In 1984, a poem helped solve a 20-year mystery: Who killed Cyrus Everett and Donna Mauch?
The handwritten verses were delivered to Tom Harvey, editor of a weekly newspaper, the Fort Fairfield Review, circulation 2,000. It hinted that the writer — who signed as “The Mystery Guest” — knew something about two 1960s murders.
It read, in part:
“At The end of the day, As the red ball sinks,
I know a man who sits and thinks,
Of The happening a score years ago
The clue to which is buried, where only he knows.
With this note, we tempt you to peek,
Searching in areas you first didn’t seek,
Perchance a answer you may uncover
To Two unsound corpses you did discover.”
Everett, 14, was a newspaper delivery boy. Mauch, 24, a cocktail waitress, was a twice-divorced, single mother. The victims were linked only by their hometown—Fort Fairfield, Me.—and their violent deaths, which came two months apart.
Everett’s mother told police the 5-foot-tall, 100-pound eighth-grader went out to make his paper route collections around 5:30 p.m. on the Saturday after Christmas, 1964. He never returned.
Shortly after he went missing, a psychic gave a lecture in which she said with certainty that the boy was in a swamp, dead, his body under a log. Police, though, believed he was alive. His parents were separated, and it was possible that he had slipped into Canada in search of his father. But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police turned up no trace of him.
Two months after Everett vanished, the small town was rocked by Mauch’s murder, which happened in the apartment she shared with her brother and 3-year-old daughter. Someone had fractured her skull with a blunt instrument. “Certainly, it would look like murder,” the district attorney told reporters.
Suspicion first fell on her ex-husbands. Several men from the nearby U.S. Air Force base also came under scrutiny. But all had alibis.
Authorities arrested and tried her steady boyfriend, suggesting her murder was a crime of passion. But there was no evidence to tie him to her death, and he was quickly acquitted.
Everett remained missing until May when three children playing in a swamp found his body. He was lying on his back, fully clothed, with his arms stretched above his head. The only thing missing was his money pouch, which probably held around $12 from his collection.
A 600-pound tree trunk pinned him down, a scene eerily close to what the psychic had described.
According to a hasty autopsy, the corpse was too badly decomposed to reveal much. Everett’s death was ruled an accident. The theory was that he had been playing on the tree trunk and it rolled over and killed him.
Few people in Fort Fairfield bought this, so the town hired its own private investigator — Otis LaBree, a highly regarded retired state police detective. LaBree pushed to have Everett’s remains exhumed. This time, the autopsy showed that, like Mauch, the boy had died from a skull fracture.
LaBree found clues pointing to a known local troublemaker, Philip Adams, 22. Adams’ father owned the building where Mauch lived, and Philip had an apartment there. That building was also the last stop on Everett’s paper route.
Years earlier, LaBree himself had arrested Adams, who had a history of violence, for sexually assaulting an 8-year-old boy.
The seasoned detective said the cases were most likely linked but local authorities paid no attention to him. The investigation came to a standstill.
Kingdon Harvey, the editor of the Fort Fairfield Review, refused to let the killings and the bungled investigation fade away. For years, he published the victims’ names and birth and death dates on the paper’s front page, with a border of question marks, to remind the community that a killer was still on the loose.
Kingdon retired in 1979, and management of the paper went to his son, Tom. Five more years passed before Tom Harvey received the poem by “The Mystery Guest,” sent from a Connecticut prison. He immediately brought it to the district attorney.
Philip Adams was an inmate at that prison, serving a 10- to 20-year sentence for attacking a 10-year-old boy. Recently he had started to talk about the murders.
In 1965, Adams had married and moved to Connecticut. One of his daughters from that marriage, which ended in divorce, received a handmade card from him on her 16th birthday. It sparked a correspondence, he said in an interview with the Hartford Courant.
He told her about his troubled past, which included starting a fire when he was 6 that killed his mother. He also mentioned the Fort Fairfield murders. He said he had a “beast inside me,” which could be controlled only through his art. In prison, he spent his time making greeting cards and practicing calligraphy.
His daughter, who had not seen him since she was 4, took the information to police. “She betrayed me. She went to the authorities,” he groused, dubbing her “my little Delilah.”
Around the same time, he gave interviews to the Fort Fairfield Review and other papers, and talked about the killings to relatives. At Adams’ trial in January 1985, his brother Wayne told the court that Philip had called him and said, “Donna Mauch, I did it.”
The jury deliberated for three hours and found Adams guilty of Mauch’s murder. He received a life sentence but it was brief, cut short by a fatal heart attack nine months after the trial.
Everett’s murder was never officially solved.
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