Post by Joanna on Nov 8, 2014 1:56:32 GMT -5
Filmmaker seeks to produce documentary about unsolved 1978 murder in York County
KENNEBUNK, Maine – A movie trailer for a documentary being produced about the 1978 unsolved brutal murder of beloved Kennebunk teenager Mary Ellen Tanner is scheduled to tape 5-7 p.m. Friday at the Nonantum Resort in Kennebunkport. Excerpts from the film Girl on the Bridge: The Mary Tanner Story, will be shown and there will be a presentation about the nonprofit project and the newly formed Mary Tanner Foundation.
Tanner, 18, was last seen alive hitchhiking home from Kennebunkport summer parade festivities July 7, 1978. Her badly beaten and decomposing corpse was found two days later in a field across the Kennebunk town line in Lyman. No killer has ever been brought to justice.
After the Friday night showing, film producer and director, Rik O’Neal of Switchback Productions, along with members of the Mary Tanner Foundation and the Tanner family, will be on hand to answer questions from the audience. Light refreshments will be served and a cash bar will be available. Admission to the premiere is free and open to the public, though donations in any amount are welcome and will be graciously accepted at the event.
“Girl on the Bridge is a film about Mary Tanner and the people she left behind in the small town of Kennebunk, where the crime’s deep wound left a dark and painful scar and where suspicion and rumor still roil beneath the surface of everyday life. Her friends, so young then, are grown up now, and they are demanding justice,” O’Neal said.
To date, O’Neal has been funding the project out of his own pocket and he has contracted acclaimed filmmaker Roger McCord to collaborate with him as well. A future crowd-funding campaign for the film is slated to take place in early 2015, with a start-to-finish budget for the project estimated to be $125,000.
At this time, $25,000 is needed to continue to fund the initial pre-production phase. O’Neal is quick to point out that Girl on the Bridge: The Mary Tanner Story is not a crime drama, it is a fact-based documentary and funding through grants, foundations and private donors will be sought. “This is all about hope and courage and people prevailing,” he said.
“There are still good people in the world, people who care about justice for Mary,” said Kennebunk native and Mary Tanner Foundation board member Francine Tanguay of the film. “This is Mary’s legacy.”
The Murder of Mary Tanner
It was hot that July day in 1978, with temperatures in the 90s across southern Maine. “Hotter than a firecracker,” recalls Robert Pelletier, who was then a member of the Kennebunk Police Department. It was a Sunday afternoon, July 8, sometime after 3:30 p.m., when Pelletier’s phone rang. Someone had found a body in Gracie Evans Field, a wooded, isolated area just over the Lyman line from West Kennebunk. “I only live about a mile and a half or two miles from there,” Pelletier said recently. “I jumped in the truck and went right up.”
When Pelletier got to the scene, he found the body of a partially clad woman, lying in six inches of grass just off the dirt airstrip that was used on weekends by a group of skydivers. The pilot of a plane had seen the body from the air as he was taking off with three jumpers. He had circled around, landed and found someone to call authorities. “She was laying face down in the field and I didn’t move her,” said Pelletier, who was 32-years-old at the time. “I secured the scene and called in the state police.”
Pelletier speaks slowly, deliberately, reluctantly, as he recalls that day. “It wasn’t a pretty sight, even though I didn’t know who it was at the time.” No one knew who she was. For the next 36 hours, authorities scoured the town of Kennebunk, even going so far as to show some people a photograph of the body in an attempt to identify the woman. She had been severely beaten, her body badly decomposed in the heat. There were no signs of a struggle and police found nothing at the scene but the striped jersey she was wearing, a jacket and a gold chain with a star pendant, according to news reports at the time.
It wasn’t until late evening on Monday that the state medical examiner identified the victim as Mary Ellen Tanner, who had turned 18 just three weeks before. A senior at Kennebunk High School, she lived with her parents and two older sisters on Cat Mousam Road in Kennebunk, the last house on the right just before Cat Mousam Road passes over the Maine Turnpike. Newspaper stories say she was not identified until friends went to police after hearing descriptions of Mary’s clothing on television.
Jacqueline O’Keefe Lincoln, a close friend of Mary’s who had last seen her that Friday night, said she and Mary both wore scrimshaw star pendants like the one police described. A mutual friend, Debbie DeTesso, called Lincoln when she heard it on television. “She thought it was me,” Lincoln said. Lincoln and DeTeso went to police with the information. The shoes, jeans and a blue and white bandana Mary was wearing the night she disappeared were never found. The murder weapon, believed to be a “blunt object,” also was never found.
Bob Pelletier knew the Tanner family well. Pelletier’s mother and Mary Tanner’s mother, Shirley, had worked together at Jones’ Diner on Main Street in Kennebunk, which is now the site of the gas station where Mary was last seen the night of Friday, July 7, 1978. Pelletier was dispatched to inform the Tanners of Mary’s death. “I was a police officer and I was the first one on the scene and seeing as how I knew the family as well as I did, it was kind of left up to me to do that. It was not easy.”
The state medical examiner at the time, Dr. Henry Ryan, said death was caused by blows to the head.
It would be a cliché to describe the town of Kennebunk as shocked and angered to learn that one of their children had been brutally murdered. The 6,000 residents of Kennebunk knew one another like members of an extended family. They looked out for one another, trusted one another. And until that Tuesday morning of July 10, when the papers reported that Mary Tanner was the woman in Gracie Evans Field, they had felt safe, free to let their children come and go in the belief that they were looked out for wherever they were. Mary Tanner’s death brought that sense of security to a sudden end.
Because Gracie Evans Field was so remote, so difficult to find that only locals for the most part knew where it was, the immediate conclusion was that only someone intimately familiar with the area, most likely someone living among them, would have thought of that as a place to leave Mary’s body.
More than 35 years later, that feeling of loss, tragedy, grief and suspicion still lingers in the town. And police are still looking for the killer. Last year, a group of people came together around the idea that they can help find the person or persons who killed Mary Tanner. Some are Mary’s friends and former classmates. Some are older, adults at the time of Mary’s death; some much younger than Mary. All had been deeply marked by the brutal murder of one of their own, and they all are determined to bring the killer to justice.
A Facebook page was created in March 2013. Entitled “Justice for Mary,” its mission is “to honor the memory of Mary Ellen Tanner of Kennebunk, Maine, and to seek justice in her unsolved 1978 murder.” Launched on March 17, within four hours the page had garnered 125 “likes.” In the succeeding weeks, the number of people joining the page had grown to more than 400.
The Justice for Mary people are an industrious bunch. T-shirts, bumper stickers and posters have been printed and distributed throughout the area. A generous donor gave $1,000 for a memorial bench in Rotary Park at the end of the Mousam River Bridge, where Mary was last seen about midnight Friday night, July 7. Money has also been raised for the Mary Tanner Memorial Scholarship, which is given each year to a graduating senior chosen by the faculty.
Charles Tanner III, Mary’s brother, 12 years older than Mary and living away from the home at the time, has become the unofficial spokesmen for the group and is the sole contact with state police, who have never closed the case.
In the meantime, there have been hundreds of posts to the page, including pictures of Mary and her friends, planning notes and pep talks to keep working hard for Mary, comments among friends, transcripts of newspaper stories, recollections and expressions of hope that the case will be solved. There also have been frequent pleas to contact police with information. The result has been that people have come forward. Names, places, dates, all gleaned from memories of what happened the night of July 7, have been forwarded to investigators.
Charlie Tanner believes the Justice for Mary page “has definitely revitalized the investigation,:” adding, “The wheel wasn’t squeaking. She was dead 34 years.”
Lt. Brian McDonough said the Tanner case has been assigned to a number of different detectives through the years, including himself at one time. The idea, McDonough said, is that “a fresh set of eyes” will develop a new thread of information and turn up a lead that could result in an arrest. “In 95 percent of cold or historical cases, we have a very good idea of what happened and who is responsible,” McDonough said, but there isn’t enough evidence “to reach the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.” In the Tanner case, he added, “it’s an open, active homicide as far as we’re concerned.“
Charlie Tanner said that at least three names of potential suspects “have been bandied about for years” among residents in Kennebunk. The name of one in particular, a man who no longer lives in Maine, is well-known. When asked about it in interviews, people say, yes, that name is on their list of suspects. “If the point comes to it that they get a real good suspect that they like,” Tanner said, “it would still come down to a confession case. There isn’t enough DNA evidence to do any good.”
The body was so badly decomposed that little physical evidence could be gathered that would be useful even with modern DNA technology, according to Tanner. The question of whether Mary was sexually assaulted, Tanner said, also could not be conclusively determined because she had lain in the hot field for two days.
In virtually any conversation about Mary Tanner, people mention 9-year-old Mary Olenchuk, whose body was found in a Kennebunk barn August 22, 1970. Many wonder if the two crimes are related, but police have said there is no apparent connection.
The Tanner property was purchased by the Maine Turnpike Authority years ago and the house was torn down. But the lilac bushes remain on the site. “I’m just a classmate interested in keeping the conversation going,” Ames says of his role with Justice for Mary. “There are a lot of people out there. A huge part of us are still young, still back in 1978, thinking, ‘Who did this?’”
Dawn Osborne Ames, described by many as Mary’s closest friend, seems to have been hit the hardest by Mary’s death. Friends say Ames collapsed at the grave side the day Mary was buried in the family plot in Biddeford. Ames, who had been friends with Mary “ever since first grade,” had expected to graduate with her best friend the following year. “I couldn’t go back to school,” Ames said. “I had to go to night school.” Because she “only needed a couple of credits,” she took the classes in the evening at Kennebunk High School. “I just didn’t want people coming up to me and stuff,” she said.
Michael D. Higgins was Mary’s boyfriend at the time. “At lot of times I can’t talk about it because it’s still a wound. It didn’t matter how many years ago, it’s still open,” Higgins said. He met Mary in the summer of 1977 when he was working at Glen-Mor Lanes bowling alley on Route 1, a local hangout. He had moved to Maine from Waltham, Mass., with his friend Michael Mahoney, whose father, Ed Mahoney, had purchased the business. Mary and her friend Dawn were making such a racket, laughing and talking, that Higgins, then 20, was forced to ask them to quiet down, Higgins recalls. The girls “were persistent,” he said, and he finally threw them out of the bowling alley. “They came back the next night,” he said.
During the summer they became better acquainted, and Michael, Mary, Dawn and Jackie, the third member of the inseparable trio, became close friends. “They were like peas in a pod, the three of them. Her (Mary), Boots and Jackie. You’d see them most of the time,” Higgins said. Boots was the nickname he gave Dawn because she wore bright yellow boots. “Their laughter, it was infectious. You loved it.” Mary Tanner and Higgins began dating that fall.
Higgins was in Massachusetts the night Mary disappeared. His brother Thomas and another friend from Waltham had been killed on the Maine Turnpike July 3 in a car accident, Higgins said. They were coming up to Maine in two cars for a July 4 party when the car in which the two men were riding went out of control and crashed. Higgins said they took his brother’s body to Bibber Funeral Home and Mary spent the evening with him at the Mahoney house. “I went over to her house, July 4th morning. That was the last time I saw her.”
Higgins left later that morning for Massachusetts. Immediately after the funeral, he flew with his uncle to Florida, Higgins said, his uncle insisting that he get away. “He worked for the airline and he had me on a plane the very next morning,” Higgins said.
Almost immediately on arrival in Florida, he got a call and was told to come back to Maine for an interview with police. He was on the next flight out, he said. He was at the Tanner home when police asked him to go to Portland for a lie detector test, Higgins said. Charles Tanner, Mary’s father, volunteered to accompany him on the trip to Portland. After the interview and the test, Higgins was no longer a suspect in Mary’s death.
News reports quoted Shirley Tanner, Mary’s mother, as saying Michael and Mary were planning to get married. “I know I gave her a ring. Wedding talk wasn’t really made,” Higgins said, “but I found later that she was pregnant. She was going to wait until after my brother’s funeral to tell me.” He said one of Mary’s sisters told him, but he could not remember which one gave him the news.
Charlie Tanner confirmed that Mary was expecting. “I’m sure my mother was a little distressed,” he said.
Lincoln said Mary had also told her, and that Dawn knew, as well. Dawn Ames did not return calls requesting comment. “They loved one another very much,” Lincoln said.
Higgins now lives in West Attleboro Falls, Mass., near Rhode Island, where he manages a store. He has been married twice. “I loved three people in my life,” Higgins said, “my current wife, my first wife, who I’m still good friends with, and the other one was Mary.”
Police reports, interviews with friends and news reports create a mosaic of the events that occurred that Friday night Mary disappeared. The evening began with the Kennebunkport Dump Association’s annual dump parade through Dock Square. It was a satirical celebration of the days when town dumps were places to meet and gossip and search for cast-off treasures. The parades featured a dump queen and floats decorated with junk.
Dawn Ames said she saw Mary in Dock Square briefly before the start of the parade. Dawn was with her boyfriend, John Ames, Timothy Ames’ brother, whom she later married. Dawn and John went off together after talking briefly with Mary. Dawn never saw Mary again.
About 7 p.m., Mary turned up at Glen-Mor Lanes on Route 1. From there she hitchhiked with a friend to a local party spot on a hill overlooking Route 9, not far from the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge and Parson’s Beach. The hill was popular with local youth because they could drink and smoke marijuana and keep an eye out for police, who could be spotted coming up the road. Among the many young people at the hill that night were Jackie O’Keefe Lincoln and her sister, Candice. Mary and the O’Keefe sisters left the party together. The last time the sisters saw Mary was at the intersection of Routes 9 and 35, Cooper’s Corner, in Kennebunk Lower Village. “Mary was heading toward Kennebunk. I’m across the street heading toward Wells. My sister was heading back toward Dock Square,” Lincoln said. It was still reasonably early in the evening, just dark, maybe 9 p.m.; Lincoln doesn’t remember exactly. Mary was headed home early because she was planning to attend the funeral in Massachusetts.
It is 3.9 miles up Route 35 from Cooper’s Corner to the Mousam River Bridge, where Mary was last seen around midnight. Neither news reports nor recollections of friends’ account for how Mary got from Cooper’s Corner to the bridge, whether she walked or caught a ride. That young people walked alone at night or hitchhiked from place to place was not unusual.
Linda Lawrence Frederick, who hitchhiked with Mary from the bowling alley to the hill that night, said that was just how kids got around those days. Frederick, one year younger than Mary, said she never hitchhiked alone, however. “We were young and invincible and we didn’t think anything could happen to us,” said Frederick, who now lives in Sanford.
Corine Wormwood and her younger sister, Celeste, now Corine Baker and Celeste Lessard, say they spotted Mary on the bridge about midnight. The driver of the car they were in was contacted for an interview but declined to comment. “I don’t remember where we were coming from or where we were going,” Baker said. “My memory was that we were at Cumberland Farms,” the gas station at the south end of the bridge where Jones’ Diner used to stand. “She had asked us for a ride. We were going somewhere and we told her we couldn’t give her a ride. We were going down the road – my memory – we were on the road and we felt a little guilty, and we came back and she was gone. That’s all I remember.”
Francine Battles Tanguay, who now lives in Wells Branch, just over the Kennebunk line, graduated from Kennebunk High School in 1964. She was an adult and had children when Mary was killed. She didn’t know Mary personally, but she knew the Tanners. Her father and Charles Tanner Jr. worked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard together. She went to school with Charlie Tanner III. Tanguay describes herself as “the grandma” of the Justice for Mary group. “I want to see this solved. It’s not going to change anything, but it needs to be solved. Somebody needs to be held accountable,” she said. “You have to remember that this was the second murder that Kennebunk had had in less than 10 years. So it was not only noticeable, it was frightening. And I saw what it did to the people in the town. It was very unsettling, and if it could happen in Kennebunk, it could happen in my neighborhood in Wells Branch.”
In an interview, Mary’s sister, Gail J. Tanner, described her sister as “a beautiful kid.” She also spoke bitterly about people in town who had characterized her sister as irresponsible, a “party girl, like she deserved to die. Stuff was said that wasn’t true, that was cruel.” said Gail Tanner, “She was just the family pet. She was our little sister, we were protective. She was a wonderful kid. Everybody loved her. Everything she did she did with love.”
Gail went on at length about her sister’s zest for life, her sense of humor. “She would have been a great comedian. She was funny. She could make anyone smile, no matter how they felt,” she said. “She was the type of person that if she knew someone hadn’t eaten, she would make them a peanut butter sandwich so they would have something to eat.”
Jane Whitten Needham, a retired U.S. Navy chief now living in Virginia recalled Mary as “very fun-loving. She loved everybody and everybody loved her. She was fun and just somebody you wanted to be with. She was kind and warm and she was always smiling, always,” Needham said. “They keep saying she was a party girl, but that doesn’t describe her. She was a majorette and I was a flag girl. We did normal things, the things kids do. You go to school, you come home, you do your chores. She was a majorette. You have to practice. You work.” She noted that Mary had a summer job at the Glen-Mor Restaurant, which burned in 1997.
But yes, Needham concedes, the kids did party, and Mary was among them. “We did go in the woods and we did drink in the woods and we did pee in the woods, but our parents did not know where we were. They trusted us.” Mary’s mother, who died in 2011 at the age of 92, was “a strict and caring person,” Needham said.
So why, after the passage of more than three decades have people become so intent on finding Mary’s killer? “You hit a certain age and everyone wants to go home again,” Tanguay observed. “You start thinking and reminiscing, and now there is Facebook. I think Facebook has had a big effect because they have been able to talk about it.”
Souces: Shelley Wigglesworth, York County Coast Star, November 7, 2014, and Rik O'Neal, KeepMeCurrent.