The Murder of Michael T. Connolly (Maine)
32:31 Share

Dark Down East is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. The unexpected can happen at any moment, and Amica knows how important it is to be prepared. Whether it's auto, home, or life insurance, Amica has you covered. Their dedicated and knowledgeable representatives will work with you to make sure you have the right coverage in place to protect what matters most. You can feel confident that Amica is there for you. Visit amica.com to get started.

The front page of the August 16, 1930 edition of the Lewiston Evening Journal was covered with eye-catching headlines. The maiden voyage of a British airship. The sinking of a Norwegian ocean liner in the Cook Islands. But for Mainers, a local headline caught their attention. Drowning of Portland policeman remains a mystery.

The front page story gave few answers, but instead highlighted the question that was on everyone's mind that night. What happened to Michael T. Connolly? Like the waters of Casco Bay, the mystery and the uncertainty surrounding the death of patrolman Michael T. Connolly in the early morning hours of August 15th, 1930 is just as deep and open-ended today as it was as a fresh case over 90 years ago.

The list of questions posed has grown over time, and those who know of the incident are now still asking the same questions that family members and investigators have asked for years. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the death and discovery of patrolman Michael T. Connolly on Dark Down East. Michael T. Connolly was born in Ireland in 1881 to parents Lawrence and Margaret Coyne Connolly.

He had a sister, Mary, and four brothers: John, Edward, Patrick, and James. In 2008, the family of Michael Connelly sat down for a series of interviews with Susan Norton, a writer for a history blog called Stories of Long Ago. In her September 17th post of that year, she published the information, the memories, and the stories that the Connelly family shared with her about their beloved family member,

According to Norton's post, Edward and James followed their brother Michael to Portland, Maine. No doubt he and his brothers boarded a steamship and faced the open ocean together for a better life in the United States, like so many people did at the turn of the 20th century. The journey was tough, brutally deadly in the cases of some.

But deadly or not, whole families, or individuals alone, would receive a big send-off from their friends and loved ones, climb aboard a ship, and then cross the briny with a dream in their hearts and a prayer of hope on their lips.

Michael Connelly married Mary Madden from Kilkenny, and the two started a family together. Though it's unclear if he made the move to the United States first and sent for Mary later, or if she too was along for the initial journey. Chain migration was the method of choice for many Irish families when it came to getting the rest of the clan stateside.

The men of the family would sail to America first, establish themselves with a job and an address, then began mailing their wages overseas to their families. Chain migration led the road for their wives and children to join them in the land of opportunity. The Portland that Michael Connelly would have found when he arrived in the United States sometime before 1918 would have been somewhat recognizable today for people who are familiar with the city's general layout and plan.

Trolley cars, very much like the ones we associate with San Francisco, rattled up and down the city's cobblestone streets. Portland's first electric streetlights illuminated the way for pedestrians after dark, and the People's United Bank building, now known as the Fidelity Trust building, was completed in 1910 as Maine's first skyscraper, towering over the Harbor City.

But before the cobblestone and the trolley cars and the skyscrapers existed here, the land of Portland was ancestral territory of indigenous populations for thousands of years. When the area that is now known as Portland was first discovered by Europeans in the 1500s, it was inhabited by the Ocosisco people and the Abenakis.

Warfare and disease scattered the indigenous population, as did tribal warfare between native nations over the rights to trade with the English settlers. The first, but failed attempt at an English settlement in the area occurred in the 1630s. This was followed by another attempt in 1658 by the Massachusetts Bay Company, which named the village Falmouth.

However, this settlement only lasted until 1676 when it was completely destroyed during King Philip's War. In 1678, the area was settled again by the English and life on the waterfront thrived until 1690.

That year, with King William's War raging, the settlements in the area of what is today Maine's largest city were so badly decimated that the peninsula was abandoned for an entire decade.

Finally, in 1698, Massachusetts built a fort on the peninsula called Fort New Casco, which was used to defend the region during Queen Anne's War. After nearly 80 years of attempted settlement, Portland finally began to grow outward from Fort New Casco into a village, and then a town, and eventually a waterfront city and major trading center like its twin sister down the coast, Boston.

After that, despite being shelled by a British warship during the American Revolution and a major fire that destroyed most of the city in 1866, Portland grew into a thriving hub for trade, commerce, and transportation. According to the Maine Historical Society,

Portland first became a major port city in the early 1850s, when the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railway, eventually dubbed the Grand Trunk Railway, linked Portland to Montreal in Canada. One man, John A. Poore, saw a vision that would turn Portland into one of the largest and most lucrative shipping ports on the East Coast.

Portland is the closest major United States ports to the European ports of call, so the dream was a feasible one, especially when the narrow channels of Halifax, Nova Scotia froze over in the winter months. It was Poore's dream that Portland would become the winter port for all major shipping intended to enter Canadian ports during the colder months.

While this never happened on the scale that Poore dreamed, the Portland of the Victorian era was still a thriving, modern, industrial city in its own right. As the first of the century's stately steamships were gliding into Portland Harbor in the 1850s, something else was cresting on the horizon too, and it was contained within the ideology of one man that would eventually overtake the state of Maine.

weave its way across the map of the U.S., and then affect economies worldwide, changing the course of history forever. Neil Dow, born in Portland in 1804, was the son of temperance-promoting Quaker parents. His father was a leather tanner, and Dow became an apprentice at his father's business.

Dow's business tactics and skills were so great that, according to Maine and Encyclopedia, he was one of Portland's leading men of affairs. Inheriting his parents' temperance values by the time Dow was a young man, he saw the poverty and crime that scourged the city of Portland's low-class neighborhoods and firmly attributed it to alcohol. By the time Dow was in his 20s, Portland was a burgeoning port in the rum trade.

Woodhulled sailing ships would enter the harbor, completing their voyages from the West Indies, and offload their cargo of fresh bottled rum into the hands of citizens of the forest city. Dow began to advocate for a ban on liquor within the city of Portland's limits by 1830.

By 1851, when Dow had become mayor of Portland for the first time, he drafted the Maine Law, a law in which the sale and consumption of alcohol would be considered illegal within the state of Maine. When the law passed, it made Maine the very first dry state in the country.

You know, I wonder what Neil Dow's reaction to Portland would be today. With all of its independent craft beer companies and microbreweries and bars and nightlife, it all seems to pop up endlessly all over the city.

The long-term effect that Neil Dow's main law would have on the pages of history eventually led to the law that gave the 1920s the glamour and allure that seems to captivate its depiction in the media and its draw among historians: the law of prohibition.

In 1920, after various contributing factors, the Volstead Act was passed, making the sale and consumption of alcohol within the borders of the United States a criminal offense, punishable by jail time and heavy fines. Neil Dow passed away in 1897, but his effect on the nation's right to consume alcoholic beverages nicknamed him the "Father of Prohibition" and the "Napoleon of Temperance."

Because of his moral values, prohibition, the ever-famous speakeasy, and the concept of bathtub gin, all started in Maine. There is evidence, however, that the police force was not always so stringent in enforcing the law as its creator was. Rum runners and bootleggers dealt in Maine and the United States with obtaining illegal alcoholic beverages to distribute to the citizens of the state and the country.

Specially crafted boats were developed by these bootleggers, capable of traveling fast enough over the water to receive a shipment of alcohol from Canada, perform the transaction on the water, and escape back to Maine without being caught. The Maine Memory Network website states that, quote, this made the job of a rum runner a lot more difficult, unless, of course, they had the police on their side, end quote.

According to the writings made by Susan Norton from her interviews with Officer Connolly's family, quote, "Who would dare rat out their neighbor because everyone liked to drink? Those were the times. When the potential to make good money is involved, the line between good and evil is not so clear. There were some prominent families who afforded their children college educations with the profits they made from bootlegging." End quote.

This leads to a strong indication that some of the police officers of the era might have been paid to look the other direction, as long as they were able to make a buck off the illegal endeavors of other people. It was just the done thing to look the other way with one hand and uphold the law with the other.

Although the Volstead Act was repealed by President Roosevelt in 1934, that was still four years away from the night of August 14th, 1930, when night watchman Michael T. Connolly, badge number 71, arrived at the station for his shift.

On October 29, 2011, an article by the Portland Daily Sun called Who Killed Officer Connolly? detailed in brief the events in Connolly's career that led up to the morning of August 15, 1930.

Connolly had predominantly worked on the west end of the city, patrolling the western promenade area. However, just six weeks before the morning of August 15th, the beat roster had been changed, and Connolly was reassigned to the eastern promenade and its surrounding areas, the twin neighborhood of the one he had patrolled for many years.

According to the same 2011 article by the Portland Daily Sun, at around 8 o'clock in the morning of August 14, 1930, a longshoreman named John Lee decided to take a walk along the beach at Fish Point on Portland's eastern promenade. Within sight of the beach, three warships of the United States Navy were moored in Portland Harbor. One of them, the USS Memphis, was moored just 200 feet from the shore.

It was an overcast morning and rain showers threatened to fall from the sky at any moment. However, the tide was low and the pickings for driftwood were plentiful. John saw a large form and got excited. If this was a piece of driftwood, it could be a good day. However, as he approached the form, which was lying half submerged in the sand, he realized quickly that it wasn't a piece of driftwood.

It was the body of a man wearing the uniform of a police officer, and he was lying face down in the sand. His hands were shackled, apparently with his own handcuffs, and a few marks were visible on his body. Lee dashed up the hill to a nearby telephone booth and immediately phoned the police, who had themselves not heard from Officer Connolly for hours.

They'd been searching for badge number 71. The Portland Daily Sun describes that in the days of patrolman Connolly, officers would walk a beat marked with bright blue call boxes on street corners, similar in appearance to the fire engine red ones you can see on the corners of Portland today. The boxes were accessible to the officers by use of a long key, which they wore around their necks and would insert into the box.

The key could be inserted into a hole marked "Wagon Call" when the officer had made an arrest and needed to have a paddy wagon sent to the location. Officers would also use the box once an hour to call into the station, effectively letting the switchboard workers know where on their beat they were.

When the key was inserted all the way on the other side, it would activate a flashing blue light and sound an alarm that the officer at that location required backup assistance. Officer Connolly had not been heard from since 3:09 a.m. when he made his last call at the call box on Congress and Montfort Streets.

His next scheduled call had been for around 4 a.m. on the corner of India and Commercial Streets, about a half-mile walk. However, this 4 a.m. call never came. The police department allotted their officers a 15-minute grace period for calling in. And when Patrolman Connolly failed to call before those 15 minutes had passed, the Portland Police Department launched a full-scale search for him.

When John Lee's call about the discovery of a body at Fish Point Beach came in, the Portland Police dispatched a complement of 20 officers to the location, and these officers, once they arrived, asked that a medical examiner be summoned. This event, though procedural and standard in cases such as this, triggered the first sideways glance from people and the press regarding how Connolly's case was handled.

It took three subsequent requests for a medical examiner to come down to Fish Point, and that medical examiner didn't arrive until 11.30 that morning. Patrolman Connolly had been on full public display, laying on the beach on one of Portland's most frequented parks, for almost the entire morning.

According to Susan Norton's reporting, when the news came to them about the death, the family of Michael Connelly was at the summer home on Peaks Island. Connelly's granddaughter, Mary Lou, recounted that an officer came out to the island and informed Mrs. Connelly's brother, Martin Madden, that the body of his brother-in-law had been found that morning on Fish Point Beach. He requested that he wait until the family had returned to the mainland to tell them the news.

They urgently closed up the house and caught the next boat back to Portland. However, before Uncle Martin could tell his family of the tragedy, the cab driver that picked them up, most likely retelling the same story that everyone in Portland was talking about that morning, broke the news to Mrs. Connolly and her children. The initial search of Patrolman Connolly's body by the medical examiner and the investigators forced more questions into the case.

They found the call box key around his neck where it should be, but, curiously, his service revolver had been disturbed. Connolly was reported to be left-handed and he wore the holster for his revolver on the left side of his belt. However, the investigators discovered that his revolver had been shoved down into the right pocket of his pants.

The handcuffs that he had been shackled with were on upside down, indicating he could have possibly had his hands over his head when they were put on him. Worth noting also was the absence of his uniform cap. In the days of Patrolman Connolly, police officers would often keep important notes they wrote during their shift inside their cap for safekeeping. The search for Connolly's cap was intense.

After the sailors from the three battleships moored just off of Fish Point Beach were grilled about what they had seen, if anything, many of the crew members of the USS Memphis volunteered to aid in the search for the missing cap. The surface of Casco Bay was searched, the floor of Portland Harbor was dredged, and anyone aided in any way they could in searching for the elusive uniform cap, but it never turned up.

Like Connolly's missing cap, the evidence in this case was difficult to come by. For one, Connolly had been in the waters of Casco Bay for an undetermined period of time, which would have washed away any important clues from his body.

Further, during the three-hour-long wait for the medical examiner, the threatening skies that had loomed over John Lee while he searched for Driftwood finally opened up and drenched the scene, the police force, and Officer Connolly, further rinsing away any evidence which could have been useful to the police. The only real evidence that the investigators had to go on were the results of Connolly's autopsy. Connolly had drowned.

The Bancorp Daily News shared a leading theory based off this fact. It was believed that Connolly had surprised rum runners and was shackled with his own handcuffs, then prodded to the edge of a pier where he was forced to jump into the waters of Casco Bay. Unable to swim with his hands behind his back, Connolly succumbed to the sea. Though scant for hard evidence, one clue did give investigators something to go on.

According to a 1988 piece by Karen Lemke in the Bangor Daily News, Connolly's wristwatch stopped at 4:07 a.m. What happened to him between his last duty call at 3:09 a.m. and the minute his watch stopped at 4:07? When asked about the status of the investigation by reporters for the August 16, 1930 article,

Captain Ingalls could only tell the Lewiston Evening Journal, quote, "Your guess is as good as mine," end quote. According to the same article, possibly one of the last people who had seen Officer Connolly was a milk bottle delivery man named Charles Moreland. Moreland told the Lewiston Evening Journal that he had been making his rounds in the city's East End when he ran into Connolly.

According to the article, he quote: "said he met a patrolman at 2:35 a.m. at the corner of India and Middle Streets, and after a brief remark about the weather, he noticed Connolly step up to the corner twice and look both ways down Middle Street." Moreland added that he was sure the officer had something on his mind. End quote. It seems entirely possible, though, that Moreland wasn't the last person to ever see Connolly alive.

If true, he certainly wasn't the only one to notice that Connolly seemed to be preoccupied and in deep thought. According to Susan Norton's reporting on this case, he had been met by a patrolman Ridge. "Patrolman Ridge and Connolly had had a conversation in the doorway of the Liverpool Tavern near 3:25am, which was 15 minutes before his last duty call.

Ridge said it appeared Connolly had something on his mind and felt he wanted to be alone. What could patrolman Connolly have been thinking about so intently that two separate people independently accounted that he seemed to be mentally preoccupied? The only person who could ever tell us his thoughts would be Connolly himself. But there are theories.

By 1930, Portland had become a hotspot for boatlegging activity. With its proximity to Canada, its waterfront district, and its rural lands just beyond the city limits, it was the perfect place to perform such underhanded, gang-sourced commerce. The old port that we know of today, with its boutiques and trendy coffee shops, was decidedly not the old port of the 1930s.

Warehouses were the predominant building one would find if they took a stroll through that part of the city back then. Freight trains lined the narrow streets between the dockside structures, and tenement houses separated by dim corners still lit by gas lamps pockmarked the city's blocks.

If Portland could have had a red-light district, it would have been the old port. It was the best place to conduct business of this sort. According to the 2011 article by the Portland Daily Sun, quote, This was the era of prohibition, when smuggling of alcohol was big business, and many bootleggers' boats carrying the illegal cargo pulled in near the shore of the city's east end to unload their goods.

The docks and warehouses of Portland's waterfront held many secrets during that era. End quote. The early morning had been foggy and dark, and the high tide had come in at 3.17 a.m. It was the perfect storm of contributing factors for a successful offloading of alcohol, if nobody noticed or got in the way. Had Officer Connolly found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Or did he perhaps know of something that was going to happen on the waterfront that morning? Had Connelly tried to stop it? A known bootlegger, John Panica of Boston, was sought for questioning by the Portland Police Department. Panica also went by the name John Wilson. It was his stage name as a middleweight boxing champion.

Newspapers harped on this potential connection. It certainly made the story more sensational to a public hungry for answers. But whether the bootlegger/boxer was ever questioned or named a suspect in the death of Officer Connolly is unknown. Patrolman Dennis Flynn was working the police quarter switchboard at 132 Federal Street that night.

Curiously, Flynn initially claimed that he received Connolly's last duty call at 6:09 that morning, when his last duty call had really come in at 3:09 a.m. When asked why Flynn had lied about the time of Connolly's last duty call during his questioning for the investigation, he confessed that he had written 6:09 a.m. in the logbook to protect Officer Connolly.

It was speculated that because Connolly had worked a double shift that night, he may have gotten drowsy or tired and forgotten to call in. According to the reporting of Susan Norton, Flynn was later suspended for his failure to report Connolly's missed duty call. Finding it difficult to answer the increasing questions of the press and the public and Connolly's family,

The police offered the possibility of dying by suicide, though they retracted the statement in time for the August 16th printing of the Lewiston Evening Journal. Mary Connolly, his wife, was quick to take up her husband's defense, saying, "...Mike would never do away with himself. He thought too much of me and the children."

The city of Portland, in true New England form, rallied around the Connelly family and set up a relief fund for Mrs. Connelly and her children. Citizens and business owners in the city donated some $1,400 in just six days. That's over $24,000 in today's money. John Connelly, then just 11 years old, promised he would take care of his mother and help in any way he could, even aiding in the search to locate his father's missing cap.

Meanwhile, the Portland Police Department retired Connolly's badge, number 71. On June 28, 1985, the Portland Police honored Patrolman Connolly's memory when they launched a brand new police boat in the waters of Casco Bay. The 31-foot vessel was christened the Michael T. Connolly and featured a large replica of badge number 71 painted proudly on its side.

In attendance at the ceremony were surviving members of his family, U.S. Senator George Mitchell and then-Police Chief Francis Amoroso and Mayor Joseph D. Cassell. The boat proudly served the Portland Police Department until 1992. According to Norton's writings, the boat took on water one day and had to be beached before it sank. By some unseen force of irony, the ditching attempt took place...

on Fish Point Beach. Following this, the boat was retired on August 1st, 1992, and the police department never commissioned another one. The Connelly children grew up without their father, watching their mother try to make ends meet on her own. Eventually, some of the children relocated to other parts of the country,

According to cemetery records, his wife Mary Madden passed away in 1958 and his daughter Catherine Ann in 2009. Mary and Catherine never got the closure of finding out who was responsible for the loss of their husband and father or the answer to why they had to say goodbye. The headstone of the Connolly family plot, located in Calvary Cemetery in South Portland, is fittingly Irish.

With its tall Celtic cross, intricately carved with Gaelic-style scrollwork and the name Connolly written in a stylistic font across the bottom, it is a beautiful memorial to the culture and the legacy of the man it stands for.

Connolly, together with his wife and daughter, joined the many of Portland's Irish cops, as they were called, which are buried in the cemetery today. Visit in the summer and you will see many bright blue flags, bearing the Portland Police Department crest, fluttering in the gentle breeze beside many of the headstones.

August 14th, 2021 was the 91st anniversary of the evening that Patrolman Connolly signed on for his last watch. The law of prohibition and the act of bootlegging no longer exist, and now, anyone who was connected to his case in 1930 likely passed away years, if not decades ago.

Though a conclusion to the case seems out of reach, his family hoped to keep his name and his story alive. In August of 2005, they told his story at a lecture held in his honor at the Maine Irish Heritage Center, housed within the very same church building that he was a member of after he moved to Portland. These days, Fish Point Beach on Portland's Eastern Prom is a popular place for people to take their dogs to play in the waves.

In the summer, people come to this little beach just a short walk from the busy hub of downtown to catch a novel steam engine ride on the city's narrow-gauge railroad or to soak up the sun or dip their toes in the water. In the winter months, parents bring their children here to ride the Polar Express. And every year before the age of COVID, people would flock to the beach for Portland's annual Polar Plunge event.

Any time of year, you can see the ferries of Casco Bay Line as they chug back and forth dutifully between the many isles of the bay. There are many things to enjoy on the east end of Portland's peninsula. Though, the next time you visit the beach, or if you ever get to, take a moment to pause and think about Michael T. Connolly.

Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. Source material for this case and others is listed at darkdowneast.com. This episode was co-written by Noah Bonnell. Noah, thank you for sharing a case with us that is important to you. Thank you for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do. I'm honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and murder cases.

I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.