Bill Diamond, a former Maine secretary of state and longtime lawmaker who spent the end of his life as a staunch critic of the state’s child welfare system, has died at the age of 80.
The centrist Democrat who cut a striking figure in the State House with his shock of bright red hair and cowboy boots was a popular figure in the area around his hometown of Windham. The community leader served 13 terms in the Legislature between 1976 and 2020, bookending his time as secretary of state from 1989 to 1997.
As a state senator, he authored the 2017 law that banned the use of handheld devices while driving. But he was best known for his advocacy against child abuse. Diamond led investigations into the deaths of two girls, including 10-year-old Marissa Kennedy, who died in 2018 at the hands of her mother and stepfather.
The state got 25 reports about Kennedy and her family in the 16 months before her murder in Stockton Springs, but it did not confirm abuse until she died. Those cases, as well as other more recent ones focused on by Diamond’s nonprofit group Walk a Mile in Their Shoes, put the child welfare system under its heaviest scrutiny since the 2001 killing of 5-year-old Logan Marr by her foster mother.
“Marissa didn’t need to die; Logan Marr didn’t need to die,” he said in an interview last month. “But the reason they did is because the department didn’t do their job.”
Diamond’s death was confirmed in a statement from his foundation. He announced last week that he was stepping back from his day-to-day role with the group “due to health reasons.”
He was born in Gardiner in 1945, playing football at the high school there and going on to a career in education. He was a teacher and principal in the Windham-area school system through his early time in the Legislature, briefly becoming superintendent before his eight-year tenure as secretary of state.
His office dealt with one of Maine’s biggest-ever political scandals. A top aide to then-House Speaker John Martin, D-Eagle Lake, was caught in a legislative committee room in December 1992 stuffing ballot boxes during a recount. That aide and another one later pleaded guilty to charges related to the incident, which prompted the institution of legislative term limits.
Republicans criticized Diamond for his reaction to the incident. He defended himself in letters to Maine newspapers. At one point, he said he thought there were only three keys to the committee room in circulation when building records showed there were more than 30. Diamond gave a candid response to the Associated Press.
“We let our guard down,” he said of his office. “We’re conditioned that the Maine way is clean and honest.”
At that time, he was seen as a leading gubernatorial candidate entering the 1994 cycle. He instead lost a primary for Maine’s 1st Congressional District. He never ran for high office after that, but voters in his swing district routinely sent him back to Augusta by wide margins.
In 2012, he published a true crime book that underscored his hardline approach to criminal justice. Three years later, he proposed a bill that would have instituted the death penalty, which Maine banned in 1887 following a botched execution, for people convicted of murder in connection with a sex crime against a child.
When Diamond got publicity for his activities in this area, some critics emerged to note his time working for the Elan School, a school that closed in 2011 after decades of abuse allegations. When a writer asked him about it, he said he believed the school’s problems were in the past and that he was mostly a liaison between it and state policymakers.
Late in his legislative career, Diamond worked with Republicans to push an effort to separate child welfare from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. While his moderate Democratic politics often aligned him with Gov. Janet Mills, he criticized her after she responded to a no-confidence vote in her child welfare chief by saying she had full confidence in her.
Diamond was respected in the State House, where Democratic aides called him “The Legend.” At a forum for Republican gubernatorial candidates this spring in Old Orchard Beach, all of them praised his work on child welfare as a roadmap for what they would do in office. Conservative radio host Ray Richardson said Diamond was his most frequent guest.
“I just always admired him for being a statesman,” Richardson said.
