The End of the Route: Why a Paperboy Disappeared After Christmas
I pressed my nose against the window pane. Santa would not be coming. It was the night before Christmas in 1964 and the unusually warm temperatures had melted what little snow had fallen in Fort Fairfield, Maine. Now it was raining, the grass green, the driveway muddy. Santa’s sleigh could not travel in this.
I sighed and felt the fur needles of our live Christmas tree inside the living room. The tree was lit and decorated with silver tinsel and shiny bulbs, with presents wrapped underneath. Perhaps we could survive without a Santa visit, just this once. We could still drive to my grandparents’ farm five miles away for presents that night, and Mom and Dad would have more gifts for me and my older brother to open the following day.
No snow came, and the day after Christmas—a Saturday—was glum. Dad drove his pickup truck into town to do some late afternoon errands at the drug store.
He parked on the opposite side of Main Street and went to cross the two-lane street, with street lamps dimly lighting the way, when a car almost hit him. “The fog was so thick he couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see him,” Dad said. “I almost got run over!”
We would always remember the fog and rain, years and decades later. That was the night that a 14-year-old newspaper carrier, Cyrus Everett, went missing while collecting money from his customers. He was carrying a money pouch, his mother said, which held about $12 in cash.
Cyrus’ route took him to several blocks near his home on Presque Isle Street, also known as Route 1A, which intersected Main Street near Bethel Baptist Church. It was near the church that Cyrus was last seen about 8:30 that evening.
He continued calling on customers, with the end of his route on Depot Street. There the trail of Cyrus went cold.
Some people thought he ran away from home, but his mother, who was raising him and his three siblings, didn’t think Cyrus would do that. The family attended the local Reformed Baptist Church on Main Street, where we also went. Mary’s children always seemed well-behaved, or so I thought.
Cyrus Everett.
Police contacted the boy’s father in New Brunswick and his aunt in Connecticut to see if he had traveled to either place. When those efforts came up empty, a town-wide search began the following Saturday and Sunday after colder winter weather had returned. Despite the town’s best efforts, Cyrus was not found.
“They’ll find him in the spring,” Myrt, an elderly friend, told me. “After the snow melts.”
The missing boy was the talk of the community until late February of 1965 when a body, indeed, was found. Only it wasn’t Cyrus. It was a woman’s body in her new apartment on Depot Street.
Mrs. Donna Mauch, a second-time divorcee and mother of a three-year-old girl, was discovered by her brother. She had died of head wounds. Donna had just moved to the Fort and worked as a cocktail waitress at the Plymouth Hotel, a hot spot for trouble in those days.
At first authorities thought her former husband or her former boyfriend may have done her in, but those leads proved fruitless.
Donna Mauch.
True to my elderly friend’s prediction, on Mother’s Day in May, after the snow had melted in the low areas of Fort Fairfield, some children, playing in a marshy woods between Depot and Richard Streets, found what looked like a body under a log that weighed several hundred pounds.
It was the less-than-100-pound body of Cyrus.
His clothes were intact, and the only thing missing was his money pouch.
The first medical examination of Cyrus indicated that he died of unknown causes and was alive when he was somehow lodged under the heavy log. After further investigation for several months, Aroostook County and state officials stated that no evidence had been discovered to indicate his death was anything but accidental, and no evidence indicated his death was tied to another. The case was not closed, but police personnel could no longer be kept on the case “full time.”
The townspeople, rallying around Mary Everett and the memories of her young son, went to the town council. The town agreed to hire a former state police detective with a great record, Otis LaBree of Old Town, to re-examine the case.
Aerial of several streets.
LaBree concluded that both Cyrus and Donna’s deaths were connected. And through his efforts, a second autopsy was finally conducted. Cyrus’ body was exhumed, and the results this time indicated he was dead by the time his body was placed under the log. He died from a hard blow to the head.
The only connection plausible, to LaBree, was a young man who had been a tenant at the Depot Street apartment building, the last building on Cyrus’ normal route. Phil Adams was the son of the building’s owner, Harold. Several other members of the Adams family also lived there, and three of them were Cyrus’ customers.
The police had questioned Phil about the night after Christmas, but Phil claimed he hadn’t seen the boy. He did show the police some scratches on his neck that he said came from some unknown person trying to attack him in the garage that night. The police didn’t question him any further.
Soon Phil, a suspected child molester recently jailed for forgery, tried to admit himself into the Bangor mental hospital. He wasn’t accepted but he still spent about a week away from Fort Fairfield.
In the meantime, his father rented Phil’s rooms to Donna Mauch.
After Phil returned to town, he moved into his grandmother’s apartment at the same Depot Street location. Did he try re-entering his old apartment to pick up things left behind—things connected to Cyrus?
Fort Fairfield Review Editor Kingdon Harvey.
Phil soon married a local girl and moved to Connecticut. After awhile he got in trouble again and was sent to a state corrections facility for assaulting a 10-year-old boy. His wife divorced him and returned to Maine with their children.
Maine’s two unsolved murders were “the most goofed up homicide investigations I’ve ever seen,” LaBree said some years later. Due to politics, the death of a state police investigator, lack of funds, and little manpower, the two cases were ignored. LaBree was not paid for his services and finally had to drop his work.
Fort’s newspaper editor, Kingdon Harvey, didn’t forget. For several years after the murders and botched investigations, King kept the names of Cyrus and Donna alive—if only on the masthead of his weekly paper.
King retired in 1979 and left the helm of the paper to his son, Tom. Five years later, Tom opened a letter mailed to the office. It was a poem, signed by “The Mystery Guest.” Looking at the return address from a Connecticut prison, Tom knew immediately who sent it.
The first two stanzas were as follows:
Phil was beginning to talk. He wanted to gain some attention after his oldest daughter, then living in Maine with her mother and step-father, refused to promise she would stay with him after he got out. First the poem, then interviews with the Review. Then Phil talked with his brother and confessed he had killed Donna. The brother contacted authorities and, a long story short, Phil was tried in the Caribou Supreme Court for the murder of Donna Mauch. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on January 15,1985.
But Phil did not confess during the trail to any murders, and there was no physical evidence. After the conviction, Phil claimed that there would be a new trial.
That day never came, however. Phil, 43, died in October of a massive heart attack while being held in a Maine prison.
The homicide of Cyrus remains, to this day, technically unsolved, as well as the whereabouts of his money pouch. Was it the “clue which is buried, with only he knows?” The one clue, perhaps, a jury would have loved to have seen? The one clue that got Donna Mauch killed?
As a result of the mishandling of both investigations, from then on the state took a more active role in homicide cases. And Mary Everett, who more than once stated her reliance and trust in God, lived to see at least partial justice administered to the man who had most likely killed her son.