1826
First settled in 1826 and incorporated in 1836 from a township originally called T-10 R-1 WELS.
about 0:08:17The story
Amity is a small town in Aroostook County in the far north-east of Maine, close enough to the Canadian border that James says you can walk east for five miles and be in Canada. Its population in 2010 was 217. In June of that year it became the scene of what a judge later called the worst massacre in the history of Maine. Jeffrey Ryan, known as Jeff, was 55. He was a disabled Vietnam veteran who had lived in the Amity area for about 12 years and took prescription painkillers for his injuries. He had been married twice. His second wife, Jamie Merrill, divorced him in about 2007, saying she had left after seven years of abuse and sought refuge in shelters for battered women before moving to New Hampshire. Their son Jesse was born in 2000 and was 10 in 2010. He had lived mostly with his father in a mobile home on Route 1 but moved back to his mother's in February 2010. In 2009 Jeff and Tamara began speaking again, and in 2010 he proposed to her and they planned to remarry. Jeff's best friend was Jason DeHaan, 30, who lived about a mile down Route 1 with his wife and three children and visited the trailer almost every day. He grew up in Ellsworth, where he ran track and wrestled and made the honour roll at Ellsworth High School before dropping out in his senior year. He had been removed from his mother's home at 12 because of physical abuse and lived with an uncle until he was 17. In 2008 he worked as a live-in aide on the congressional campaign of John Frary, a former college professor in Farmington, and he later stayed with Reverend Louis Glidden of St Stephen the Martyr Anglican Church in Oakland. Glidden put him out in February 2010 after he took a car without permission and the women at the church became afraid of his mood swings. On Father's Day 2010 Jeff drove to Lewiston, New Hampshire, to collect Jesse for a weekend of fishing. Jamie spoke to her son at about 8.30 on the Tuesday evening. On the Wednesday she rang Jeff's phone all day and got no answer, and Jason DeHaan did not come home either. Jason's brother Jake went to the trailer three times. On the third visit he shone a torch through the window and saw blood everywhere. In a back bedroom they found Jesse, stabbed repeatedly and lying on his hands and knees. Jeff's blue and silver 1989 Ford F-150 was missing. Investigators searching the property found Jeff in a small shed beside the trailer, also stabbed. An hour and a half later they found Jason in a ditch in front of the house, his throat cut so deeply that he was nearly decapitated. The medical examiner said all three died from multiple sharp-force injuries and that all of them appeared to have been trying to get away. A beer bottle and a cigarette butt at the scene gave a full DNA profile of an unknown man. Three days after the bodies were found, a burned pickup was found about 15 miles away on a field road off Bancroft Road in Weston. They found footwear impressions in the path that matched impressions near the burned truck. He said he had gone to the trailer because his father told him Ryan owed him $10,000 from a drug deal. He said he had met Jeff once and had left a beer bottle on the kitchen sink two or three weeks earlier. He denied ever meeting Jason or Jesse and agreed to give DNA and fingerprints. Three days later his fingerprints matched the bottle. The next day his DNA matched the bottle and the cigarette butt. Police interviewed him again, this time reading him his rights several times. He said his plan had been to kill Jeff Ryan and leave no witnesses or evidence, because Jeff was a bad man who hurt people and he thought something good could grow from taking him away. He asked Jeff about some nails, and when Jeff bent over in the woodshed he stabbed him in the back. He then went inside, stabbed Jason on the couch, chased Jesse into the back bedroom and stabbed him in the back as he cowered. He went outside, found Jason gone, chased him down the road and cut his throat two or three times. He said he had not planned to kill Jason or Jesse but did not want to get caught. The defence called no witnesses. Dr Catherine Thomas said he was out of touch with reality and believed he was ridding the world of a bad man and boosting his resume as an assassin. The state's experts said he had no mental defect, heard no voices and acted methodically afterwards by cleaning the scene, burning his clothes and throwing away the knife. Dr John Lorenz for the defence described a neglected, abused child who had never had counselling.