Finding Amy

by Joseph K. Loughlin

  The words her boss wrote in a note to me were “Amy was the best” and she was.

  So this is what her friends and colleagues have left—photographs and memories of a young woman who touched their hearts.

  My personal loss is beyond words. A piece of me died that day also. Pain does not end, it only changes and pain really doesn't care when it rears its ugly head and what it is that triggers it to come back at you one more time.

  I want people to understand what this has done to us and me. Imagine getting the call that is a parent's worst nightmare, being told that your child can't be found. After the initial shock, can you imagine how traumatic that is? Then having to pull yourself together because you have another child and you need to be there for them.

  Imagine having to tell your parents and trying to explain that their grandchild is missing and then just two days later, having to go back into the same nightclub you know your daughter was in last and asking everyone if they have seen this young woman and having to explain to them that this is your daughter and she is missing. Then going back out two days later for the next two nights and doing it all over again in hopes that someone will remember something.

  Imagine days turning into weeks, imagine walking railroad tracks, construction sites, woods, marshes, truck yards, fields, and vacant buildings. Nothing. Nothing. By that time, you're not looking for your daughter, what it is you're looking for is a body. Not the vibrant, beautiful daughter.

  Imagine doing this until you emotionally and physically can't anymore. That is pain and trauma. Imagine for seven weeks seeing your daughter looking back at you from the reward posters, those beautiful blue eyes piercing your heart, but you know how important those posters are.

  Imagine having to maintain a career during all of this. Imagine having to send your other child back to school. Imagine having to deal with the missing child's finances, try explaining to someone why you're canceling someone else's phone service, cable, or why the bills now have to be put in your name. Imagine seven weeks of this.

  Imagine finally getting the call that you are hoping for and dreading, the call that they found her and they are waiting for positive ID and then waiting to learn how she died. Then imagine being told that she was found partially clothed and died of a gunshot wound to the head. Then imagine telling her sister how she died and imagine what you would say when you were asked the question by this child who has lost her only sibling, “Why her? Why did she have to die?”

  Imagine having a funeral service just a little over a week before Christmas and what would you do with the gifts you already bought her?

  Now imagine having to pack up your child's apartment, boxing up a young life. Imagine going through her clothes and holding them next to you because they smell like her and you know you will never hold that person again. So you keep going back and holding the sweater and inhaling the remains of the person you loved very much, but eventually the scent goes away.

  So what are we left with? Memories, possessions, pain, the ring she wore when she was murdered.

  I'll never see her children, my grandchildren. A funeral for a friend's young sister brings all of the painful memories back to the surface like it was yesterday. Even simple everyday things like listening to the rain bring pain.

  For the duration Amy was missing, each time it rained, my heart ached thinking she was out there somewhere cold, wet, afraid and wondered why someone hasn't come to save her yet. I can't stand listening to the rain now.

  When I allow myself to go there, I can imagine what the last moments of her life must have been like. The fear, pain, and horror and I am also almost ashamed to tell you that I don't allow this to happen often, it hurts too much. This I want you to know is real. I live with this every day and it invades my thoughts, breaks my sleep, and breaks my heart over and over again and I'll never forget it as long as I live.

  Our family and friends were not the only ones who lost when we lost Amy. Society did as well. If she had this much caring, understanding, and compassion for the human spirit at twenty-five, just imagine what she could have done if she lived.

  Jeffrey Russell Gorman was sentenced to sixty years in the Department of Corrections custody for the murder of Amy St. Laurent.

  Subsequently, Gorman appealed his conviction to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court (the Law Court), arguing that allowing his mother's grand jury testimony violated both the Maine rules of evidence and the Confrontation Clause of the United States Constitution. Legal matters move slowly. The case was argued before the Law Court in February of 2004. In March of 2004, the United States Supreme Court decided a landmark Confrontation Clause case, Crawford v. Washington. Because the Gorman case involved potential Crawford issues, both sides had to re-brief and reargue the case. A final decision, denying the appeal and affirming Gorman's conviction, was issued by the Law Court on July 22, 2004, two years and nine months after the night Amy St. Laurent disappeared.1

  While the sentencing phase of the trial was the family's first opportunity to speak for their daughter in a legal forum, and while their anxiety that the conviction might not be affirmed and they might have to face Gorman again through the ordeal of a second trial was not laid to rest for another year, Amy's mother, Diane Jenkins, did not wait for finality to begin taking steps to ensure that other young women would have a better chance to be protected than her daughter had.

  When a loved one dies, survivors often have a powerful desire to perform some memorial act to ensure that the value of that person's life does not simply fade away. When you've loved someone, you want the world to understand something of who they were. You want to create a legacy that will confirm that the person who is gone lived a meaningful life. Most important, you want to carry on the meaning of that life into the future.

  Within months of her daughter's death, as the facts concerning the circumstances of Amy's death came to light, Diane Jenkins, from the depths of her own personal pain, was already looking for ways to prevent the same thing from happening to someone else's child. In Amy's memory, she created the Amy St. Laurent Foundation to encourage the avoidance of violence, to provide help for victims, and to help arrest and convict violent offenders.

  The first project undertaken by the foundation was to bring RAD2 (Rape Aggression Defense systems) courses to the area by underwriting the training of a group of Portland police officers as instructors,3 and providing the equipment necessary to teach RAD classes. The RAD system is a basic self-defense program for women, taught in a series of three or four sessions, that involves awareness, risk reduction and avoidance, and basic physical defense systems. It is designed first of all to make women safer by enhancing their awareness of their surroundings, teaching them strategies to make their environments safer, and teaching them to recognize and avoid risks. Second, the course teaches assertiveness and verbal confrontation skills to help women avoid the appearance that they are victims and to stop aggressors. Finally, the course teaches realistically employable tactics to women who are serious about defending themselves in situations where their life is in jeopardy, allowing them a chance to escape.

  Diane Jenkins also began speaking to high school students, beginning at a “Give Back the Night” safety forum at Falmouth High School, sponsored by the Junior League. She joined Chief Chitwood and community policing officers to deliver the message that violence and danger are real and can happen in the lives of ordinary people. No speaker, however well prepared or sincere, could possibly have matched the eloquence of someone who had been through it. Seeing Jenkins's small, upright figure holding her daughter's picture, and hearing the deep vibrations of sorrow in her voice as she told about who her daughter Amy was and the impact of her disappearance on the family, was the most vivid reminder possible of the real-world effects of violence on a family.

  The audience was absolutely silent as Jenkins, who never imagined herself as a public speaker, described the last conversation they ever had, ending with Amy's last words: “I love you, too, Mom.”
Jenkins's willingness to share her personal story had a powerful impact on adolescents who imagined that bad things happened in other places and to other people, and that their lives couldn't be touched.

  In an interview after that first event, Jenkins said, “It could have been either of my kids sitting in that audience, any one of our children … It's important that they don't think they're invincible and that nothing bad is ever going to happen to them.”4

  While Diane Jenkins honors her daughter's memory and carries out Amy's caring and compassion for others by working to make other people's children safer, Amy St. Laurent's memory lives on in another arena as well, and the bonds forged by her spirit linger. Ask public safety officers involved in the Amy St. Laurent case what was special about the case and they will come back, again and again, to the unusual working relationship forged among their different agencies.

  On January 22, 2003, Deputy Attorney General William Stokes wrote the following in a letter to Captain Loughlin:

  In my 25 years of service to the State of Maine, I have seldom seen a case involving such a wonderful collaboration and level of cooperation between law enforcement agencies as in this case. The Portland Police Department and the Maine State Police, together with the Maine Warden Service, did themselves proud by their cooperation and their single-minded focus in first, finding Amy's body and second, bringing her killer to justice. I want to thank you for your wonderful support and for assigning such terrific people, such as Danny Young, to work on this case.

  His relationship with the Maine State Police, and in particular with Scott Harakles, is an example to all of the law enforcement agencies to follow.

  As Bill Stokes recognized, it had been an unusual case for everyone. Without the collaboration, and an extraordinary willingness to put personal differences aside, combined with the passionate desire they all shared to secure justice for Amy, the case might never have been resolved and Gorman might not have been convicted.

  Cooperation happened at every level and at every phase of the investigation. Despite radically different personal styles and command structures, Sergeant Tommy Joyce and Sergeant Matt Stewart, both used to deference to their status as CID sergeants and both used to calling the shots, were able to work out or put aside their differences in order to ensure that their primary detectives were able to work, unimpeded, on Amy's case. Both recognized the importance of smoothing the path and providing staff support and moral support throughout a long and difficult investigation. Matt Stewart said that even if there were differences of opinion regarding the case higher up, on the ground, the detectives just kept things rolling and worked it out.

  Sergeant Stewart summed up the relationship between the agencies in this way:

  This case showed the reality of having two experienced and capable homicide units, both staffed with a bunch of “alpha dogs,” go after a case together. Add to that some fairly blurred jurisdictional lines and an outspoken and media-savvy Chief of Police whose press philosophy is basically opposed to that of the MSP and AG, and you've got quite a challenging situation. There was always mutual respect between the investigators and supervisors on both sides because we all knew we were dealing with fellow homicide detectives who had been “there.” So maybe the real story is how this bunch of cops rose above all of the distractions and confusions of this kind of blended investigation and prevailed to successfully bring a killer to justice.

  Scott Harakles gives the credit for their positive working relationship to Amy, to the goodness of her spirit and to the way she got under their skins and made them need to solve her case. The situation with Amy was so important that everyone focused on getting justice for her. He also talks about the unusual nature of his reception at the Portland Police Department. In many situations, when the state police come into an investigation where they have superior authority, the welcome may not be very warm. People often don't greet him or make eye contact. In Portland, where he had to go every day, he was treated like one of the guys, welcomed and made a member of the team.

  Danny Young now has Tommy Joyce's job, as CID sergeant, while Joyce has left the department to teach criminal justice. Danny Young and Scott Harakles continue to be good friends, maintaining the bridge between the two agencies that was built while solving Amy St. Laurent's murder. Recently, they have begun to work together on some of Young's cold cases, the cases he would never give up.

  Another significant, and in many ways even more surprising, legacy of the Amy St. Laurent case was the involvement of the Maine Warden Service. When Lieutenant Patrick Dorian made his initial phone call, asking if the warden service might offer its search and rescue expertise in helping to find Amy St. Laurent's body, he knew it was a long shot. It was unheard of at that point for the warden service to get involved in what was essentially an urban murder case.

  Every police investigator went into that initial meeting skeptical about the possibility that the wardens would have anything to offer, and came out of it convinced that it was a chance worth taking. On the Saturday of the massive search operation, even as some of the detectives rolled their eyes in cynical disbelief about the possibilities of finding a needle in a haystack or, as one of them put it, a buried needle in a buried haystack, Danny Young and Scott Harakles woke with the firm belief that they would find Amy before the day was over. They ended that day grateful that Amy had been found and firm in their conviction that Amy's spirit had guided them.

  It is also part of Amy's legacy that, having succeeded in that initial effort, the Maine Warden Service emerged more willing to offer its search expertise to other law enforcement agencies, and its success encouraged other agencies to call on them.

  Warden Kevin Adam says that these days, when there is a high-profile missing person case in Maine, the state police or local police will get the call and they, in turn, will call the warden service. Wardens have assisted in finding the body of David Langway, in Glenburn, where the police, following up a tip, had located the skull but couldn't find the rest of the remains. They searched the site with dogs and MASAR volunteers, and on the last pass a warden spotted an out-of-place piece of dirt in the woods the size of three silver dollars. The dogs were brought back in, and they found the dismembered remains. Wardens also located the crime site in the disappearance of a Colby College student. And they used their dogs to find the body of Cody Greene in Brunswick, camouflaged with brush in the yard of the house where she was last seen.

  In the spring of 2003, the wardens and MESARD (Maine Search and Rescue Dogs) went north to Miramichi, New Brunswick, to assist in locating the body of a homicide victim. The first effort failed, but a second effort, in June, eventually led investigators to the body after one of the wardens noticed, from their mapping, a gap in the area initially searched.

  In the summer of 2004, a teenage girl named Crystal Higgins went missing. The warden service was called in and searched hundreds of miles of roads. Finally the wardens sat down and had a meeting, applied their training and experience, and said that either she had left the area or she was in the water. Based on what they knew about the missing teenager, it seemed unlikely she'd left the area. They got the Marine Patrol out and found that her car had gone off a pier.

  As with all areas of expertise, the more searches the wardens do, the more experienced and better at it they get. And the impetus came from Lieutenant Dorian and Amy St. Laurent.

  In Fort Williams Park in Cape Elizabeth, facing the ocean, is a granite memorial bench donated in Amy's memory. Here, in a place of quiet beauty, those who loved her can sit and remember the lovely, vibrant girl Amy St. Laurent was. It is a fitting memorial to the thoughtful, wistful young woman who wanted to be more attuned to the beauty of the world. She touched many lives with her warmth and generosity in the brief twenty-five years of her life. She has touched many more through the actions of those who strove to bring her killer to justice. And she continues to reach forward into the future through the efforts she has inspired to bring closure, justice, and saf
ety to others.

  A portion of the proceeds from this book is being donated to the Amy St. Laurent Foundation, to continue the work being done in Amy's name. Readers wishing to send contributions to the foundation should send them to:

  The Amy St. Laurent Foundation

  P.O. Box 664

  Yarmouth, ME 04096

  NOTES

  Chapter 1 (pp. 5–19)

  1. Edgar Allen Beem, “Teflon Tough Guy,” Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, July 28, 2002.

  2. In his preface to Practical Homicide Investigation, 3rd ed. (CRC Press, 1996), Vernon Geberth writes, “Homicide investigation is an aggressive business. Not everyone is qualified for the mission-oriented commitment of death investigation. Your homicide case is yours forever.” Detective Young keeps the files from unsolved cases that he hasn't given up on, and has families he has stayed in touch with for years.

  3. Under the SOP (standard operating procedure) in place at the time, unless extenuating circumstances such as suicide, an elderly person, a mentally handicapped person, etc., existed, reports were not taken on adults until they had been missing for twenty-four hours. In Portland, 99.5 percent of missing persons cases are resolved within a few days.

  Chapter 3 (pp. 29–40)

  1. A background check on a suspect begins in-house, with a check of the internal database for criminal history. Detectives also check with the Department of Motor Vehicles and the SBI (State Bureau of Investigation) for a record of all state convictions. For criminal history beyond state borders, detectives use the NCIC computer, which can supply a national printout of arrests and convictions. Once one of these checks reveals a criminal record, detectives often call the police department where the arrest took place to get the inside story on the suspect.

  2. The “homicidal triad,” or triangle, is bed-wetting at an inappropriate age, starting fires, and cruelty to small animals or children. At least two of these three characteristics are frequently found in the histories of serial killers. See John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Journey into Darkness (Scribner, 1997).