Post by Joanna on Mar 15, 2015 1:22:59 GMT -5
1986 Disappearance of Kimberly Moreau
Every day, Richard Moreau and his family of Jay, Maine, live with the pain of losing 17-year-old Kimberly Moreau (above), who disappeared in 1986 and has never been found. “My only interest is bringing Kim home,” he said in a recent interview. “I’ll do anything I can. I want to see her put to rest at the cemetery.”
Ever since that fateful Saturday night, May 10, 1986, the Moreaus have worked tirelessly searching for answers to what happened to Kim. It was a night that remains frozen in time and Moreau and his daughter, Karen Dalot, vividly recalled their memories of Kim in an emotional interview at Dalot’s home. Kim was a cheerleader and participated in gymnastics at Jay High School where she was a junior at the time she disappeared. According to Dalot, her sister liked going to the beach and outdoor activities. “Kim wanted to be a model,” she said. She was an entry in the Miss Maine beauty pageant at the time of her disappearance.
On the night his daughter disappeared, Moreau, who was chairman of the 120 Club, was working with his wife at the VFW in Jay on Jewell Street not far from the family’s home. “We had a big supper and dance,” he remembered. “We came home at 1:30, 20 minutes of 2. We looked in [Kim’s bedroom]. No Kim.” They became concerned, because Kim “was never one to be out like that at that time,” Moreau said. “We went over to the [Jay] Police Station, and they said, ‘You can’t report her missing until 48 hours have gone.’”
That night, according to reports, Kim went into town with her friend, Rhonda Breton, who was a senior at Jay High School. There, they encountered two 25-year-old acquaintances in a white Pontiac Trans Am, Brian Enman and Darren Joudry. Around 11 p.m,. after Darren left to go to work, the car pulled up in front of Kim’s home on Jewell Street and she ran inside and told Karen she was going out for a ride and would be back in an hour. She didn’t take a purse or other belongings with her.
There were rumors that Kim attended a big party where they was a lot of drinking. “We’ve heard stories every which way,” Moreau continued. “I can’t find anybody that absolutely says she was there. The one that could have told us – and she’s dead – is her girlfriend, Rhonda Breton.”
Moreau believes Kim died accidentally, that the people she was with didn’t set out to kill her. Moreau thinks his daughter died not live long after leaving home for the final time. “I would stake my life that within four hours of the time she left home, she was dead,” he added.
The Moreaus asked their other daughters, Karen and Diane, if they knew anything about Kim’s whereabouts. When she had been missing 48 hours, they returned to the police station. Although the paperwork went to Farmington to be processed, somehow, it got lost, Moreau recalled, and wasn’t listed in the database until August 1986. The police wasn’t cooperative, according to Dalot. “The Jay police stopped articles from being in the newspaper. They stopped us from hanging up posters,” she claimed. “No matter what, you can solve it, but I want her body, I want her to have a final resting place,” Dalot added. Kim has a headstone beside her mother, Patricia, who died of breast cancer in 1988. “My mother never gave up,” Dalot added.
She and her father haven’t given up either. Both say they are not only advocating for Kim, but for all the families in Maine who have had a loved one go missing. “Ask questions and advocate. That’s why the cold case squad is so important,” Dalot insisted. “Every family deserves closure. Kudos to the many men and women who’ve helped. She’s not home yet. Don’t stop looking.”
“We’re living with the pain of this thing every day,” Moreau added. “We’ve got people out there who could end it. I’d like the people with this information to live in our shoes for not even a full day, but half a day. There’s definitely some people who know where she is now. Just pick up a phone and call us. Use a pay phone. Give me specific directions to get to her body.”
Breakup. Kimberly Moreau and Mike Staples (who also lived in Jay) were high school sweethearts. Mike gave Kim his class ring, engraved “Mike Staples” and “Mike ’87” and the two planned to attend the junior prom together on Saturday, May 11, 1986.
Jay is a western Maine town with a population of less than 5,000. Many residents of this predominantly blue collar community work at one of the two paper mills, International Paper’s Androscoggin Mill and the Wasau Paper Mill. Jay’s website boasts that while the town’s roots are entwined with the industrial revolution, the feel of the town is rural and small-town, making it an ideal place to live, work and raise a family. There are exceptions to the idyllic experience, of course – and Kimberly’s disappearance is among them. Jay’s official murder rate is zero and its missing persons list consists of one name: Kimberly Moreau.
The day before the prom, Mike and Kim argued and Kim canceled their prom date. The following night, Kim spent time with various friends. Instead of dressing up and spending Saturday evening dancing with Mike as planned, she donned blue jeans, a white short-sleeved blouse and white high-top sneakers and headed into town with Rhonda Breton, who later told police Kim was still upset over her fight with Mike and asked to be dropped off a half-mile from her house at 3:45 a.m., saying she’d walk the rest of the way home. Brian claimed he dropped her off at Jewell Street and this was the last time he saw her. Her father says this is not believable because it was cold that night and Kimberly was afraid of the dark. Whatever happened, the teenager was never seen or heard from again.
Delayed investigation. Police initially considered Kimberly a runaway. She wasn’t classified as a missing person until four months later when police launched an all-out investigation. Eventually, officers searched party locations where Enman and Joudry were believed to hang out. They searched abandoned wells and quarries, rivers and woods and followed leads. One popular hangout, Meadowview, was searched multiple times to no avail. Dalot said Kim didn’t typically hang out at Meadowview, but the two men she was with that night did frequent the place. It took 18 years before investigators searched the Pontiac Trans Am which, by that time, had cycled through three owners.
Although her body has never been found, Kimberly is now officially presumed dead – a victim of foul play. After seven years without a sighting or communication, the girl was declared dead in 1993.
With the official investigation suffering from a “too little, too late” malaise, Dick Moreau has conducted his own inquiries, guided by friends with investigative experience. He has interviewed more than 100 people in his determination to find out what happened to his daughter, the Sun Journal reported in 2004. He also is responsible for more than 50,000 posters concerning Kim’s disappearance. Over the years, the determined father has turned up leads, but no answers.
Familiar refrains. Who holds the answer to Kimberly Moreau’s disappearance? And does anyone have a tidbit of information that could set her family free from their 29-year torture of not knowing?
In an interview marking the 25th anniversary of Kimberly’s disappearance in 2011, police mentioned Brian Enman and Darren Joudry when asking anyone with information to come forward, anonymously if necessary, to give the Moreau family some peace. Both men still live in the area. “You know who you are and you know that we have a good idea of who you are,” Maine State Police Lt. Brian McDonough said regarding the person who can provide information concerning what happened to Kim.
Maine State Police Detective Jeffrey Love expressed a similar sentiment a year later while speaking with WABI TV. “We know who she was with, we’ve talked to those people, and we feel as though they do have some more information that would help us,” he said.
Investigator’s inability to pierce group silence is a common thread among some of Maine’s more notorious unsolved missing persons and homicide cases. In 1995, a baby named Aisha Dixon was beaten to death in her home where there were three adults. “All three of those adults are still suspects,” Bangor police Sgt. Ward Gagner said a year later. Twenty years later, Bangor police Sgt. Tim Cotton told the Bangor Daily News: “It’s a case where somebody needs to talk to us. It’s very frustrating … to have a grasp of what you believe happened. You can’t always confirm.”
The police posture is much the same in the case of 20-month-old Ayla Reynolds, reported missing from Waterville by her father, Justin DiPietro, on December 16, 2011. Maine State Police repeatedly said the three individuals – DiPietro, his sister Elisha, and his new black girlfriend Courtney Roberts – in the home with Ayla know more than they’ve told police and have not been truthful, but despite the baby’s blood being discovered at various locations in the house, there have been no arrests and few outward signs of progress in the investigation as it begins its fourth year.
Search for answers. Because so much time has elapsed, potential sources of information about Kim Moreau have been lost. Rhonda Breton graduated the year Kimberly disappeared and moved to California two years later. She died in a hit-and-run incident in 2009, so any unreported knowledge she may have had went to the grave with her.
Besides Enman and Joudry – the last known to have seen Kim – police have set their sights on others who might have information concerning Kim’s fate. Calvin Tidswell owned an arcade next to the high school back in 1986. He knew many of the local teens from the arcade and according to Dalot, was friends with Mike Staples. In a 2004 Sun Journal article, Moreau family friend Barry Romano described Tidswell as “a control freak,” who controlled the teens he befriended, and said Kimberly and her friends may have visited him between the time of her argument with Staples and her disappearance. Tidswell has an extensive criminal record, having spent 12 years in the penitentiary on drug charges. He also has been convicted of involuntary manslaughter and unlawful possession of firearms. Kimberly’s father was so convinced Tidswell had information concerning his daughter that he set up an interview with him in 2004. However, before the interview took place, Tidswell, then on parole after serving a12-year sentence, was jailed for violating his probation by selling cocaine. On the day in 2004 when Tidswell was arrested for the probation violation in an undercover sting, he was quoted in a Sun Journal feature on ex-cons saying, “I’d rather starve than hustle drugs again.” The newspaper later acknowledged it had been snowed.
Another potential suspect is serial killer Lewis Lent. Police have said Lent, who was convicted of murder in nearby Massachusetts, is not high on their suspect list, but hasn’t been crossed off the list either. When Lent confessed to killing Sara Anne Wood of New York and James Bernardo of Pittsfield, Mass., he told investigators he attacked an unidentified child in Maine. He did not specify whether the child was from Maine, nor did he indicate the attack was fatal. The only child to go missing in Maine during the relevant time period was Kimberly Moreau. Lent was investigated for possible involvement in murders from New England to Florida, the Boston Globe noted. He blamed demons that allegedly possessed his alter ego for the killings he admitted.
Sources: Barry Matulaitis, The Lewiston Sun Journal, March 13, 2015, and United for Ayla, February 21, 2015.
