Finding Amy (2 page)

I
t is every parent's nightmare—your child goes out one Saturday night and vanishes off the face of the earth. It is also, sadly, something that happens far too often—a sensible and independent young woman who thinks she knows how to take care of herself crosses paths with a predator. The bad guy doesn't look evil. He is charming, charismatic, lively, and fun. It is only when he has his victim alone that his true self—his violent, explosive, self-indulgent, and remorseless side—emerges. Suddenly, a lifetime of striving toward maturity and self-awareness, of good decisions and generous acts, is changed by one bad choice. This is one of those stories.

On Saturday night, October 20, 2001, a lovely blonde woman with a generous heart and a happy disposition set out to show a new acquaintance from Florida the nightlife in the Old Port area of Portland, Maine. After an evening shooting pool and dancing, twenty-five-year-old Amy St. Laurent disappeared.

This is the story of how a group of tenacious detectives solved the case. From the start, it was an unusual situation. They had no body. No crime scene. No witnesses. Only their certainty, based on years of experience, about what the circumstances suggested and an ever deepening determination to find the young woman they had never known when she was alive but who became, over the course of the investigation, “Our Amy.”

They had a complex tangle of lies and half-truths to unravel. A cocky young suspect partying under their noses, shielded by the inaccurate stories, fuzzy or false recall, and inaction of friends and relatives who couldn't believe someone they knew could be a killer. They had difficult jurisdictional and territorial issues to resolve. Personal style differences. Crushing workloads. Weeks of sixteen- to twenty-hour workdays ticked by with no resolution as a Maine winter came relentlessly toward them, the holidays approached, and the family's agony of uncertainty pressed them on.

This is a story about the way real-world investigation works, from the first phone call and the intensity of the first week through the long, miserable grind of many more weeks, then months. It details the way detectives collect information, evaluate that information, formulate theories, and continuously test and retest their theories as new facts become known; how they work under pressure from a desperate family, a worried public, the media, the command staff, and city government, knowing that haste truly can make waste and that a good investigation must be detailed, careful, and methodical. The whole enterprise is informed by their knowledge of the ways they'll be tested when a case comes to court.

This is a story of good, old-fashioned police work. Not the sexy, solve-it-in-an-hour forensics of
CSI
or the intense, sweat 'em in a box psychological manipulations of David Simon's
Homicide
. In the real world, the investigation, arrest, and trial don't happen neatly in an hour, as they do on
Law & Order
. They happen piece by slow, determined, painstaking piece, through a complex interweaving of different detectives' skills. The investigation took thousands of hours of legwork, phone calls, interviewing, and report writing. Careful listening informed by instinct and experience. Meetings and arguments and a continuous reassessment of the story. Patience and taking chances, overcoming legal hurdles, refusing to take no for an answer, and coming to know the victim and the suspect extremely well.

The investigators weighed a number of suspects, testing the veracity of their often incredible stories, until they fixed on a young man devoid of empathy and self-discipline whose goal in life was to have sex with as many women as possible; who regarded women solely as objects for his satisfaction, believing he had a right to be satisfied no matter what the cost. A young man who would prove, even to experienced detectives, to be shockingly cold-blooded in the lengths he would go to to hide his crime.

This is also a story of unusual interagency cooperation, of strong bonds formed where territorialism and suspicion normally reigned. Of a case that might never have been successfully resolved, a body that should never have been found, of dark dreams and psychics' maps and divine intervention. This is the story of how some good and dedicated cops relentlessly tested the evidence—and the suspect— until the false stories unraveled, waiting for the missteps that would give them their breaks, and, in the way of the best homicide investigators, did not give up until they had found their Amy and brought her killer to justice.

Portland is Maine's largest city. With a residential population of around 70,000, it is one of the largest cities north of Boston. During business and entertainment hours, the population swells to 150,000. The population of the surrounding area is about 300,000. The city's old downtown sits atop a hill on a boot-shaped peninsula surrounded by the Fore River, Back Cove, Portland Harbor, and Casco Bay. At the East End and West End, the toe and heel of the boot, there are lovely vistas. Daily ferry service carries residents to the city from the many inhabited islands that rise from the sparkling waters of the bay.

Like many anchor cities in predominantly rural states, Portland is a city in transition. Once a charming port of old brick storefronts, warehouses, and wharf buildings, thriving department stores and businesses, overwhelmingly white and homogenized, by the midsixties it was hit hard by the decline of small manufacturing. Many of the warehouse buildings near the waterfront were abandoned or became decrepit. In the streets near the projects on Munjoy Hill, disgruntled residents partied and battled and lit bonfires in the streets.

A few people with vision, seeing what urban revivals had done for other cities, bought buildings and started to restore the Old Port area, streets of fine brick buildings and old warehouses leading down to a working waterfront. Today, the Old Port is a mecca for tourists, who come by car, Amtrak, and off cruise ships and flock to the interesting shops and restaurants. Urban and suburban couples come to enjoy theater and music and the Old Port's fine restaurants.

At night, it also becomes a destination for another crowd. Young people from as far away as Boston come to enjoy the restaurants, bars, and clubs that line the brick and cobbled streets. Underage teens looking for life beyond the empty streets of their small towns rub elbows with bikers, college students, drug dealers, gangsters, and young professionals. Fights are common. Crowd control is a perennial problem, especially late in the evening as the bars and clubs close, releasing thousands of patrons who are drunk, rowdy, and uninhibited onto the narrow old streets. At closing time, the swarm of bodies on Wharf Street can become so dense in the summer months that uniformed cops find it difficult to see each other when they're only ten to fifteen feet apart.

The same years that have seen Portland's Old Port revival have also seen the city transformed in other ways. Increasingly, the city has had to deal with sharp rises in two populations that require a lot of police intervention— the homeless and the mentally ill, drawn from other cities, small towns, and rural areas to the shelters, the community service agencies, and cheap rooming houses the city offers. Portland also has seen a rise in drug use, bringing with it the associated drug-related violence, overdoses, and deaths. Heroin is rampant, as is cocaine. In 2001, there were twenty deaths from drug overdoses, along with hundreds of close calls suffered by users who were saved because of the city's fine medical facilities.

Added to this are the complexities of dealing with new immigrant populations. In particular, Portland has seen an influx of Vietnamese and Cambodians and, more recently, many refugees from Africa and eastern Europe. All these populations have brought added language and cultural difficulties to the usual challenges of policing an urban area.

The city is served by a 165-person police department headquartered at 109 Middle Street, on the edge of the Old Port area. Each year, Portland police respond to approximately seventy-five thousand calls for service, mostly 911 calls. They are dispatched to over two thousand domestic violence cases and over a hundred death scenes, including suicides, homicides, and drug overdose deaths, as well as to burglaries, rapes, terrible child abuse, and vicious assaults.

For seventeen years, the department was presided over by Chief Michael Chitwood, a former Philadelphia detective. In Philadelphia, his flamboyant style and controversial record led critics to call him “Dirty Harry.” In Portland, his outspoken style and strong public stands on issues such as concealed weapons permits, children in horrendous home situations where the Department of Human Services wouldn't act, and district attorneys who settled too many cases, earned him the nickname “Media Mike.” Chitwood was a strong and controversial leader in a department recently under fire for alleged police brutality. Despite these controversies, he was very popular with a public who felt he was making the city safer, and he forged good relationships with the media.

However controversial he might have been on many fronts—an article in the
Boston Globe Sunday Magazine
called him both a smooth operator and a loose cannon
¹
— Chief Chitwood had a passionate concern for crime victims. Throughout his career, his press conferences, often held with victims and their families, helped the media and the public understand the true impact of crime on ordinary people.

Portland is a microcosm of any large U.S. city, and its troubles are a microcosm of any big city's woes. But even for Portland police, who see stabbings, beatings, child abuse, drug overdoses, pedophiles, rapes, and suicides on a regular basis, a murder is still a big deal. In an average year, there are between twenty-five and thirty murders in the entire state of Maine. A genuine whodunit, as opposed to a domestic murder, a drunken dispute settled by violence, or a drug deal gone bad, is rare. The challenge of solving a murder triggers all the hardwired investigative responses trained into a personal-crimes detective. For the best detectives, it immediately becomes a contest that they
must
win.

Police involvement in the Amy St. Laurent case began with one of those informal cop-to-cop phone calls the public rarely hears about. At 7:30 p.m. on Monday, October 22, 2001, Cumberland County deputy sheriff James Estabrook called his friend Danny Young, a Portland police detective, at home, and asked if he could speak about a missing South Berwick woman. The young woman, Amy St. Laurent, was the daughter of a friend of Estabrook's girlfriend. She had gone out on Saturday night to show a visitor from Florida the nightlife in Portland's Old Port district. She never came home.

Estabrook made his call to the right receptive ear. Danny Young, a tenacious investigator with finely honed cop's instincts and twenty-one years on the job, had a daughter the same age as the missing woman, and her name was Amy. Detective Young himself defines stable and decent. He's married to the high school sweetheart he met at age fifteen and is a devoted father and grandfather. A heavyset man with a comfortable fatherly, engaging manner, Danny Young exudes the kind of warmth and amiability that make him deceptively easy to talk to. But behind that genial exterior is a dedicated homicide detective.

Young is known for his encyclopedic grasp of the details of a case, as well as an anal-retentive's compulsion for order and filing. Along with his charm, Young has the naturally competitive pit-bull quality of the true detective. He will work tirelessly because he's not going to let the bad guys win, leaving victims and their families to suffer a double set of losses and betrayals.
²
Supervisors say Young is the detective they'd want on the case if something happened to one of their family members.

Estabrook had been lucky to find him at home. Since the events of September 11, Young had been working seven days a week. Along with his detective duties, he was also a bomb investigator. As part of the post-9/11 heightened security, he and his bomb dog, Karla, had been patrolling the
Scotia Prince
, the ferry that provided service between Portland and Nova Scotia, every evening. He was also regularly called out for patrols at the airport and other locations. The night of Estabrook's call was his first Monday night at home in more than a month. He was half an hour into
Monday Night Football
when the phone rang.

Young listened carefully to Estabrook's information about the missing woman and asked some questions. He then followed up with phone calls to the woman's mother, Diane Jenkins, and to the South Berwick police. Good cops are adept at applying their investigative instincts to the facts. Danny Young had spent a lot of years of assessing situations and sorting out facts, and the story he was hearing didn't feel right.

Normally, when an adult goes missing, it is not an immediate cause for alarm. In any given year, the Portland police get reports of around two hundred missing persons. The reasons people disappear are usually related to drugs, alcohol, financial or relationship problems, mental health issues, or general irresponsibility. Most of those reported missing eventually turn up, often expressing surprise or even annoyance that anyone bothered to worry.
³

It wasn't unusual for an attractive, single, twenty-five-year-old woman to go out on Saturday night and not come home. But it was unusual for this missing woman—Amy St. Laurent, a caring owner who was devoted to her cat— not to return on Sunday or Monday to feed it. Because of the cat, she rarely stayed at her mother's South Portland house late in the evening or overnight. If she did stay overnight somewhere else, she always went home in the morning to check on the cat or arranged for someone else to feed it.

It was also unusual for this woman to let days go by without a call to her mother or her younger sister, Julie. Amy St. Laurent belonged to the cell phone generation. She was regularly in touch with people by phone and e-mail, and she was close to her mother and her younger sister. She was also close to her father, Dennis, who lived nearby in South Berwick. If she needed help with the cat, or a ride because her car was in the shop, she would give him a call. But Amy St. Laurent hadn't been home or called anyone for two days.