Finding Amy (15 page)

A prickle of excitement went through the dozen men and women standing around in weeds and scrub on a cold, gray December afternoon. After a day of false alarms and seven weeks of high expectations but negative results, everyone was afraid to hope that this was finally it.

Young, who like Sergeant Joyce had begun his day thinking, “Hey, this sucks. It's colder than hell and here we are out in the woods,” had been working toward this moment since the night he first got the phone call about Amy's disappearance. Afraid to believe this might finally be what they had searched for for so long, the detectives asked if this was likely to be a body or might just be buried clothes or another dead animal. Sergeant Guay assured them that Reba's reaction meant they'd likely found a body.

Not wanting to call a Code Blue too soon, and knowing that they'd found many dead animal parts already, Detective Young returned to his car and got some tools from the trunk. He returned to the scene and pulled on gloves. On his knees, using a trowel, digging very carefully to avoid disturbing any evidence if it was Amy, he dug a small test hole about four to six inches wide, at the opposite end of the site from where Reba had been digging. Approximately two feet down, he hit something that felt different from the soil. He cleared the dirt, exposing a small expanse of gray material. He reached into the hole and touched it, confirming that it was sweatshirt fabric. Amy St. Laurent had been wearing a sweatshirt the night she disappeared.

At 2:40, Young called a Code Blue, and the site became a crime scene. At 2:41, the search teams were recalled to Crosby Farm.

As the search teams set out, Lieutenant Dorian shouts one final message: “If you discover anything, call out Code Blue over the radio so the news or scannerland doesn't pick up, and we'll get the dogs there. In a hospitable spirit, we also have food available.”

I plan to roam to various sites and check in at headquarters. Right now, I'm very glad to be inside where it's warm.

Within an hour, there's a hit in an area near where Gorman was stopped by Westbrook police. It makes sense, and I think, Oh, my God, what if it's her? But a short time later, they call in that it's a dead deer. A huge letdown. Time to get out there and poke around with the teams.

I watch one group probe the woods, moving in a line through the trees. There's another false alarm—a dead dog. A few more false alarms come in during the morning and into the afternoon. I go to 109 around 1300, have lunch, and update Deputy Chief Burton and the chief.

Tommy, Danny, and I have been on the phone, on and off, but I haven't heard from them for a while. Around 1430, I'm starting to lose faith. I head outbound on Congress toward Route 22, where I know they're starting to search near Gorman's mother's house. Suddenly, my pager starts beeping like crazy. It's Tommy. I think he must want food for the guys. It beeps again. Okay, Tommy, okay!

I get on the cell and hear Tom's voice, “Joe? We found her.”

“Really?” It floats in the air. “Really, Tom?”

“I'm telling you again, Joe. We found Amy.”

“Where, Tom? Where?” I hear voices in the background. Dogs barking. “Are you sure?”

“We're off a short tote road off 22 near the mom's house. Danny's here. The dogs hit hard. Get out here, Joe. It looks like a grave.”

I hardly believe what I just heard. I drive hastily to the site, still in disbelief. It's colder, the sky bruised and cloudy with a curious light. I'm shouting in my car for other cars to move out of my way. Still not believing. Maybe it's just her clothes.

Out of Portland, I drive past Smiling Hill Farm and spot numerous police and warden vehicles in the distance, their emergency flashers on. Dispatch is paging me. I tell the operator to tell the news media that we're still searching and conducting a meeting to make more plans, hence all the cars.

I pull off onto the dirt shoulder. It's all woods and unfamiliar territory. Officers and wardens out by the road say, “Lieutenant, they're up this road about two hundred yards. You'll see them.”

I feel the weight of it as I move up the road through the skeletal wood. A gray landscape, bleak as a Goya painting. Will this be her, dammit? Will it? Will we finally have something to tell Diane?

I see a group and, yeah, there's Dorian, looking at me with a big hillbilly smile. My stomach flips. It's really true, I think, it's really true. Tommy walks jerkily up to me. I grab his arms and look at him.

“It's her, Joe.”

Danny next. I hug Danny. His eyes are moist and I feel my own eyes getting cloudy and hot. Seven weeks he's worked toward this moment. “Danny. Oh, God, Dan. Great job!”

Dogs are probing the woods. There's a bustle of activity. I start noticing other people around me. Matt. Scott. Roger Guay with Reba. That friendly redheaded warden.

They lead me through the brush, ducking branches, into the woods about fifty feet. A branch snaps into my thigh, the sharp sting saying, “This is real. This is real.” I smell dirt and see the outline of a grave. There's a small hole and Danny explains how he dug down until he felt something in his probe about two feet in. It was Amy! Her gray sweatshirt. I peer into the hole and see the sweatshirt.

I turn and look at Danny. Imagine him digging with his fingers and actually touching Amy. I rise, feeling thrilled, sad, troubled. “Roger,” I ask Guay, “what if it's just her clothes?”

Guay and Dorian assure me. The way the dogs hit, it's a body. Buried. I think, buried how? Buried alive? Strangled? Stabbed? Shot? What are we going to find? The Rolodex of crime scenes starts.

Finding what they hoped would be Amy St. Laurent's burial site was nothing short of a miracle. Murderers rarely take the time to bury a body. They may shroud a body with brush or leaves, but usually they want to get away from what they've done as quickly as possible. For more than a month, everyone had been searching for a dumped body or a hidden body. Naturally, they had been alert to signs of recent digging, but mostly they had been looking above-ground. Luckily, the wardens had asked their question about connecting Gorman to a shovel. Even more luckily, the detectives had gotten an honest answer to that question.

Amy St. Laurent's suspected grave was located less than four-tenths of a mile behind Gorman's mother's house. And without Lieutenant Pat Dorian and MASAR, it probably never would have been found.

E
veryone was eager to get on with the work of getting Amy out of the ground. The small glimpse of gray sweatshirt Danny Young's digging had revealed had brought tears and a heartbreaking mixture of excitement and profound sorrow. But while Danny Young and Scott Harakles might have wanted to just grab some shovels and start digging, and all the officers would have liked to get inside out of the seeping cold, none of them, having come this far, wanted to take a chance on losing the evidence or information the burial site might give them by moving too quickly. They knew what they had to do.

It was only weeks away from the shortest day of the year. The weary detectives had no time, in the fading gray light of a December afternoon, to do much more than pat each other on the back and shake the grinning wardens' hands before turning their attention to the complexities of converting a major search operation into a crime scene requiring the meticulous exhumation of a buried body. Young said it was as though the minute they found her grave site, time slowed down.

Another time, another season, they might have discussed securing the scene and coming back in the morning. It is always best to work an outdoor crime scene in daylight.
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But snow was coming, and a December snow in Maine might still be on the ground in April. The detectives couldn't risk losing days or weeks with their evidence buried.

Even if a tarp might have protected the grave site itself, and not collapsed under the weight of snow, the surrounding area as well as the access road needed to be carefully searched, and the investigators couldn't cover all that with tarps. They had already lost many weeks during which valuable evidence was being destroyed. They were also running on an adrenaline high fueled by their sheer amazement at having found Amy's grave. So no one wanted to stop. Everyone wanted to finish the job. They wanted to bring Amy home.

As civilian personnel were released, it was critical to make sure they understood that no information about what had been found and what police were working on could be released to anyone—not to family or friends and, most critically, not to the media. The Mahoosic Mountain searchers were pulled aside back at Crosby Farm and told, in cop-speak, that there had been a significant find. Their names were taken in case they would be needed later to appear at a trial, and they were released with profound thanks. As the story unfolded, the Mahoosic team could see that however reluctantly they had come into the search, their expertise had made a difference, and it had been worth doing for Amy's family.

Those in command also moved quickly through the business of thanking and dismissing the police personnel who had helped with the search, many of whom wanted to stick around and have a piece of the action. But everyone knew that crime scene processing worked better with a small, efficient crew.
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There would be some bruised egos and hurt feelings; but there wasn't time to worry about it, there was way too much to be done. As Lieutenant Loughlin put it, “You feel bad, but you're already moving on and they've got to understand it's just part of the job.”

As the scene was stabilized and decisions were made, the ranking officers on the scene, Lieutenant Brian McDonough, from the state police, and Lieutenant Loughlin, had to pass information up their respective food chains so that their superiors would be in the loop. Because the media were already focused on the search and aware that personnel and vehicles had converged on the area off Route 22, news vans had begun to arrive. It was necessary to agree quickly on a uniform story and to convey it to dispatch in Portland and to Stephen McCausland, the state police spokesperson.

Then came the complicated issue of staffing the scene. Although Portland and state police had worked side by side for weeks on the case, the grave site and surrounding crime scene were not in Portland but in Scarborough, resolving, finally, the question of jurisdiction. Amy St. Laurent was now officially an MSP case. The decision was quickly made, however, to proceed as a team, and the investigators moved on to the question of how the scene would be handled. Whose evidence technicians would do which tasks. Who would videotape the dig, sketch the scene, take the photographs, record and collect the evidence. Whether both the MSP and Portland crime scene vans would be used.

The chief medical examiner, Dr. Margaret Greenwald, and her deputy, Dr. Ed David, had to be located, notified, and summoned to the scene. The presence of a body meant that the exhumation could not proceed without Dr. Greenwald. A scene with a body “belongs” to the medical examiner. Because the body was buried, and the exhumation of a buried body is a detailed and complicated process, Dr. Marcella Sorg, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Maine in Orono experienced in such excavations, was also contacted.

Portland and state police evidence technicians had to be contacted. The parameters of the crime scene had to be identified and secured. Access to the scene was by the tote road, which was blocked by piles of accumulated debris. Somehow, Todd Coons, one of the Portland detectives, got a road grader that could be used to clear the tote road and allow the state's large crime scene van (a converted mobile home) and Portland's smaller one access to the site. Before any of that debris could be moved, however, it—and the road into the site—had to be searched so that no potential evidence would be lost.

Since it was obvious that the exhumation process would be going on long after dark, police borrowed a generator and large lights from Scarborough Rescue, which they set up to illuminate the scene deep in the woods, complementing the lights the state police had provided.

None of these steps took place without conferences among the ranking officers at the scene and often consultation with their respective command staffs. But all the investigators proceeded with the smoothness of professionals who were used to the complexity and chaos of crime scenes. Everyone clicked into gear and began to do their jobs.

All day long, the air had held the promise of snow. As darkness closed in, it brought a damp and biting chill. The detectives could feel the impending snow in the air and knew they were racing the clock. They also knew that one of the basic principles of crime scene investigation is that it cannot be rushed. Crime scene investigation is a detailed and time-consuming process designed to preserve the integrity of the scene and all the information and evidence collected there.

The suspicious site was first identified around 2:15 p.m. The Code Blue was called at 2:40. The medical examiner arrived at the scene at 6:15. During that time, there was a tremendous amount of work to be done before the exhumation itself could begin, following the site protocol. Identifying and cordoning off the parameters of the scene. Establishing designated paths into and out of the scene to avoid trampling on evidence. Documenting the scene in sufficient detail to allow an officer to later recreate it in a detailed written report.

Scene documentation involved the taking of detailed notes, not only about the scene itself, but also about the steps taken to capture those details. Mapping, for example, was a very complex and time-consuming process. First a rough sketch was made. Then, in order to reproduce the scene accurately later, measurements were taken to record distances, angles, fixed items, and movable items. The site was then photographed and videotaped.

The site was searched visually and with metal detectors. Every step of the process had to be photographed and videotaped. Evidence discovered was photographed in place with and without identifying numbers, a scale, and an arrow. Along with the usual crime scene requirements—never move, touch, or alter anything until it has been noted, sketched, and photographed—the detectives faced the additional complexities of conducting a forensic dig—the long, slow, careful process of exhuming the victim's body.
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The fact that it was night, and December, and that everyone had already been on the job for nearly twelve hours, was irrelevant. The detectives all had the picture of Amy's smiling face in their minds as they stood around what they now believed was her grave. Soon, perhaps, they would know how she had died. No one wanted to miss a shred of evidence that might help them understand the details of the crime or help them secure a successful conviction of the smooth-talking charmer who had offered Amy a ride home and instead killed her and dumped her into this hole in the ground.

Early in the process, Chief Chitwood came through the dark to the scene, congratulated Danny Young, and shook his hand. It felt good to Young to have his efforts recognized. What felt even better was when Detective John Dumas, who had started the day in a piss-poor mood, angry about giving up a Saturday and muttering darkly about finding needles in haystacks, came and shook his hand.

For Young, there would be some serious emotional rushes that night. It really hit him hard, he said, when he called his wife, Linda, from the scene. “You know how I told you I was going to have a day off tomorrow?” he said. “Well, it looks like I'm going to be working after all.”

“You've found her, haven't you,” she said. And only then did he realize that, yes, indeed, they had.

Chief Chitwood, bouncing with energy, snapping his gum, definitely Clint Eastwood-esque, moves up the tote road to me. When he gets close, I see he's got his jogging suit on. The chief is a workout fanatic. He knows crime scenes and starts off, “Great job, Joe. You guys did a great job.”

“It was all Danny and Scott, Chief, believe me. And those warden guys are amazing. I still can't believe we found her. Still can't believe.”

Chitwood moves to Danny, Tom, and others, shaking hands and congratulating them, like they've won a sports event. It's pretty dark now. News teams are choking up the road, I'm told over the radio.

Matt comes up to me, wide eyed. “Joe!” He grabs my arm. “Joe, you gotta stop the chief from the news …”

This is MSP's biggest nightmare. They play it close to the vest, while Chief Chitwood is a lot more open, more willing to speculate.

“Oh, yeah, Matt, real easy. Sure. Hang on a minute. I'll just go tell him.” Media Mike is a publicity hound. He loves the media so much it's almost like an aphrodisiac. And he's good. The public loves him.

I walk up to the chief by the command post. “Chief, can you do me a favor and talk to Matt before you go to the press so we can agree on issues?”

“Sure, Joe. No problem. Where is he?” The chief ambles over to Matt and they converse.

Off to the side, I see white sneakers emerge from the gloom as if they are walking on their own. Then I see it's Tim Burton. Thank God, I think. Burton has such good, logical sense, such a calming effect and a unique relationship with the chief. He shakes my hand and congratulates me, then looks around curiously. “Where did we get all this equipment and who's gonna pay for it?”

“Jeez, Tim. Not now. We've got a potential conflict brewing, and fast. I need you.” I ask him to appeal to the chief before he goes out to the road. Everyone huddles up and Tim does his thing with alacrity.

The last thing I see is Mike Chitwood walking down the dark tote road, jogging suit reflecting the light, heading toward the news like a moth to a flame.

As I turn, Matt rolls his eyes because he knows what's coming, and strides off into the darkness after the chief. Not my problem, I think, as I turn to the scene.

The discovery of what they believed to be Amy St. Laurent's grave site in Scarborough, which was under the investigative jurisdiction of the Maine State Police, changed the dynamic of the case. Both police agencies were still working side by side, and both felt it was crucial to the success of the case to keep it that way; at the same time, the jurisdictional shift highlighted what had been an ongoing source of tension—the widely divergent styles of the two agencies with respect to handling the media. It was close to time for the 6:00 p.m. news. Media vans were lined up on Route 22, and Sergeant Stewart was very concerned about what Chief Chitwood would say to them.

Although the investigators all believed they'd found Amy's grave, what they had so far was a scrap of gray sweatshirt and the behavior of the dogs. The medical examiner hadn't arrived yet. The families had not been notified. MSP and Portland personnel, including Chief Chitwood, discussed the matter, and everyone agreed to say only that a significant discovery had been made, that detectives were now investigating it, and that in a short while, Portland police and the MSP would issue a joint press release.

Chief Chitwood then left the scene and went back out to the road. Sergeant Stewart, following, heard him speak with some reporters to the effect that a buried body had been found, a sweatshirt identified, and detectives believed it to be the body of Amy St. Laurent. Stewart subsequently spoke with the reporters, explained that the information was premature until the site had been examined and the families notified, and persuaded the reluctant reporters to hold the story. Stewart then returned to the scene, vigorously protesting the chief's actions, and tried to secure the Portland police department's cooperation in keeping a lid on public statements. While Stewart was back at the scene, trying to control what would be said to the media, the chief gave another interview that did make it onto the air, infuriating the state police and the stations that had cooperated in holding the story.

Route 22 was ablaze with the flashing lights of emergency vehicles. Scarborough police and state police were out there, preventing the media from having access to the site. Route 22 had been closed. Detectives and evidence technicians were in gear, searching the tote road and the area around the grave site. Now that the process was under way, it was time for Lieutenant Loughlin and Danny Young to make the painful phone calls to Amy's mother and father, informing them of the discovery.

“Yeah, yeah, okay, Dan, let me call Diane and you call Dennis.”