Finding Amy

by Joseph K. Loughlin

  As the ME's van drove away and the evidence techs were snapping their last pictures, it began to snow.

  It had been a long, grueling, miserable day and it had been as exciting as any the detectives had ever had in their careers. Danny Young said that, for him, finding the body was like getting to set down a hundred-pound weight. Tommy Joyce said, “The feeling you get when you succeed … it's why we do the job.”

  Tired, they stared at the snow, and looked at their watches, and found confirmation for their belief that for that whole day they had received the gift of divine intervention. Someone had sent the wardens, held off the snow, given them the faith and patience and willingness to come out this day and search. If they hadn't found Amy that day, they might not have had another chance to search until spring. And by then, snowpack, wind and rain, and freezing and thawing might have settled the disturbed earth, scattered the pine needles, and erased the shovel marks. Like many buried victims, Amy St. Laurent might never have been found.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On Sunday, the state of Maine awoke to snow on the ground and news headlines proclaiming that a body found in Scarborough was likely that of the missing South Berwick woman, Amy St. Laurent. A relieved public assumed that the job was done, now that Amy had been found, and looked for a quick arrest.

  For the detectives, it was different. The case detectives awoke on Sunday feeling a hundred pounds lighter. They had worked hard to find the missing young woman they had come to think of as “Our Amy,” but there was no time to relax and rest on their laurels. Now that they had a body and a grave site that should yield some information about the crime, and would soon have a cause of death, a new phase of their work had just begun.

  Men who had barely slept were up and off at dawn to attend the autopsy. And the pace didn't let up. It wouldn't be until the following Sunday that Danny Young and Scott Harakles would get to spend some time with their families, after one of the most extraordinary weeks of their careers.

  Sunday morning, December 9. I peek out my window and see the snow on the ground, everything clean and white. Not enough to clean the muddy image of Amy … not enough snow for that. Stumbling around to make coffee, I am thrilled that we found her. I know Dan and Stearns, Scott and Matt are already going to or are at the autopsy. They must be burnt toast, I think, as the smell of my own toast rises in the kitchen.

  I still can't believe we found her. Days like that, you have to believe in divine intervention. And the way we found her … that bastard at least tried to rape her. Maybe we'll know. Maybe we won't. The CSI-watching public has no idea how random forensic evidence can be. I'll bet he strangled her.

  “We will get you!” I shout aloud, startling myself with the sound of my own raspy voice, as the image of Amy in the grave floats before me. I cannot clear my head. Joe! That's not her, Joe. The smell of dirt and decay mixed with cold and pine lingers in my nostrils.

  I shake my head. Why does this image bother me so? I've seen hundreds of dead.

  That's not Amy, I think. Amy is the picture on the flyers. The pretty girl in pearls. I see her as an angel with a pink rose. Clean, floating smiling to heaven, not coated in dirt like a mummy.

  I keep spitting and blowing my nose, trying to clear out the death smell.1 I think back to horrific scenes, the blood smell, the scent of physical matter destroyed. I would come home and throw my clothes off, discarded like a bad skin, and in the morning, putting them in the wash, I would hardly remember the scene, but Amy stays … so strong, so distinct right down to individual pieces of dirt. The tenacity of this image will not leave.

  Later, my pager goes off, and it starts again. It's Tom. I ask how he and Dan are holding up.

  “Joe, they're done with the post and on their way back.”

  “Yes, Tom, yes. How?”

  “Are you ready?” He gives me a beat. “Gunshot to the head.”

  Gunshot! Gunshot! It hangs a moment. God. That bastard. The downside of being taught to imagine it. I think of her fear. A lovely girl who thinks she can handle herself facing a guy with a gun. We've been imagining it all along. Now we'll have the details. Start all the arguments again. Was it Campbell's gun?

  “Listen, Joe, we got a lot to do. I'm going back to 109 with Dan in a few. We gotta keep this tight when you tell the chief and command …”

  I hang up and walk in circles in my living room. A gunshot. That explains the fluid we saw last night. God, poor Amy. Poor Amy. I gaze into the backyard, out to clean snow. A large crow looms in a pine, watching. I see you, deathbird. I see you.

  Before they left the grave site, the medical examiner had scheduled an autopsy for 9:00 a.m. the next morning. Detectives and evidence technicians rose at dawn, gathered their equipment, and trooped up to Augusta, about an hour north, for the sad task of collecting evidence from the body and learning what the autopsy would reveal. For the last seven weeks, they'd been imagining the last day of Amy St. Laurent's life. Now they would get the information that would let them imagine her death.

  The body on the stainless steel autopsy table, still thickly coated with dirt, looked more like a mummy than a person. After seven weeks in the ground, a visual identification wasn't possible. As the body was slowly cleaned, the investigators would get confirmation of what they'd observed the night before. Amy's sweatshirt, shirt, and bra were pushed up above her breasts. Her jeans, shoes, and one sock were missing. Her underpants were rolled down around her ankles.

  With the same concern that had been used for preserving evidence at the exhumation, the clothing and remaining dirt were removed from the body with great care to ensure that any clinging hairs or fibers wouldn't be lost. Body hair, head hair, and fingernails were collected. Then the body was washed so that the skin could be examined.

  Although formal identification would have to wait for DNA results or a comparison to Amy St. Laurent's dental records, there was sufficient information on the body or with it to make the detectives certain that this was Amy. Four details in particular matched information provided by Amy's mother. These were the surgical scars on Amy's hips, the tattoo of jumping dolphins around her ankle, her earrings, and her ring.

  Once the autopsy was under way, detectives began to get more detailed information about the circumstances of Amy's death. They would learn that, prior to her death, Amy had been severely beaten about the head and face. Her skull would show evidence of several blows to the head. One of the bones in her face was broken. Her lip was cut and swollen and one of her teeth was freshly chipped.

  Behind her left ear there was a large hole in her skull, which the medical examiner, Dr. Greenwald, pending the results of further examination, believed to be the result of a gunshot wound. A hole on the right side of the skull was probably the exit wound. Although the medical examiner had more work to do before she could officially state as a cause of death that Amy St. Laurent had been shot, detectives left the autopsy room knowing that their victim had been savagely beaten, quite possibly sexually assaulted, and shot in the head.2

  Later in the day, detectives and evidence technicians would return to the burial site to finish digging out and sifting the soil that had been underneath the body and to take more photographs. Young and Harakles would return several more times to search the area, as well as conducting searches in other areas well known to Gorman, looking for Amy's clothes, Gorman's clothes, Amy's shoes, and the murder weapon. Since they hadn't found blood or a bullet, they surmised that the crime scene might still be somewhere else.

  MSP detectives canvassed the homes in the area, searching for witnesses. Detectives also searched for hunters or fishermen who might have been in the area in October.

  Danny Young returned from the autopsy to find an interesting telephone message. A woman named Mary Young (no relation to Danny) had called from Florida with information regarding the St. Laurent case. Told that he was the primary detective on the case, she had left a message asking him to call her back.

  When Detective Young returned t
he call, he learned that Mary Young was a friend and former neighbor of Gorman's mother, Tammy Westbrook, when Westbrook lived in Delray Beach, Florida, and that Tammy's teenage daughter and hers were close friends.3 Mary Young told him she had recently received a phone call from Tammy Westbrook, her first such call in many months. In that call, a distressed Westbrook described getting a phone call from her son, Russ, in which he'd said he had known all along that Amy St. Laurent was dead.

  Gorman told his mother that it had not been he, but his roommates Kush and Jason, who had left with Amy, while he had never left the apartment except to go across the street for coffee. Sharma and Cook had been gone for several hours, and when they returned, they told Gorman they had killed her. They then asked him where was a good place to hide a body. After they threatened his ex-girlfriend, Jamie, and his family, Gorman directed them to the wooded area near a pond behind his mother's house, where they dumped the body and later went back to bury it.

  It was ironic, after all their efforts to provide him with an alibi, that Gorman should try to explain the presence of Amy's body near his mother's house by blaming Cook and Sharma for the murder. The detectives, hearing Mary Young's information, understood exactly what Gorman was doing. Now that Amy's body had been found, he felt pressured to explain to his family and friends why it had been found where it was.

  Since his departure for Alabama, Gorman's mother had been phoning him repeatedly, giving him details of the news reports and telling him how the police were coming around all the time asking questions about him.

  The pressure on Gorman was cranked up on the Monday after Amy's body was found when David Hench, a reporter for the Portland Press Herald, reiterated even more strongly than in his previous article that police investigators believed they had been given inaccurate information by the last person known to be with St. Laurent, and that he did not drop her off in the Old Port as he'd claimed. On Tuesday, Gorman's name was publicly linked to the investigation when the same newspaper reported that a document filed in the Cumberland County Superior Court identified Jeffrey “Russ” Gorman as a suspect in the case.4 Gorman's mother called his grandparents to warn them that his name was in the paper.

  As the police had expected, down in Alabama, Gorman was starting to unravel. One of his first acts on arriving in Troy was to get himself a little .25 handgun. Shortly before Amy's body was found, he acquired a second one, telling people he needed them for protection or, alternatively, that he had them in case the police came after him.

  He and Sean Littlefield had been staying with his paternal grandmother, Littlefield mostly moping around with little to do while Gorman wore Littlefield's clothes and drove around in Littlefield's car, looking for women to add to his list of conquests. At one point, Gorman might have taken off for Florida with plans to sell some drugs, leaving Littlefield behind in Troy.

  When Russ Gorman's uncle, Danny Gorman, was due to be released from prison, his grandmother told Russ he had to leave because he had a record and she couldn't have someone with a criminal record staying at the house if her son Danny was going to stay there.5 She said that Littlefield was welcome to stay. Russ Gorman and Littlefield went to stay with Erika Walker, a friend of the family.

  Early in the investigation, Gorman had reported to friends that the police were interested in him but that they had no evidence against him. He had also stated that Amy St. Laurent's body would never be found. Following a phone call from his mother, telling him that a body had been found, he went to the local college, Troy State University, and used the Internet to check the stories in Maine papers. Later that day, on December 9, at approximately 2:30 in the afternoon, he called his mother on her cell phone as she was on her way to the Maine Mall.

  In response to her prompting that the stories he'd been telling her didn't add up, and that he should tell her the truth, Gorman said, “Mom, I did it. I killed that girl.” He described walking with Amy by the lake, becoming enraged at something she'd said, and pulling out a gun and shooting her in the head.6 He told his mother that when he was beating and killing Amy, he was seeing her (Tammy's) face, and that she should be glad she wasn't the one he'd killed.

  Following the conversation on December 9, Gorman called his mother and asked her to send him money, which she promptly did.

  Tammy Westbrook, having asked for the truth and gotten some version of it, did not report this conversation to the police. She did, however, call her friend Mary Young again and repeated the conversation to her. She also called an Episcopal priest in Florida, Father Fred Basil, and told him about her son's confession.

  Although no official cause of death had been announced—the medical examiner would not release the information that Amy St. Laurent died from a gunshot wound to the head until March 22, 2002—information linking Gorman and guns continued to come in. Later on Monday, December 10, interviewing Jamie Baillargeon, Gorman's former girlfriend, Young and Harakles learned that Gorman had dropped what she believed was a plastic grip from a gun in her car three days before he left for Alabama. She gave the suspicious part to Young. It turned out not to be part of a gun; however, she also told Young that Gorman had told her he had a gun down in Alabama and that he'd had guns in the past.

  In the same interview, the detectives learned that Gorman had told her the same story he'd told his mother—that he didn't take Amy back to the Pavilion, Kush and Jason did, and that they were gone three hours and returned with blood on their hands to say they'd killed her. She told them Gorman had said that Jason and Kush threatened harm to her (Jamie) and to his family if Gorman didn't tell them about a good place to hide the body, and he suggested they put it out by his “fishing hole.”

  She told them she was really troubled by the idea of a threat to her but also felt that it didn't quite ring true. Gorman was not the type of person to be intimidated by a threat. In that same conversation, Gorman had admitted to her that he had known all along that Amy was dead and where the body was.

  In response to Jamie's shocked expression of how cruel this was to Amy's family—and didn't it bother him?—Gorman had responded that at first he felt bad but now he didn't really care anymore.

  The following day, Detective Young heard from Jamie's mother, Dot, that Gorman had been seen at a party with a 9 mm Glock around the time Amy St. Laurent disappeared. And information from Jamie's current boyfriend was that he had heard that Gorman was looking for someone who wanted to buy a gun.

  While Danny Young and Scott Harakles were interviewing Dot and Jamie Baillargeon, Tommy Joyce and Matt Stewart, along with five or six other Portland and MSP detectives and evidence techs, were executing a warrant Young had obtained to search Gorman's mother's house. Among the things police were looking for were the spade shovel he had borrowed from his stepfather; a firearm, firearm packaging, or ammunition; Amy's missing clothing or her driver's license; bloodstained clothing or clothing with soil or vegetation that might connect it to the grave site; a computer or other writing that might contain the letter Gorman told Brent Plummer he had left when he went to Alabama; and items that might contain Gorman's DNA.

  It was an extremely dynamic scene as personnel arrived and began their search of a dwelling that, while not large, was cluttered and rambling, with small rooms and cubbyholes everywhere. When they first arrived, they found only Gorman's teenage sister, Britney, at home. Soon after that, the phone rang and it was Gorman. After speaking with him briefly, Britney handed Sergeant Stewart the phone, saying, “My brother wants to speak with you.”

  Stewart said hello and asked if the caller was Gorman. Gorman angrily stated that it was, and questioned their right to be there when his mother wasn't home. Stewart told him they had a warrant to search and that his sister was okay. Gorman ordered them to leave. Stewart responded that they would leave when they were finished and asked Gorman if he'd like to talk about things. Gorman snarled, “Fuck you, come get me, bitch,” and slammed down the phone.

  Soon after that, Tammy Westbrook arrived with her t
wo younger children. From her behavior, Sergeant Joyce and Sergeant Stewart both had a gut-level reaction that she knew something. They also recognized that this might be their only chance to do an untainted interview with her, as she had refused to leave the house to be interviewed and they believed it likely that as the case against her son progressed, she might retain a lawyer and refuse to speak with them.

  The two detectives sat down with her in the kitchen. Slowly, they eased into a superficially casual conversation about family, the challenges of raising children, and the holidays while the search proceeded around them, detectives coming and going in the room and her kids clambering in and out of her lap and clamoring for attention. She would alternate speaking to the detectives with little chats to her kids in a singsongy voice. Once Joyce and Stewart started talking to her, they became certain that what she knew was significant and that she was determined to protect her son.

  As they attempted, through their questions, to bring her down the road to truth-telling and convince her to unload her heavy secret, her internal battle between telling what she knew about a horrible crime and her desire to shield her son was apparent. She seemed to teeter on the verge of control while her demeanor screamed anguish, conflict, and deception. As they talked, emphasizing her responsibility to do the right thing and not cover up for her son, she would visibly soften as the part of her that wanted to tell the truth would be dominant. Several times, they felt they had reached her and she was right on the verge of blurting out what she knew. Then her desperate desire to protect her son would surface. She would pull back. The sad, confused, and panicked looked in her eyes would harden into a flinty, determined stare, and her face and body would stiffen with resistance.