Dark Downeast

A special update to this week’s episode, Murder on Goose Rocks Beach, covering the cases of David J. Nixon and Steven Ray Johnson.  View source material and photos for this episode at darkdowneast.com/davidjnixon   Dark Downeast is an audiochuck and Kylie Media production hosted by Kylie Low. Follow @darkdowneast on Instagram , Facebook , and TikTok To suggest a case, email hello@darkdowneast.com...

MAINE, 1987: On the night of June 8, 1987, David Nixon had just hung up the phone with his father. He called back home to let his folks know that he was staying over at their family beach house in Kennebunkport, Maine for one more night. That phone call was the last contact David ever had with his family. Sometime after he put the phone back on the hook, David was killed just steps from the house...

CONNECTICUT, 2018: On the night of May 18, 2018, 36-year old James “Jimmy” Stone Jr. was loading up his belongings from the trailer where he once lived on the Golden Hill Paugussett Reservation in Colchester, Connecticut to take them to his new apartment. Somehow, the mundane task of packing and moving became a deadly one. Jimmy never made it off the reservation alive. The investigation into the m...

MASSACHUSETTS, 1991: On July 20th, 1991, 17-year-old Patricia Moreno sat on the fire escape at her foster family’s apartment building. She often used the fire escape for solace – the apartment was crowded and hot and loud – but in the early morning hours of that scorching summer night, her place of respite became the scene of her murder. For over three decades, the mystery of Patricia's death pers...

VERMONT, 2020: On April 15, 2020, 38-year old Ralph “Rizz” Jean-Marie was reported missing from a motel where he was living in Barre, Vermont. The story was that he up and left after an argument, leaving behind his personal belongings, never to be seen again. But from day one of the investigation, law enforcement had reason to believe the initial narrative of Ralph’s disappearance wasn’t anchored...

NEW YORK CITY, 1990s: On May 28, 2001, after an eight year long investigation spanning three states, New York police officers finally closed in on their target: a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital. Advancements in fingerprinting technology had finally identified a suspect connected to garbage bags containing the remains of four men discarded on the side of the road in New York, Pennsylvania, and New J...

MAINE, 1973: In April of 1973, the vibrant college town of Orono, Maine was shattered by a shocking murder that sent tremors through the University of Maine community. The victim was Frederic Alan Spencer, a promising UMaine graduate student with a bright future ahead. When Frederic's roommate came forward and confessed to the killing, it seemed like an open and shut case. However, as the trial of...

PORTSMOUTH, 1981 & 1982: In just over a year span during the early 1980s in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the lives of two young women were ended by an assailant who broke into their apartments, violently attacked and beat them, and somehow managed to escape undetected, remaining anonymous for decades. Laura Kempton and Tammy Little’s murders have long been intertwined. As you’ll hear, the circumstan...

MAINE, 2003: On the night of December 23, 2003, two friends dropping off Christmas gifts at the home of 40-year old Raymond “Butch” Weed were shocked to find that their friend, a well-known and beloved member of the Wilton, Maine community, was dead. Sometime between his regular visit to his favorite hangout in downtown Wilton and returning home just a quarter mile away on Main Street, an unknown...

On March 14, 1968, kids playing in the oil fields of Huntington Beach, California discovered the brutally beaten body of a young woman. Investigators scoured the scene for clues, finding shoe imprints, marks from tires, and a cigarette butt, but it had rained the night before and so any other evidence left behind had likely washed away. Police labeled the woman a Jane Doe and set out to investigat...

MAINE, 1976: Anne Payson Holt, better known as Nancy, was almost 80-years old, but not quite yet. Her milestone birthday and the fancy gala planned in her honor was still a few days away in early October of 1976, but Nancy never saw a day past 79. On October 5, 1976, the safety of her secluded Falmouth Foreside estate was violated by intruders seeking electronics. Before they fled the dirt drive o...

BOSTON, 2014: On February 4, 2014, 13-year old Kristopher Bryan Lewis got off the school bus at his usual stop on the corner of West Selden and Morton Street in Boston, Massachusetts. He should've been home just a few minutes later around 5:30 p.m. but Kristopher never returned. Kristopher's mother Nina Cancel-Rodgers reported him missing that night. At first, police dismissed Nina’s concerns. The...

NEW HAMPSHIRE, 2001: It was late fall of 2001 and Louise Chaput was looking forward to her weekend plans of hiking the White Mountains with friends. But when those plans fell through, Louise, who was eager to return to the majestic White Mountains that she’d hiked before, decided to do the trip on her own. She arrived at the Pinkham Notch Visitors Center in New Hampshire on the afternoon of Thursd...

ATLANTIC OCEAN, 1896: The chilled, windy air of the Atlantic Ocean surrounded the ship past midnight on July 14, 1896. Nine days into its voyage between Boston, Massachusetts and Rosario, Argentina, a single shriek rang out through the back cabin where the officers of the ship resided - the after house. A guest aboard the ship later found the bodies of Captain Charles Nash, his wife, Laura, and th...

MAINE, 1971: The quiet of a dark late spring evening in Bangor, Maine was interrupted by frightened screams inside an Otis Street Apartment building. Though several residents would later report hearing the sounds of a woman in distress, no one called for help, no one picked up the phone to dial the police, and no one checked in on their downstairs neighbor, 84-year old Charlotte Dunn, until the ne...

Sylvia Baker, 28, went downstairs on July 17th, 1982 to take out the trash. Sylvia never returned to her apartment, where her two young kids were watching TV. When she was found the next day, nude and bound with pieces of her own clothing, her family remained in a state of shock as police worked to track down her killers. Over 40 years later, no one’s been held accountable for Sylvia’s murder, but...

On February 6, 1997, 18-year old Bryan Nisenfeld sat in his afternoon literature class at Roger Williams University in Providence, Rhode Island. Bryan was acting differently during class that day, almost despondent. Where he went after class, what the final moments of his life entailed, is still a mystery. He was simply never seen or heard from again. He never returned to the campus or even to his...

RHODE ISLAND, 2003: On Christmas morning in 2003, a security guard on the Johnson & Wales Harborside campus in Providence, Rhode Island discovered the body of a young man leaning up against a chain link fence. Fingerprints would later identify the man as 22-year old Roy Weber. Roy was part of a population of men who engaged in street-based sex work in Providence, many of them exchanging sexual act...

NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1982: On December 10, 1982, a car sat in a ditch engulfed in a furious blaze. Janet Dow and her son, Stephen Dow, were inside that vehicle that appeared to have skidded off the road just 500 feet from their own home. They were deceased, but the cause of their deaths – whether from the seemingly gentle car crash, the wild flames, or something else – was not clear. What was clear to t...

MASSACHUSETTS, 1982: For over 40 years, the family of 19-year old Brenda LaCombe has wondered what happened to the single mother of a little baby boy after she walked out of her grandmother’s apartment in Lowell, Massachusetts after midnight on May 16, 1982. Lacey Kearns has taken the lead in the fight for answers in her aunt Brenda’s case. Though she never got to meet Brenda, Lacey wants to help...

NEW HAMPSHIRE, 2001: On December 27, 2001, a friend arrived at 50-year old George Jodoin’s farmhouse in Auburn, New Hampshire, expecting to get a tutorial on caring for his animals ahead of George’s trip to Thailand. Instead, he found George dead in his bedroom. In the early days of the investigation, the list of suspects could never be narrowed down to just one person. Investigators were frustrat...

MASSACHUSETTS, 1969: It was the morning of January 7, 1969 and 23-year old Harvard University graduate student Jane Britton should have been in class to take her exam. A dedicated and standout student of anthropology, Jane wouldn’t have missed a test unnecessarily. Jane was later discovered by her boyfriend and neighbors dead in her bed, the victim of a violent attack. Details of the investigation...

In March of 1976, a young woman was discovered, with no obvious trauma, in the Harpeth River in Nashville; she carried on her a picture of a little boy, and a trail that led to witnesses who said she’d hitchhiked with a mysterious friend, all the way from Minnesota—but that trail led nowhere. Without the possibility of DNA testing, the best shot of identifying “Sherry” Jane Doe is using her extrem...

MASSACHUSETTS, 1979: It was August 20, 1979 and 35-year old Margaret Pizio was clocking into her overnight shift at the Susse Chalet Motor Inn in Seekonk, Massachusetts. Margaret should have returned home the next morning, but as it got later and later with no sign of her, the growing unease in the house was palpable. And then the phone rang. A reporter wanted to speak with someone about Margaret...

MASSACHUSETTS, 2022: On November 26, 2022, 41-year old Reina Morales Rojas got into a car in East Boston, MA and some time later was dropped off in nearby Somerville. That’s the last time anyone had seen or heard from the mother of two. Though she was reported missing soon after, the public didn’t hear anything about Reina’s disappearance for almost two months, and if advocates like Lucy Pineda of...