Unsolved Murder at the Bangor House Hotel

Unsolved 1965 murder at prestigious Bangor House, one of state's cold cases

BANGOR, Maine – The strangulation slaying and molestation of a chambermaid at a premier downtown hotel 49 years ago, sent shockwaves through the community and her family, and led to speculation that her death was tied to the unsolved sex murders of the infamous Boston Strangler.

The way the unknown killer used her nylons to strangle Effie MacDonald (above), 54, at the prestigious Bangor House is how investigators, including two Massachusetts detectives assigned to the “strangler squad,” determined her death was not related to the 13 still unsolved deaths in the Boston area. The last Boston Strangler murder was recorded January 4, 1964, and MacDonald was killed on March 18, 1965. “In most of the Boston slayings … nylon stockings were tightly knotted around the victim’s necks,” a March 22, 1965, Bangor Daily News article reported. “In the Bangor murder, the stocking was wrapped tightly four times around the woman’s neck, but was not tied.” The two Boston detectives left Bangor shortly after determining the murder cases were not connected.

Tuesday marks the 49th anniversary of the “Bangor House Strangling,” as headlines at the time referred to the case, and even though nearly five decades have passed, MacDonald’s family has never been able to truly heal because the case remains unsolved. MacDonald arrived for work the morning of Thursday, March 18 at 9 a.m. and her partially-clothed, badly beaten body was discovered at 2:45 p.m. on the floor of an unoccupied room on the third floor. She was last seen alive around 12:30.

The weeks following the murder, Bangor residents – particularly women – were in a state of paranoia, created in part by the actions of pranksters. For several days after MacDonald’s murder, a man with a gruff voice would telephone women at midnight and threaten to kill them. On March 24, 1965, police received more than 200 calls within a two-hour period concerning an alleged attack on a 16-year-old girl at the newly-opened Bangor High School. The student was confronted by an unidentified man in the girls’ restroom and although there was no assault, the girl was so frightened she required treatment for shock.

The month of March ended and there were still no leads in the MacDonald case, but in May, police received a report that the woman had been observed talking to a man about an hour before her body was found. The two were said to have been standing near the room where her body was discovered. Police questioned approximately 30 men, but were unable to place any of them at the scene of the crime.

At the time of her death, Effie MacDonald had been divorced for nine years and lived alone in a room at 3 Boynton Street, but she had close family ties in the area. “I think about her all the time,” Avis Mower, Effie’s younger sister, said Saturday. The Bangor resident said after all this time, she doesn’t think her sister’s death will ever be solved. Cold cases like MacDonald’s – one of approximately 120 unsolved homicides, suspicious death and missing person cases in Maine over the last 50 years – need to be reviewed by a fresh set of eyes, which is why the state’s attorney general hired former drug prosecutor Lara Nomani in 2007 to start reviewing the state’s unsolved homicides.

Nine cold cases have been solved in the last seven years, and funding for LD 1734, An Act to Create a Cold Case Homicide Unit in the Department of the Attorney General, would provide Nomani with additional technical help. “We’re asking for two detectives and a forensic chemist, but even if we had one detective or one forensic chemist we would be able to provide focus on the cold cases and give them the attention they deserve,” Assistant Attorney General William Stokes, head of the criminal division in the Maine attorney general’s office, said Saturday by phone. Rep. Steve Stanley, D-Medway, who crafted the bill in October originally to help the family of East Millinocket’s Joyce McLain, a 16-year-old murdered in August 1980, testified at the bill’s public hearing before the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee last month, as did members of the Maine chapter of Parents of Murdered Children. “The judiciary committee was very supportive and now the question is: Can the appropriations committee find the money to make this a reality,” Stokes added.

A 2001 effort to create a cold case squad died because of lack of funding. The Legislature would have to allocate about $500,000 for the first year and $424,000 annually thereafter to fund the cold case squad.

The Bangor House Hotel. Although its finest days have long since passed, the Bangor House (above) remains an imposing presence at the corner of Main and Union streets in downtown Bangor. Built between 1833 and 1835, the building is perhaps the only remaining business district structure from its early days. It escaped the Great Fire of 1911, which decimated downtown Bangor and destroyed East Side neighborhoods. It also escaped the Urban Renewal movement that overtook the business district in the 1960s. Modeled after the Tremont House in Boston and designed by Charles Bryant, the Bangor House was one of the nation's great palace hotels for more than 100 years. In fact, it has stood longer than the Tremont and its cousins that once dotted the country; the Tremont was demolished in 1895.

Guests at Bangor House included Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, Howard Taft, Arthur McKinley and Benjamin Harrison. Also, entertainers and sports figures Jack Benny, John Phillip Sousa, Gene Autry, Rudy Vallee, Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, Duke Ellington, Ben Ames Williams, Tommy Dorsey and Ted Williams have all spent nights at the house during their visits to the Queen City.

With the lumber industry booming and the population increasing quickly in the first quarter century of the 1800s, Bangor’s leaders had visions of the Queen City’s challenging Boston as the industrial and shipping center of New England. To put Bangor in position to stake a claim to becoming the unofficial capital of New England, 42 businessmen joined forces to develop a palace hotel. The Bangor House Proprietary, established Feb. 26, 1833, consisted of such notables in Bangor history as Thomas A. Hill, George Pickering, Waldo T. Peirce, Richard Treat, Henry Call and Rufus Dwinel.

Although construction didn’t end until 1835, the hotel opened on Christmas evening in 1834 under the management of Martin S. Wood of Providence, Rhode Island. When it opened, the building looked much different from its appearance today. It had 3½ stories, with 112 feet of frontage on Main Street and 92-foot wings. The first floor had a spacious reception hall, a bar, gentlemen’s parlor, ladies’ drawing room, ladies’ dining room, a smoking room, a reading room and a 50-foot-by-27-foot dining room. The second floor featured a large ballroom that could seat 200 for dining.

As cities expanded outward with shopping centers and strip malls, and motor vehicles became more common, downtown hotels throughout the country found business slowing down in the 1960s and 1970s. Visitors no longer needed to walk to shops and offices. As a result, the Bangor House fell victim to the ubiquitous automobile. In 1977, owner Abraham Shapiro, who had bought the hotel in 1973, decided to sell the building to a Portland developer, State Street Management Co., that wanted to convert the building into an apartment complex for low-income elderly. “This is probably the best way to preserve the building,” Shapiro told the Bangor Daily as workers carried out furniture and equipment in January 1978. “The new owners will tear down some of the newer additions, take off the top floor and rebuild the roof to its original style. When they get through, it’ll look pretty much like it did when it was first built.”

On March 28 that year, demolition crews razed the building’s wooden additions that brick additions would replace. Then, in July, a previously unknown ballroom was discovered on the third floor. At 25 feet wide and 60 feet long, with a balcony believed to have been for a band, the ballroom was identical to the one on the second floor. Workers found the structure’s architecture confusing and nonsensical in places. Throughout the years, the building had endured numerous fires, but repairs were haphazard. Some trusses never reached the building’s outer walls, prompting the project manager of the 1978 renovation crew to wonder why parts of the building had never collapsed. “Sometimes I wish Charles G. Bryant would come back just long enough so I could ask him why he built this place on so many levels,” the manager, Andy Voikos, told the Bangor Daily News.

Crews gutted the building and rebuilt the interior, covering the hotel’s fireplaces that were in nearly every room. When they finished, the building had 120 apartments. A five-story atrium off the main entrance, topped by a skylight, greeted visitors. Tenants began moving in July 31, 1979.