When Heather Henry-Tenan heard that police had arrested a suspect in murder of a Calais teen in 1984, her first impulse was to do cartwheels.
“If I weren’t 60 years old, I’d be doing cartwheels all over this place,” she told the Bangor Daily News on Thursday. “I didn’t think it would ever happen, to be honest with you.”
Maine State Police on Thursday charged Raymond Brown, 65, of Bangor with the murder of 18-year-old Linda Maxwell, reviving the more-than-40-year-old cold case.
Henry-Tenan was one of the last people to see Maxwell alive and talked to her briefly outside The Mart in Calais, a local teen hangout at the time, two days before her body was found. She recalled Maxwell as a “sweet, quiet girl.”
When she heard that Maxwell’s body had been found naked on the shore of the St. Croix River in the neighboring town of Robbinston on Aug. 25, 1984, she and her mother immediately went to the rock quarry, where the teen was rumored to have been the night before. They spent the day looking for Maxwell’s clothes “or anything” but came up empty handed.
In the years that followed, there were always rumors in the small Down East city about who had done it, but the case remained unsolved.
“It was a huge story for a small town like Calais back then,” she said.
As a reporter at the Calais Advertiser for 21 years starting in 1991, Henry-Tenan annually recapped the cold case and made a plea for anyone to come forward with information. As the years went by, she credited her former editor, the late Ferguson Calder, with keeping the story alive when she began to doubt that it was doing any good.
She kept in contact with police but said they were always tight-lipped about what they knew. In a notable exception, Henry-Tenan recalled an officer saying police knew who did it, but they were waiting for corroboration from family members. But that was about 20 years ago, she said.
In a 2007 interview with the Bangor Daily News, Henry-Tenan said she believed there were local people who knew what happened to Maxwell, but a small-town conspiracy of silence might keep the truth from ever being known.
Police have released few details about the arrest of Brown other than that he lived in Pembroke, a short distance from Calais, at the time of Maxwell’s death. Henry-Tenan said she didn’t recognize his name.
On Thursday, Henry-Tenan was in Honduras where she has a home in addition to her home in Lubec. She said her phone was blowing up with Down East locals celebrating the news.
“We all prayed that it would happen while her parents were still alive. When they passed, it was just, I just didn’t think it would happen now,” she said. “I can tell you all of Calais is trying to do cartwheels like me right now.”
