Town note
The town was first named New Madberry, after Madberry in the UK.
about 0:05:49The story
In the far east of New Hampshire, close to the Maine border and inside the White Mountains, sits Jackson, a town of 998 people in Carroll County. Malcolm Jennings, known as Mal, and his wife Elizabeth, known as Betty, had run the Dana Place Inn in Pinkham Notch since 1960. Their son Christopher was born in 1961 and their daughter Page in 1964. Page was a tall, athletic honour student and a champion javelin thrower. He was still married to Debbie Alderfer. Page was twenty. Late in 1983 the couple moved to a duplex at Palm Harbor, Texas, near Rockport, where Page got a job as a sports writer on the Rockport Pilot. The couple moved to Florida, where Page worked at the Stacks Restaurant inside a Holiday Inn. On January 11, 1985, Christopher told them both to leave. They took a room at the Gator Court Motel, and Page went back to collect her half of the apartment deposit. On January 12 he booked a room at an inn in Brattleboro, and the following night he checked into the Bridgeport Motor Inn in Connecticut. On January 13 he telephoned Christopher and claimed that he and Page were on honeymoon in Miami. On January 14 or 15 he pawned more of her jewellery in Portland, Maine. On January 15, 1985, a fire broke out in the caretaker's cottage at the Dana Place Inn. Firefighters found Mal and Betty Jennings in separate bedrooms, bound and gagged with nylon rope, their throats slashed and their bodies repeatedly stabbed. The cottage was not the inn itself but the smaller building where they stayed. The town was terrified. Richard 'Dick' Patch, who owned Patches Gun Shop, said residents talked of nothing else and that he was selling a great deal of ammunition. He said that he and Page had made all their arrangements and were ready to do what Page thought was the only way they could be together for all time. He described their love since their eyes first met in Alaska, complained of her family's meddling, and said Page had asked him to burn the New Hampshire home so that no mementoes were left. He described putting a chokehold on Page, releasing her when she began to move, then holding her again until she stopped breathing; when she twitched he hit her with a large stone. He said he would rope himself down before using a shotgun, then set the fire. On January 28, 1985, the Alachua County sheriff's office received a call about a suspicious car in a field off State Road 236 and 93 at High Springs, outside Gainesville. Sergeant Danny Brown found an abandoned blue Fiat with the keys in the ignition, neatly folded men's and women's clothing behind the seat, and an envelope on the dashboard addressed to the Gainesville police homicide bureau. The letter inside said that near the car was a burned shack containing the remains of two people. About a hundred feet away, in a clearing at the edge of a cornfield, deputies found the burned structure and two skeletons, one larger and one smaller, reduced mostly to fragments and dust. There were two melted one-gallon fuel cans, a melted shotgun, a sprayer and more than ten thousand bone fragments. Dr William Maples, a forensic anthropologist, reconstructed the remains. Florida concluded in 1987 that the smaller skeleton was Page's, and that the male had died of a shotgun wound to the head. Christopher Jennings sold the Dana Place Inn the next year. Page and her parents appear to be buried in the Kearsarge Cemetery in North Conway, New Hampshire.