORMAN:
Explaining everything.

P
LUMMER:
Why everything?

G
ORMAN:
Well, why I'm leaving, um, also saying that you, all you people know, Dude, all you fuckin' people that I know, my parents, everyone, know that I love my little girl and I couldn't possibly imagine my little girl twenty-five years old and disappearing or not knowing what happened to her. So that right there should just show something. Dude, I do, I do have fucked-up mental problems. I do, but I'm not that kind of person, Dude.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Gorman and Sean Littlefield left Maine in Littlefield's small red Neon and drove to Troy, Alabama.

I
n early December, a state police lieutenant received a call from a man who identified himself as Lieutenant Pat Dorian from the Maine Warden Service.
¹
Lieutenant Dorian had been in the warden service for twenty-six years and had been head of search and rescue since 1986. Since the warden service dealt with over three hundred lost people each year, Dorian and his officers were very familiar with the challenges of conducting searches in wooded areas. Although Lieutenant Dorian lived far from Portland, like so many people in Maine he had been following the St. Laurent case from the beginning and had been increasingly perturbed by the failure to find Amy St. Laurent's body and the distress he knew this was causing to police agencies and to her family.

Dorian regretted that he hadn't called sooner, but he was stationed up in Greenville, nearly five hours northwest of Portland on the shores of Moosehead Lake. It had been foliage season and hunting season in Maine, and between hunting violations and hunters and hikers getting lost in the woods, the duties of his job had consumed all his time. Lieutenant Dorian said he might be able to help with the investigation and asked to be put in touch with the case detectives.

Dorian knew he was making a radical suggestion. It was a totally new idea for a conservation law enforcement agency to be working with criminal divisions on a criminal investigation. He risked running into the natural territorialism of both the MSP and the Portland Police Department as well as the skepticism of the police for outsiders, even outsiders in another branch of law enforcement. But Dorian was focused on the central issue in the case: finding Amy St. Laurent. He had been to seminars at national search and rescue (SAR) conferences on searching for abducted victims. He'd studied the statistics showing where bodies and evidence might be. He had a professional Incident Command Team that knew how to organize and manage major outdoor search and rescue operations. He believed that the warden service could help.

When he was connected with Sergeant Stewart, Dorian said he'd been thinking of ways that the warden service, utilizing experienced Maine Association of Search and Rescue (MASAR) teams, might be able to help them find Amy's body. He said that in 1999 he had been at an SAR conference and heard a talk by a Michael St. John, out of Oregon, reviewing a ten-year Department of Justice (DOJ) study on child abductions, which had established some parameters for searching for bodies.
²
In that talk, the presenter had raised the question: How do you use the expertise of search and rescue as a resource for law enforcement agencies?

Dorian knew that the wardens had an area of expertise detectives might lack, especially in the area of finding people who were lost in the woods, because wardens were attuned to subtle changes—broken twigs, disturbed dirt, leaves, or needles, things that don't fit in a natural environment—that a police officer might miss. He and some of his officers were also trained in managing large-scale search operations and outdoor crime scenes. He offered to bring some of his wardens down to sit with the case detectives, do an assessment of the case, and develop a methodology for conducting a search for Amy's body.

By the time they got Dorian's call, Danny Young and the other detectives had been working the case nonstop for six weeks. They had lost none of their fervor to find Amy and to give her family at least some closure and a chance for a decent burial, but they were exhausted. The pressure was particularly intense with the holidays coming. It was difficult to take pleasure in their own family holidays with visions of Amy and her family in their minds.

Danny Young was pacing the floors at 2:00 a.m., wondering if there was something he'd missed, racking his brain for things he might have forgotten to do, other avenues to pursue. Tommy Joyce was sleeping only because he knew Danny was up pacing. They were frustrated: it was hard for them to avoid feeling that while they were working their butts off trying to find Amy, Gorman was down in Troy, Alabama, laughing at them and thinking that he was home free. Also they were skeptical: they had tried everything, from searches by land, air, and sea to clairvoyance. And now here were a bunch of game wardens offering to help.

On the other hand, they were badly in need of a break in the case—some new way to crack it open. Winter was coming. If they didn't find Amy soon, they knew they might never find her.

And Dorian was making a very sensible offer. He had an expertise that they were willing to admit they lacked. They were city cops or, as Tommy Joyce put it, bricks and asphalt guys, while the wardens and the MASAR personnel were experienced outdoorsmen and women, trained in woodland searches. Dorian had a methodology for identifying and analyzing potential areas to be searched. His wardens had sophisticated mapping and GPS technology, which simplified identifying areas to be searched and produced an accurate and detailed record of the ground covered. Dorian knew how to take a profile of the lost person, a profile of the suspect, and test those against statistics and experience to identify sites with the greatest potential, and he could develop search parameters for those sites. He could also mobilize the many experienced personnel necessary to mount a massive outdoor search operation using the trained volunteers of MASAR, On December 3, Dorian brought wardens from his Overhead (or Incident Command) Team, including Warden Kevin Adam, his mapping and GPS expert, Sergeant Roger Guay, and Sergeant Joel Wilkinson, and came to the Portland Police station for a meeting. That meeting, held in the Detective Bureau's conference room, turned into an all-day session. Skeptical, bone-weary city cops sat on one side of the table, wondering whether these hillbillies from the north woods really had anything to offer. The wardens, with their computers, mapping programs, and GPS equipment, sat on the other. State police were in the middle. They had worked with the warden service before, though no one had ever done an operation like this. And always, despite the traditional separation of their agencies, Danny Young and Scott Harakles sat together, as partners should.

Right from the start, the wardens ran the meeting. Dorian and his team immediately started gathering information about the crime. This included first getting the lead detectives, Young and Harakles, to present the nucleus of the case. By questioning the detectives, the wardens gathered profiles of the victim and the suspect, along with the theories detectives had developed about what had happened the night Amy disappeared.

Once they had a basic picture of the case, they began to gather information to plug into what they knew about cases like this, employing their expertise in outdoor crime scenes. They asked for a detailed assessment of Gorman, including information about how familiar he was with the outdoors. Wardens asked whether Gorman was a hunter or a fisherman. Whether he was known to have spent time in the woods. How long he had lived in Maine and how familiar he was with the local area.

The detectives shared the picture of Gorman that they had developed. Gorman had lived in the state for about eighteen months. He was idle and lazy, working only when he had to in order to support his fondness for drink, drugs, playing pool, and other recreation. He had little respect for women, poor impulse control, and a violent temper. His principal drivers were pleasure and sex. He would go anywhere—her place, Campbell's place, on a beach, in a car, whatever it took to score—and, once he had made up his mind, do anything to persuade or coerce a woman to have sex with him.

Gorman wasn't a hunter, but he was a fisherman and had fished in the ponds behind his mother's house both during the daytime and at night. Gorman had also used the woods behind his mother's house as a hiding place, burying items there that he'd stolen from customers' cars at the car dealership where he had worked.

Next, the detectives reviewed the timeline of the crime. Gorman was known to have left the Brighton Avenue apartment between 1:45 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. The earliest time his presence back at the apartment could be confirmed was David Grazier's statement that he had found Gorman in the bathroom washing sometime around 4:30 a.m.

Using maps, detectives then identified possible routes Gorman might have taken when he left the apartment with Amy. During the course of the investigation, as routes were identified, detectives had driven them and timed the length of each drive. Along any route he might have reasonably taken, wooded areas, parking lots, and industrial sites had been noted. The wardens also asked for other details of the Portland area, such as what were the popular places for teenagers to go “parking.” They asked where Amy lived and where her mother lived.

As the day wore on, a bond developed between the men. Going into the meeting, the wardens knew that 60 to 70 percent of their likelihood of success in the operation depended on the quality of the information they could get, which in turn depended on the thoroughness of the underlying investigation. They were very impressed by the information they were getting. The wardens listened to the detectives and asked questions, and together the different groups used their collective information to identify sites where Amy's body might be.

There were eight general areas they considered: areas near Gorman's mother's house, the roadsides on the turnpike going south, along Brighton Avenue, areas near Amy's mother's house, the Old Port area near the Pavilion, exit 2 off the Maine Turnpike near Wells, the area around Amy's residence in South Berwick, and a scattering of random sites Gorman had spoken about during conversations with his friends. They prioritized the sites using a technique called a Matteson Consensus, learned from the National Park Service, in which the detectives used a consistent, systematic method to rate the identified sites from highest to lowest in terms of the likelihood that Amy might be there.

The wardens would design their search criteria based on the timeline of the crime, their knowledge of Gorman's character, his experience, and his familiarity with the area, and their own information about killers' behavior when disposing of a body. Wardens knew, for example, that 72 percent of victims are less than 200 feet from a way or a parking lot. They knew, as the police did, that once a killer is sexually gratified and realizes what he's done, there's a sense of panic and a need to get out of there as quickly as possible. Also, that a killer is unlikely to go far into the woods at night. Police also knew that people believe they travel much farther than they actually do at night.

After the meeting, the wardens spent several hours driving around with the detectives, following the identified routes and studying the terrain. Kevin Adam, who would be developing the maps for the search teams, was trying to put himself inside Gorman's head as they drove around, trying to see what Gorman was seeing. “Okay,” he imagined Gorman thinking. “I've got this girl in the car and I am going to have sex with her. Where can I take her? Pretty soon, she's going to notice that we're not going where I said I'd take her, and I've got to be able to control the situation. Where can I take her where there are no people around and I can have her all to myself?” It was the same scenario the detectives had run in their own heads for weeks.

Like Danny Young five weeks earlier, when the wardens and detectives drove along Route 22 past Gorman's mother's house, Kevin Adam saw the old access road leading back into the woods and thought, “She's there. Amy's there.” Later he would say that, if they'd had Warden Sergeant Roger Guay's dog, Reba, a ten-year-old chocolate Lab, with them that day, they probably would have found her.
³

At the end of the day, everyone was on board for conducting a massive search effort to take place on Saturday, December 8. The wardens headed back north with a lot of work before them, planning to return on Friday to go over the logistical details of assembling their teams, setting up a command post, doing the legwork for each of the designated sites, finalizing the maps for those sites, and designing the structure of each area's search. How a search team is deployed in a given area depends on the terrain. Where the terrain is heavily wooded, the searchers may walk practically shoulder to shoulder. Where it is more open and they can see the ground more clearly, they may walk five to ten feet apart.

The wardens left the detectives with some unanswered questions, including one that was very important. Had anyone, in the course of the investigation, been able to connect Gorman with access to a shovel? It would make a difference, in designing the search criteria, to know if it was likely they were looking for a buried body.

During the days that followed, Danny Young and Scott Harakles turned up two pieces of information that would be of major importance in designing and carrying out Saturday's upcoming search. First, in an interview with Gorman's mother's boyfriend, Richard Deveau, on Wednesday, December 5, Deveau told the officers that around the time Amy St. Laurent disappeared, Gorman had asked if he could borrow a shovel because he was going to help a friend put in a fence. Deveau had directed Gorman to a spade shovel behind the house, as well as to a posthole digger in the shed. Later, Deveau would observe that the posthole digger had never been touched. He didn't know about the shovel.

Detectives couldn't locate any friend who had asked Gorman for help in installing a fence. Based on their knowledge of Gorman's character—lazy, unhelpful, and generally dedicated to avoiding physical work whenever possible (a characterization that Deveau affirmed, telling the detectives Gorman was too lazy to pick up a shovel)— they concluded it was likely the shovel might have been used to bury Amy's body.

A second significant piece of information was discovered the following day. As a routine part of his investigation, Danny Young had put in a request to the FBI asking for an off-line search of police records concerning Gorman through the National Crime Information Computer (NCIC). On Thursday, December 6, Young received the results of that search. The report revealed that at 3:14 a.m. on Sunday morning, October 21, the last day Amy St. Laurent was seen alive, and at a time when Gorman had claimed, and his roommates had initially confirmed, that he was back at the apartment, Tim Gardiner, a police officer in the neighboring city of Westbrook, had stopped Gorman for a high-beam violation at the corner of Main Street and Larrabee Road. Gorman was alone in the car.