Finding Amy

by Joseph K. Loughlin

  Like many anchor cities in predominantly rural states, Portland is a city in transition. Once a charming port of old brick storefronts, warehouses, and wharf buildings, thriving department stores and businesses, overwhelmingly white and homogenized, by the midsixties it was hit hard by the decline of small manufacturing. Many of the warehouse buildings near the waterfront were abandoned or became decrepit. In the streets near the projects on Munjoy Hill, disgruntled residents partied and battled and lit bonfires in the streets.

  A few people with vision, seeing what urban revivals had done for other cities, bought buildings and started to restore the Old Port area, streets of fine brick buildings and old warehouses leading down to a working waterfront. Today, the Old Port is a mecca for tourists, who come by car, Amtrak, and off cruise ships and flock to the interesting shops and restaurants. Urban and suburban couples come to enjoy theater and music and the Old Port's fine restaurants.

  At night, it also becomes a destination for another crowd. Young people from as far away as Boston come to enjoy the restaurants, bars, and clubs that line the brick and cobbled streets. Underage teens looking for life beyond the empty streets of their small towns rub elbows with bikers, college students, drug dealers, gangsters, and young professionals. Fights are common. Crowd control is a perennial problem, especially late in the evening as the bars and clubs close, releasing thousands of patrons who are drunk, rowdy, and uninhibited onto the narrow old streets. At closing time, the swarm of bodies on Wharf Street can become so dense in the summer months that uniformed cops find it difficult to see each other when they're only ten to fifteen feet apart.

  The same years that have seen Portland's Old Port revival have also seen the city transformed in other ways. Increasingly, the city has had to deal with sharp rises in two populations that require a lot of police intervention— the homeless and the mentally ill, drawn from other cities, small towns, and rural areas to the shelters, the community service agencies, and cheap rooming houses the city offers. Portland also has seen a rise in drug use, bringing with it the associated drug-related violence, overdoses, and deaths. Heroin is rampant, as is cocaine. In 2001, there were twenty deaths from drug overdoses, along with hundreds of close calls suffered by users who were saved because of the city's fine medical facilities.

  Added to this are the complexities of dealing with new immigrant populations. In particular, Portland has seen an influx of Vietnamese and Cambodians and, more recently, many refugees from Africa and eastern Europe. All these populations have brought added language and cultural difficulties to the usual challenges of policing an urban area.

  The city is served by a 165-person police department headquartered at 109 Middle Street, on the edge of the Old Port area. Each year, Portland police respond to approximately seventy-five thousand calls for service, mostly 911 calls. They are dispatched to over two thousand domestic violence cases and over a hundred death scenes, including suicides, homicides, and drug overdose deaths, as well as to burglaries, rapes, terrible child abuse, and vicious assaults.

  For seventeen years, the department was presided over by Chief Michael Chitwood, a former Philadelphia detective. In Philadelphia, his flamboyant style and controversial record led critics to call him “Dirty Harry.” In Portland, his outspoken style and strong public stands on issues such as concealed weapons permits, children in horrendous home situations where the Department of Human Services wouldn't act, and district attorneys who settled too many cases, earned him the nickname “Media Mike.” Chitwood was a strong and controversial leader in a department recently under fire for alleged police brutality. Despite these controversies, he was very popular with a public who felt he was making the city safer, and he forged good relationships with the media.

  However controversial he might have been on many fronts—an article in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine called him both a smooth operator and a loose cannon1— Chief Chitwood had a passionate concern for crime victims. Throughout his career, his press conferences, often held with victims and their families, helped the media and the public understand the true impact of crime on ordinary people.

  Portland is a microcosm of any large U.S. city, and its troubles are a microcosm of any big city's woes. But even for Portland police, who see stabbings, beatings, child abuse, drug overdoses, pedophiles, rapes, and suicides on a regular basis, a murder is still a big deal. In an average year, there are between twenty-five and thirty murders in the entire state of Maine. A genuine whodunit, as opposed to a domestic murder, a drunken dispute settled by violence, or a drug deal gone bad, is rare. The challenge of solving a murder triggers all the hardwired investigative responses trained into a personal-crimes detective. For the best detectives, it immediately becomes a contest that they must win.

  Police involvement in the Amy St. Laurent case began with one of those informal cop-to-cop phone calls the public rarely hears about. At 7:30 p.m. on Monday, October 22, 2001, Cumberland County deputy sheriff James Estabrook called his friend Danny Young, a Portland police detective, at home, and asked if he could speak about a missing South Berwick woman. The young woman, Amy St. Laurent, was the daughter of a friend of Estabrook's girlfriend. She had gone out on Saturday night to show a visitor from Florida the nightlife in Portland's Old Port district. She never came home.

  Estabrook made his call to the right receptive ear. Danny Young, a tenacious investigator with finely honed cop's instincts and twenty-one years on the job, had a daughter the same age as the missing woman, and her name was Amy. Detective Young himself defines stable and decent. He's married to the high school sweetheart he met at age fifteen and is a devoted father and grandfather. A heavyset man with a comfortable fatherly, engaging manner, Danny Young exudes the kind of warmth and amiability that make him deceptively easy to talk to. But behind that genial exterior is a dedicated homicide detective.

  Young is known for his encyclopedic grasp of the details of a case, as well as an anal-retentive's compulsion for order and filing. Along with his charm, Young has the naturally competitive pit-bull quality of the true detective. He will work tirelessly because he's not going to let the bad guys win, leaving victims and their families to suffer a double set of losses and betrayals.2 Supervisors say Young is the detective they'd want on the case if something happened to one of their family members.

  Estabrook had been lucky to find him at home. Since the events of September 11, Young had been working seven days a week. Along with his detective duties, he was also a bomb investigator. As part of the post-9/11 heightened security, he and his bomb dog, Karla, had been patrolling the Scotia Prince, the ferry that provided service between Portland and Nova Scotia, every evening. He was also regularly called out for patrols at the airport and other locations. The night of Estabrook's call was his first Monday night at home in more than a month. He was half an hour into Monday Night Football when the phone rang.

  Young listened carefully to Estabrook's information about the missing woman and asked some questions. He then followed up with phone calls to the woman's mother, Diane Jenkins, and to the South Berwick police. Good cops are adept at applying their investigative instincts to the facts. Danny Young had spent a lot of years of assessing situations and sorting out facts, and the story he was hearing didn't feel right.

  Normally, when an adult goes missing, it is not an immediate cause for alarm. In any given year, the Portland police get reports of around two hundred missing persons. The reasons people disappear are usually related to drugs, alcohol, financial or relationship problems, mental health issues, or general irresponsibility. Most of those reported missing eventually turn up, often expressing surprise or even annoyance that anyone bothered to worry.3

  It wasn't unusual for an attractive, single, twenty-five-year-old woman to go out on Saturday night and not come home. But it was unusual for this missing woman—Amy St. Laurent, a caring owner who was devoted to her cat— not to return on Sunday or Monday to feed it. Because of the cat, she rarely stayed at her mother's S
outh Portland house late in the evening or overnight. If she did stay overnight somewhere else, she always went home in the morning to check on the cat or arranged for someone else to feed it.

  It was also unusual for this woman to let days go by without a call to her mother or her younger sister, Julie. Amy St. Laurent belonged to the cell phone generation. She was regularly in touch with people by phone and e-mail, and she was close to her mother and her younger sister. She was also close to her father, Dennis, who lived nearby in South Berwick. If she needed help with the cat, or a ride because her car was in the shop, she would give him a call. But Amy St. Laurent hadn't been home or called anyone for two days.

  It was more unusual still for St. Laurent, an ambitious young woman who had worked her way from the third-shift assembly line at the Pratt & Whitney aircraft engine assembly plant to a responsible administrative position, not to show up at work on Monday. Plenty of young adults are haphazard about their jobs, or work only to get the money to go out and party, but St. Laurent was not one of them. When she had to miss a day and knew in advance, she would let someone know. If she was sick, she would always call in or e-mail, but no one at Pratt & Whitney had heard from her.

  Although she had been an honors student in high school, she had chosen not to go to college; perhaps in part to compensate for that, she had taken a very professional approach to her work. She had been employed at P & W for several years, moving from the Portland area to South Berwick, forty miles away, to be closer to her job. She was pleased by her promotion to an administrative assistant position, enjoyed her increasing responsibilities, and was saving to buy a house. There was an important presentation on Tuesday she had to help prepare for, the sort of project she enjoyed, yet she hadn't shown up at work.

  Police investigations are rarely the stuff of high drama seen on TV. Often, it's the small details that tell the story. For Detective Young, who'd seen at least a thousand missing person cases in his career, all those aberrations from St. Laurent's normal routines were significant. Everyone had said the same things about Amy St. Laurent—with respect to her responsibilities, she was regular, she was faithful. She was close to her family and would not behave in a manner that would alarm them. She would not neglect a helpless animal to go off and have fun.

  Detective Young relayed his concerns to his supervisor in the Criminal Investigation Division, Detective Sergeant Tommy Joyce, who was also at home. Joyce, like Young, felt that the sudden changes in St. Laurent's behavior were a cause for concern. Although neither of them was scheduled to work that evening, they decided to drive back into Portland to see what they could do about finding the missing woman. Sergeant Joyce called his lieutenant, Joseph Loughlin, for permission.

  “Ahh … c'mon, Tommy. It's bullshit and you know it.”

  “I'm telling you, Joe … I mean Lieutenant … this is the real deal.”

  Tommy has got my attention now as I prepare my dinner. It's Monday night, October 22, 2001, and it's been a long day. When he calls me “Lieutenant” instead of Joe, I know he's serious, but I'm the boss and I have to worry about the bottom line. “Tom, look. I can't do the overtime. I'm maxed! What's the girl's problem? Drugs? Boyfriend? Finances? Or did she just plain take off for a day?”

  “Okay, Lieutenant. You talk to the mom then and tell her we're not going to look for her daughter that went missing from Portland!”

  We continue with another spirited argument, one of several a week we have about cases and crime scenes. Tom and I have known each other for twenty years, professionally and personally. We can have some intense exchanges.

  “Look, Dan talked to Estabrook, that's how we got it and it really doesn't look right.”

  I give in. I'm still skeptical but Tom and Dan both have good instincts. “Okay, okay. But just you and Dan, Tom. Just you two. See you tomorrow, Tom, and let me know when you find her nursing a hangover and I paid all of this OT for squat as usual with missings!!”

  “Hey, Joe,” Tommy shoots back, “remember—all the actors aren't just in Hollywood.”

  I recognize the quote from Tom's dad, Thomas, Senior, a now deceased Portland police detective from the 1960s. The craft of being a good detective is passed down from the guys who came before us. And Tommy's dad was right. Some of our criminals are really great actors.

  Despite their lieutenant's misgivings, the two detectives, who at that time lived about three hundred yards apart, met and drove back into Portland. At that point, they had the following information: that St. Laurent had called her mother sometime between 10:00 and 10:30 p.m. on Saturday the twentieth, stating that she was on her way to the Old Port area of Portland; that she was traveling in a car driven by Eric Rubright, a man from Florida she had met three weeks previously while visiting a friend in Ft. Myers, Florida; and that Rubright had flown into Portland on Thursday night and rented a car before going to meet St. Laurent.

  Before he left for Portland, Young called the Portland Jetport and asked Melissa Sargent, a Portland officer on duty there, to check car rental agencies to see if Rubright had rented a car at the airport. She called back to report that Rubright had rented a maroon GMC Envoy with an OnStar system. Through the South Berwick Police Department, which was already involved in searching for Ms. St. Laurent, OnStar was contacted. The vehicle was located parked in downtown Portland. Young assigned a patrol unit to watch the car until he could get to Portland and try to locate Mr. Rubright.

  By the time Detective Young got the call on Monday night, St. Laurent's parents, concerned about their inability to reach their daughter on Sunday, had already contacted the South Berwick police. They were so alarmed by her continued absence that her mother, Diane Jenkins; her younger sister, Julie; St. Laurent's ex-boyfriend, Richard Sparrow; and worried friends had spent Monday tacking up posters with her picture, description, and the information that she was missing all around the city.

  Under the dramatic heading MISSING since Saturday night 10/20/01, pictures of blonde, blue-eyed St. Laurent, smiling her vibrant smile, had appeared on posts and poles and in storefronts all over Portland, asking anyone who had seen her to contact her family or the South Berwick police.

  At 10:30 Monday night, Eric Rubright walked up to the police officers waiting by his rental car. He readily identified himself, said he'd just seen a flyer with St. Laurent's picture and the information that she was missing, and had just called the South Berwick police and offered to tell them what he knew about her whereabouts on Saturday night and early Sunday morning. Rubright, who had been drinking, then agreed to come to the Portland Police Department and talk about Amy St. Laurent, rather than driving the forty miles to South Berwick.

  Back at the department, he was interviewed by Sergeant Joyce and Detective Young. Sergeant Joyce, a twenty-two-year veteran of the department, was in charge of the crimes against persons section of the Criminal Investigations Division, as well as supervising the crime lab and evidence technicians. A former evidence tech himself, Joyce was an adept personnel manager but readily admitted that evidence was his first love. Evidence, he would say, just sits there and tells the story. It doesn't lie. Officers who have worked with him describe him as a brilliant and instinctive reader of crime scenes.

  At six foot one, Sergeant Joyce is a lean, spare man who is rarely still. He's got dark, unruly hair and glacial blue eyes. Colleagues tease him about being sartorially stuck in the sixties, but the style suits him. He has an air of being perpetually overworked, which he is, and an abrupt, physical impatience (colleagues call his jerky style of pacing when he wants your attention “parakeeting”), which hides a storyteller's knack and a subtle Irish charm. He is territorial and argumentative and runs at 78 rpm when everyone else is at 33. Even at 3:00 a.m. on a cold February night when his people are up to their asses in crime scenes, he's got a smart remark or quick bit of banter. He functions calmly in the controlled chaos of a detective bureau and thrives on it.

  In a recorded interview, Rubright told Joyce and Young he had met A
my St. Laurent three weeks earlier in Florida through Jason Kolias, a mutual friend she was visiting, and had decided to come to Maine and see St. Laurent, with her permission, when he was coming to New York to visit his grandmother. He told the detectives that Amy St. Laurent had been “a totally cool girl, a totally cool human being,” and he had wanted to see her again.

  He had arrived on Thursday. On Saturday they had gone to Boston to the Museum of Fine Arts. They had had dinner in Boston, and later in the evening they had decided to visit the Old Port section of Portland, driving directly from Boston to Portland without stopping at St. Laurent's house in South Berwick. On the way, St. Laurent had called her mother in South Portland and invited her to join them. Her mother had declined.

  Once in Portland, they had gone first to the Fore Play Sports Bar, where Rubright, who didn't play pool, had drunk beer and St. Laurent had played pool with some men she didn't appear to have known. Another guy had come up, described by Rubright as having dyed blond hair with brown roots, heavily gelled, maybe five foot eight or five foot nine and maybe 160 pounds. This new guy, according to Rubright, “played pool like a shark.” The man had been with a chubbier friend Rubright hadn't paid much attention to.

  St. Laurent had chatted with the men, and the guy with gelled hair had given her his phone number. Later, after Rubright and St. Laurent had stopped at a pizza place where she bought him two slices of pizza, they met up with the men again at the Pavilion, a smart, high-ceiling dance club renovated from an old bank building. Rubright, who didn't dance, again hung around and drank beer in the pulsating noise of the dance club while St. Laurent said she was going to find someone to dance with. He had leaned against the wall and watched as St. Laurent talked and danced with the two men she had met earlier at the Fore Play bar.