The Case of Everett Delano: Solved After 53 Years
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Go to knix.com and get 15% off with promo code TRY15. That's knix.com, promo code TRY15 for 15% off life-changing period underwear. That's knix.com. This is Murder, She Told, true crime stories from Maine, New England, and small-town USA. I'm Kristen Seavey.

You can connect with me at MurderSheTold.com or on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast.

Everett Delano stayed busy. Between working security as an overnight watchman and his part-time shifts at a combo gas station mechanic shop, he was putting in 60-hour weeks. He had three kids, Daryl, Darlene, and Denise, and he worked hard to provide for them. They had lived all over the place with his work in the U.S. Navy in radar and radio operations, where he had achieved the rank of Chief Petty Officer.

from Rhode Island to Florida, from California to South Carolina. He had entered the service in 1941 at the outset of World War II and served throughout the war primarily on ships in the Pacific.

The family mostly lived in base housing as they moved around, but although their scenery and friendships changed from year to year, they were anchored by visits to see Everett's extended family in Orange, Massachusetts, and his wife's family near New London, New Hampshire. Everett would be gone for months at a time when he was at sea on boats in the Mediterranean, but when he was in town working on base, he had regular hours and would spend a lot of time with his family.

I spoke with Daryl, Everett's oldest son, and he remembered family dinners together. His mom was a homemaker and would have dinner ready punctually for the family. He remembered that his dad valued order, neatness, and cleanliness, and would inspect the kids' fingernails before sitting down to eat.

He made sure that me and my sisters respected our mother. And that's why he was determined that we were going to help out as much as we could around the house, whether it be cleaning our rooms, doing dishes, buying special gifts for my mother on Mother's Day. I think this was because his adoptive mother was such an important factor in his life. That's the impression I had. And

didn't really fully recognize that at the time he was alive, but as my sisters and I went through some things from his past, it's clear that he had a special relationship with his adoptive mother. And I think he wanted to make sure that we affected our mother to the degree that we should and that we were disciplined in some sense. You know, I remember him as being someone who liked to take us

places and do things that were fun as a family. And I think some of that is probably because he regretted the fact that, you know, a lot of months in a given year, he'd be away at sea. And therefore, he was not home with the family. And he wanted to make sure that we experienced things together as much as we could in those months that he was around.

Everett was a handsome guy and had met his wife, Blanche, and gotten married in the late 40s. In September of 1966, he was 49 years old.

His wife Blanche, born in 1928, was 11 years his junior, and together, the five-member Delano family had found their own version of the American dream. Darrell fondly remembered that the family would go on long Sunday drives to see the country, but he would pray for good weather, because if it was raining and the windows were up, the parents' cigarettes would trap the kids in a haze of tobacco smoke.

His dad enjoyed woodworking and gardening, and anything electronics-related. Friends on base would often ask for help fixing TVs, and Everett would be their first call. Everett would often watch the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, paying attention to the latest news about the Vietnam War.

Blanche was looking for more stability in their living situation, especially as the kids were getting older, and they decided to settle down in Wilmot, New Hampshire, a small town that was nestled in the valleys of the mountains that lie between Concord and Lebanon, New Hampshire. So in 1964, Everett retired from the Navy.

Everett was a high-ranking enlisted man in the Navy with authority and a lot of responsibility, and Daryl suspected that he may have struggled to adapt to his new life as a civilian.

Everett tried to find a job in radio or television repair, but he couldn't find anything close enough to Wilmot, and after an entire career of short commutes while living on base, he wasn't too keen on an hour-plus commute to nearby larger towns. Although he was still looking around for other options, in

In the meantime, he worked as a security officer on the night shift at Colby Sawyer College in New London, and he picked up shifts at a gas station mechanic shop in Andover.

September 1st, 1966 was an ordinary day for Everett. He drove by the familiar colonial-style buildings with their signature green shutters and dormer windows as he cruised down Main Street in Andover, another small town that even in 2021 still doesn't have a stoplight, and pulled into Sanborn Auto Body where he worked.

Kenneth Sanborn, the owner, was partnered with Gulf Oil and had the prototypical Gulf Service Station, a two-bay garage attached to a small office area with a walk-up window where most of the gas transactions were handled. The front of the building was flat as a pancake, a fun New England example of Western false front architecture, and the

and the notched top provided a little architectural interest, as well as a nice white siding backdrop for a simple sign. The town's post office was also contained within the small building, and together it was a hub of activity for the little town. Get your car fixed, get your mail, and get some gas.

At 8:50 a.m. that morning, Kenneth asked Everett to hold down the fort because he was heading out to run some errands. As Kenneth left, he later recalled Everett was pumping gas for a customer. Everett primarily helped in the office to ring up transactions and at the pump, refilling customers' cars with fuel. This was the era of full-service gas stations and gas station attendants.

Between 8.50 a.m. and 9.25 a.m., there was activity every 10 minutes or so. The cash register tape indicated three sales had occurred. At 9.25 a.m., a local who knew Everett, Marilyn Bacon, drove by the station and waved to him. He was backing up a vehicle at that moment. He smiled and waved back. Marilyn was the last person to see Everett conscious.

Between 9.25am and 9.35am, somebody robbed Sanborn Auto Body and Everett was their only employee there at the time.

The thief confronted Everett and absconded with all the money that was in the register's cash drawer, estimated to be about $75 to $100, or $650 to $850 today, but didn't make off with a cash box hidden below, which contained an additional $500, or over $4,000 today.

A few minutes after the thief departed, a white vehicle pulled up and waited for a bit, hoping that an attendant would help them get their gas tank filled. When no one appeared, they grew impatient. Around 9:45 AM, two guys named Ralph and Bruce showed up. They saw that white car leave and the woman who was driving shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, "I don't know where the attendant is, so I'm taking off."

They popped their head into the office and heard some noises that almost sounded like snoring. They saw a man laying face down on the office floor and thought that maybe he was passed out drunk.

Closer to 10 a.m., three more men arrived, Leon, William, and Pat. Ralph and Bruce were still there, and they told the new group that someone was asleep inside on the floor. Leon took a look in the office and discovered a pool of blood forming under the man's head and immediately called the New Hampshire State Police, as well as the nearest hospital in New London.

Meanwhile, Ralph, from the first group of men, drove to the nearby Sanborn residence and fetched Kenneth's wife. They noticed that the cash register was left open and empty, and they started to put two and two together. This was a crime scene, and a tragedy.

Both the police and the paramedics arrived promptly, and Everett was transported to New London Hospital where he was stabilized. Police initially believed that he was a victim of a vicious beating, and it wasn't until he was inspected by medical professionals that it was discovered that he had been shot three times in the head by a .22 caliber handgun.

Everett was in critical condition. He was transferred to a major hospital, Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Lebanon, with dim prospects for recovery. Meanwhile, the police were processing the crime scene.

In an extraordinary stroke of luck, nobody turned off the water that had been running in the men's restroom since the horrid scene was discovered. When Sanborn's wife arrived, she was careful not to disturb the handles of the faucet, and in order to kill the flow of water, she instead shut off the water pump from outside. I assume that the building ran on well water.

The police believed that the robber may have been the last person to touch the bathroom faucet, and the shiny chrome of the fixture would probably provide an excellent surface for pulling a fingerprint. The state police crime scene technician worked carefully and pulled a good-quality latent fingerprint from the faucet.

The police interviewed everyone present and also canvassed the neighborhood. They were the ones to discover Everett's friend, Marilyn, the woman he waved to. And they even found a man who heard three gunshots as he was driving by the service station. He estimated the time of the shots to be around 9.45 a.m. But it was Everett's watch that would have the last word.

His watch was struck by a bullet which froze the hour and minute hand at the exact time of the shooting, 9:35 AM. There were two more bullets found at the scene. Bullet number one was embedded in the clapboard at the front of the office, and bullet number two was in the left end of a roll-top desk. Weirdly, no spent cartridges were found.

Perhaps the gun that was used was a revolver, which retains the spent cartridges. Or perhaps the murderer took the time to collect them.

If they were collected, it was likely in an effort to elude law enforcement. There is information that can be gleaned from the cartridges. The firing pin of the handgun as well as the ejection mechanism creates a unique set of marks on the soft brass casing that can be used to confirm whether or not a specific gun was used to fire the round.

Also recovered was an extinguished cigarette butt found next to Everett's body and a hair from the cash drawer. The next day at Mary Hitchcock Hospital, Everett passed away and a father and husband was stolen away from his family.

I remember waking up that morning. Of course, it was just a week or so before school was going to start. Waking up that morning, and my mother was off to work at Freedom Acres Farm, which used to be a jam and jelly place on the top of...

the hill in Wilmot Flat. It used to be a pretty famous tourist place. My mother and my aunt were up there working. So I was home alone with my two sisters. I was old enough that I was considered responsible to take care of them, and it wasn't unusual. But I remember waking up and being surprised that I saw my father's hat on top of the refrigerator, which is where he always...

put it when he came home from his his night watchman work but i was surprised my father was not sleeping in in the bedroom and usually when we got up under those circumstances if my mother was working

in the bedroom sleeping after his night of work. You know, didn't think too much of it. I'm sure there were other times when he was off doing something else before he came home and slept, but time went on and it was about an hour and a half, two hours later or so when, I think it

I think it was my aunt came and gathered up me and my sisters, brought us upstairs to her apartment and simply said, "Something has happened," without being specific. And my mother, of course, had been brought down to the garage.

And then she came home and simply said that, you know, did tell us what did happen and said that he had been rushed to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover and weren't really sure what was going on, but, you know, just wanted us to get dressed so that we could all go up to Hanover. But, you know, just that shock. I mean, obviously, it's hard to put it in context, but, you know, it just turned from a normal day to something that was a little unsettling because, you know, still at that point, of course...

hoping and expecting, I guess, being as young as we were, that everything would turn out fine. But, you know, it all happened very quickly over the course of the morning and then the afternoon.

that he was in very serious condition when we went up there and the surgeon talked to us all as a family there. And then the next morning, actually, I had walked up to the post office, which was just a couple of houses up in a general store, walked up there to get our mail that morning, and I came home and found that my mother had gotten the call from the hospital. An autopsy was performed shortly thereafter, and

and the medical examiner determined that two of the gunshot wounds to his head had happened when Everett was upright, and the third one, which had gunpowder residue near the entry wound, was inflicted while Everett was on the ground, and the gun was held nearly touching his head. The murderer clearly intended to leave no witnesses.

On September 7th, six days after the crime, the New Hampshire State Police sent the fingerprint lifted from the faucet to the FBI to add to their national collection.

In the months that followed, the state police checked purchase records of .22-caliber firearms and collected many guns from nearby residents in Andover and from outsiders who had recently purchased .22s in the vicinity. These guns were subjected to ballistic testing, but none of the guns collected fired the bullets recovered from the scene or the victim.

They also searched the nearby waterway, Blackwater River, hoping that the killer had ditched the weapon. But the searches turned up nothing. By the end of 1966, the case went cold.

Daryl was the oldest of the children and took some leadership in helping the family to think about their future in the wake of this tragedy. It was shock and grief and the sadness of all of us there and went on for, I remember, that New Year's Eve between 66 and 67, just all being at home on New Year's Eve and playing Monopoly and just saying, OK, this is...

This is what we can do together at this point. Let's not dwell on things and just try to move forward. Not really moving on specifically, but move forward as best we can. Then it became less difficult to deal with a couple of years later when her husband, Bill Sanborn, was a very good husband and a good stepfather to my sisters. I just wasn't home all that much. But my mother ended up having a good enough life after that, but obviously for her.

For a year or two, it was just very difficult. Daryl's dad was still in a period of transition, and even now, he wonders how things might have turned out.

He had applied for a job at a Raytheon facility in Middletown, Rhode Island. And I remember our mother telling us about six months later, maybe not quite that long, that finally a letter had come from there. I don't know if it was offering a position, but certainly it was something that he would have applied for.

And he was hoping to get into something like that rather than being a night watchman at a junior college or picking up the kinds of repair jobs that he was for a couple of years there. So, you know, the transition wasn't complete at the time. He died, obviously, and we don't know how it would have ended.

What remained clear to Darrell was that there were four important people, himself included, that needed to live up to his father's expectations of living full and happy lives.

With our family in the aftermath of my father's murder there, it's a matter of moving forward. You put it in perspective, you try to live the best life you can, and obviously you know that there are going to be good times and bad times, and there could be better times if this didn't happen, but we go forward. Shopify's already taken the cash register online, helping millions sell billions around the world.

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For decades following Everett's death, the

The family was left wondering what, if anything, would happen. We certainly, for decades, thought the case was just totally gone. Occasionally, my mother would say, because, you know, for the first 20 or 25 years, my mother was at the center of things there, and she sometimes would mention to me when I was home for a visit, the holidays or whatever, somebody heard something from somebody in prison, from a Vermont prison, about this guy who...

was talking about a case that sounded a lot like our father's case, but it never went beyond that. In 1975, a technology company called Rockwell International won a contract to create five fingerprint readers that were collectively dubbed Finder. And in the years that followed, the FBI successfully converted 15 million criminal fingerprint cards into digital records.

Over the following decade, Rockwell sold systems to many major metropolitan police departments, and the modernization of the old ink and paper fingerprint card system was fully underway. By 1999, the FBI's database, called IAFIS, Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, still the world's largest fingerprint database,

contained fingerprints that identified 64 million individuals and was available on demand to law enforcement around the country. In 2009, the state of New Hampshire formed its cold case unit, but Everett's name wasn't on the list. He had been forgotten.

It wasn't until 2013 when Everett's youngest daughter, Darlene, called up and brought it to their attention that efforts were renewed to solve the 47-year-old cold case. And they didn't have to look very far. The fingerprint found at the crime scene had never been entered into and compared to known criminals in the iAPHIS database.

When investigators submitted the fingerprint taken from the bathroom faucet, it came back with a match. And after cross-checking it with a state police forensics lab, the match was confirmed to belong to Thomas Cass, who was 20 in 1966. Oh, it was a huge, huge revelation because I had no idea that there was any evidence like that that could match a specific person to the crime. You know,

You know, I was surprised by an awful lot of the details that were offered to us in this conference call. Prior to that, I had no idea that there was any physical evidence like that that could possibly tie any particular individual to the crime. The lab also tested the hair found at the cash register and the cigarette butt found on the ground, but they were unable to pull DNA from either of them.

Thomas Cass was no stranger to the law. He accrued 13 convictions between 1966 and 2000 in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont for repeat charges of theft, armed robbery, aggravated assault, and escaping from prison twice. His final conviction in Vermont in 2000 was for manufacturing drugs at a federal prison.

In the fall of 2013, 47 years after the crime was committed, New Hampshire investigators met with Thomas Cass.

Cass told detectives that he joined the army at 18 around 1963 and left three years later on a general discharge, which in most cases means something wasn't quite up to standard. Immediately after, in 1966, he moved back home to Vermont and got married before moving to Springfield, Massachusetts. The couple lived there until 1967 when he was arrested for robbery.

During this particular incident, Cass said that the robbery was at a gas station in Springfield, using a sawed-off shotgun as a weapon. Cass and two accomplices, Ray Bennett and Frank Hutchins, were arrested while attempting to flee the scene.

Cass told them that he spent most of his life behind bars and acknowledged his criminal history, but he denied having any involvement in Everett's murder. He didn't know who he was and even claimed not to know where Andover, New Hampshire was, saying that he'd only been to the state once in his life. Though in the same interview, he mentioned that he'd once stolen a car from Vermont and drove it to New Hampshire, but apparently that time didn't count.

or the time that he was convicted for two criminal offenses in Grafton County District Court in New Hampshire. A few months later, investigators met with Cass a second time, asking if he would submit DNA samples, to which he agreed. However, when asked to take a polygraph test, he refused.

Around this time, people who were close to Cass were also interviewed. Friends, family, and an ex-wife who told them that Cass first introduced himself to her as a businessman and a crook. She said that when they first met, Cass was working as a roadie for a rock and roll band.

Miles Conner and the Wild Ones, who was known at the time for his wild New England rock and roll, in a similar vein to the hip-shaking piano tunes of Jerry Lee Lewis. Miles Conner also moonlighted as an art thief who robbed from museums. He was featured in the Netflix documentary This Is a Robbery, about the infamous 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist.

He was also convicted of a double homicide in 1981, but the conviction was overturned a few years later at the second trial. Miles Connor and Thomas Cass were best buddies. Miles even acknowledged him in his book, The Art of the Heist, Confessions of a Master Thief, saying, Tommy Cass, you'll always be my pal.

Also, around the time he was a roadie for miles, Cass broke into a family's home and terrorized them, an incident that once again landed him in prison. Cass' ex-wife told investigators that his home life growing up was rough. His father was an alcoholic, and the household was abusive.

She also said that he was a very violent person and on multiple occasions had threatened to kill her. She subsequently got a restraining order and ultimately a divorce. She mentioned Cass would frequently brag about his crimes, proudly calling himself a career criminal. She also believed that he had no problem with hurting people to get what he wanted.

Another ex-wife told investigators the company Cass kept was no better than he, telling them of a conversation she overheard between his friends, laughing and boasting over a murder that they'd allegedly gotten away with in the 70s. She also recalled an evening where Cass stormed out of their home, gun in hand, to go take care of somebody who owed him money.

On occasion, she would witness the bloody and beaten aftermath of people who crossed Cass, and she remembered a time when he used the butt of one of his many guns to get his point across.

A few months later, in February 2014, the investigators made a surprise visit to Thomas Cass. They said that forensic evidence had been collected at the scene of Everett Delano's 1966 murder that linked him to the crime scene. Cass refused to speak and requested a lawyer. Following the interview, a search warrant was granted in an attempt to find the .22 caliber handgun, but they didn't find the murder weapon.

Four days later, on February 24th, 2014, Thomas Cass shot himself with a .45 caliber handgun and died by suicide at the age of 67. His girlfriend, Jane, told the 911 operator that he believed the police were coming to arrest him that day in relation to a cold case, so he beat them to the punch, refusing to go back to prison again.

When investigators spoke with Jane, she said that he never told her about the investigation before this week and also mentioned that his behavior was normal on the day of their surprise visit four days prior. He had reiterated to her what he originally told investigators, that he'd never been to Andover and knew nothing of Everett Delano's murder.

In the past, he'd mentioned to her, never talk about something that has no statute of limitations. But she didn't think anything of it. He also said that he would never go back to prison because he refused to die in a square box. Jane remembered seeing him with a large sum of money after their surprise visit, and she

and she surmised that he used that to purchase the gun to kill himself. Investigators confirmed a recent purchase with a local gun dealer, who was unaware of the intention of the purchase, and also confirmed that Cass had a consultation with a defense lawyer to represent him for a homicide case.

Jane also called his sister and told her that if she wanted to see her brother, she best be doing it before he was arrested in the near future. His sister remembered his words about refusing to go to jail and suspected that suicide was imminent.

The cold case unit told the family in 2014 what they learned about the fingerprint match and that the primary suspect had died by suicide. With his death, they said that they were confident who the killer was and that they would make an official announcement and issue the findings in a report. That report took five years to produce.

Darlene called me and said she had just heard from the Attorney General's office that Cass had shot himself. That upset all of us, but she was – and leaving the message for me was certainly extremely upset that all of this progress would possibly come to naught.

We didn't know how things would proceed at that point, although the attorney general's office had made it pretty clear they felt they had most of what they needed to move forward with the case. But obviously we knew that with him killing himself, that was going to complicate things.

And it did obviously complicate things for several years. And as those years went on, we became less hopeful that it would ever come to a resolution. We knew that they were still working on it. We knew that they felt they had a good case here. But understandably, they weren't really sure that they could fully resolve it.

In November 2018, the cold case unit interviewed Jane again about Cass, and she reiterated that Cass had never said anything that would have incriminated him. The closest he had come was what he said about keeping quiet when you commit a crime that has no statute of limitations.

And four months later, on February 20th, 2019, the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit finally released its formal report on the murder of Everett Delano and announced that after 52 years, the case had officially been solved.

Susan Morrill, an assistant attorney general for New Hampshire who oversaw the cold case unit, stated that the reason it took five years to announce, despite knowing since Thomas Cass' death in 2014, is because of the intense verification process and lack of resources and staffing for the department.

In response to the news, the Delano family issued this statement: "We are happy this day has come where our family has been given a small measure of justice. For almost 53 years, our family has wondered what happened on September 1, 1966. There was a very long time our family didn't know if we would ever receive the answers about what happened that day.

Today, our family finally has the long-overdue answers we've been waiting for. Nothing ever came of it until the cold case unit was formed, which unfortunately was after my mother had passed. There was really no focus of investigation here, and no reason to think that it would ever reemerge in the consciousness or reemerge with law enforcement there, but...

I can say that law enforcement in the early days went above and beyond in what they did to try to follow up all of the clues. And once it was reactivated, I think it's clear that they went above and beyond in their investigation. And that kind of speaks to the need, I think, for more devoted resources to cold cases because these things can, in fact, finally come to a resolution.

I asked Daryl if he could look back and reflect on his father's death, now as a man who has lived a full life and had a family of his own.

You know, the victim was my father. I, you know, I think the shock, the grief, the sadness, um, you know, and then the regret. I think at this point, the regret that my father didn't get to experience the joys of being a grandparent as long as he, or being a parent as long as he should, or being a grandparent at all. And one of the things that I enjoy most at this time is being a grandparent. Sometimes I think, boy, my father would have, would have loved being a grandparent. And that was something that, uh,

He was robbed of for no good reason. It was just a senseless, random act of violence. And with my father, we can never know the circumstances, can never know specifically what went on in the office when my father was shot. But I would like not to think that Cass went there with the intention of killing my father.

What blows my mind about this case is the number of odds, both good and bad. Daryl shares this feeling. He didn't know anything about Andover. Just a random place that apparently he stopped to rob. I think he was just passing through, and if he had turned right instead of turning left, or left instead of right, this chance encounter probably wouldn't have happened because I don't think he was seeking out this particular place.

What are the odds that a bullet struck Everett's watch, freezing it at the exact moment of the murder? What are the odds that none of the first witnesses or first responders turned off the water faucet?

Mrs. Sanborn got to the crime scene and saw the faucet running, but instead of turning off the water by the faucet handle like every human is conditioned to do, she did so by cutting off the source and turning off the water pump. In a world today where the importance of crime scene preservation is drummed into our heads by shows like Law & Order, most people understand that you shouldn't touch anything.

Back in the 60s, this wasn't the case. If anyone there had touched that running faucet, it could have destroyed the fingerprint, wiping away the only piece of evidence that linked Thomas Cass as the killer. Mrs. Sanborn is the unsung hero of this case.

Speaking of fingerprint, it wasn't run through the AFIS system until 2013. The FBI, who worked on this case back in the early years of the investigation, had the capabilities to run an automated fingerprint match through their digitized system by 1976, and if they did,

it's possible it would have been matched to Thomas Cass, who was likely already in their system because of the crimes he committed and was caught for in the years following Everett's murder.

Thomas Cass had an extensive and violent criminal history after Everett's death, between the many crimes that he was charged and convicted for to the assaults, abuse, and crimes, as told by his ex-wives, that weren't reported. He hurt a lot of people, and in retrospect, he could have been stopped much sooner. It's possible that this career criminal could have been stopped before he even got started.

But because that print sat for 47 years, Cass was able to remain free or serve shorter sentences for lesser charges than first-degree murder. Cass lived 47 years of his life thinking he successfully eluded law enforcement and got away with murder. Because he did.

If the family hadn't have told the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit about their case, it wouldn't have been solved. How many other fingerprints sit waiting for their match that's already in the AFIS system? Thomas Cass killed a man in cold blood, a dad with a loving family.

A responsible, honest, and hardworking member of the community who was just doing his job. All because he didn't want to leave any witnesses behind. The biggest thing Thomas Cass robbed that day was not from the cash register. Not only did he shoot Everett twice, he fired a third and final round at close range to the back of his head after he'd already fallen to the ground defenseless.

A vicious act that showed Cass' true colors, and would refute any claims of self-defense that he may have invoked if he'd been caught.

Thomas Cass was brazen. He robbed a gas station post office building on Main Street in the prime of the morning, likely one of the busiest spots in Andover. It's possible he was interrupted, which is why the faucet was left on. But he wasn't caught. He got away. What are the odds that he wasn't caught in the act? He was very lucky.

While I'm not sure if this senseless act of violence could have been prevented, I'm sure if it happened today, the killer would be caught. In a way, Everett Delano and his family never got justice. Cass evaded law enforcement by taking his own life. He fled from justice.

At least the Delano family has some solace knowing their father's mystery killer isn't still out there. Everett's story is still one of hope. Hope that a case can be solved, even after a lifetime's worth of years have passed. Hope against the naysayers who say this will never be solved. Hope that fights against the odds.

So here's to the ones who fight for justice, whose cases have gone on five decades without answers. There is always hope. Ask about your family's case. There might just be a fingerprint on file that's waiting for its match to be made. I want to thank you so much for listening and for all the incredible support over the past two weeks. Thank you for sharing Reeve's case.

Today is my birthday, and next week is Murder, She Told's birthday. And if you want to help me make it special and support the show, there's a link in the show notes with options. Leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts or sharing the show on social media is also a great way to support and make this week very special. You can connect with me on Facebook or Instagram at Murder, She Told Podcast.

My sources for this episode include the Portsmouth Herald, the New Hampshire Department of Justice, and the Burlington Free Press. Thank you to Daryl Delano for sharing his memories and family photos with me. All photos and sources for this case can be found on the blog at MurderSheTold.com.

Thank you to Byron Willis for his research and writing support. If you're a friend or a family member of the victim, you're more than welcome to reach out to me at hello at 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. My only hope is that I've honored your stories in keeping the names of your family and friends alive. I'm Kristen Sevey, and this is Murder She Told. Thank you for listening.