Danny Young was pacing the floors at 2:00 a.m., wondering if there was something he'd missed, racking his brain for things he might have forgotten to do, other avenues to pursue. Tommy Joyce was sleeping only because he knew Danny was up pacing. They were frustrated: it was hard for them to avoid feeling that while they were working their butts off trying to find Amy, Gorman was down in Troy, Alabama, laughing at them and thinking that he was home free. Also they were skeptical: they had tried everything, from searches by land, air, and sea to clairvoyance. And now here were a bunch of game wardens offering to help.
On the other hand, they were badly in need of a break in the case—some new way to crack it open. Winter was coming. If they didn't find Amy soon, they knew they might never find her.
And Dorian was making a very sensible offer. He had an expertise that they were willing to admit they lacked. They were city cops or, as Tommy Joyce put it, bricks and asphalt guys, while the wardens and the MASAR personnel were experienced outdoorsmen and women, trained in woodland searches. Dorian had a methodology for identifying and analyzing potential areas to be searched. His wardens had sophisticated mapping and GPS technology, which simplified identifying areas to be searched and produced an accurate and detailed record of the ground covered. Dorian knew how to take a profile of the lost person, a profile of the suspect, and test those against statistics and experience to identify sites with the greatest potential, and he could develop search parameters for those sites. He could also mobilize the many experienced personnel necessary to mount a massive outdoor search operation using the trained volunteers of MASAR, On December 3, Dorian brought wardens from his Overhead (or Incident Command) Team, including Warden Kevin Adam, his mapping and GPS expert, Sergeant Roger Guay, and Sergeant Joel Wilkinson, and came to the Portland Police station for a meeting. That meeting, held in the Detective Bureau's conference room, turned into an all-day session. Skeptical, bone-weary city cops sat on one side of the table, wondering whether these hillbillies from the north woods really had anything to offer. The wardens, with their computers, mapping programs, and GPS equipment, sat on the other. State police were in the middle. They had worked with the warden service before, though no one had ever done an operation like this. And always, despite the traditional separation of their agencies, Danny Young and Scott Harakles sat together, as partners should.
Right from the start, the wardens ran the meeting. Dorian and his team immediately started gathering information about the crime. This included first getting the lead detectives, Young and Harakles, to present the nucleus of the case. By questioning the detectives, the wardens gathered profiles of the victim and the suspect, along with the theories detectives had developed about what had happened the night Amy disappeared.
Once they had a basic picture of the case, they began to gather information to plug into what they knew about cases like this, employing their expertise in outdoor crime scenes. They asked for a detailed assessment of Gorman, including information about how familiar he was with the outdoors. Wardens asked whether Gorman was a hunter or a fisherman. Whether he was known to have spent time in the woods. How long he had lived in Maine and how familiar he was with the local area.
The detectives shared the picture of Gorman that they had developed. Gorman had lived in the state for about eighteen months. He was idle and lazy, working only when he had to in order to support his fondness for drink, drugs, playing pool, and other recreation. He had little respect for women, poor impulse control, and a violent temper. His principal drivers were pleasure and sex. He would go anywhere—her place, Campbell's place, on a beach, in a car, whatever it took to score—and, once he had made up his mind, do anything to persuade or coerce a woman to have sex with him.
Gorman wasn't a hunter, but he was a fisherman and had fished in the ponds behind his mother's house both during the daytime and at night. Gorman had also used the woods behind his mother's house as a hiding place, burying items there that he'd stolen from customers’ cars at the car dealership where he had worked.
Next, the detectives reviewed the timeline of the crime. Gorman was known to have left the Brighton Avenue apartment between 1:45 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. The earliest time his presence back at the apartment could be confirmed was David Grazier's statement that he had found Gorman in the bathroom washing sometime around 4:30 a.m.
Using maps, detectives then identified possible routes Gorman might have taken when he left the apartment with Amy. During the course of the investigation, as routes were identified, detectives had driven them and timed the length of each drive. Along any route he might have reasonably taken, wooded areas, parking lots, and industrial sites had been noted. The wardens also asked for other details of the Portland area, such as what were the popular places for teenagers to go “parking.” They asked where Amy lived and where her mother lived.
As the day wore on, a bond developed between the men. Going into the meeting, the wardens knew that 60 to 70 percent of their likelihood of success in the operation depended on the quality of the information they could get, which in turn depended on the thoroughness of the underlying investigation. They were very impressed by the information they were getting. The wardens listened to the detectives and asked questions, and together the different groups used their collective information to identify sites where Amy's body might be.
There were eight general areas they considered: areas near Gorman's mother's house, the roadsides on the turnpike going south, along Brighton Avenue, areas near Amy's mother's house, the Old Port area near the Pavilion, exit 2 off the Maine Turnpike near Wells, the area around Amy's residence in South Berwick, and a scattering of random sites Gorman had spoken about during conversations with his friends. They prioritized the sites using a technique called a Matteson Consensus, learned from the National Park Service, in which the detectives used a consistent, systematic method to rate the identified sites from highest to lowest in terms of the likelihood that Amy might be there.
The wardens would design their search criteria based on the timeline of the crime, their knowledge of Gorman's character, his experience, and his familiarity with the area, and their own information about killers’ behavior when disposing of a body. Wardens knew, for example, that 72 percent of victims are less than 200 feet from a way or a parking lot. They knew, as the police did, that once a killer is sexually gratified and realizes what he's done, there's a sense of panic and a need to get out of there as quickly as possible. Also, that a killer is unlikely to go far into the woods at night. Police also knew that people believe they travel much farther than they actually do at night.
After the meeting, the wardens spent several hours driving around with the detectives, following the identified routes and studying the terrain. Kevin Adam, who would be developing the maps for the search teams, was trying to put himself inside Gorman's head as they drove around, trying to see what Gorman was seeing. “Okay,” he imagined Gorman thinking. “I've got this girl in the car and I am going to have sex with her. Where can I take her? Pretty soon, she's going to notice that we're not going where I said I'd take her, and I've got to be able to control the situation. Where can I take her where there are no people around and I can have her all to myself?” It was the same scenario the detectives had run in their own heads for weeks.
Like Danny Young five weeks earlier, when the wardens and detectives drove along Route 22 past Gorman's mother's house, Kevin Adam saw the old access road leading back into the woods and thought, “She's there. Amy's there.” Later he would say that, if they'd had Warden Sergeant Roger Guay's dog, Reba, a ten-year-old chocolate Lab, with them that day, they probably would have found her.3
At the end of the day, everyone was on board for conducting a massive search effort to take place on Saturday, December 8. The wardens headed back north with a lot of work before them, planning to return on Friday to go over the logistical details of assembling their teams, setting up a command post, doing the legwork for each of the designated sites, finalizing the m
aps for those sites, and designing the structure of each area's search. How a search team is deployed in a given area depends on the terrain. Where the terrain is heavily wooded, the searchers may walk practically shoulder to shoulder. Where it is more open and they can see the ground more clearly, they may walk five to ten feet apart.
The wardens left the detectives with some unanswered questions, including one that was very important. Had anyone, in the course of the investigation, been able to connect Gorman with access to a shovel? It would make a difference, in designing the search criteria, to know if it was likely they were looking for a buried body.
During the days that followed, Danny Young and Scott Harakles turned up two pieces of information that would be of major importance in designing and carrying out Saturday's upcoming search. First, in an interview with Gorman's mother's boyfriend, Richard Deveau, on Wednesday, December 5, Deveau told the officers that around the time Amy St. Laurent disappeared, Gorman had asked if he could borrow a shovel because he was going to help a friend put in a fence. Deveau had directed Gorman to a spade shovel behind the house, as well as to a posthole digger in the shed. Later, Deveau would observe that the posthole digger had never been touched. He didn't know about the shovel.
Detectives couldn't locate any friend who had asked Gorman for help in installing a fence. Based on their knowledge of Gorman's character—lazy, unhelpful, and generally dedicated to avoiding physical work whenever possible (a characterization that Deveau affirmed, telling the detectives Gorman was too lazy to pick up a shovel)— they concluded it was likely the shovel might have been used to bury Amy's body.
A second significant piece of information was discovered the following day. As a routine part of his investigation, Danny Young had put in a request to the FBI asking for an off-line search of police records concerning Gorman through the National Crime Information Computer (NCIC). On Thursday, December 6, Young received the results of that search. The report revealed that at 3:14 a.m. on Sunday morning, October 21, the last day Amy St. Laurent was seen alive, and at a time when Gorman had claimed, and his roommates had initially confirmed, that he was back at the apartment, Tim Gardiner, a police officer in the neighboring city of Westbrook, had stopped Gorman for a high-beam violation at the corner of Main Street and Larrabee Road. Gorman was alone in the car.
For the exhausted detectives, it was a eureka moment. Although Gorman's alibi of being back at Brighton Avenue twenty minutes after he had left to drop off Amy St. Laurent at the Pavilion had been seriously undermined by subsequent statements from Cook and Sharma that they couldn't say when he'd returned, and statements from other residents of the apartment who had returned around 3:00 a.m. and not found him home, police now had an official source—another police officer and official police records4—confirming that Gorman had lied.
“My God, Danny … are you sure? My God!” Danny hangs in my doorway with his ever present notebook attached to his hand.
“Lieutenant, I feel bad I didn't check this earlier … we already ran plates and everything else but I …”
“Danny.” I hold up my hand. “I don't know how much information a human being can handle, but you've taken on eight times the load.”
I was stunned. Thrilled. I had the receiver in my right hand and I could hear a voice in the distance squeaking. I think I hung up on the person, I was so enthralled with this information. Danny's NCIC search showed Gorman was stopped in Westbrook at 3:14 on the morning of the murder.
This was huge. I slammed my fist into the desk. “My God, Danny. That blows him out of the water and confirms so much for us.”
I was already framing up a map of Gorman's actions and the area he might have traveled according to this new timeline. Maybe he went around his mom's house. Or was he coming from Campbell's or the Game Room area? And Amy wasn't in the car, unless she was in the trunk, and that was unlikely, based on Stearny's search. He must have disposed of her in a quadrant of about four or five miles. But where?
Then I considered what Danny had just said, and the hairs on my arms bristled. That cop stopped a murderer! Gorman had just killed a girl and dumped her. Officers get shot, stabbed, beaten, and killed more frequently during traffic stops than any other type of police contact.5 The “routine” becomes tragic within moments. You never know who, or what, is behind the wheel.
In our training, we observe dozens of videos of officers being killed during routine traffic stops, unaware of the monster lurking behind the wheel. Who knows what was going through Gorman's mind at the time. Was he armed? Did he have blood on his clothes? Evidence of Amy?
Gardiner had been incredibly lucky. I look at Danny's face and see he's thinking the same thing. He's elated, but it's just so goddamned chilling to think what a close call that was.
“Get to him, Dan, and find out what he remembers of the stop.”
Danny leaves and I sit pensive for a few moments. It is such fantastic news. We were at the end of our rope and now we've got this. This and the wardens and the shovel. It's really coming together. And I wonder. Is Amy helping us?
The discovery of the traffic stop in Westbrook was vitally important because it confirmed a major lie. It also significantly narrowed the window of time during which the crime could have been committed, enabling the detectives and the wardens to focus on a much smaller search area in and near Portland.
Everyone settled in for the major effort of organizing a search involving more than a hundred people: search and rescue personnel, state and Portland police, game wardens, and dog handlers with trained cadaver dogs. Logistics included locating a command center where the wardens’ Overhead Team could set up their mapping and communications center with space for the team commander, mapping and logistics, communications, operations, and a briefing/debriefing officer.
The command center also needed a space where search teams could be assembled and briefed, their vehicles could be parked, and searchers could be fed. Since the search teams would roll out early on Saturday morning, overnight accommodations needed to be arranged for those who had to travel. Arrangements had to be made to feed everyone. And all the arrangements had to be made with maximum attention to managing the media, which would be briefed at a press conference on the morning of the search. No one wanted to try to conduct the searches in the shadow of media vans. The press had to be informed, yet kept away from the actual search areas.
On Friday, the wardens returned to sit down with detectives and do the work of identifying final target sites, assigning teams to search those sites, defining the makeup of the teams, and doing the detailed writing of the search parameters for each site. This time the meeting was held at Crosby Farm, the highway maintenance depot and state police facility that would serve as the command post for the following day's operation.
The setup of the search had to be defined, with maps and written assignments, including waypoints and instructions to the search teams about ground to be covered, what they were looking for, and details such as the spacing of their grid searches. Because different conditions affect a dog's ability to detect odors, such as clay soil or bodies of water or extremely wet conditions, the wardens wanted to use multiple resources for each site. Therefore the plans called for each search site to be covered by both a dog and handler team and a search team.
As darkness fell on Friday afternoon and the lights came on, the wardens went back out onto the roads, checking and rechecking the loop from Brighton Avenue to Gorman's mother's house to the location of the traffic stop. They were on the road for five hours, checking out the lighting, visibility from the street, and the general appearance of the search sites at night, noting places that had appeared to be likely dumping spots during the day but were too brightly lit at night.
At nine that evening they finally checked in at their hotel. It was eleven before they had dinner. The National Weather Service was predicting snow for Saturday.
“Well, Tom, where are the hillbillies now?”
“They're all over, Joe. S
ome are in the gym, some are driving the route, and some are at the Sonesta.”
“The gym? Shit … just don't let them start any fires in there. Ya know, Tommy, I really like that Dorian guy. He's got clean, straight eyes and good humor, too. Guay, I like him, too. They are really sincere guys. This could work, ya know? How's Scott and Danny?”
“They're holding up. Running around like crazy getting ready.”
“I still can't believe that freakin' car stop. Thank God!”
I see Sergeant Coffin in the bay. He looks whipped but, as usual, keeps his humor and tells us a joke. “Hey, mister …” His favorite phrase. “… there's these two guys in heaven …”
I go back to my office and call Diane one last time about the plans for tomorrow. I'm planning a press conference involving her in another public appeal for help on Saturday morning before we start this massive operation.
It's Friday night. 1915. Another long day. Tommy comes in and shows me the ops plan. It's huge.
Some of our detectives are pissed because we're dragging them in at 0700 on a Saturday. I've heard the mutterings. “Fuckin’ Danny. This is crazy,” one detective blurts out as he passes my office.
I'm not in the mood for it. “Just shut up and be there, crybaby!”
“It's like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he continues.
“Just be there, Clownie. We've found needles in haystacks by the way … way before you were a frigging big detective.”
Sergeant Coffin comes by the office. He's been pushing it hard and is red-eyed. “Hey, Bruce,” I say, “I checked ops and you're not on it. What's up?”
“I'm beat. I need a day away from this. I made plans with my wife.” I tell him it's no problem.
Tommy's excited and tells Bruce we're going to find her. Bruce says, “Yeah, like the needle in the haystack.” Tommy and I go over the finals. I order a pizza for everyone and then head home, whipped. Danny and the others are still out there.
Finding Amy Page 13
