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Visit adobe.com slash students to save big today. When Pamela Webb left her home in Winthrop, Maine on the first Saturday of July in 1989, her dog and Bible beside her, she could not have anticipated that her road trip would be interrupted by a still unknown predator.
There was no shortage of potential connections to explore following her presumed abduction and murder. But so far, the perceived similarities have not developed into any publicly named suspects or arrests. What happened to Pamela Webb? And what are investigators doing to answer that question today, more than 35 years later? I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Pamela Webb on Dark Down East. ♪
It was Saturday, July 1st, 1989, and 32-year-old Pamela Webb had just tucked her nieces and nephews into bed after a day of making memories together. She lived just down the road from her mother and father, Virginia and Kenneth Webb in Winthrop, Maine, and all the grandkids were there for a sleepover. Susan Rayfield reports for The Sun-Journal that Pamela helped with dinner and even treated the kiddos to some ice cream sundaes with all the fixings before it was time to crawl into bed.
As the kids drifted off to dreamland, Pamela headed back down the road to change. At 9.03 p.m., she made a brief phone call to her boyfriend, Josh, who lived in Mason, New Hampshire. Pamela told him she was about to leave for his place and expected to arrive around 1 a.m. Soon after that call, Kenneth saw his daughter trundle past their house in her pickup truck with her dog Thumper riding shotgun.
Kenneth had to have shaken his head at the sight of his daughter's less-than-reliable pickup rolling down the road that night. He'd wanted her to get rid of that thing for something more reliable, not to mention more practical. Pamela was just 5'1 and had to use blocks to reach the pedals. But if she had any plans to listen to her father's advice, she hadn't yet done anything about it.
The truck made it to New Hampshire just the weekend before, no problem, and besides, her boyfriend planned to tinker on it that weekend to see if he could solve some of the issues. There are only a few things that have been publicly confirmed about Pamela's travels after she left Winthrop that night. The first comes from a toll receipt. She passed through the Augusta Tollbooth, Mainers might refer to it as Old Exit 15, on the main turnpike at 9.52 p.m.,
After that, what's known about Pamela's movements, what she faced on the dark but well-traveled turnpike in the late night hours, we can only guess at now. Pamela Webb grew up in Winthrop, Maine, went to Winthrop High School, and stayed in Winthrop as she began to build her adult life on a 10-acre plot of land she bought just down the road from her parents. She loved horseback riding, her family, growing in her faith at church, and had always been passionate about music.
She even studied music and voice at the University of Maine at Augusta for two years. She planned to continue her education after earning a little money with her job at Digital Equipment Corp. in the Augusta location as a quality control inspector. It was only going to be a short-term gig, but one year spilled over into two, and before she knew it, Pamela was approaching her 12-year anniversary at the company.
Digital Equipment Corp. had a computer dating service, which by the sounds of it was a late 80s version of a dating app sans the swiping. That is how Pamela met her boyfriend, Josh, who was working at the company's location in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Her parents later described it as Pamela's first serious relationship. They'd been dating about eight weeks when Pamela left for his house that Saturday night.
By 10 a.m. the next morning, July 2nd, Pamela's boyfriend Josh had already been worrying for hours. Pamela didn't show up at 1 a.m. as expected or any time after, and she hadn't called to let him know if her plans had changed or if something happened along the way. Unable to track her down himself, Josh called police. When the report of a missing person reached Maine State Police, the description of Pamela's vehicle stuck out.
The same kind of truck, a blue 1981 Chevrolet C10 pickup, was spotted on the side of the turnpike just a few hours earlier. According to reporting by Steve Campbell for the Evening Express, a state trooper had pulled over to take a look at the truck around 7.30 a.m. It was parked on the shoulder about a half mile north of the southbound Biddeford exit.
There was a dog inside, plus the signs of a flat tire in mid-repair. The spare was leaning up against the back bumper. Since it was a Sunday, there was no place to bring the dog, I'm assuming that meant animal control and area shelters were closed. So the trooper left the dog in the truck where it sat and didn't call for a tow. But that state trooper wasn't the first to take notice of Pamela's truck.
Another trooper by the name of Jeffrey Haas was on duty the night of July 1st into the early morning hours of July 2nd, and when asked if he'd seen anything during his patrol, he said he actually saw the truck in question around 2am. He checked it with a flashlight and saw a barking dog in the front seat. He also noticed that one of the rear tires was flat, and the spare was leaning up against the rear bumper, just as the other trooper described.
Trooper Haas filled out a patrol check card for the disabled vehicle, but with the dog left inside, Trooper Haas just assumed the driver had gone to get help to fix the tire and would be back soon. Now in broad daylight and with a missing persons report for the vehicle's owner, those assumptions were proven terribly wrong.
According to reporting by Tammy Wells for the Journal Tribune, when state police took a closer look at the scene surrounding Pamela's truck, they found two pools of blood on the pavement near the passenger side. On the ground nearby, a pair of earrings were pushed into the gravel. Pamela's dog Thumper was still inside the truck that morning, and he was okay, by the way. Police took him to a nearby toll booth where he was spoiled with treats until Pamela's parents were able to pick him up.
Everything else inside the truck seemed okay too. Pamela's personal belongings were still there, undisturbed, including her purse and her Bible. Investigators didn't know exactly what they were dealing with yet, but no money was missing from Pamela's purse, so robbery was quickly ruled out, and the blood in the earrings didn't bode well. Police immediately feared for Pamela's well-being and suspected she had been abducted.
Investigators treated the truck and the area surrounding it as a crime scene and began scouring for evidence. They collected the two sections of pavement with blood on them and sent them off for testing at the state police crime lab. They believed or worried that the blood belonged to Pamela, but wanted to confirm it with blood type comparison. Police also located a footprint about 20 feet away from the truck and made a plaster cast of the impression in the soil.
Search dogs were brought to the location, but they didn't find anything conclusive. A few articles of clothing were recovered about a half mile away from the truck, a pair of sneakers and a shirt, also a towel. But they didn't appear to have anything to do with Pamela's disappearance. By July 3rd, news of the investigation began to circulate, and police hoped that publicity would lead to answers. That part of the highway near the Biddeford exit was heavily traveled, especially on the night of July 1st.
Mike LeBaird reports for the Kennebec Journal that there was an Allman Brothers 20th anniversary concert in nearby Old Orchard Beach that let out around 10.30 p.m. that night. The main turnpike authority said the concert was the likely cause of increased traffic in the area. But the more cars passing by, the better as far as police were concerned. It meant more people may have seen Pamela or her truck. They were first interested in the stretch of time between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.,
The publicity did generate almost two dozen calls within the first day from people who had seen the blue Chevy on the shoulder of the turnpike, some mentioning that the emergency lights were flashing when they passed. While most said the truck was empty when they saw it, court records indicate that at least one caller who passed the truck around 11:20 p.m. said there was a woman near it at that time.
With these initial calls from witnesses, police narrowed the timeline of Pamela's assumed abduction to between 11 p.m. and 12.30 a.m. Police expanded the search efforts in the following days, spinning a two-mile radius from the truck's location with more search dogs on the ground and a National Guard helicopter circling overhead. On July 5th, the search got even more intense, with assistance from game wardens and personnel from the Brunswick Naval Air Station.
Michelle Vallee reports for the Journal Tribune that a systematic search of the grassy and wooded areas between the shoulder of the turnpike up to a security fence running parallel to the road, all the way down to the York toll booth, turned up some items. A pair of men's pants, a pair of white knee-high socks, but nothing believed to be connected to Pamela.
Investigators received several more calls in the days that followed, upwards of 70 reports from people who saw Pamela's truck, allowing Maine State Police Captain Reynolds Lamontagne to narrow the timeline even further. He stated that whatever happened to Pamela, quote, in all likelihood, end quote, happened around 11.15 p.m. and 11.45 p.m. on the night of July 1st.
But exactly what happened and where she ended up was a question they still had yet to answer. And the evidence collected so far wasn't giving police a full picture. The analysis performed on the blood found near the truck proved it to be type O human blood. But police couldn't find a record of Pamela's blood type anywhere. Pamela's parents volunteered blood samples, and both Kenneth and Virginia had type O blood, making it likely Pamela was the same.
Police operated on the assumption that the blood spilled on the turnpike was Pamela's. After examining the truck, police determined that the flat tire was not punctured, rather it had a slow leak that probably went flat gradually. Everything else inside the truck had been fingerprinted and inventoried, and those prints were being analyzed, but police did not say what they'd found specifically, only that some clues inside the truck may be helpful to the investigation.
As far as that footprint found at the scene, it was said to be in poor condition, and so it's unclear what, if anything, investigators would be able to learn from the print. But that too was being studied. Interestingly, as far as I can tell from the source material available to me at this point, what police didn't find in or near the truck was the tire iron and jack you might expect to see if someone was changing a flat tire.
But those items, if they ever existed, were missing from the truck and the scene. After more than five days and lacking any concrete evidence to direct the investigation and search, police moved to create a scene profile, which would allow them to compare the known circumstances of Pam's disappearance with other cases to identify a possible common denominator.
They were specifically looking into other assaults, accidents, and incidents that occurred on the turnpike and nearby routes in recent weeks. Turns out, there were a couple. About seven months earlier, in December of 1988, a man tried to get a woman into his car after her car broke down in Augusta. She refused, and after several attempts, the man left.
Less than two months before Pamela's disappearance on May 12th, 1989, a woman reported that she was sexually assaulted when her car broke down in the southbound lane of the turnpike near a gunquick, about 15 miles from where Pam's truck was abandoned. The woman said she had stepped out of her car and the attacker came out of nowhere. The suspect was still at large, but police did have a description of the man.
On June 27th, police received a report that a man tried to get into a woman's broken-down vehicle on the turnpike near York, which was within 30 miles of where Pamela's truck was parked. The man was scared off when another car drove by. And then on July 3rd, just two days after Pamela disappeared, there was another chilling incident on a main roadway.
A woman was driving on a quiet street about 50 miles away from Biddeford in the town of Freiburg when a man in a truck came up beside her. The man said she had a bad rear tire on her car and then forced her to pull off the road and stop. The man approached the car, but the woman locked her doors and refused to get out. The man tugged on the door handles, trying to get in, but he finally left when another car came along and asked him to move because he was blocking the road.
When that other guy looked at the woman's tire, he said there was nothing wrong with it. The suspect in this incident was also still at large at the time, but police had a description. According to news reports at the time, the suspects in the December and June incidents were both interviewed as part of the investigation into Pamela's disappearance, but police did not officially list them as suspects in her case.
Investigators had not conclusively determined if any of the four attacks or attempted attacks were connected to each other or to Pamela. Identifying possible connections seemed to be the primary focus of the Pamela Webb investigation in the weeks that followed. Though there had been no public discussion of evidence that indicated sexual assault was a factor, police were checking the movements of people in the area with a known history of sexual offenses.
And then on July 18th, 1989, the FBI arrested a man who really grabbed the attention of Maine law enforcement. Has your kid asked for help with homework or maybe your child's ahead of the curve and getting bored in class? Whether your kid is struggling or soaring, IXL can make a real difference. IXL is an award-winning online learning platform that helps kids really understand what they're learning. It covers math, language arts, science, and social studies from pre-K all the way through 12th grade.
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When FBI agents arrested 29-year-old Randolph B. Jacobitz on kidnapping charges out of Vermont, he was already being looked at as a possible suspect in Pamela's case. Jacobitz was accused of kidnapping a 23-year-old woman from a rest stop on Interstate 91 in Westminster, Vermont at 10 p.m. on June 13th. She had just finished using a payphone when Jacobitz forced her to the ground, put her in handcuffs, and forced her into his tractor-trailer truck.
He allegedly sexually assaulted her and drove to Bronx, New York, where he left her on the side of the highway. According to an Associated Press report in the Journal Tribune, the woman had seen enough through the pillowcase he'd placed over her head to pick Jacobitz out of a lineup. She also left hair in the back of his truck and intentionally dug her fingernails into the dirt on the floor of the truck so investigators had more evidence. A remarkable story of survival.
Maine State Police did not immediately consider Jacobitz as a suspect in Pamela's case or the other attacks on women along Maine roadways, but they weren't about to ignore the guy either. Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Caruso said a necklace that Jacobitz was wearing when he was arrested matched the description of a necklace a woman saw her attacker wearing during the sexual assault on the side of the highway on May 12th.
So obviously, Maine authorities had some questions for Jacobitz. If only they could get him to talk. While they waited for Jacobitz to break his silence, Pamela's family pleaded for her safe return. Pamela's mother, Virginia, appealed to the person who may have taken her daughter through the newspaper, saying, quote, if she's still alive, for heaven's sakes, bring her back or let us know where she is, end quote.
The Webb family didn't know yet that the same day Jacobitz was apprehended, a terrible discovery was made in the New Hampshire woods that would turn their lives upside down. Just after 5 p.m. on July 18th, 1989, construction workers heading home for the night had stopped off Route 3 in Franconia, New Hampshire for a reprieve from the road when they noticed a foul odor coming from the woods. Not far from where they'd stopped, they discovered badly decomposed human remains.
According to reporting by Gloria Poliquin for the New Hampshire Union Leader, the person was wearing a denim miniskirt and a red shirt, but the condition of the remains made it impossible to make a positive identification. An autopsy was unable to determine age or height or a cause of death, but the remains were believed to be that of a woman.
Now, investigators in New Hampshire were aware of Pamela Webb's disappearance, but based on the state of decomposition, it was believed that the woman had died sometime in the spring, and so it didn't seem likely the body was Pamela. A search of the area failed to locate any evidence that would help give this woman her name back. But when a reporter from the New Hampshire union leader named Nancy West heard the description of the woman's clothing, she called Maine State Police.
The clothing sounded a lot like the clothing Pamela was last seen wearing. From there, the Maine medical examiner contacted the New Hampshire medical examiner. And the next day, dental records proved that the body was that of Pamela Webb.
It was still impossible to determine the cause of death, time of death, or if she had been sexually assaulted due to the state of decomposition. However, David Anderson reports for the Sun-Journal that circumstances of her disappearance and evidence found near her truck left investigators to rule Pamela's death a homicide. Type, undetermined.
The site of her remains was described as a wooded area of Franconia in a secluded part of the White Mountain National Forest about two miles from Interstate 93 and approximately 30 feet from a discontinued section of Route 3. It was around 110 miles away from the spot where her truck was found abandoned on the main turnpike.
To get from the spot where her truck was found to that location in Franconia, you'd head south from Biddeford and get on Route 16 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and then get onto Route 302 in North Conway, continuing north to Franconia. Franconia was about 130 miles north of Mason, where Pamela's boyfriend lived, and her intended destination that night. The Webb family couldn't think of any ties that Pamela had to Franconia.
Searches of the discovery site continued, but again, no evidence was found. Police did locate a discharged bullet, but it was not believed to be connected to her case. There were also early, unconfirmed reports that Pamela's legs were missing from her body when she was discovered, presumably because of animal activity. That detail was more or less confirmed later on. According to the source material I have access to for this case, Pamela's legs were never recovered.
When word circulated of the terrible discovery, a tipster came forward who said he biked along Route 3 all the time, and on July 2nd, the very day Pamela was reported missing, he saw a green van with Maine license plates pull off the road in the general area of the remains and a man got out. He had shoulder-length hair and was described as medium height. The bicyclist said that the guy was acting strange in the woods.
New Hampshire State Police weren't too sure the tip was anything significant to begin with, but they did appear to check it out. They brought the bicyclist back to the area where he saw the van, and it was indeed close to where Pam's body was ultimately found. Police reportedly asked the man if he'd be willing to be hypnotized to see if that would surface the license plate number of the green van, but it's unclear if the man agreed or if it ever happened.
Investigators in two states, plus the FBI, continued to work Pamela's case alongside the other reports of attacks on women on New England roadways. Information about Pamela's abduction and murder would be checked in VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which allows agencies to compare notes on crimes to see if any similarities exist.
Meanwhile, Pamela's family, friends, and supporters in the community circulated a letter for signatures they planned to send to the producers of the TV show Unsolved Mysteries. Tom Farkas reports that Pamela's loved ones wanted the show to take up her case, hoping it would generate new information and leads. However, producers said that Pamela's case was lacking necessary information to be featured, and that it was unlikely that exposure on the program would lead to a suspect.
But it's not like the case was lacking in people to look at. Let's talk about suspects, or people who would potentially be likely suspects, because at this point, police have not indicated if they have any official suspects in Pamela Webb's murder. Some sources claimed that Randolph Jacobitz had an alibi for the time Pamela was kidnapped. He said he was in New York that day, but investigators wanted some hard proof of that before they took the guy at his word.
That proof came in the form of his logbook, which showed his movements in the days before and after Pamela disappeared. A highway toll receipt showed he was in New Jersey and New York on July 1st, and records proved he had dropped off a shipment of beef in Quebec, Canada on July 2nd.
He passed through customs at the border back into the United States at 6.30 p.m. the same night, making it unlikely he was on the side of the main turnpike on July 1st when Pamela was abducted. With that, Jacobitz was all but ruled out as a suspect in Pamela's case. And it's unclear if he was ever ruled in or out in the May 12th, 1989 sexual assault on the side of the main turnpike.
However, he was convicted of kidnapping and kidnapping only in the case of the Vermont woman and sentenced to 29 years in prison, almost the max. The judgment reads, quote, the criminal history category does not adequately reflect the seriousness of the defendant's past criminal conduct or the likelihood of further crimes by the defendant, end quote.
Interestingly, this case was the first time federal prosecutors used DNA evidence to place a suspect at the scene of the crime. Jacobitz challenged the admissibility of DNA evidence in appeals, but his conviction was upheld. He was released under supervision in February of 2015.
Records show he currently resides in Texas, where he opened a food truck in 2016 before violating his probation conditions in 2018 with the possession and use of methamphetamine. He was arrested and charged with burglarizing a vehicle in 2019 and ultimately pleaded guilty to that in 2021. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Anyway, back to August of 1989. By then, police had also apparently ruled out Pamela's boyfriend Josh as a suspect. But there's little context to this in publicly available sources. Several months passed without much obvious forward motion. The next major public update in Pamela's case came in March of 1990, when a man contacted local NBC affiliate WCSH6 in Portland, Maine.
According to the news director at the time, Michael Clark, the man told the news station information about Pamela's murder that they'd never heard before. He said he had information about a weapon that could have been used and a possible suspect who had a history of violence against women.
The man was an inmate at Maine State Prison at the time, and he said another inmate who had been convicted of the aggravated assault of a sex worker had admitted to killing Pamela using a hammer or a wrench. The man said that when the guy was arrested for the aggravated assault, there was an earring in his vehicle similar to the ones Pamela was wearing when she disappeared. The news station had no way of corroborating the details, so they referred the man over to investigators.
Maine State Police called the witness the first fresh lead in months, but he was apparently already on their radar and police were aware of his quote-unquote connection to Pam's case. On March 28, 1990, police interviewed the source for several hours. They also spoke to the other inmate who allegedly admitted to killing Pamela as well as other people incarcerated at the same time, but the lead wasn't found to be legitimate. Another dead end.
For almost three years, the investigation continued in fits and starts. A lead would surface and police checked it out, yet there was no obvious forward motion from the public's perspective. However, the public wasn't seeing or hearing everything going on behind closed doors. Until 1992, when major news broke about the case. A Maine State trooper was caught lying.
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During late summer of 1989, one of Pamela's co-workers wrote a letter to the Public Safety Commissioner, John Atwood, asking why it took police three hours to check Pamela's truck after it was first seen.
Now at this point, the public-facing information regarding sightings of the car was that a passerby saw a woman near the truck at 11.20 p.m. The next sighting was around 2 a.m. when an employee of the Maine Turnpike Authority saw it parked on the shoulder. And then Trooper Jeffrey Haas saw the truck and stopped to view it after 2 a.m., which was supposedly the first time Maine State Police became aware of the disabled vehicle.
The person who wrote the letter couldn't recall where he'd gotten that information about the delay in police checking the car, but the letter prompted Maine State Police Colonel Andrew Demers to order a response in September of 1989.
According to Maine State Supreme Judicial Court records, Trooper Jeffrey Haas told the colonel that he first saw Pam's truck and stopped to check it at 11.35 p.m. on July 1st, not 2.30 a.m. on July 2nd, as he stated back when he first talked about it.
Trooper Haas was asked to complete an incident report at that point, and he did. But he stated in the incident report that he filled out a patrol check card at 11.35 p.m., not 2.30 a.m., which was the time on the actual, original patrol check card. He turned in the incident report, along with a falsified patrol check card showing an 11.35 p.m. timestamp.
When the discrepancy in his story was realized, Trooper Haas landed himself on a list of potential suspects, if only briefly. From a Maine Supreme Court decision directly, quote, only after Haas became a suspect in the murder investigation did he confess the truth, end quote.
On October 11th, 1989, Trooper Hawes admitted he lied about stopping to check the truck at 11.35 p.m. and that it was actually 2.30 a.m. on July 2nd, as he first stated. He also admitted to falsifying a patrol check card. On October 19th, Trooper Hawes sat for a polygraph examination, and the results apparently cleared him as a suspect in Pamela's case. But it didn't clear him of wrongdoing.
The Internal Affairs Division launched an investigation of Trooper Hawes, and on November 20th, 1989, Trooper Hawes was quietly fired from Maine State Police for falsifying a record and his untruthfulness. Jeffrey appealed his dismissal, but an arbitrator who reviewed the appeal upheld his firing in May of 1991.
The arbitrator wrote in their report that Jeffrey may have compromised the investigation into Pamela's case. Quote,
It continues, End quote.
I said that Jeffrey Hawes was quietly fired because there wasn't a peep about it in the public, and not even Pamela Webb's family knew about his misconduct until February of 1992, over two years later. They'd received a phone call from Maine State Police on February 7th, 1992, as a heads up that an article would run in the Kennebec Journal about the trooper's dismissal. The headline read, "'Former Trooper Lied About Seeing Truck of Slain Winthrop Woman,' written by Mike LeBurge."
It's impossible to determine what effect this could have had on the early search and investigation. A witness placed a woman near Pamela's truck on the side of the highway at 11:20 p.m. The actual first sighting of Pamela's car by Trooper Haas was 11:35 p.m. That's just a 15-minute window. What if Trooper Haas had stopped to check the truck immediately instead of waiting until after 2 a.m. when he saw it again? Would he have noticed the blood on the pavement?
Could he have taken action to find her? Could he have prevented her death? If you asked the Webbs those questions back when they first learned of the misconduct, they believed that Jeffrey Haas' failure to stop and check Pamela's truck that night was a critical and possibly even fatal mistake. On June 30th, 1992, Kenneth and Virginia Webb filed a lawsuit against Maine State Police, the Maine Turnpike Authority, and former trooper Jeffrey Haas.
According to reporting by Kenbrack, the primary argument was that if Haas had stopped when he first saw the vehicle at 11.35 p.m. and not waited several hours, that it was possible in their view that Pamela would not have been abducted.
The civil complaint sought recovery for a wrongful death, negligent and intentional infliction of severe emotional distress, vicarious liability against the state and the Turnpike Authority, negligent hiring, supervision and investigation, violations of their state and federal civil rights by failing to stop and investigate, concealment and making false statements, failure to train and supervise, and the cover-up of the investigation."
Just a note, the state and the Maine Turnpike Authority were eventually removed from the lawsuit after appeals, so Haas would end up the sole defendant. In his initial response, Jeffrey Haas said that his actions, quote, do not constitute deliberate indifference or conduct, which is shocking to the conscience. The defendant has at all times acted in good faith, end quote.
Jeffrey is quoted in a 1993 Kennebec Journal article saying, I never saw anything that would indicate that the operator of the pickup truck or any passengers had been victims of criminal activity. If I had believed that the operator of the disabled pickup truck had been the victim of criminal activity, I would have immediately inspected the vehicle."
The Webbs and their attorney, David Webbert, held firm in their argument that it was the duty of a mainstay police trooper to stop and inspect all disabled vehicles immediately, and that it was not a discretionary action. So one of the big questions to answer in the suit, was Jeffrey Haas liable when he saw Pamela's car earlier in the night but didn't stop to inspect it?
Attempting to get answers to that question and all the others in the civil suit would be a long road. In 1993, Jeffrey Haas filed a motion to dismiss, claiming that it was beyond the statute of limitations and that discretionary and qualified immunity shielded him from liability. The issue of statute of limitations didn't apply in cases of fraudulent concealment. When fraudulent concealment is a factor...
The statute of limitations is six years from when the concealment is discovered, so his motion to dismiss was denied. The state Supreme Court affirmed the denial. Jeffrey then moved for a summary judgment based on the same arguments, and the court denied his motion, and he appealed again. In 1995, Maine's highest court allowed the suit to move forward.
In November of 1997, after another appeal by Jeffrey Haas, Kennebec County Superior Court Justice Donald Alexander refused to dismiss the case and said that it was, quote, appropriate to move this long-delayed action towards trial, end quote. Jeffrey appealed again, and if necessary, intended to take it back to the Maine Supreme Court trying to get himself removed from the suit, which had already rejected his similar appeal once before in 1995.
But in October of 1998, arguments were heard on the most recent and what would be the final appeal in the case. On May 13th, 1999, the Maine Supreme Court ruled that Pamela Webb's parents could not sue Jeffrey Haas for failing to prevent her death. From the opinion directly, quote,
Failing to stop and investigate a disabled truck is not a crime. It is a violation of state police procedure for which Haas was subject to and received discipline. In 1989, a reasonable officer would not have understood that a cover-up of a violation of state procedure deprived the Webs of their right of access to the courts.
There is no allegation that either Haas or a colleague was involved in the perpetration of the murder or abduction. Nor is there an allegation that Haas attempted to conceal the identity of the perpetrator. Therefore, Haas' conduct does not rise to the level of a constitutional violation as understood or as apparent in 1989.
End quote.
The civil proceedings ended almost a decade after Pamela was murdered. The webs got some answers along the way, but I can't imagine they landed with any sort of relief or sense of closure.
Jeffrey's lawyer said in 1995 that the reason Jeffrey first lied about what time he saw the truck was because he was quote-unquote frightened about what might happen to him. He said that his client felt awful about the situation and wished he could turn back the hands of time. And he posed the question, should Jeffrey's failure to stop that night be held against him for the rest of his life?
Jeffrey told Portland Press Herald reporter Joshua Weinstein in 1999, quote, End quote.
After his dismissal from state police, Jeffrey Haas was hired as an officer at Gardner Police Department. As for Kenneth and Virginia and the rest of Pamela's surviving family, they were profoundly disappointed by the dismissal of the case. They believed that Jeffrey Haas was intentionally deceitful and still firmly hung on to their feeling that he should be held accountable.
Throughout the nearly decade-long process of the civil proceedings, the investigation into Pamela's murder trudged forward. As of late 1993, police were exploring a possible connection to a truck driver who was accused of abducting a girl in Maine, killing her, and leaving her body in Pennsylvania. In 1994, that suspect, 36-year-old James Robert Cruz Jr., was convicted of murder in the death of 17-year-old Dawn Marie Birnbaum.
Dawn had run away from the Elan School in Poland, Maine on March 21st, 1993. Three days later, her body was found near Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania. Cruz was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. And if the Elan School sounds familiar, by the way, it's because I've covered the dark history of that establishment on Dark Down East.
Cruz continues to appeal his conviction to this day. As recently as 2024, he took his appeal to federal court, arguing that he was wrongfully convicted based on faulty hair evidence analysis. Back when he was first arrested, Maine State Police wanted to examine Cruz's driving logs, toll tickets, or anything else that might show where he was in early July of 1989. Whether that happened or not, I haven't seen any updates about it either way.
In April of 1995, 28-year-old Seen Patrick Goebel, name spelled S-E-A-N like Sean but reportedly pronounced Seen, was arrested in Winston-Salem, North Carolina after he admitted to killing 45-year-old Brenda K. Hagee and dumping her body off Interstate 81 in Virginia. He would later be labeled the Interstate Killer. He is known to be responsible for the deaths of four people,
Sherry 2 Manser, Alice Rebecca Haynes, Lisa Susan O'Rourke, and Brenda K. Hagee. However, in recent years, he recanted his own confessions and appealed his convictions asking for DNA testing on evidence. He remains incarcerated in Tennessee. Goebbels' M.O. was kidnapping women who were known to engage in sex work. He strangled them and dumped their bodies along highways in various states.
I can't say if this MO fits with Pamela's abduction and murder because we do not have a cause of death in her case. And it seems Goebel was mostly active in the South and does not have any suspected victims in New England. I don't know if he's been ruled out at this point. So James Robert Cruz Jr. and seen Patrick Goebel remain question marks, but Randolph Jacobitz, Jeffrey Haas, and Pamela's boyfriend Josh were all ruled out at some point over the years.
It seems any time there was news of an attack or murder on or somehow related to the Turnpike or interstates of New England, a figurative Venn diagram was created to check for similarities. There's one other theory that was ever present in the early days of the investigation, one that has quite a few elements in the intersection of the Venn diagram. But to explore this theory, I need the help of someone who has been researching and investigating it for years.
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Back in 1989, news reports indicated investigators were examining Pamela Webb's case in the context of the Connecticut River Valley killings. Jennifer Amell is the producer and host of AudioChuck's Dark Valley podcast, a deep dive into the cases attributed to the Connecticut River Valley killer. ♪
None of these cases are officially connected. There's no forensic evidence that are linking them. There's no, like, DNA profiles that are across these victims. But law enforcement has historically tied a lot of these cases together in their own investigations. Like, they formed task forces between Vermont and New Hampshire and were...
looking into them as connected. I will say that the generally held belief is that these cases are the work of one or two individuals. But there are dots to connect.
The Connecticut River Valley killer cases include eight unsolved homicides. Catherine Milliken, Elizabeth Betsy Critchley, Heidi Martin, Bernice Quartemache, Ellen Freed, Ava Morse, Linda Moore, and Barbara Agnew. As well as the attack and survival of Jane Borowski, thought to be the lone survivor and potentially final would-be victim. But we'll get into that.
Usually the victims attributed to the Connecticut River Valley Killer are victims of opportunity, out alone at night, on highways, at payphones. They're usually young women or teenagers.
and all of these murders were knife murders. And then if we probe a little deeper and we look at the method of murder across these eight core cases of the Connecticut River Valley Killer, all of them had a frenzied stab pattern. They were all stabbed in their upper chests, some to the torso, and there was some kind of like fascination with the neck area. Location is also a factor when connecting these cases.
The court cases for the Connecticut River Valley killer are located in our radius in the upper Connecticut River Valley, which is where, of course, this killer gets its moniker. But I want to say that my personal investigation did lead me to Maine, and it's possible that we can expand this radius. And that, of course, brings us to Pamela Webb's case.
Pamela was attacked on the side of the main turnpike at night. This fits the victim of opportunity. What we know about Pamela Webb's case is that she had reason to stop alongside the highway
If the Connecticut River Valley pulls up and sees a victim of opportunity like that and then forces her to get in his truck, that's classic, classic pattern for the Connecticut River Valley killer. Additionally, what's consistent across all the victims is that they were taken elsewhere and their bodies were left in a remote wooded area. So two obvious similarities here, victim of opportunity and her body was dumped in a remote wooded location.
But lacking a cause of death determination for Pamela, or missing that key piece of the MO? I asked Jennifer about Jane Borowski, whose story of survival is central to the Dark Valley podcast. If the attack Jane survived in August of 1988 is thought to be the last of the Connecticut River Valley Killer's work, wouldn't that immediately exclude Pamela's case or any others for a potential connection? Short answer, no.
That's the general consensus that she was the final victim. And it makes sense, right? Because she survived and potentially the killer got spooked and was like, I can't.
possibly get away with this any longer and stopped. But what we also know about predators of this nature is that they don't stop. They can't stop. So it's possible that the rationale of the killer was, I can't kill anymore in this area. I need to go elsewhere. And Pamela Webb's murder is in 1989. Jane's attack was in 1988. So that kind of trajectory makes sense for him moving elsewhere.
Jennifer mentioned that her investigation brought her to Maine to examine the case of Jessica Briggs, who was murdered on May 23rd, 1989, after Jane was attacked, but before Pamela's disappearance and murder. Jessica Briggs' body was found in Portland Harbor on May 24th. She'd died from a knife attack. She'd been eviscerated.
Portland is 20 miles away from Biddeford, where Pamela's truck was found. If Jessica Briggs' case is potentially connected to the CRVK cases, it remains a possibility that the attack on Jane Borowski was not the end of this person or person's terror. Which in turn means it is also possible that Pamela's case is the work of the Connecticut River Valley Killer. But is it probable? I'm not so sure.
This year marks 36 years since Pamela was killed, and her case remains unsolved. But it's not inactive by any means. I'm Detective Chad Lindsey with the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit Unsolved. Detective Lindsey is the primary on Pamela's case. I guess what I can say about Pam Webb is that is a very active case. We do have several investigative irons in the fire, so to speak. It's not sitting on a shelf. It is one that we are actively working on.
With the case open and active, Detective Lindsay is limited in what he can say. He's got to protect the integrity of the investigation. But he welcomed my questions. You know, in a lot of these cases that I see unsolved, particularly in Maine, sometimes there's an obvious suspect. You can infer that there's a known person and it's just a matter of proving it. But Pamela's case doesn't read that way to me. Do you think that's an accurate assumption? Yeah.
Oh, God. That's an excellent question. You're good at this. Um, trying to decide what I can say here. I would say that Tamela's case is a genuine whodunit. He did not expand. I moved on to all of the connections explored early on, the similar attacks in Maine and across state lines, the Connecticut River Valley Killer angle. What did he make of all of that?
That was certainly a theory that was batted around a lot in the early days and for several years after. I know there was a lot of effort made with federal authorities, the BICAP program, trying to match up MOs and different things like that to see if we had potentially, if Pam was one in a string, a serialized killing. What really came out of that is
is that every single one of the VICAP leads that came back was followed through very thoroughly. And there was really nothing whatsoever to indicate that this was part of a serial.
I would never say that 100% no, because there's obviously things we don't know about the case. But there was absolutely no evidence pointing to any active serial killer or any string of murders, either related in MO or geography or anything like that. But there was a lot of follow-up done in that regard for several years.
I asked if Pamela's case was appropriate to reanalyze with contemporary testing methods trying to dig at possible DNA evidence that may have been found in the truck. Wherever there is physical evidence in a case, we are going to run that through a fresh set of scientific eyes with 2025 technology and understanding and all of that. For the specifics of Pam Webb, that's something I cannot get into.
For any case like Pamela's that is over three decades old, one of the biggest challenges impacting solvability is aging witnesses. Witnesses get older. We're talking 35 years in this case. And when you start losing witnesses, you start losing admissible evidence. And so that is always the biggest problem that I run into, is I might know something from a report back then, but if I don't have that person to say it on the stand, it doesn't exist.
And that is the true difficulty in the older cases of losing your witnesses. Detective Lindsay remains committed to uncovering the truth about what happened to Pamela Webb.
There has been a renewed commitment by the state police in recent years to really aggressively attack these cases and try to bring closure to these families. It was a long time coming. There was a lot of people involved, both within and outside of the agency. But the culture as far as cold case investigation in Maine has changed. And this state police administration is very much more supportive and geared toward bringing
throwing the necessary resources and doing whatever we can with these cases. Pamela's father, Kenneth, passed away in 2004. He was 68 years old. He never got the answers he deserved about what happened to his daughter. But he and Pamela's mother, their family, and the community kept her name and story in the public eye.
They honored Pamela's life and legacy in many ways, one of them being a scholarship fund in her name at Winthrop High School. Virginia said that they wanted the scholarship to go to a student like Pamela, who had to work for everything she got. It was still being awarded as recently as 2017. Pamela is remembered as a caring person who always had a heart for the underdog. A friend from Bible study classes described Pamela as sweet and tender-hearted.
At her funeral service, Reverend Glenn Metzler said he overheard Pamela's sister saying that if she were here right now, she would probably forgive her abductor, whoever that may be.
If you have information that could help close this case, please share it with Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit South at 207-624-7076, extension 9. You can also leave a tip via the tip form in the description of this episode. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at darkdowneast.
This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. 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. Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audiocheck. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?
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