1745
The Mousam River runs through the town and provided power for industry; there was a saw mill on it as early as 1745.
about 0:05:02The story
Sanford, Maine, in 1984 was a mill town of about 21,000 people in the southern part of the state, close to the New Hampshire line. He had been born without a hip joint on one side, had several operations and walked with a limp that everybody in the neighbourhood knew. He played drums in the school band, smoked weed, took the odd hit of acid and liked metal. A year earlier he had been put on six months' probation after he and some other boys broke into a car and stole grapes.
He had also become fixated on a fifteen-year-old flute player in the band. He wrote asking her to meet him and she did not come. He wrote again that he would get his rightful due and that she would be repaid. In the days before the murder he put a note in her flute case saying her days were numbered unless she wore a purple top and purple socks and acknowledged him. He stole her shoes and said she would get them back only if she met him alone, warning that if anyone else was involved she would lose not only her clogs but possibly her life.
On Sunday 29 April 1984 the clocks had gone forward that morning, and nobody in Sanford was sure what time it really was. The school band had been hired to play at the opening day of harness racing at Scarborough Downs. He said he was going for a walk to get something to eat.
Giselle Cote was twelve. She liked stickers and Michael Jackson and was a normal, well-liked neighbourhood child. She left her house on Jackson Street at about quarter past five to meet friends near the woods on Pikes Hill and was due home by quarter past six for Sunday dinner. She never arrived. By eight o'clock her parents had called the police, and the search went on all night.
About twelve hours after she left home her body was found on the edge of the Mousam River, half in and half out of the water, lightly covered with leaves and sticks, some five hundred yards from her house. She was wearing a purple blouse. Detectives found white plastic nylon rope tied to a steel reinforcement bar inside a large square section of sewer pipe about a hundred yards from the body, a pipe the local teenagers used to hang out in. Marks on her body showed she had been strangled or hanged, and there were ligature marks on her wrists.
Witnesses came forward. Two people described a slender teenager guiding a twelve-year-old girl in a purple shirt through the woods with his hands on her shoulders. At half past six four people had seen him stooping by a shallow pool near where she was found, saying he was looking for a fishing spot while carrying no gear.
A search of his locker and his room turned up what the police called satanic artwork, the Satanic Bible, and handwritten Satan's prayers and Satan's rules. On the interrogation tapes he admitted being a Satanist and explained hexes and destruction rituals, saying Satanism did not advocate killing anyone. He denied being near the river, then admitted it, and said he had tripped over the body, said "here's a body", kicked at it and told nobody because he did not want to get involved.
The autopsy found sperm cells on her shirt just below the neckline and on a pair of green underwear about twenty-five feet from the body, with no sperm in or near the vaginal area.
By October the town had lost its head. Anonymous death threats were sent to teenage girls, a note on a time card at Oncore Shoe said a woman's sister would be dead by Halloween, and a taxi driver reported a similar threat. A crowd gathered at the abandoned mill on Spruce and High Streets talking of getting the cult they believed was inside, and a fire damaged the upper storeys. The police said it was all kid stuff and rumour.
His defence complained of a gruelling three-hour interrogation. The prosecution said he killed Giselle for the hell of it and as part of a game, that he had tied her wrists to put her at his mercy, and dwelt on the satanic holidays. Afterwards the police chief said there was no evidence of any organised cult.