It was one of the most horrific murders in Maine history and one of the most controversial murder cases. A 12-year old girl abducted and brutally murdered in a rural Maine town, an investigation and prosecution with many troubling shortcomings and twists, and a man convicted for the crime who was in police custody for many hours before forensic science says she died. Thirty four years on the Sarah Cherry case and Dennis Dechaine’s conviction still hang over the state’s legal community.
Now Dechaine has been granted another chance to test crime scene evidence using cutting edge DNA technology. And as I report in today’s Maine Sunday Telegram, some think they might find notorious serial killer Richard March Evonitz’s genetic material. The chilling parallels between Evonitz’s crimes and the Cherry case and why the serial killer of children was in Maine in 1988-1989 explored in the story.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.