Chapter Four
Fundamental to the entire investigation, as it was for any investigation of this type, was for the detectives to come to know the missing woman, Amy St. Laurent. It would be through their understanding of who she was and what was characteristic behavior for her that they could accurately assess and interpret the truthfulness and value of the information they received. They started by talking to the people who knew her best—her parents, stepparents, her sister, friends, and her supervisors and coworkers at Pratt & Whitney.
They had started with some basics. They had her photograph and physical description. Her face stared at them from lampposts and store windows all over town: A pretty, smiling woman with long, reddish blond hair. They knew that she was five foot five and a slender 120 pounds. She had recently had professional photographs taken and was thinking about putting together a modeling portfolio. They knew that the night she disappeared, she was wearing jeans and sneakers and a gray sweatshirt with the Pratt & Whitney logo on the front, her hair caught back with a scrunchie.
They knew the facts that had triggered their investigative instincts: She was close to her family, especially her mother and her younger sister, Julie, and wouldn't go for days without contact. Her father, Dennis, and his girlfriend, Kathy, lived right around the corner from St. Laurent's apartment in South Berwick. She saw him frequently and worked with Kathy. She was a reliable and responsible employee who would not willingly miss work. She was a devoted pet owner who was crazy about her cat, Alex, and would go to great lengths to ensure that he was never neglected.
Like painters working with a paint-by-numbers canvas, the detectives would gather more and more information about this young woman who, they were increasingly certain, had been the victim of a violent crime.
A great deal of their initial information came from Amy St. Laurent's mother, Diane Jenkins. She created a strong and positive image of her daughter in the minds of the detectives, supplying pictures, background, and stories that illuminated Amy's character. A graceful, thoughtful, attractive, and well-spoken woman, Diane Jenkins provided a powerful visual image for the media when she appeared at press conferences with Chief Chitwood and appealed for help in finding her missing child, reminding people that this could happen to anyone's daughter. Her tragic eyes and trembling courage illuminated for the public something central about the case: that a sudden event like Amy's disappearance exposes everyone's vulnerability.
Valuable as Diane Jenkins's assistance was, the detectives needed to pursue the other traditional avenues for developing a profile of the victim. It is sometimes shocking to realize how little privacy crime victims have. In many crimes, detectives have to scrutinize the victim to determine whether she truly is a victim and whether there has actually been a crime. In the case of a homicide—and from day one, the police proceeded as though this might be one—the perpetrator robs the victim not only of life but also of privacy.
In developing their profile of Amy St. Laurent, detectives would learn about her education. Her work habits. Her relationship history, including her sex life. They would collect information about her lifestyle, including drinking habits and possible drug use. They would talk with her employers and coworkers to form a picture of her as an employee. They would ask questions about her personality, drawing a sense of her from family, friends, and neighbors. They would obtain her medical and dental records. Check her driving record.
Detectives would comb through her past and present, looking for any aggrieved boyfriends or ex-boyfriends, anyone at her workplace who might have shown a special interest in her, any history of arguments or domestic violence, anyone with an obsessive crush, any enemies Amy might have made.
As the inquiry expanded to include a closer look at Amy St. Laurent, her home, her family, and her coworkers, the number of key players on the investigative side also expanded. From the moment Danny Young had received a phone call about the missing South Berwick woman, the Portland detectives had anticipated that another complication would soon arise—the jurisdictional challenges of which police agencies would be involved in conducting the investigation and the question of who would be in charge.
Amy St. Laurent was last seen alive in Portland, but that didn't necessarily make Portland the site of the crime. Her home was forty miles away in South Berwick. Her house and car needed to be searched, along with the area around her house. With no definitive crime scene or confirmation of any actual crime, police would need to spread a wide net. If someone—Rubright, Gorman, or someone not yet identified—took St. Laurent in a car, she could be anywhere.
Maine is a largely rural state. Outside the larger cities and towns, the public safety functions are performed by county sheriffs’ departments and the state police. Except in Bangor and Portland, which are authorized by the attorney general's office to conduct their own investigations, the Maine State Police (MSP) handle all homicide investigations.
Police organizations often need to work together to solve crimes, but police are also very territorial and wary about sharing authority, control, and sensitive information. Even in a case like this, where everyone wanted to cooperate, cooperation could be extremely complicated. Different law enforcement organizations participating in the search for Amy St. Laurent would have different command structures and different investigative approaches, different systems for keeping records and writing reports, and different protocols and SOPs for sharing that information. Even their radios couldn't automatically talk to each other.
There were also the natural tensions between police agencies. The edgy rivalry between local police departments and the state police begins at the academy level. For many years, all police officers in Maine trained together at the Maine Police Academy except state police, who trained at their own facility. Their facility had a longer training course, and right from the start there was an assumption that longer must be better. Although both state and local police now train together for part of the time, the traditional sense of inferiority/superiority lingers, often exacerbated by the fact that in most jurisdictions, when the state police arrive, they come to take over.
There was also the practical reality. No cop wanted to put his heart and soul into an investigation that might be jerked out from under him tomorrow, and the best homicide detectives absolutely do put their hearts and souls into their work.
For now, Joyce and Young were cool with the need for cooperation. They could work out the details later. Right now, they had a missing woman, a worried family and friends, and a community on alert. They had one set of priorities, and only one. To find Amy St. Laurent as quickly as possible and, if she had indeed been the victim of foul play, to identify and arrest the person responsible.
The state police arrived in the form of Detective Sergeant Matthew Stewart, Sergeant Joyce's counterpart from MSP Criminal Investigation Division I, which covers most of southern Maine, including Amy St. Laurent's hometown of South Berwick. Although they were both admitted control freaks and extremely territorial, Stewart and Joyce could hardly have been more different.
Despite hair so closely cropped that its color is undiscernible, Sergeant Stewart, with his smart suits, gold-rimmed glasses, and shiny shoes, looks more like a banker or a lawyer than a cop. Although he is not the tall, hulking presence many state troopers are, Stewart has plenty of that innate, if difficult to describe, quality the police call “command presence.” His demeanor is reserved and taciturn, but when he chooses to be, Sergeant Stewart is extremely charming.
Because his job frequently thrusts him in front of the media, and because cops, particularly detectives, are deeply cautious about the careless word or inadvertent slip, Stewart has become an expert wordsmith. He likes to weigh his words before he speaks, and the sentences he finally parts with are masterpieces of verbal construction. He says he has had to acquire the skill of saying something without really saying anything when speaking to the media.
Recognizing that there was much to be done in and around St. Laure
nt's residence in South Berwick, Portland police cautiously welcomed Stewart's offer to take over part of the investigation. Sergeant Joyce was careful, however, to keep his people involved in any joint efforts to ensure continuity and quick access to new information. After a meeting to update the MSP detectives on the case, it was decided that the state police would concentrate on the South Berwick portion of the investigation. For the first week of the investigation, Sergeant Stewart assigned MSP detective Rick LeClair to work with Danny Young.
MSP detectives, sometimes accompanied by Portland police, conducted forensic searches of Amy St. Laurent's apartment as well as searches of the surrounding area. At that time, police did not know where or under what circumstances she had gone missing. It did not appear that she had made it back home, but until they could rule out that possibility, they had to treat the apartment as a potential crime scene.
On Saturday, when St. Laurent had been missing for a week, her mother, Diane Jenkins, asked if she could go to Amy's apartment to retrieve some personal items. The lock had been changed to control access, and the condition and contents of the house had been documented, photographed and examined, but the police were not yet ready to release the apartment. Although he was supposed to be off that day, Sergeant Stewart agreed to meet Diane Jenkins there. It was the first time he had met Amy St. Laurent's mother.
What followed was an excruciating experience for everyone. Sergeant Stewart, a meticulous and cautious man colleagues describe as the kind of detective who is first to a crime scene and last to leave, was deeply troubled by the dilemma posed by Diane Jenkins's presence, torn between his duty to preserve the scene, because any item might have evidentiary value, and compassion for a desperate mother's desire to touch her daughter's possessions.
The dilemma was vividly played out as Amy's mother went from room to room, reaching out to touch clothes, jewelry, and other items in order to “connect” with Amy, wanting to feel and sometimes take away many of her daughter's things while Sergeant Stewart felt he had to dissuade her from doing that. At one point, Diane Jenkins picked up her daughter's jacket, buried her face in it, and said, “It smells like her.”
As they left the apartment, Jenkins asked if anyone had checked the crawl space under the duplex to see if Amy might be there. Stewart assured her that the space had been checked during an earlier search, but recognizing from her forlorn and desperate look that she needed to put that possibility to rest, he crawled underneath with a flashlight.
During searches of the apartment, police carried away Amy St. Laurent's computer and her personal correspondence. Her telephone answering machine. They even collected the bloody tissues from the bathroom wastebasket. Later they would read her letters and her diary, a slender volume designated as the diary of Amy Elizabeth St. Laurent, which charted her struggles to find herself after her breakup with longtime boyfriend Richard Sparrow. Detectives would listen to her phone messages and read the e-mail on her computer. They would contact her correspondents and her callers, checking names, relationships, and stories.
Detectives examined the clothes in Amy's closet, including the pockets. Looked through her dresser drawers. They would check her phone records to see whom she'd been calling. Learn about her spending habits from bank statements and credit card bills.
To an outsider, it sounds terribly intrusive. After all, if something had happened to Amy St. Laurent, she was the one on whose behalf the police were working. But in a potential homicide case the detective stands in the shoes of the victim and becomes her earthly representative. As Vernon Geberth says, “Many times the detective ends up learning more about the deceased than the victim knew about him or herself.”1
They learned that Amy St. Laurent had spent her earliest years in New Hampshire with her parents, Diane and Dennis St. Laurent. When the marriage broke up, Amy lived briefly with her father, then went to live with her mother. Her mother subsequently married a man named Don Jenkins, and Amy and her younger sister, Julie, lived with them. They moved to South Portland in 1989. She attended South Portland High School. Although she was an honors student, she found high school unchallenging and, perhaps because she feared it would be more of the same, opted not to attend college.
Later, Amy became involved with Richard Sparrow. Amy and Sparrow lived together in various places for about five years, most recently in the apartment in South Berwick. At one point they became engaged, but the engagement was later broken. At the time Amy disappeared, their relationship had been over for several months and they remained close friends.
Part of the reason for the breakup was Amy's feeling that she was too young to settle down. Although she longed for a home and children, she'd always been involved in a relationship and wanted time to find herself before settling into something permanent. She and Sparrow felt that they had grown apart; she had become more career oriented and focused on that goal.
She had long harbored a secret crush on a man named Jason Kolias, whom she had met in high school when they both worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts. His wife, who had been a good friend of hers, had died, leaving him with a small son, Jacob, of whom Amy was very fond. It had been on a trip to Florida to visit Jason and Jacob, a few weeks earlier, that Amy had met Jason's neighbor Eric Rubright.
Like many pretty girls in their midtwenties, Amy longed to be taken more seriously for her intelligence and her skills. She was paying more attention to her wardrobe, learning to dress more professionally. She was excited about the challenges and responsibilities of her job. She was saving money toward buying a house where she hoped to live someday with a husband and children. She exercised regularly and did yoga to help her manage stress.
Amy had occasionally smoked pot and was a social drinker. Friends described her as spontaneous but not impulsive. A bouncer in the Old Port who had known Amy since high school described her as the type of girl who could take care of herself. Someone who wouldn't impulsively go off with a stranger. She was careful. She was sensible. She was responsible. She had too much self-respect to take foolish chances. She carried Mace in her purse. She was also good hearted and generous and hated to hurt people's feelings, and she was used to viewing the world, and men, from within the safety of an established relationship.
Although much of the picture they built of her came from other sources, the detectives got closest to Amy through her own words. On the day she broke up with Richard Sparrow, Amy started a diary. She began to chronicle her feelings watching Sparrow's truck disappear after five years together, on a page headed, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
The detectives watched her struggle to adjust to the loneliness of an empty house, yet taking pleasure in the way solitude made her more attuned to the world around her. Watching birds at her feeder, working in her flower garden, charting the changes in the summer sky. A summer thunderstorm reminded her of a night when the power went out and Sparrow cooked them noodles over a camp stove. Another storm ended with shimmering rainbows and booming thunder, and Amy mused about nature's way of beauty in destruction, likening it to an “I love Jesus” bumper sticker on a tank.
Reading her diary gave the detectives insight into the caring woman others had described. One day, Amy drove past her high school boyfriend crouched on the lawn beside his baby daughter. She wrote how she was glad she'd moved on but would always retain love for him, how she longed to have a child of her own someday, and wondered how she would feel if Richard Sparrow had a child with someone else.
And there was her diary entry after September 11. After hoping America's response as a nation would not be more hatred and destruction, she asked, “If I died today, what would I regret most? I wish I had noticed all this beauty and tranquility around me before. What the hell was so captivating that I didn't see the spider spinning his web? Didn't hear the crickets every night? Didn't notice all the goodness and beauty around me?”
It might have been her kind heart that got her into trouble on that last Saturday. Detec
tives knew that Amy had met Eric Rubright on a trip to Florida three weeks earlier. Amy spent some time with Rubright, who took her on a motorcycle ride and showed her places on the Gulf around Ft. Myers, including Sanibel Island. When she returned to Maine, Rubright e-mailed, saying he'd never been to Maine and asking if he could visit her when he came to visit relatives in New York. He sent her roses.
Amy was not romantically interested in Eric Rubright, but she appreciated the attention and didn't want to be unkind, so she agreed that he could come. At first, she was casual about the visit, but as the date approached, she expressed reservations to her mother, McElaney, Sparrow, and others. In her diary, she wrote, “And he's pretty aggressive. Have to keep on my toes when he's around. Keep the defenses up.”
Detectives learned from the South Berwick police that they had had a call on the Monday after Amy disappeared from Ruth McElaney, Amy's next-door neighbor and a coworker at Pratt & Whitney. She had contacted the police because Amy's expensive coat was lying on the ground beside her car and had been for some time. McElaney had gotten their landlady to bring the key so that she could enter Amy's apartment and see if everything was all right. Although Amy's backpack was there, Amy clearly wasn't around.
Ruth McElaney told the South Berwick police that she was worried, in part, because Amy had been afraid of a visitor from Florida she'd had over the weekend. On Friday night, McElaney had been turning into their shared driveway when the visitor, Eric Rubright, came peeling out, very angry. Amy, standing outside watching, confided that Rubright was mad because she had dashed his hopes they would have a sexual relationship. McElaney said Amy hadn't wanted Rubright to visit but was too nice to say no. Despite Amy's reservations, after discussions with her friends she had felt she could manage the situation.
The South Berwick officer responding to McElaney's call found a note on Amy's door saying “where the f—— did you go?”
Finding Amy Page 5