Town note
It is the most populous town in Maine, though still a town rather than a city.
about 0:05:35The story
Amy St. Laurent was twenty-five in the autumn of 2001. She grew up in New Hampshire and moved to South Portland, Maine, with her mother and stepfather after her parents divorced, and she graduated from South Portland High School with honours in 1994. Diagnosed with hip dysplasia at thirteen, she had two surgeries and months of physical therapy but recovered. Rather than go to college she moved out and worked at the Dunkin' Donuts on Broadway, then took an overnight shift making jet engine parts at the Pratt & Whitney plant in North Berwick and worked her way into an administrative job. She lived in a two-bedroom flat with her boyfriend Richard 'Dick' Swallow and a big black cat called Alex. The couple split in mid-2001 but stayed friends.
In late September 2001 Amy flew to Florida to visit Jason Calais, a boy she had liked at school, and he introduced her to his neighbour, Eric 'Rub' Wright. Wright was attracted to her; she told him they were only friends. A few weeks later he rang to ask whether he could stay with her for a couple of days on a trip north, and she hesitantly agreed. He rented a car, drove up from Florida and arrived on Thursday, 18 October 2001. The next night she, Wright and Swallow had a lobster dinner at her flat; Swallow said he wanted to meet the man.
On the Saturday they spent the day at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Swallow rang at about 11 a.m. to say he had bought Ozzy Osbourne tickets. That evening she and Wright drove to the Old Port in Portland, arriving about 10.30 p.m., and she rang her mother to invite her for a drink. At the Four Play sports bar she hugged two men she did not introduce, and the same two turned up at the Pavilion dance club on Middle Street at midnight and she danced with them. Wright went to the toilet, came out around one o'clock to find the bar closing and Amy gone, waited outside until 1.20 a.m. and drove back to her flat, assuming she had left without him.
He said he and a friend had taken Amy to a party at an apartment on Brighton Avenue that fizzled out, then driven her back to the Pavilion around 2 a.m. and gone home. Witnesses still outside the club had not seen him drop her off, his roommates said he got in between three and three fifteen, and police records showed he had been stopped at 3 a.m. for driving with his high beams on. His car had just been detailed. A few days after Amy vanished his friend Ryan Campbell reported a stolen 9mm handgun. Wright, meanwhile, submitted to an inconclusive polygraph, slept in his car in her driveway, showered in her flat, left her belongings on the kitchen table and an angry note, and flew home on the Tuesday.
Amy was declared missing on 23 October; her family offered a $35,000 reward two days later. Detectives brought in a psychic, Vicky Monroe, who named Russ, spoke of a blow to the head, a yellow house, a man who had lived in two states and was now with his mother, a large farm, and said Amy would be found before the first snow. It began snowing heavily as she was recovered. The autopsy showed she had been beaten, sexually assaulted and shot in the head, with traces of GHB in her system.
The next day, at a petrol station in Alabama, he pointed a pistol at a man and asked what he was looking at; on 12 December a four-to-six-hour standoff at a house outside Troy, Alabama ended when negotiators traded a cigarette and a can of soda for his two guns.
Amy's mother and family have spent the years since running RAD, a rape aggression defence programme, and two of the detectives wrote a book about the case, Finding Amy.