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Nearly 50 years ago, amid the riot of pink and purple flowers and serene Japanese-inspired landscaping at the Asticou Azalea Gardens in Northeast Harbor, a horrible discovery was made.
A vacationing family on a morning stroll on June 19, 1977, found the body of a young woman, beaten and bloodied, on a walking trail in the gardens, just a stone’s throw from the entrance to Acadia National Park.
Eight days later, police identified her as Leslie Spellman, a 27-year-old Massachusetts native who had arrived on Mount Desert Island the day before. Medical examiners estimated she had been killed only a few hours before she was discovered, and determined she had been killed by blunt force trauma to the head, with no signs of sexual assault. Her dog, Taylor, was found running loose about a mile away.
Nearly a half-century later, law enforcement and Spellman’s family are no closer to an answer as to who killed her. The information they do have about the last few hours of her life offers a few clues, and two potential suspects were floated at various points over the years, but nothing conclusive has yet been found.
According to the Maine State Police, Spellman was from Hingham, Massachusetts, and had most recently been in Barre, Vermont, hiking in the area with her sister, Amie. On June 18, Spellman decided to strike out on her own, taking her dog and hitchhiking to Maine, with plans to stay at an Ashram community in Bar Harbor and potentially teach yoga for the summer.
It’s not known who she caught a ride with, or how many individuals she rode with in the trip from Vermont to Maine, but it is known that she arrived on Mount Desert Island sometime between the afternoon of June 18 and early in the morning of June 19. A few local residents claimed they’d spotted a 5-foot-tall woman wearing a maroon-colored vest and brown turtleneck at the Jordan Pond House in Seal Harbor sometime on June 18, but that could not be confirmed.
With little physical evidence to go by, Maine investigators began working with police and media in Vermont to try to find any other clues as to who Spellman was with on her journey to Maine. In the end, almost no leads turned up. Within a year, the case had gone cold.
In October 1977, a Maine State Police investigator said they would like to question Lorne Acquin, who in July of that year murdered his foster brother’s wife, her seven children, and their niece in their Connecticut home. Acquin had connections to Maine, there were dog hairs in Acquin’s car that were similar to Spellman’s dog’s, and there were similarities between the deaths of Spellman and the Connecticut family, but the connection ended there.
More than 20 years later, police began looking into whether or not Maine serial killer James Hicks had anything to do with Spellman’s death. Hicks was convicted in 1984 of murdering his first wife, Jennie Hicks, in Carmel in 1977, and later was convicted in 2000 of murdering two other women, Jerrilyn Towers in 1982 in Newport and Lynn Willette in 1996 in Brewer. He remains incarcerated at the Maine State Prison, and police haven’t said whether he was ever questioned in connection with Spellman’s death.
Although Maine State Police investigators said on the 30th anniversary of Spellman’s death in 2007 that they were planning to use DNA technology to attempt to retrieve more evidence in the case, no more information has yet come to light. It is one of the oldest cold cases in eastern and northern Maine still on file with the Maine State Police, and one of the most puzzling — not least because Spellman was found among the flowers, in the heart of Maine’s most iconic tourist destination.
