Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
On March 18, 1965, a chambermaid at the Bangor House walked into an unoccupied room at the once-iconic Bangor hotel to a horrifying sight: her coworker, 54-year-old Effie Terrill MacDonald, dead, strangled by her own nylon stockings, which were tightly wrapped around her neck.
Since that day nearly 60 years ago, MacDonald’s death has haunted her family and friends, the community, and the law enforcement officers who for six decades have never found the answer to the question: who killed Effie MacDonald?
It remains Bangor’s oldest cold case since modern recordkeeping, and one of the oldest cold cases still unsolved in Maine.
The story is unchanged all these years later. MacDonald, who was born in Aroostook County in 1911, lived between Houlton and Bangor for most of her life, and had a marriage in the 1930s that ended in divorce sometime in the 1950s. Her family recalled her as a kind, quiet and pleasant woman, who enjoyed simple pleasures like cooking, crochet and spending time with her family.
In 1956, MacDonald settled permanently in Bangor, working at a bakery and then as a chambermaid for the Bangor House — a hotel in downtown Bangor once renowned in the 19th and early 20th centuries for its grandeur, but rather shabbier by the 1960s. In the late 1970s, the Bangor House was converted into apartments for disabled and elderly people.
MacDonald arrived for work around 9 a.m. on March 18, 1965, with coworkers reporting having last seen her around 1:15 p.m. that day. By 2 p.m., she was nowhere to be found, and a search of the property commenced. That’s when her coworker found her body in an unoccupied third floor room — beaten and sexually assaulted, with her stockings tied around her neck.
The crime shocked the Bangor area, and speculation quickly began that the murder was the work of the Boston Strangler, a serial killer who murdered 13 women — the majority of whom were in their 50s or older — in greater Boston in the early 1960s. The last confirmed Boston Strangler murder was in January 1964, and MacDonald’s death occurred just over a year later. A Massachusetts man named Albert DeSalvo, who was already in police custody on rape charges at the time of MacDonald’s murder, later confessed to the killings.
Within a week, Boston police had determined that MacDonald’s murder was unrelated. The task of solving the case now lay with longtime Bangor Police Department detective Clifton E. Sloane.
Sloane would spend the next decade of his life trying to solve the murder. He and other investigators interviewed hundreds of people in the weeks after the crime, attempting to narrow down the list of possible suspects. Meanwhile, Bangor area residents were terrorized by a spate of “prank” phone calls, with the Bangor Daily News reporting on April 5 of that year that several elderly women had received calls from strangers saying they were going to “kill all the women in Bangor.”
On March 23 police identified a person of interest, and released a description of him as being roughly in his 30s, about 5 feet, 10 inches and weighing around 175 pounds, with brown hair and very prominent brown eyes, wearing an open neck shirt and a brown jacket or short coat. Bangor Daily News editorial cartoonist Vic Runtz created a sketch of the individual based on reports from Bangor House employees. No one ever came forward.
By May 1965, the trail had begun to run cold. Despite their best efforts, no one was ever charged with MacDonald’s murder. Sloane told the BDN in 1973 that he believed he knew exactly who killed MacDonald, but had no physical evidence to back up his claims. Sloane died in 1976, with the case unsolved.
As far as police know, any evidence that was left over from the crime 60 years ago does not contain any DNA that could now be used to identify a suspect. A number of decades-old cold cases have been solved using modern DNA technology, including, famously, the Golden State Killer, who murdered at least 13 people and committed at least 51 rapes in California between 1974 and 1986. In 2018, using DNA evidence, a Sacramento man was arrested and later convicted for those crimes.
Very few people who remember Effie MacDonald are still alive today. Those who remain, like her nephew, Bangor resident Dale Mower, who was five years old when his aunt was killed, said he simply doesn’t want people to forget her.
“I just want people to realize that the family — we know it’s never going to be solved, and we’re resigned to that,” Mower told the podcast “Murder, She Told” in 2021. “We just want to keep the memory of her alive. She was a simple, loving individual.”
