Dark Downeast

NEW HAMPSHIRE COLD CASE, 1991: February 16, 2021, marks 30 years since two beloved figures of the Portsmouth, New Hampshire community were found dead, victims of an attack in their own home. This is the case of Stella Bolton and James ‘JJ’ Moore, a special release mini-episode of Dark Downeast. Report what you know with the New Hampshire Cold Case Tip Form   View source material and photos for thi...

HISTORIC SOUTH PARIS MURDERS, 1937: The murders of Dr. James G. Littlefield and his wife, Lydia Littlefield, became one of Maine's most sensational and confounding cases of the early 1900s. Who really killed the couple, and why? Could the 18-year old Paul Dwyer be the true perpetrator? Or did someone else force him to take the fall, sending him off on a wild ride to nowhere with two bodies in the...

MAINE MURDER, 1988: 12-year old Sarah Cherry disappeared while babysitting on July 6, 1988. A clue laying in the driveway of the house where she was last seen pointed investigators to their primary suspect. Two days later, Sarah's body was discovered in a shallow grave in the woods in Bowdoinham, Maine. Dennis Dechaine is serving a life sentence for the murder of Sarah Cherry, but over 30 years la...

ACADIA COLD CASE, 1977: Leslie Spellman was just 27-years old when she set off to Bar Harbor in the summer of 1977, hitchhiking from Vermont with her scruffy mutt Taylor by her side. Her beaten body would be found just a day after she left for her adventure, along the walking trail at Asticou Gardens in Northeast Harbor. To this day, over 40 years later, her family is still searching for answers -...

MAINE MURDER, 1987: 26-year old Kathy Frost scanned the pages of her Bangor Daily News, concluding with a careful assessment of the personals. One ad caught her eye. An active outdoorsman searching for a lasting relationship. Kathy circled the address. Three weeks later, Kathy married the man from the ad. And 21 days after they said "I Do", Kathy Frost Larson died in an apparent accidental fall fr...

MAINE COLD CASE, 1987: After she was refused service at a bar in Waterville, Maine on December 23, 1987, 20-year old Janet Brochu accepted a ride home from a guy she'd met at the bowling alley earlier that night. But Janet never made it home. When you hear the details of Janet Brochu’s case, and how it intertwines with the murder of Geraldine Finn, another young Maine woman around the same time an...

MAINE COLD CASE, 1954: On July 22nd, 1954, Daniel K. Wood Jr. grabbed his fishing pole and set off on foot down Portland Road in Gray, Maine. Just ten minutes later, the phone rang at the Wood home. It was Danny. He told his mother he got a job with a door-to-door salesman. She warned him not to go off with strangers, but Danny simply replied, "I'll be home by dark." 12-year old Danny did not retu...

NEW HAMPSHIRE MURDER, 2012: When Elizabeth "Lizzi" Marriott left the University of New Hampshire campus for a movie night at a friend's house, she told her aunt and uncle she'd be home by midnight. On Wednesday morning, Becki and Tony noticed their niece wasn’t home. Maybe it got late, and Lizzi crashed at her friend’s place. But on Thursday morning, there was still no sign of Lizzi. No one has se...

MAINE MURDER, 1983: Sonny Grotton lay in his dooryard, blood pooling around him. Norma dialed 9-1-1. Everything happened quickly. When first responders arrived at the scene, Sonny spoke only in gurgled noises, unable to say who pulled the trigger firing three shots into his body, one at close range. Mervin "Sonny" Grotton was pronounced dead at 8:36 p.m. on December 16, 1983. A giving family man,...

MAINE MISSING PERSON, 1977: When Honey kissed her sleeping mother goodbye before school on December 15, 1977, it was the last time Pauline Rourke was ever seen again. But this isn’t just the case of Pauline Rourke’s disappearance. This is also the story of Janet Baxter, Patricia Ann Sinclair, and her children Craig, Christopher, and Christine. The one name that connects every person on that list?...

MAINE MISSING PERSON, 2011: The Ayla Reynolds case is both the largest criminal investigation and the third largest search for a missing child in Maine’s history. If you’ve lived in Maine or New England in the last decade, you probably know the high-level details of the night she went missing from her father’s home, but there is so much to this case. There’s so much that Ayla’s mother Trista Reyno...

MAINE MISSING PERSON, 1993: 26-year old Virginia Sue Pictou Noyes disappeared in the early morning hours of April 24, 1993, after she slipped out unnoticed from her Eastern Maine Medical Center hospital room. Nearly 30 years later, her family continues to search for answers through their own investigations and cultural rituals. This is the Cold Case of Virginia Sue Pictou Noyes. Homicide is the th...

MAINE MURDER, 1991: On August 11, 1991, Bill and Pearl stood in their kitchen, each taking verbal jabs at the other in another argument over money. As the shouting got louder, Bill grabbed his keys and slammed the door on his way out of the house. When he got home hours later, the house was quiet. Pearl was gone. “Probably run off with one of her ex-husband’s,” Bill thought. He crawled into bed an...

PORTLAND, MAINE MURDER, 2001: Amy St. Laurent was a beautiful, driven woman entertaining a new friend in Portland's Old Port one Saturday night in October 2001, when she met a guy -- a predator. Amy never showed up for work the next week. She never returned home to feed her cat. Her friends and family distributed missing posters around the Old Port, hoping someone saw something that would lead the...

MAINE MISSING PERSON, 2006: Two women, one murdered and one missing, connected by one man. When police discovered the badly beaten body of Cheryl Murdoch and arrested her boyfriend Shannon Atwood for the crime, they pinned him with the mysterious disappearance of his wife, too. But what should be the simplest answer in the disappearance of Shirley Moon-Atwood isn't simple at all. In this case, we...

INFAMOUS MAINE MURDER, 2006: On Labor Day weekend in 2006, Christian Charles Nielsen spiraled into a killing spree that a would claim the lives of four people -- Julie Bullard, Selby Bullard, Cynthia Beatson, and James Whitehurst. This is the story of a true monster and one of the most grisly multiple murders in Maine’s history, and it all happened just minutes from a well-known and beloved winter...

HISTORIC MAINE MURDER, 1873: Smuttynose Island in the Isles of Shoals has become an iconic part of the dark side of Maine and New Hampshire history. This is the historic case of three women attacked in the dead of night, when a robbery turned bloody and the thief wielded an ax that would end the lives of two. The third woman lived to tell her tale, though some argue that it was the sole survivor h...

MAINE'S OLDEST MISSING PERSON CASE, 1971: Nearly 25 years after Cathy Marie Moulton's disappearance, a new detective was assigned to the case, and he uncovered new details that no one bothered to look into when the 16-year old girl first disappeared on her way home from a shopping trip in Portland, Maine. The narrative of Cathy’s story for over two decades would be that she simply disappeared, tha...

MAINE'S OLDEST MISSING PERSON CASE, 1971: On September 24, 1971, Cathy Marie Moulton stepped out onto Forest Avenue in Portland, Maine heading the direction of home. She had plans to attend the YWCA dance that night... But Cathy never made it. The Portland Police Department dismissed her as a runaway in 1971, but that didn't seem like the daughter that Roy Moulton and his wife Claire knew and love...

MAINE MISSING PERSON, 1988: A spontaneous Maine adventure turns dark when Virginia C. Douglas steps into Reny's in Belfast, Maine and is never seen again. Where did Virginia go? This decades-old missing persons cold case spans two New England states, and will have you questioning which story to believe and who is to blame for the peculiar disappearance of Virginia C. Douglas.   View source materia...

INFAMOUS MAINE TRUE CRIME, 2003: Walter "Reid" Morrill heard there were leftovers from the bake sale the day before. They would be the perfect pairing for the strong Swedish coffee always served in the fellowship hall after Sunday service. What Reid and his fellow parishioners didn't know on the morning of April 23, 2003, was that their strong Swedish coffee was tainted, and one of their own was r...

Dark Downeast digs into the decades-old and modern day cases that prickle the history of Vacationland and beyond – the unsolved homicides, undetermined deaths, unexplained disappearances and other dark stories of New England. Investigative journalist and storyteller Kylie Low gets straight to the story with a mix of narrated episodes and documentary style production featuring interviews with survi...