Town note
Lumbermen and trappers set up the first camps in the 1810s, and the first settlers arrived in the 1820s.
about 0:07:23The story
Caribou, Maine, is the most north-eastern city in the United States, a potato-shipping town in Aroostook County about three hours from Bangor. His birth parents, his father said, had abused him considerably, and for a long time after the adoption the boy would speak only in a whisper.
Gary Nadeau was sixteen and in the eighth grade. He was a stoner who hung around with a er crowd, including Carl Bishop, who was about to turn fifteen.
On 15 September 1978 they carried out the plan. Gary was picked up, driven around, and let out on Langley Road on the pretext that a six-pack of beer was hidden under a tree. Gary said he had not known what he was signing.
He punched him until his jaw and nose broke, kicked him in the face, and went on kicking him after he lost consciousness. He fetched a shovel from the car and began to dig a grave. He put the boy in the hole and covered him with a thin layer of soil, not enough to hide him properly.
The autopsy found lacerations of the scalp, fractures of the skull, a subdural haemorrhage, stab wounds of the chest and contusions of the trunk and extremities. One stab wound had gone through the right lung and the left lobe of the liver to a depth of about ten inches.
They were covered in mud and blood. Another heard him say he had killed and disposed of Gary and had beaten him to death before burying him. A third heard him boast of beating, burying and stabbing him with the sword that usually hung on the wall. Daniel St James heard him say on the porch that he had taken care of Gary and that if anyone told, he would do the same to them. At least six people heard him.
Four or five days later Ruth Nadeau, Gary's mother, reported him missing to the Caribou police. James gives the date as 18 or 19 October. His father visited and urged him to tell the truth, including about the boy who was supposed to testify against him. He said she had decided the boy had to die 'to save us'. He took the police and his father to the burial site in a remote area called Township 14 Range 5, which he had chosen because he knew the logging operations there meant no cutting for three years.
She told Porter, 'I guess I knew Gary was going to be killed, but it just didn't register.' Asked later whether she had got out of the car, she said, 'I don't want to know if I hurt the boy. He was only a little boy.'
James doubted the ten-inch detail, since the sword was three feet long and the newspapers all reported a ten-inch wound.
The trials were moved to Somerset County.
The judge said the strongest evidence against her was that of being an accomplice, and that he would not impose life; he gave her the mandatory minimum of twenty-five years. She was sent to the women's correctional facility in South Windham.
Ruth Nadeau sued the city of Caribou for $700,000, alleging negligence by the police; the city claimed immunity under the Maine Tort Claims Act. She had seven children between eleven and twenty, had run out of fuel for a month at Christmas, and one of her daughters had been hospitalised because of the cold. About two weeks later the Bedrock Granite Corporation of Bar Harbor offered a headstone and a footstone, and she received about $53 and many letters from readers.
The board delayed its decision. Ruth Nadeau opposed every application, wearing a shirt that said Justice for Gary. 'My boy was killed for ten dollars worth of drugs and a ten dollar witness fee,' she said.