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This is Murder, She Told, true crime stories from Maine, New England, and small town USA. I'm your host, Kristen Seavey. You can connect with me and suggest your hometown crime at MurderSheTold.com and follow me on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast. ♪
Before we get started, I just have a little bit of housekeeping. We still need a lot more signatures for the petition. If you haven't signed the petition for Danielle and Sheila, please take a moment to sign it. I'll link it in the show notes. This week's story is a story of hope. But before it became a story of hope, it was one of Maine's longest homicide investigations in the state's history and one of its most famous cold cases.
At what point do you give up hope? After one decade? Two? Three? But this tragic case is solved, and justice has been served. And this nearly 40-year, very public investigation serves as a reminder that if this case can be solved after that much time has passed, maybe others can too.
Every victim deserves to be remembered, and every case has the potential to be solved, no matter how cold. This is the story of the murder of Joyce McClain. It was the summer of 1980 in East Millinocket, and all the kids were getting ready for the upcoming school year, milking those final last days of Maine's summer and wishing it would never end.
The summer must have been a well-deserved break for 16-year-old Joyce McClain, and she spent a good bit of it on her family's summer camp on Lake Ambajagus, one of Maine's large northern lakes near Baxter State Park with a view of Mount Katahdin. Joyce lived in a modest, single-family home with her mom, Pam, and her younger sister, Wendy.
Joyce was a pretty exceptional girl. She was the kind of teen who excelled at anything she put her mind to, and she was involved with just about everything, though I cannot fathom how she fit it all in. Joyce loved to play her saxophone. She played in the school band, and she would improvise solos and write her own music. Her musical talent went beyond her saxophone, though, and according to her mother, she could play just about any instrument she picked up by ear.
She was involved with theater as a member of the thespian troupe. She was also an officer of her class and a member of the student council. She was on the soccer team, the tennis team, the basketball team. She was on the cheerleading team, too. She babysat and taught piano lessons and was on the honor roll. And she was just about ready to start her junior year at Skank High School in East Millinocket.
On Unsolved Mysteries, Joyce's mother, Pam McClain, said, "...Joyce's mind was filled with thoughts of what kind of future she was going to have. She was heading into a new step in life. She was getting her driver's license. She was turning 17 soon, and she had a big party planned. It was a time of growing up for her."
On Friday, August 8th, 1980, after a day of hanging out with her friends and swimming on the lake, Joyce decided to squeeze in one last activity, a run. It wasn't her favorite, but she'd been trying to do a little more exercise to make sure she was ready for the upcoming soccer season.
It was 7:30 p.m. and the air was thick with humidity, but Joyce was grateful for the slight breeze coming in as dusk started to settle in. "That's my kid," her mother, Pam McClain, said as Joyce headed for the door in her pink terrycloth running set. "I'm stalling, can't you tell?" replied Joyce.
Little did Pam know that when Joyce smiled and waved goodbye before jogging off, that this would be the last time she would ever see her daughter alive again.
Joyce ran in her neighborhood, starting from her home on Spruce Street. Despite the small population of the town, she lived in a pretty typical-looking suburban neighborhood. Single-family homes on small lots, sidewalks flanking most of the streets, the majority of homes clad with white siding, and even the occasional white picket fence.
She was last seen shortly after 8 p.m. by Orchard and School Street residents running towards the woods behind the high school on a well-used path, less than a mile from her home. By 9:30 p.m. that Friday evening, two hours after Joyce had left, the sun had set and the twilight of the August evening deepened the shadows of the trees.
Pam was returning home from an errand, expecting to see Joyce's smiling face. But she was greeted by a dark house. She had left Joyce a note telling her to let the cat in and put her bike away before the rain, thinking Joyce would beat her back. But when Pam came home, the cat was still outside, and the bike sat lonely on the lawn. Summer lightning crackled in the dark, hot August sky, and Pam subconsciously started biting her nails.
The stagnant and muggy blanket of air that hung over the town portended the violent storm that would later come that evening. So Pam hopped in her car and drove around the neighborhood to try to spot her daughter, but she had no luck. She called Joyce's father, Michael, from whom she was separated, and asked him if he had heard of anything or had any idea where she was. "'Oh, she'll be home in a while. She probably just made a quick stop at a friend's,' he said."
referencing a party that was happening at one of her classmates' houses nearby. Maybe she just lost track of time. Joyce was usually a very responsible girl. But hours later, there was still no sign of Joyce. The front of the storm brought a strong wind that bent trees and toppled trash cans and sent Pam into a panic. The heaviness in the air turned into raindrops, and the raindrops pounded the windows and the roof of her home.
Pam called around town, trying to find her daughter. "Hello, sorry to bother you so late, but I'm looking for Joyce." One no after the other made her realize this wasn't the mistake of a careless teenager, but something more sinister.
She alerted friends and family about Joyce's disappearance, spending all night on the phone through the thunder, lightning, and torrential rain. By the time morning came, a group of Joyce's classmates and friends had made a plan to find her. The search for Joyce had begun. By Sunday, August 10th, there was still no sign of Joyce, and the search continued, this time with more volunteers.
But there was one boy, Peter Larley, who didn't quite fit in, according to Pam McClain. She didn't really consider him one of Joyce's friends, who filled out the majority of the volunteers. Peter was four years older, but they needed all the help they could get.
A funny side note, I watched the Discovery ID show on this case, and I thought his name was Lally because of the thick Maine dialects of the people interviewed. The Mainers were saying Lally, but when I heard somebody else say it, I realized, uh, yeah, it's actually Larly. When the group dispersed into their respective zones, they all had a plan, and everyone stuck with that plan, except for Peter Larly.
He decided to go off and explore on his own, and around 7 a.m., almost immediately after the group had left the McLean household, Peter found Joyce. He told Unsolved Mysteries, quote, I saw Joyce. She wasn't moving. I knew that she wasn't alive. I started screaming her name, and after that, I ran home and called the police. I never expected what happened at all. End quote.
He found Joyce in a power line clearing behind Skank High School, just 200 feet from the field where she was set to play fullback that coming soccer season.
She was mostly naked, the only clothing that remained were her socks and her sneakers, and her hands were bound behind her back with a cloth ligature. It was obvious she'd been beaten to death, struck repeatedly by a blunt object to the head and neck. The fatal blow delivered to the back of the head. The autopsy later revealed that part of her skull had been crushed in.
Pam McClain lost her daughter that weekend, and a close-knit town of about 2,300 lost its innocence. Even after she'd been missing for almost two days, her friends never thought that she could have been killed. She was such a well-loved young woman.
I feel like every small-town crime story includes something along these lines, but this news completely changed the local community. People were scared for their children, fearing that a killer was walking among them.
Peter Cummings, a Massachusetts medical examiner from East Millinocket, told People magazine in 2009, "I remember how protective became and the fear it invoked because there were so many stories going around about what happened. My sister couldn't go out. I couldn't go out. It was a very safe place and it became very scary overnight."
Peter was eight at the time of Joyce's murder, and he later became part of the investigation in 2008. As somebody who grew up in a small town in Maine, I also remember a time when doors were never locked. You could walk up to a neighbor's house at any time. There's a certain level of security and trust in the community.
The last murder to happen in East Millinocket was over 40 years before Joyce in 1939, when a police officer was killed in the line of duty.
Something like this could never happen here. Quote, but it did happen in my home, said Pam. It's hard for me to believe that anyone I know could have done it, but someone did do it. It did happen. We have to accept it, but there will be no peace or rest until whoever did it is caught, nor is there going to be any rest for anyone in this community. So please, as a mother, I'm begging you, please come forward.
The investigation had now shifted from finding Joyce to finding her killer. This kind of brutal crime isn't even something that the Maine State Police were accustomed to seeing. There was only one problem. About 35 hours had passed between the time that investigators believed Joyce was killed on Friday to when she was found on Sunday morning.
Sergeant Ralph Pinkham mentioned several things to the Bangor Daily News that were a hindrance to the investigation. The fact that the killer had 35 hours to remove himself and destroy evidence, and the fact that that evening brought on a downpour that may have washed away hair, fiber, blood, or fingerprints that could be important to the case.
Two major searches were done to collect evidence: the day after the murder and one week later with a team of dogs to search the nearby woods. Ten game wardens and local and state police joined forces to conduct a shoulder-to-shoulder search and collected 11 pieces of important evidence.
The dogs found a broken industrial ceramic insulator, the kind you'd see protecting power lines, which was believed to be the main weapon used to bludgeon Joyce's head. They also found her clothes, the pink terrycloth short set, stuffed into nearby rocks. And while it didn't appear that there was any obvious sexual assault, police were confident that it was most likely the main motivation for the crime.
Right off the bat, Pam felt that the person who killed Joyce knew her and that it was somebody she wasn't afraid of. But the police and the public weren't so sure. Nobody thought such a heinous crime could have been committed by a local. Everybody in town knew Joyce and everybody loved her. So police turned their eyes to outside possibilities.
There was a big softball tournament in town, and the paper mill had a big construction project that brought in 700 workers from all over the state and beyond. They interviewed people from both groups, detectives working in shifts around the clock to cover as much ground as quickly as possible. But they came up with nothing. So when those possibilities started to dry up,
police started to think that maybe it could be someone local, and they started talking to Joyce's friends and her classmates for more information. One of the names that came up was Peter Larley, the boy who had found Joyce's body almost immediately on his first search. Where was he the night of Joyce's murder?
According to Peter, he was hanging out with a group of boys that night, drinking beer and four-wheeling. Peter was only 20, but the legal drinking age at that time in Maine was 18, and it wasn't until 1987 when they changed it to 21. He took a polygraph, and he passed. And after talking to his friends that he claimed to be with, his alibi checked out, and Peter Larley was cleared as a suspect.
Like any small town, rumors spread like wildfire, with fingers pointing and names being dropped at every opportunity. The newspapers were constantly questioned, and police received hundreds of phone calls day and night. But police had to look into every angle, every tip.
And because of the sheer number of rumor calls being made, police spent most of the weekend answering telephone calls. And despite that volume, they were running out of solid leads. With a town hot on their heels for an arrest, the Maine State Police called in unconventional outside help to help sort through these rumors. And they hired hypnotists to help question witnesses, hoping that something may have been imprinted on their subconscious.
They also petitioned help from the FBI, whose behavioral science division created a psychological profile for the killer based on the details of the investigation and compared it to others in the FBI database. Maine detectives now had a description of who the killer was likely to be, though no details of the profile were released to the public.
Sergeant Ralph Pinkham, one of the investigators on the case, said that after a month without an arrest, people are starting to wonder what we're doing. We have a minimum of three detectives working here 24 hours a day on this case. We are using every possible resource, and we are not giving up."
There was another strange incident that happened the night of Joyce's murder. 19-year-old Philip Scott Fournier, who went by Scott, was in an accident involving a fuel truck that practically killed him. In fact, during the initial phase of the investigation, he was in a coma from a traumatic brain injury.
On August 8, 1980, he broke into a local garage and stole their fuel truck, drove it straight through the garage door, and ended up colliding with a car a few miles away, completely flipping the truck. It took about three weeks for him to regain consciousness, and it was around that time that police paid him a visit to see if he knew anything.
He was disoriented, and because of the accident, he couldn't remember anything except that he got drunk, stole the truck, and crashed it. By March of 1981, less than a year after the murder, police had interviewed 700 to 800 people.
Pam told the Bangor Daily News that same year that her tragedy was hell on earth. "It's like I lost two daughters. Wendy will never be the same. That's a lot for someone to take away from you. You try to do your very best and work hard and then someone comes along and wipes it all out. We've got a cross to bear for life. It's our memory."
A little bit later in 1981, Scott's memory started coming back into focus, and he recalled some disturbing memories the night of Joyce's murder. He still couldn't remember much from that night, but what was resurfacing was disturbing. Was it just a dream, or was it real? Scott knew he needed to share his thoughts with the police, even if the memories were scattered.
He remembered being at a party at his friend Adam Austin's house, which coincidentally wasn't too far from where Joyce was found. According to Detective Brian Strout, who was one of the final detectives on the case, he told them that he overheard a conversation of a girl being assaulted and got the sense that there were several guys involved, but he couldn't remember any of their names. His story had a lot of holes.
Then he remembered he thought he may have tripped over a girl's body on the way home that night, and that her hands were tied behind her back. But the details weren't consistent with the information police had, and the memory loss from the accident coupled with the intoxication of that night didn't seem to be leaving them with a reliable witness.
It was difficult to get solid answers out of Scott. One moment he would say, "I was told this," or "I overheard that," or "It was part of a dream I had," and the next he would backtrack and change it. Sometimes he was just a witness, and other times he was forced to participate.
It was hard to determine what was fact from fiction. But despite this, investigators took him seriously. And he did give them some names. And that was an angle they could work with. So they decided to focus on the party at Adam Austin's house, making a short list of names that had been mentioned by Scott.
Scott mentioned a guy named Grant Boynton, a close friend of Joyce's whose family had a camp next to hers on the lake. According to Scott, he saw Grant and a small group head off with Joyce into the woods where she was found, and then he heard screaming, and that was it.
Police investigated the other names at the party and confirmed alibis for everyone, except for Grant. Grant told People magazine investigates that, quote, "Without warning, the police just picked me up off the street and dragged me to the station, immediately pulling out the white spotlight to interrogate me on the night of Joyce's murder." He said they were asking him questions he had no idea about,
and didn't know where the information came from. Grant maintained that he didn't remember a thing because he was so drunk that he was throwing up on the lawn at one point in the night, and claims that that was his alibi for the unexplained gap of time police were trying to account for. No witnesses remembered seeing him inside the party during this mystery gap.
Grant's initial polygraph test came back inconclusive, but when police asked him to take it again, he passed, and Grant was let go. Police returned to Scott once again, prying him for any more details he may have forgotten. This time, he said he knew for sure who killed Joyce. It was Grant Boynton.
And once again, Grant found himself in the backseat of a police car, on his way to another round of interrogations. Except this time, the heat was on. Police were determined to pin their guy. According to People Magazine Investigates, Grant said that the police told him on the way to the station that he might as well confess because they knew he killed Joyce. They also told him that they were only going to charge him as a juvenile.
Once he was at the station, Grant was led to a room where he sat in a torn vinyl padded chair, waiting for the police to return. The air was stuffy and the fluorescent lights were buzzing. There was no way for him to tell what the officers were going to say, but he knew it wasn't good. He shifted uncomfortably. When the officer returned, he slapped a paper down on the table in front of Grant and leaned in close, pointing confidently at the signature.
It was a statement from Scott Fornier incriminating Grant Boynton for the murder of Joyce McClain. Scott said that Grant lied about his whereabouts that night and placed him at the scene of the crime. He said that he saw Grant and Joyce head into the woods together, but when Grant came back to the party, he was alone. And he wouldn't say where Joyce went. He also had scratches on his body that he couldn't explain.
After a year of trying to solve this case, police felt that they were so close to putting it to rest. But Grant stuck to his original story, insistent that he had nothing to do with Joyce's murder. He was at the party the whole night, threw up on the lawn, and eventually passed out like most people there. Police want this to be their guy. They want to solve this case. But despite their lingering suspicions about Grant,
They have no choice but to let him go. Adam's party remained a focus for police. They knew there was somebody there who had seen something or heard something. Whispers, bragging, strange behavior, anything.
Over the years, Scott, albeit a little unreliable, did remain a source for the police. He'd recall somebody he thought was at the party, sending police on a wild goose chase to track them down and get their story. He'd sent them to investigate at least five other men who had been at the party. Pam McClain was very vocal about her frustration over the pace of the investigation and often took to the media to lament about it.
According to Pam, it appeared that the investigators became more active near the anniversary, reigniting interest through communication and to the public. She wondered why they couldn't be this interested for the rest of the year. She told the Bangor Daily News, quote, "...the police don't have to come here on the anniversary day to remind me and the people here that she died."
It feels like it's just to pacify me and give me a pretense that they're working on it. They work on it for a few days and leave. But it doesn't have to be at the time of year that she died. If they are working on it at any time, they don't have to appear on August 8th every year.
End quote. And while the local police were letting Joyce's case collect dust, at least in the eyes of Pam McClain, she and the local community weren't just sitting by and idly waiting. They rallied together, led by Pam, and raised $15,000 for any information that resulted in an indictment of the perpetrator. But things were still happening, even if they weren't visible on the surface.
In 1986, Detective Joe Zamboni took over the case, and he had a theory that still sticks with him today. There were some striking similarities between Joyce's case and that of 20-year-old Justine Gridley, who'd been abducted while jogging and whose body was found in a town near East Millinocket in 1983.
Her killer, Joe Albert, had made a comment about spending time up in East Millinocket before he was convicted of killing Justine. He'd also spent time in jail previously for killing his girlfriend in the 1970s, and he killed Justine only three years after his release.
But the most damning evidence is the theory that Justine was also found naked and bludgeoned, and her clothes were found stuffed and hidden in rocks. In 1984, Joe was convicted of life in prison for the murder of Justine.
When this theory first came up, Pam wrote him a letter begging him to tell her if he was responsible for her daughter's death. In his response, he said, "I did not kill your daughter. If I say I did, you will never find out who her killer is. But it wasn't me who killed her."
Joe Albert didn't end up being convicted of killing Joyce, but Zamboni maintains that he thinks the coincidence is too strong. He later told the Bangor Daily News, "When I looked at the case in the early '80s, the investigation looked very seriously at people in the local area.
By the time I retired, I felt very comfortable that the person responsible was not a local person. When you look at the crime, when you look at what happened, this is not a crime that was committed by a local teenager. This is a crime committed by a very serious sociopath. The person I believe responsible for this is in a position that he's not going to be able to do it again. I'm going to leave it at that. He's no longer a threat to society.
Later in 1984, Pam was told by police that a grand jury indictment was imminent. But after another year without any charges brought, Pam McClain lost her patience and wrote to the Maine Attorney General, James Tierney, requesting that another agency be assigned to the investigation. She said, "'For quite some time now, I've not been happy with the way the investigation has gone,'
I was kept in the dark, lied to, told things were going to happen, then didn't, in reference to the promised grand jury indictment in 1984. I was told to keep quiet, not to go to the paper and say anything because they were so close that I'd only mess it up. And Pam got the attention of some of the highest-ranking officers in Maine.
Assistant Attorney General Fernand Larochelle responded, I don't see anything being gained by changing agencies. Usually you make this request if you expect something positive or extra to come from it. You don't just change for the sake of change. I am totally persuaded it would add nothing to the investigation. That would just be asking for someone to do work that's already been done.
Sergeant Pinkham added that, as the commander of the Northern Criminal Division, I have reviewed the work done on this case and I'm satisfied that everything that could be done has been done or is being done.
But after five years without an arrest, Pam McClain had had enough. She felt the Maine State Police had plenty of time to track down the killer. In her opinion, there was no reason this case shouldn't be solved. She created a grassroots community group called Concerned Citizens Justice for Joyce Committee to keep Joyce's memory alive and this case in the public eye.
The committee set out to petition for Unsolved Mysteries to cover Joyce's story, collecting over 7,000 signatures on foot by hitting up local grocery stores and the mall to collect names. And it worked. Joyce was featured on the original Unsolved Mysteries hosted by Robert Stack that aired in February of 1989.
Though nothing substantial came from the show, it did get national attention for the tiny Maine town, and all of America was rooting for justice for Joyce.
Pam told People magazine, quote, I wasn't an easy mother to push in a closet and keep quiet. I got loud, rude, crude, ignorant, anything it was going to do to make the police just do something, end quote. On the outside, Pam was a tough-as-nails mother fighting the front lines for her daughter, but inside, she was pushing through the sadness and the grief of such a massive loss. She
She said that it was sometimes hard to live inside the Spruce Street home that she once shared with Joyce and her other daughter Wendy, especially after Wendy moved out.
So in 1992, Pam turned the corner on her pain, in part with help from a little Sheltie puppy that she bought herself for her birthday. She said, "That dog, believe it or not, gave me my heart back. You can't live with hate and pain for too long, not if you want to live a normal life at all. I've chosen a normal life."
In the early 2000s, Pam pushed for the state to exhume Joyce's body for a second autopsy. DNA evidence was far more advanced than it was in the 80s, and Pam hoped that a second exhumation of the body would reveal new information.
The state refused, and on March 21, 2008, Deputy Attorney General William Stokes said, "Given the fact that 27 years have now passed since your daughter's death and burial, the amount of bacterial degradation would be significant and would destroy any foreign DNA that might exist. We can say with a fair degree of certainty that the likelihood of finding anything new is nearly non-existent,
and we would have no way of linking it to anything." McLean countered, "I am not judging them on what they have done. What I am saying is, why not go one step further because of today's technology? Test her inside and out. Today. Now. I want the insides of her tested." Pam thought there might be some trace evidence left in the wounds from the assailant.
Only twice between 2001 and 2008 had the state exhumed a body to serve an investigation. Stokes further expressed his reservations. "Suppose you got a DNA profile that wasn't hers. Is it the undertaker's? Somebody who prepared or dressed the body? How could you tell that this DNA was connected to the crime?" The body left the chain of evidence, which is designed to limit outside contamination, when it was returned to the family for burial.
Pam was undeterred, and with her leadership, the community that continued to support her pitched in financially to empower Pam to hire some of the most famous forensic investigators in the world. She selected Dr. Michael Baden and Dr. Henry Lee to do the autopsy and analysis. Both men are celebrities in the world of forensics.
Dr. Baden was the host of the HBO series Autopsy from 1994 to 2008 as an expert forensic pathologist. He served as an expert to Congress in the investigations of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and has served as an expert witness in countless cases, including the widely televised O.J. Simpson trial and the George Floyd case.
Dr. Henry Lee is also one of the world's foremost forensic scientists. He has written or co-authored more than 40 books on forensic science. He has served as a consultant or an expert witness on many famous cases and has worked extensively with the state of Connecticut law enforcement, serving as their chief criminalist. He also hosted a show on TruTV network called Trace Evidence.
Dr. Bodden and Dr. Lee were respected not only by forensic professionals, but by law enforcement in general. Their involvement got the attention of the highest-ranking officials in Maine State Police, and they were given full access to the state's police files. On Thursday, August 8, 2008, a beautiful Maine summer day, they exhumed Joyce McClain's body.
Much rested on the condition of the casket, and to everyone's surprise, 85 to 90% of the body was preserved, despite the passage of exactly 30 years. During the autopsy, they found some physical hairs as well as fingerprints that they were able to send to the lab to be tested. The team then compared the DNA to former possible suspects who'd been at the party, including Scott Fournier and Grant Boynton.
but the only match they got was to Joyce herself. Sadly, it appeared that the torrential rain from the night of her murder had likely washed away any evidence that could have conclusively identified her killer. Just a few weeks later, on September 1st, 2008, Joyce's body was reinterred at Gridstone Road Cemetery, a burial ground very close to her East Millinocket home.
Pam McClain told the Bangor Daily News that she dreamed about the day that Joyce's killer was caught, saying, "I will look at the killer, eyeball to eyeball, and I am going to smile. And I will walk away. I will let the state of Maine do what has to be done to him, and my job will be done. I'm going to smile and walk away because it's over. He will be a prisoner, and not just in his own mind. That's what he is."
He hasn't been free for 29 years, he's been a prisoner in his own mind. All was not lost though. The Herculean effort reinvigorated the case, and the Maine State Police assigned a new team to re-examine all the evidence they had on file and look at it in a new light. At this point, all of the original detectives on the case had retired, and with them went their own personal notebooks.
So the team tracked them down to try and recover as much as they could of personal notes to add to the evidence already on file. According to People Magazine Investigates, there was one key piece of evidence that was missing: one of Philip Scott Fournier's interviews from Bangor in 1989. The only thing they knew was that a pastor named Venal Thomas was the one who brought Scott to the station.
so they tracked him down in Florida to see what he remembered about his conversation with Scott. However, according to an affidavit to substantiate an arrest warrant by Detective Thomas Pickering in 2016, police did have this interview on file, and the evidence in it is incredibly damning.
According to the 2016 affidavit, Pastor Thomas told Detective Zamboni in 1989 that Scott had confessed a few years prior to killing Joyce McClain. Scott told him that he got mad at Joyce and hit her over the head with a large, clumsy object he had to hold with two hands. He said that he tried to have sex with her, but that it was the wrong time of the month.
Scott revealed very specific details about the crime scene that hadn't yet been released to the public. That Joyce was killed with a ceramic insulator. That she had a ribbon in her hair. That she was lying face down, hands bound behind her back, and the right side of her face was exposed. That she was on her period. The autopsy revealed that Joyce was indeed on the tail end of her period.
something not even the detectives knew about at the time. In 2014, 25 years later, Scott's mother, Anita Powers, was interviewed about that same night. She told Detective Darryl Peary that Scott left the house to go for a walk, and that sometime later, she received a call from Pastor Thomas to come to the church.
Immediately upon arrival, Scott broke down into sobs, clinging to his mother. "I'm sorry, Mama. I did it. I killed Joyce McClain. I didn't mean to. I'm sorry, Mama."
Pastor Thomas drove him to the police station to confess after this conversation without his mother, but ended up bringing him back home to Medway after he was released and no charges were made. According to this affidavit, back in 1981, Scott had revealed to Detective William Caron that he thought Joyce was cute and had a nice smile. He gave him similar details about the ribbon and the crime scene,
and said, "I remember tripping over her feet and falling right on top of her. I felt her arm with my hand and what I felt was dead cold.
Her hands were tied behind her back, and she was lying on her stomach with her face to one side. I saw the side of her face had a cut or a bruise on her forehead. I thought at one time that I may have killed her, but now I don't think I did it because it's just not me. It's not something I would do. There are parts of that night I don't remember. He said he stole the truck after drinking a bottle of Seagram 7 because he was trying to kill himself.
From 1980 until present day 2016, Philip Scott Fournier had 30 interviews with the detectives about this case. 30. And every time, they let him go. Police were also able to track down key witnesses who had been hanging out near the high school who placed Scott in the area the night of the murder. For 36 years, everything just kept pointing to Scott Fournier.
They also spoke with a man named John DeRoche, who told them that back in 1989, when he was working as Scott's supervisor for an out-of-state job, he talked to him a little bit about East Millinocket, which had become a bit famous in the media thanks to the recent Unsolved Mysteries episode. John jokingly asked Scott if he knew Joyce McClain, and to his surprise, Scott replied, "Yes, I did. I killed her."
According to Detective Brian Strout, John asked why he wasn't arrested for it, and Scott's reply was, Well, I beat the interviewers about 20 times. Every time they interview me, I just say I can't remember. It's in my head, and they buy it.
Upon release of the affidavit in March of 2016, and after 36 years, Philip Scott Fournier was arrested for the 1980 murder of 16-year-old Joyce McClain. Scott, who was 55 in 2016, was 19 at the time of her murder.
Surprisingly, none of Joyce's friends or family had ever seriously considered Scott as the killer because of the tall tales he told throughout the years. They were shocked that not only was somebody finally arrested, but that it was Scott. On January 22, 2018, Philip Scott Fournier's trial for the murder of Joyce McClain began. This is a moment the entire state of Maine had been waiting for.
Prosecutors argued that the accident caused temporary amnesia, but that the memories did come back to haunt him, pushing him to confess multiple times over the years to police and to Pastor Thomas. Some accounts even nine months after the murder. Scott's stepbrother, Sammy Powers, even testified that Scott had a fixation with Joyce. Sammy was friends with the McLean family, and sometimes Scott tagged along, his crush on Joyce growing stronger with each visit.
The defense, however, said that his head injury was to blame for the inconsistencies in his many statements. They implicated other suspects Scott had mentioned, like Grant Boynton, who also took the stand for the state.
They said that Scott was a "well-intentioned parishioner trying to help the police by repeating rumors he'd heard around town." In a quote from CBS News, the defense also tried to instill doubt by saying, "Doubt will linger over the case regardless of whether Fournier is convicted. After all, there was no physical evidence that linked him to the crime scene."
Detective Zamboni also took the stand for the defense, stating that he believed there was no way Scott could have done it, and that the coincidence of the similarities in the murder of Justine Gridley was just too strong to implicate anyone other than Joe Albert. Detective Zamboni spent the most time on the case, joining the team in 1986 and working on it until his retirement in 2004.
Perhaps his fixation on these details in the Gridley case is part of the reason why Scott wasn't arrested sooner. My biggest question in the case is why it took 36 years to arrest a man who confessed to the police in the 80s and came in for 30 interviews over the years.
My personal theory is that police just didn't take him seriously because of the brain injury. And once Zamboni took over, because of both the injury and the similarities in the Gridley case, Scott's interviews were pushed to the corner of the desk.
One thing I can't explain is even if Scott did have a major injury that made his interviews unreliable, he revealed key information that only the killer knew pretty early on. And the dates on the affidavit state the police knew he revealed these details in the 80s. Why was he not arrested sooner?
Something worth noting is that back in 2009, Scott was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for possession of child pornography. The peculiar thing about this trial is that he was named a person of interest in Joyce's murder by Judge John Woodcock, saying, "If you know anything about that case, I urge you to think long and hard about telling the police."
Steve McCausland, a spokesperson for the state police, was quick to decline commentary on any persons of interest.
saying that they hadn't officially named anyone. Pam also found it peculiar and told the Bangor Daily News that she did know of Scott. His name came up early in the investigation, and he was one of the top names mentioned to her by police out of the dozens who were on their list. But she still wondered why the judge would say that, unless it might be a push to get him to cooperate further in exchange for a plea deal.
After nine days of testimony and presentations, the trial came to a close. Scott had waived his right to a jury trial, so the outcome rested on the shoulders of a judge, who happened to be a woman.
And beyond any reasonable doubt, Superior Court Justice Anne Murray found Philip Scott Fournier guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to 45 years in prison. Despite there being no physical evidence, Justice Murray was confident the right man was being put behind bars. And the physical evidence that she found most significant was the fact that Scott knew Joyce was on her period.
a fact that only the medical examiners knew. Other details, like the witnesses who placed him at the scene and the fact he knew she had a ribbon in her hair that evening, also tied him to her death. And because of that, Justice Murray didn't need any physical evidence to know she was convicting the right man.
After 38 years of fighting for her daughter, Pam McClain finally had justice for Joyce. A day that was celebrated by everyone across America who had left a piece of their heart in East Millinocket through watching Joyce's story on Unsolved Mysteries, myself included.
This case has only been solved for two and a half years. It's one of the main cold case unit's most recent success stories. And because of the length of time it took and the persistence to get it solved, Joyce's story gives hope to other family members of cold case victims that one day it will finally be their turn and the gavel will come down on a sentence that they've been waiting years to get.
And that is the story of Maine's most famous recently solved cold case, Joyce McLean.
My sources for this episode include articles from the Bangor Daily News by Mary Ann Lagasse, Nick Sambides Jr., and Judy Harrison, and articles from News Center Maine, People Magazine, and CBS News. Additional sources include Investigation Discoveries, People Magazine Investigates, Unsolved Mysteries, and a case affidavit from 2016. Special thanks to Byron Willis for his support on this episode. And a special thanks to you for listening.
I'm so grateful that you chose to be here and I couldn't do this without you. Please consider sharing it with a friend and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. It's the best way to support an indie podcast.
Be sure to connect with me on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast. All links for sources and media can be found in the episode link in the show notes and on MurderSheTold.com. Murder She Told is co-produced by AKA Studio Productions. If you haven't already joined the Murder She Told secret Facebook group, you can join right now by signing up for the newsletter on MurderSheTold.com. If you have a story that needs to be told or would like to suggest one, I would love to hear from you.
You're more than welcome to reach out to me at MurderSheToldPod at gmail.com. My only hope is that I've honored your stories in keeping the names of your family and friends alive. Murder She Told will be back next week with another episode. Thank you for listening.
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