1795
Martin Kinsley of Hampton bought the township in 1795 and started selling off lots with the idea of having a town.
about 0:06:30The story
Carmel, Maine, is a small town of 2,828 people in Penobscot County, about twenty minutes from Bangor. On 16 October 1982 Jerolyn Lee Towers, born on 2 December 1947 and raised in Rome, Maine, went bowling at the Pittsfield Bowling Alley with her three children and her mother and stepfather. It was a family reunion: her two younger children had been living with their father and had come to visit. Jerolyn had saved her change in a jar for the outing but forgot the money, so her stepfather drove home to fetch it while the family bowled. She said she would call for a ride. At about one in the morning a vehicle with a loud exhaust pulled into the driveway and switched off its headlights, and her stepfather went to bed assuming she was home. She never came inside.
Her parents put a notice in the local papers, and a man calling himself a psychic, Nathan Small, said her body was in a river in Bingham, trapped by rocks. A plane checked and found nothing. Then an anonymous caller named a man called Gary Hicks. A bartender said he had come in around ten, drunk bottled Miller with Jerolyn, paid for their drinks and left with her. She only remembered him when he returned the next month in the same yellow Steel chainsaw hat.
His family was poor and his father left when he was young, and friends remembered him being cruel to animals as a child. By 1982 he was living with Linda Marquis on his family's property in Etna. When police interviewed him he immediately announced that everyone thought he had murdered his first wife, and that she was alive. He sweated profusely, poured a glass of water over himself and seemed to faint. He denied leaving with Jerolyn, then said he might have walked out at the same time as some girl, and claimed he had sex with an unknown woman in the lounge restroom. He said he stayed until closing and woke at the Etna campgrounds at 4.30, and that he sometimes slept in his car. His car, registered to Linda, had a loud exhaust which had been repaired after 16 October. Asked why his vehicle was seen at two in the morning, he simply stared. Linda came home and threw the police out.
The Etna postmaster described Hicks as strange and said his first wife had disappeared about five years earlier. Jenny Lynn Cyr was born on 6 February 1954 in Danbury, Connecticut. She met Jimmy Hicks on the school bus when she was a freshman and he was three years older. She was pregnant at sixteen, they married, and their daughter Veronica was born in 1970. A son followed in December 1974, after divorce proceedings had begun over Hicks's affairs and his advances toward Jenny's sister Danice. By 1977 they were living at the TNN Trailer Park in Carmel, lot 28, while Hicks commuted a hundred and fifteen miles a day to Woodland. Jenny made cakes and worked as a kitchen helper at a nursing home in Brewer. Then a fifteen-year-old named Susan Matley moved in to look after the children in return for room and board and cigarettes. Susan was a ward of the state of Massachusetts who had run away from a foster home and hitchhiked to Maine.
In July 1977 Hicks made advances on Susan. On 6 July he grabbed her, backed her into the refrigerator, threw her onto a bed and burned her neck with a cigar. On 16 July she told Jenny, and Jenny said one of them would have to move out. On Sunday 17 July Jenny, Jimmy and their son drove to Kenduskeag and agreed that Jimmy would leave by the end of the month. On Monday 18 July he went to work as usual. Jenny visited her sister Danice, left her daughter there and drove to Bangor to buy cake ingredients. She called Linda Ellston and asked her to come along the next day, but Linda could not. That night at two in the morning neighbours heard Jimmy and Jenny arguing around the trailer. Susan came home at four and saw Jenny lying in an odd, scrunched position on the love seat in her blue bathrobe, her hair over her face, while Jimmy sat at the other end watching television and said she was asleep. Susan heard slippers shuffling and the trailer door open, and hid under the covers.
The next day Hicks reported his wife missing and suggested she had run off with a truck driver. Her glasses, purse and blue bathrobe were still in the trailer, though he later claimed the glasses had vanished while he was out. He told people he had seen her at the Gateway with a tall, dark-haired man, that she was staying with friends in Waterville and planned to go to Florida in a Winnebago. He later placed her in Augusta, Newport, New Hampshire and Florida. Her mother Mira said she would never have left her children. A friend, Linda Dunifer, took a call from a woman claiming to be Jenny who asked for her clothes and would not say where she was.
The original investigation was, in the words of a later report, botched. Police accepted that Jenny had left. In late 1982, while Newport police were working on the Jerolyn Towers case, information reached the state police and the Attorney General's criminal division that pointed to foul play in Jenny's disappearance. A girlfriend, Fern, said Hicks had remodelled the trailer and given away the marital mattress, which had an eighteen-inch bloodstain on it. Jenny's medical records showed a history of injuries. It would be the first no-body murder prosecution in Maine's history. Bail was set at $60,000, but he could not raise it.
The prosecutor, Fernand La Rochelle, relied on Susan Matley, on Jenny's sister and parents, on Wayne Ellston and on Linda Dunifer. The defence argued that there was no body, no blood, no weapon and no proof that a death had occurred, and attacked Jenny's character. Hicks took the stand and contradicted Wayne Ellston about the chase through Bangor. The state still would not issue a death certificate, and he refused to sign a statement that Jenny was dead.
In 1994 Hicks was the maintenance supervisor at the Twin City Motel in Brewer when he hired Lynn Ann Willet, a thirty-nine-year-old artist, army veteran and former paramedic. He moved in with her and they worked together through 1995. In 1996 she decided to leave him because of his possessiveness and began moving her belongings to her mother's house in Orrington. On Saturday 25 May neighbours saw Hicks enter their South Main Street apartment alone shortly after noon; they never saw Lynn arrive. On Friday 31 May her locked car was found in a back row at Dysart's truck stop in Hermon. Hicks said she must have run off with a truck driver. Her bank account was never touched and her paycheque was never cashed. By the end of the year he had moved in with an eighteen-year-old chambermaid, Brandy Mayo. They married in November 1998 and moved to Texas after a daughter was taken into foster care and a son was born.
In June 1999 June Elizabeth Moss, sixty-seven, of Lubbock, Texas, hired Hicks to paint her house. On 8 and 9 April 2000 he came back to finish the interior. He pulled a gun, which turned out to be a Daisy CO2 BB gun, took her glasses, ripped out the phones, locked the doors and told her he had killed his second wife and done ten years in Maine. He forced her to hand over $200 and the title to her car and to write a note to her children, then made her drink cherry cough syrup from a thirty-three-ounce bottle. When he checked the bathwater she ran to a neighbour.
He said he strangled her in the apartment, dismembered her at the motel maintenance shop, put her head and hands in a five-gallon bucket of cement dumped in the woods near Houlton, and scattered her torso, arms and legs near Ellsworth Road. He said Lynn was the one who haunted him most. Police found the remains in the Hainesville woods outside Houlton after a local man noticed two buckets.