The Three Murder Trials of Nancy Fredette
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I'm your host, Kristen Seavey. You can connect with me at MurderSheTold.com or follow on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast. In January of 1977, an unexplained fire destroyed the main clubhouse of a local civic society called the Fraternal Order of the Eagles, or the Eagles for short. The Eagles are an organization similar to the Oddfellows, the Masons, or the Elks.

The fire also damaged a neighboring building, an apartment house that was owned by Fred and Nancy Fredette. They even occupied one of the units. Fred and Nancy, husband and wife, lived in Biddeford, Maine with their six children and were somewhat prominent community members and landlords. Since the club had been totally destroyed, they would have to rebuild it, which would require them applying for a building permit.

This bureaucratic process gave the Fredettes and other nearby families an opening to voice their grievances to City Hall and to the Eagles. They claimed that the club brought noise, litter, congested parking, and safety issues to the neighborhood. They acknowledged that the club had been there for over 50 years, since the 1920s.

but they claimed that the character of the club had changed in recent years. A younger demographic with far more cars. There had been a car explosion two years prior in 1975 in their parking lot, and the Fredettes were particularly miffed that the Eagles hadn't offered to help repair the damage caused by their most recent fire. In the meantime, the Fredette family moved out of their Birch Street apartment and into a nearby apartment on Hill Street.

Nancy remembered getting threatening phone calls that would be brief and aggressive. You're going to get it. Tonight's the night. Your husband's going to get it. Though the callers never identified themselves, Nancy believed that they had something to do with the opposition of rebuilding the Eagles club. She even reported the calls to the police.

Two months after the fire, the Fredettes brought suit against the Eagles Club for damages. The harassment continued, escalating to property damage. Their cars were vandalized with paint and hit with eggs. At the same time the Eagles were dealing with the reconstruction of their club, the Fredettes were dealing with the repairs of their apartment house.

Though it's not entirely clear from newspapers, I believe they enlisted a friend and contractor, Gus LeVarier, to extract as much as possible from their insurance company for the fire claim. They made a deal with Gus. If he got $75,000 out of the insurance company, they would pay him a kickback of $5,000.

He agreed and was nearly successful. With his support, they got $73,800 from the insurance company. He did not perform the repairs, though. This strikes me as an insurance fraud scheme.

Gus was living with them at the time, and Fred and Gus were drinking buddies. Evidently, their friendship and drinking drove Nancy nuts. According to Nancy, they would go out in the evening and not return until late at night, rip-roaring drunk. In her words, the situation became intolerable. Nancy told Gus and her husband to move out.

They did. She said that Fred returned every night to spend the night with her to try and mend their marriage. Around this time, Gus and Fred had a falling out. Fred hadn't paid him a dime of the promised kickback for bilking their insurance company, and Gus was mad. Nancy later recalled that Gus had said, "'Someday, somehow, you are not going to know, but I am going to get even with you.'"

According to Gus, things had soured tremendously between Nancy and Fred, and he recalled a day in October, months after he'd moved out, with vivid clarity. It was Saturday morning, and Gus was eating at a Biddeford restaurant with a friend when he was interrupted by Nancy.

She approached his table and asked if he would chat with her privately. He ended up agreeing to take a ride with her in her car, and she said, I have got to get rid of Fred.

She pulled out her York County Savings Bank checkbook from her wallet. Gus said that usually when someone wants to get rid of a husband, they get a divorce. She retorted that divorce was not enough and then offered him $3,500 if he found someone to do the job of killing her husband. Gus accepted the offer.

Again, according to Gus, a week later, Nancy dropped by his Hill Street apartment and made arrangements to meet him at noon in the parking lot of a restaurant called Wonder Bar on Washington Street in Biddeford. She said she would have what she promised him. According to bank records, on that same day, Saturday, October 8th, 1977, Nancy applied for a loan. The application called for her husband's signature. She forged it.

The loan was approved, and the $3,300 was paid in cash to Nancy, who, on the same date, withdrew $200 from a savings account for a total of $3,500. Nancy later claimed that it was for the purchase of a backhoe to help with the construction of a home they were building on Granite Street. The backhoe was never bought, and she said simply, the money was spent.

She later clarified it was used to buy building materials. At noon, as promised, Nancy met with Gus and gave him an envelope containing the $3,500. He accepted the money with no intention of carrying out the heinous deed. His mind was focused on the $5,000 they refused to pay him. This, he thought, would make a nice dent in the debt.

Gus said that she suggested a time frame for when the murder was to be done. Do it today, because Fred will have money on him and it will look like a robbery. And if not today, then don't do it on Monday, because Monday is Columbus Day and Fred will be with the children.

Gus chuckled as he set off for Arizona that very same day, where he would spend the rest of the winter, not to return to Maine until March. According to Nancy, this whole scenario was a fabrication by Gus. In February of 1978, amidst the ongoing threats, Nancy and Fred decided to get handguns. Fred collected guns, but he didn't have a carry permit, so they filed for a permit with the police department.

On the paperwork, they cited the reason for needing the gun is because they carried large sums of money. The police department approved the permit, and Nancy registered her Colt 32, a small-caliber, lightweight gun that's a good candidate for concealed carry. The bullets it fires are smaller than a 9mm round, but larger than a .22 caliber.

There are differing accounts of Nancy's capability with the pistol, but she and her son, Fred Jr., both said that although she carried the gun with her, she didn't know how to use it, and it wasn't even loaded. She said that her husband, Fred Sr., was going to take her to the range to teach her how to use it and get in some practice, but he never did.

On May 8th, three months later, Nancy notified police that her Colt .32 was missing, and about a week later, on May 17th, she officially reported it stolen. Around this same time, in April of 1978, after the repairs to their Birch Street apartment were complete, the Fredette family moved back in.

On the morning of Friday, May 28th, 1978, Nancy said it was a morning like any other. She woke up at 7am, made breakfast for Fred, and looked in on the children. She was watching the clock and gave Fred a heads up that he needed to get going.

She yelled to her husband that he had five minutes until he had to get up to prepare for work. She went into the bathroom, closed the door, and started running bathwater. As she was filling the tub, she heard three loud bangs. Gunshots. She tried to get out of the bathroom, but she couldn't. She said the door was jammed up against another door in the house. And when she finally opened the door, she found a chair in the way.

While she was struggling in the bathroom, she said she heard footsteps from the kitchen of someone hurrying out the back door. When she finally emerged from the bathroom, she found the back door of the apartment wide open. She peered out but saw no one. She then went down the hallway to the primary bedroom, turning on the hall light on the way. And what she saw shocked her. Her husband lay bleeding on the bed,

shot three times from close range. She called his name, but he didn't answer. She ran to the phone and dialed the Biddeford police. At 7.25 a.m., police dispatch told nearby officers Robert Gregory and John Morang that gunshots had been heard at 55 Birch Street. They quickly made their way over, but stopped at the wrong house. As they were running down Birch Street, they saw children beckoning them from an upstairs window.

When they arrived at the front door, they found it locked. After a short wait, Nancy opened the door and let them in. She was wearing a robe. She said that the intruder had just left. He's got a gun. He shot my husband and he went out back. The cops asked Nancy to stay in the front bedroom with her children while they turned their attention to the intruder. The back door was ajar. The police immediately checked out back and found no one, so they returned to Fred.

Fred was critically injured. He was lying on his back in the bed, and he'd been shot three times, once in the head, once in the wrist, and once in the neck. He was unconscious, but clung to life. Paramedics took him immediately to Portland Hospital, where he survived until later that evening when he passed away. The police cordoned off the area and began their investigation.

Nancy and the children, after brief questioning, were asked to leave the scene and stay away from the house until their work was complete.

Since this was a homicide investigation, the state police were immediately involved, and they worked in concert with local Biddeford law enforcement. Biddeford Police Chief Moran found a single black leather women's glove in a filing cabinet in the living room, and he found its mate, the right one, on the floor at the foot of the bed where Fred had been shot. Detective Letard spent most of the day making an inventory of the firearms and ammo in Nancy's apartment.

21 guns, several boxes of ammunition, including .32 caliber shells. Two spent rounds of ammo were on the floor, and one was on the bed. One live round of ammunition was found on the floor of the bedroom too, and it was later determined it had been extracted from the pistol.

The next day, the crime scene processing continued. Officer Leslie Bridges decided to take a look in the Fredette's washing machine. He pulled out some damp clothes and a gun fell to the ground. It was Nancy's missing Colt 32. The serial number matched the records from the police. Forensic analysis later confirmed it was the gun that fired the three rounds that killed Fred. The spent shells were conclusively linked to the gun.

They had found the murder weapon, but unfortunately, they could pull no prints from it. The gun could hold up to nine rounds, eight in the magazine and one in the chamber. But in common use, if you were to load a full magazine into an empty gun, it would only have an eight-round capacity. Three shots were fired and when the gun was found, the magazine was empty.

suggesting that whoever shot Fred had decided how many bullets they were going to use when they were loading the magazine. The murderer had stashed the gun in the washing machine right after shooting Fred.

The medical examiner, based on the trajectory of the bullets, believed that Fred had been lying down when he was shot. A time experiment was done, and it would take approximately 33 seconds to enter the back door, fire the rounds, and leave by the back door, not including the time it would take to stash the gun. Police canvassed the neighborhood in search of anyone who had seen the mystery assailant.

Two sisters who lived in the apartment over the Fredettes spoke to the police. The older sister, Darlene, said she saw a man in front of the Eagles Club at 7 a.m. on her way to school. She described him as tall, in his late 20s, with shoulder-length hair. When she was walking down the stairs from her unit, it took her right by Nancy's back door, and she said it was closed.

She also said she saw a man in his 30s with a normal short haircut going south on Prospect Street driving a brown car. She didn't know his name, but she said she'd seen him at the Fredette home before. She realized she left her school lunch ticket at home and returned to fetch it. She left her home again that morning at 7.10 a.m. and said that the back door was still closed. The two men she'd seen earlier had moved on, and she didn't see them again.

She did not hear the loud bangs. Her younger sister, Sharon, said that she got up around 7.15 and she thought that her older sister had left later than she said, more like 7.25 a.m. Sharon heard some loud bangs after her sister had left. She ran into the living room and looked out the window overlooking the Eagles Club. She saw no one outside.

She said that she heard Nancy yell someone had shot her husband. At this point, Sharon woke up her parents. Another neighbor, Kenneth Fogg, had been working on his truck installing a CB radio since early that morning at 5 a.m. He said he had a good view of the apartment house from where he was working. He heard some loud noises and he thought it sounded like a car backfiring and then police arrived about 15 minutes later.

He said he hadn't seen anyone come or go in that period of time. Another neighbor, Lisa DeGay, a Biddeford Junior High School student, told the detective that she saw someone leave Nancy's apartment that morning on her walk to school.

though her account was contested by her mother and her friend. She said she'd walked to school and seen a man with dark, shoulder-length hair come out of the vacant apartment at 53 Birch Street and head toward Alfred Street at a jog after throwing something in the bushes. The police searched the bushes and area she pointed out, but found nothing. Her friend, Kathy Ouellette, said that she was walking with Lisa that morning, casting doubt on her testimony.

Lisa had said that she was walking alone. Kathy said that they decided to walk down Birch Street because they had seen some police activity and were intrigued, suggesting that they arrived in the area much later than the time of the shooting, and much too late to see a fleeing assailant.

Lisa's mom and her brother later said that she left around 7.30 a.m., much later than the shooting. Regarding Lisa's reputation for honesty, Lisa's own mother later testified that her daughter didn't always tell the truth. In her words, Lisa doesn't tell the truth because she doesn't know how to tell the truth. And Lisa was the only witness who had seen a suspicious person running from the scene that morning.

Detective Letart interviewed all six of the Fredette children and spoke to the oldest, Nancy Jr., twice. None of them had seen an intruder. Police asked Nancy to walk them through her thoughts and actions.

She said that after she heard the shots, she froze momentarily and then went to see what happened. She made a point of explaining that she had been slowed considerably from leaving the bathroom by the doors getting jammed up. There were two doors in the apartment that were close together. One of them was the bathroom door and the other was the back door. The two door swings interfered with one another.

She said that the interference prevented her from exiting the bathroom, and during that struggle, likely the assailant had escaped. The police tested this theory and found that no matter what position the doors were in, there would always be a minimum two-foot-wide opening that a cop twice Nancy's size could fit through.

With the strong circumstantial evidence and the discovery of the murder weapon, the state's attorney's office felt like they had a strong case against Nancy, and they moved to indict.

They held a secret grand jury hearing on September 12, 1978, three and a half months after the incident, and the grand jury handed down an indictment against Nancy Fredette for the murder of her husband. They arrested her that day and booked her at York County Jail. She was transferred to Cumberland County Jail and then arraigned the next day, on September 13th.

She pled innocent and was granted $25,000 bail, an unusual move in a murder trial, but likely was allowed in this case because of her responsibilities to her six children and the reliance of the prosecution on circumstantial evidence. Nancy hired a defense attorney, Carolyn Glassman, and one of the first things she did was get the trial moved from York County, where the crime was committed, to Somerset Superior Court in Skowhegan.

She felt that the jury pool in York County would be tainted by the prejudicial press coverage that had been so prevalent leading up to the trial. A Superior Court judge approved the change in venue, and the trial was scheduled.

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On December 3rd, 1978, about six months after Fred's death, the trial of the State of Maine v. Nancy Fredette began. Nancy's attorney, Carolyn, was a widely respected attorney, and her husband was a justice on the Maine Supreme Court. Her formal, often stern approach strongly contrasted the prosecution's attorneys.

State's attorney Gleason had been likened to the young, clean-cut Columbo, the television investigator who would mask penetrating questions with a folksy approach.

After the jury was selected, they visited the crime scene, her Burt Street apartment in their apartment house. The list of witnesses for the prosecution and the defense was huge. Over 70 witnesses in total could be called. From jury selection to jury deliberation, the trial was to take three weeks, during which a huge amount of testimony and evidence would be entered into the record.

The interest in the case from the public was enormous, and news reporters would be in the courtroom every day creating headline after headline of new developments in the case. The stakes were very high. Nancy faced the possibility of life in prison, but the jury's decision had to be unanimous.

Edward Berube, a man who was employed for a time by Fred and Nancy as a construction worker, testified that he was in Joe's Donut Shop, the breakfast place where Nancy had approached Gus.

He testified that he saw Nancy enter the shop and speak with Gus, corroborating Gus's claim that Nancy had come to him with a murder-for-hire scheme in mind. Nancy's defense attorney, Carolyn, on cross-examination, established that there might be a conflict of interest for the witness.

His father was being sued by the Fredettes for breach of contract relating to a construction job he was doing for them for their Granite Street home. It was later settled in favor of the Fredettes for a judgment of about $7,000, and the dispute cast doubt on the veracity of his testimony. Berube also testified that Fred had once shown him his gun collection and remarked about a small caliber handgun.

This is Nancy's. I taught her how to use it, and she's better with it than I am.

The defense called Lorraine Ely to the stand as a character witness for Nancy. She was Nancy's babysitter for several years and testified that Nancy and Fred were happy with each other and had a fine family, bolstering their reputation as a stable and content couple. The prosecution called a rebuttal witness, another woman named Lorraine, who had carpooled with Ely while leaving the grand jury proceedings months prior.

The second Lorraine testified that Ely, the babysitter, had told her in the car that she discovered a gun wrapped in clothing in the Fredette washroom before Fred was killed, after Nancy had reported it stolen, and that it was the same gun that had been used to kill Fred. Furthermore, she said that Ely knew a lot about the case that she would never tell.

Nancy's daughter, Stacy Fredette, who was 12 years old, also took the stand. Stacy said that she saw her mother go into the bathroom the morning of the shooting, and then she heard three loud bangs. She said that she saw her mother struggling to get out of the bathroom, but she said she didn't see anyone else enter or leave the apartment.

The defense also tried to call a former insurance agent who had done work for the Fredettes, who said he had spoken to Fred a week before his death. He said that Fred had told him that tens of thousands of dollars were going in and out of the Eagles Club and that he intended to blow the whistle on the operation. He had names of the organized crime figures who were in charge of the gambling ring and Fred said that he expected to be shot.

The insurance agent sent an anonymous letter to the state police shortly after learning of Fred's death, alerting them to this conversation. The prosecution opposed his testimony under a hearsay objection, and the judge agreed he would not be allowed to testify. The jury had been removed from the courtroom, so they heard none of his testimony.

The defense also tried to call one of Fred's co-workers, Walter Thorne. He remembered Fred chatting with him at work, saying that he made a lot of enemies. He wouldn't be surprised if someone took a shot at him. He got the impression that Fred wasn't joking. Again, this testimony was not heard in front of the jury and was disallowed by the judge in response to the prosecution's hearsay objection.

Carolyn also called several character witnesses to impeach Gus's credibility. They said that he was unreliable, a drunk, and not too good for honesty. Gus himself took the stand and acknowledged that he had a sketchy memory and that the extent of his education was a couple weeks in the sixth grade.

and that he had been hospitalized several times for a liver problem related to excessive consumption of alcohol. After Gus returned from his winter stay in Arizona in March of 1978, two months before Fred's death, he was asked if he ever encountered Fred.

He said he had one time, and when asked if he told Fred about his wife's murder for higher scheme, he said, No, I had a mind to, but I didn't want a punch in the nose. He also stressed that he had nothing to do with Fred's death.

Several witnesses were called by the prosecution to corroborate Gus's claims of him meeting with Nancy in the fall of 1977. All three told the court that he had mentioned to them about the agreement that Nancy had suggested to Gus. One of them was an attorney, and Gus asked him if he would be breaking any laws by accepting the money. The attorney advised him to accept it.

Nancy, dressed in a gray suit, took the stand in her own defense and testified for six hours, speaking quietly and answering questions from both sides. Nancy said that she hadn't met with Gus since he moved out of their house, denying that the supposed murder-for-hire meeting ever took place.

She said that in addition to the doors being jammed up, there may have also been a chair interfering with her getting out of the bathroom, something she did not tell police in her initial statements. On cross-examination, she admitted that the chair may not have prevented her from exiting the bathroom, but nonetheless impeded her progress. When asked if she killed her husband, Nancy teared up and said, "'Absolutely not.'"

During closing arguments, Prosecutor Gleason said, It doesn't make sense that an intruder would come into the apartment, shoot Fred, and take additional time to bury the murder weapon under clothes in a washing machine. How could someone get into the Fredette bedroom, fire the shots, and leave without any of the six Fredette children or Nancy herself catching a glimpse of the intruder?

There is only one person who could have shot Fred Fredette in his bedroom, in the light of day, at 7.30 in the morning. And that is Nancy Fredette.

Prosecutor Stokes added that Nancy did not realize she wouldn't be able to get back into her house after the police sealed it off as a crime scene. He said that she likely planned to deal with the handgun once the police left, but they thwarted her by finding it during their investigation. Her defense attorney, Carolyn, stressed that the state had no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence that linked Nancy to the crime.

She also said that the state had shown no motive for Nancy to kill her husband, but that ample motive existed for Eagles Club members. She called Gus a liar and a crook, and repeatedly claimed that Biddeford Police had done a poor job investigating the murder, and that it may have been possible for the murderer to have fled the apartment and hid in a rear shed or the basement until the police left the scene.

Prosecutor Gleason said that Carolyn wanted the jury to believe that a nebulous, sinister force was responsible for the murder, but he exhorted the jury to use their common sense to determine the plain and simple truth.

The jury, after being given instructions by the judge, left the courtroom on Wednesday, December 19, 1978, at 1.30 p.m. to begin their deliberations. After eight hours, at 9.30 p.m., they asked for a transcript of the testimony of young Stacey Fredette. Heated discussions and shouts could be heard in the neighboring courtroom through the evening, though it wasn't clear to reporters what the arguments were about.

The jury retired that evening and were sequestered overnight. They continued their discussions on Thursday morning. At noon, the judge asked for a vote. The jury responded that it was a split 10-2 and had been since they began deliberations.

For four more hours, the debate raged on. And finally, at 4.30 p.m., after 16 hours of debate, the jury threw in the towel. A unanimous verdict would not be reached. A mistrial was declared.

Shortly after the conclusion of the trial, the prosecutors told Nancy that they were going ahead with a second trial. Her attorney asked that she be tried once again in a different jurisdiction due to the extensive pre-trial publicity. She wanted to find a jury that knew as little about the case as possible. Her request was granted and the trial was moved to Lincoln County.

In February, two months after the trial, Nancy filed paperwork seeking a court-appointed attorney. She was no longer in a financial position to afford private counsel. A month later, the court granted her request and asked Carolyn Glassman to continue representing her. In preparation for the second trial, she needed a full transcript of the first to be prepared.

It was a huge amount of testimony, and it took weeks or even months to get produced. The written record ended up being 10 volumes long, hundreds of pages each.

In May, Carolyn filed a request to the judge to withdraw as Nancy's counsel. She explained in an affidavit that it was beyond her physical capability to be prepared for the May 27th trial. She said that the 3,000-page transcript had not been ready on time and that her teaching obligations would make preparation impossible. She estimated that she had spent 1,500 hours on Nancy's first trial.

and she said that in 36 years of legal practice, she had never before asked for a continuance or to be relieved of her responsibilities because of her inability to meet the trial schedule. The judge denied her request to withdraw, but did postpone the case a few weeks. The new trial date was set, June 9th, 1980. It was to be held in Wiscasset, a small coastal town on the way to Booth Bay.

The second trial proceedings closely resembled the first, though there were a few surprises. Gus was in rough medical shape and was no longer able to testify, so he didn't appear in the second trial at all. This was one of the most important witnesses to the prosecution, so they asked permission to read his previous testimony. This request was granted.

The prosecution spent more time working to establish a pattern of behavior of Nancy Fredette lying. They brought Casco Bank manager William Roberts to testify about the discrepancies between Nancy's records and the bank's records.

On May 20th, six days before Fred's death, the Fredettes confronted William at the Saco branch, complaining of the inaccuracy of an overdraft notice they received in the mail. They claimed that according to their records, they should have about $8,000 in their account. Nancy produced a deposit log that contained numerous entries, written in pencil, that didn't correspond with the bank's records.

She claimed that the deposits had been made at the Biddeford branch, but the manager noticed that the teller's initials that corresponded to the entries were from a teller who worked almost exclusively at the Saco branch. The Fredettes claimed that they had never received any mailed monthly statements, so the branch manager offered to get copies from their Portland headquarters and set up another meeting with the Fredettes to reconcile the differences.

Nancy said that she would be registering a complaint with the Maine Banking Commission if she didn't get answers, and followed through with that threat before the bank even had a chance to meet up with them again. William met with Nancy again, weeks after Fred had been shot, and she produced a deposit slip to him to substantiate a difference of $1,000.

The bank had credited their account with $210, but Nancy claimed that she was due $1,210 instead. When the manager reviewed the deposit slip, he noticed something unusual.

The 1 and the comma in the 1210 were written in a different color ink than the rest of the deposit slip. In addition to the pattern of deception, the prosecution also sought to establish motive. In their estimation, Fred had relied upon the deposit records that Nancy kept and implied that Nancy had secretly destroyed or otherwise kept the bank's monthly statements from Fred.

When he finally learned that the account was overdrawn in an overdraft notice that he happened to see, he learned that Nancy had failed to deposit $8,000 over a period of months in their account. When Nancy's deception was exposed, she decided she would get rid of him.

The prosecution also spent time working to disprove the theory that the murderer could have slipped into the shed in the backyard of the apartment house and hid there until police left the scene. They produced a photograph, taken on the day of Fred's murder, that showed a padlock was threaded into the hasps of the door on the shed.

It wasn't locked, but there was no way someone could have closed themselves in the shed and also threaded the deadbolts through the two eyelets on the outside of the door.

The prosecution produced a mock-up of the doors from her apartment, and when Nancy took the stand, asked her to recreate being detained in the bathroom. She broke down and said that maybe a chair was in the way, that she was doing her best to provide an accurate recollection of the situation.

The second trial took about as long as the first one and followed a similar path, wrapping up on Monday, June 30th, 1980, 21 days after jury selection began. In closing arguments, Carolyn told the jury for almost an hour that Nancy had no motive for the killing and that the state's circumstantial case was replete with inconsistencies, doubts, and uncertainties.

The jury retired to deliberate and after seven hours reached a verdict. The next morning, Tuesday, July 1st, the jury foreman read the verdict. We, the jury, find Nancy Fredette guilty of murder.

Nancy wept as her lawyer asked for a roll call from the jury. Over Nancy's sobs, the jury, one after another, pronounced the word guilty. Nancy, who had been out on bail since her arraignment, was immediately taken to York County Jail.

On July 26, 1980, Nancy was sentenced to 35 years in prison at the Women's Correctional Center in Wyndham for the murder of her husband. Justice Robert Clifford said she could be eligible for a reduction of up to a third off of her sentence for good behavior. Nancy cried out, "'I am innocent of murdering my husband. I accept only the judgment of my Lord and God, and this judgment is tainted by error.'"

Carolyn made an appeal to the Maine Supreme Court on several grounds. While she was waiting for a hearing, she also tried to get Nancy out of jail on bail. Surprisingly, this was a thorny question, and it took a surprising amount of legal analysis for the Maine Supreme Court to ultimately rule unanimously that she, nor any convicted murderer, would be granted bail.

In June of 1983, while Nancy was serving her sentence, things took yet another surprising turn.

Nancy's appeal was successful, and her conviction was vacated. Her case was returned to the Lincoln County Courthouse by the Maine Supreme Court. She was getting another trial. The Supreme Court agreed with Carolyn that Justice Clifford had made a prejudicial error in allowing three witnesses for the state to give testimony.

Under the difficult-to-understand legal concept of hearsay, their testimony should not have been allowed. In principle, hearsay standards exist to prevent just anyone from testifying at trial. It serves to establish minimum standards for what can generally be considered reliable testimony.

The justices, in their decision, said that Gus Levarier had reason to lie. He was owed $5,000 by the Fredettes, which they refused to pay, and they weren't even on speaking terms.

In other words, Gus had a possible motive to fabricate the entire murder-for-hire plot as a way to get back at her, so the other witnesses should not have been given the opportunity to bolster his testimony. The three witnesses in question had each testified that Gus had told him about his meeting with Nancy before he left for Arizona.

Nancy's third trial began on January 25, 1984. She had a new attorney because her longtime attorney, Carolyn Glassman, had been appointed as a justice for the Maine Supreme Court in August of 1983, two months after the court granted Nancy a new trial. Carolyn was the first woman to serve as a high court justice in Maine and stayed there until 1997.

During Nancy's third trial, a jury of six men and six women deliberated for 11 hours over the course of two days before reaching their decision. Nancy sat with her daughter, son, and grandson in the witness room while the jury deliberated over her fate. "I have to believe there is going to be justice this time," she said. The Assistant Attorney General predicted the outcome of either a guilty verdict or a fourth trial.

We, the jury, find Nancy Fredette not guilty of the 1978 murder of Fred Fredette. Nancy was free. The murder case of Fred Fredette was an extraordinary event from Maine's criminal history, but it's mostly forgotten today.

When I stumbled on it in the newspaper, what made me curious was the fact that Nancy Fredette had been tried three times for the same crime, with promises from the prosecution for a fourth trial if the third one had ended with a hung jury.

It was one of the few cases of a murder conviction being overturned by the Maine Supreme Court. The evidence itself was primarily circumstantial, and the conflicting testimony made it difficult for jurors and spectators to parse fact from fiction. Nancy Fredette was found both guilty and innocent of the same crime, and after her third trial, when she was finally released, her freedom was short-lived.

She passed away in 1985 at the age of 39, just over a year after the last trial ended. There isn't a lot of info on Nancy or Fred themselves, despite extensive trial coverage. I was unable to find an obituary for her or find the details of her death, but what struck me the most about her sudden death was the impact to the family she left behind.

the children who lost their father eight years prior, who endured a trio of traumatic trials, who lost their mother to three years in prison. They, too, are victims. But I can't help but wonder what really happened in the Fredette household the morning of May 26th, 1978. Could there really be an intruder who committed this brazen crime and slipped away unseen?

What caused one jury to find Nancy guilty and the other innocent? Did Nancy Fredette get away with murder? Fred Fredette's death technically remains unsolved, and we will never know who pulled the trigger that took his life away. This story intrigues me and also leaves me with a lot of questions. So, what do you think?

I want to thank you so much for listening. I'm so grateful that you chose to tune in and I couldn't be here without you. Thank you. Sign up for the mailing list on MurderSheTold.com for an invite to the secret Facebook group to discuss your thoughts on this case and connect with me and other listeners. My sources for this episode include the Bangor Daily News, Biddeford Journal Tribune, and the Portsmouth Herald. All links for sources and images for this episode can be found on MurderSheTold.com linked in the show notes.

Special thanks to Byron Willis for his research and writing. If you loved this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. It's one of the best ways to support an indie podcast. If you're connected to this case in any way, 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.