When Teenager Sandra Knowlton Killed Officer Paul Simard
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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 at MurderSheTold.com or follow on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast.

Ten Lewiston police officers stood in the woods just off a back road in Sabatus, Maine, hiding behind trees in defense positions. They'd been engaged in an armed standoff, and for the past 30 minutes, they'd been trying to coax the shooter to drop their weapon and come out from behind the bush they were hiding in.

The ground and trunks around the officers were peppered with about 50 bullets that had greeted them when they closed in on the shooter, who aimlessly shot in their direction. But police were at a standstill. The shooter wasn't budging, despite multiple attempts to talk them into surrendering. 32-year-old patrolman Paul J. Simard took the lead, attempting to de-escalate the situation.

"Don't be gun-happy, just come out and nobody will get hurt," he said, cautiously stepping forward. A voice from the bush shouted at the officers to go away, and when they didn't follow instructions, the voice warned once again, "Get that flatfoot out of the way or he'll get shot." Flatfoot is an old slang term for policemen. But the officers didn't back down, and in response, a shot rang out, piercing the air.

Officer Ralph Frazier counted his blessings as a .22 caliber round whizzed just past his ear, barely missing him. The bullet lodged itself into a nearby tree. In an instant, a second shot was fired, and Paul Simard fell to the ground, hit with a bullet between the eyes. The officers didn't return fire. Officer Frazier told the shooter he had them in his gun sight, and if they didn't surrender immediately, he would shoot.

Tension hung in the air as the standoff came to a head. Frazier fired a warning shot into the ground and once again ordered them to drop their weapon. And the shooter did. And out from behind the deadly bush, in a pair of blue jeans and a red shirt, stepped Sandra Knowlton, a 14-year-old girl. A girl who had just shot and killed a Lewiston police officer.

Sandra had fled her home on foot just east of Lewiston, Maine, in a rural country near the present-day town of Sabatus. She had wearied of her parents' fighting and her father's temper and had decided to remove herself from the situation. That morning, she had gone upstairs to her bedroom under the pretense of getting some clothes, and at 8.30 a.m., she escaped through a bedroom window with $3 she'd been saving for a camera.

From a nearby cabin that the family owned, she retrieved a .22 caliber rifle and a box of ammo. It was the afternoon of Monday, July 7th, 1958, and it was a pleasant 70-degree overcast day. Her mother was distraught by her disappearance and called the Lewiston Police Department to report her missing. Some neighbors found her and she threatened them with the gun. They left and alerted the police.

It wasn't long thereafter that the police got some calls from the community about some moron taking potshots at passing automobiles. They responded to the calls to investigate.

Police located Sandra, hidden in a clump of bushes off a road just a mile or two from her home. They called for backup and altogether about 10 officers faced off against her. Over the course of the next 30 minutes, they tried to reason with the armed teen to de-escalate the situation, but she was resolute, firing about 50 rounds in the direction of the police.

It wasn't until after she shot and killed five-year veteran Paul Simard that her mother was summoned and was finally able to convince her to give up her weapon and come out. After listening a few minutes to her mother's pleas, Sandra stalked out from her hiding place and dropped her rifle. Four sheriff's deputies then seized her.

Police immediately arrested Sandra and took her back to the station where she signed a statement admitting that she had fired the shots. They then took her to the Anderskoggin County Jail where she spent the night.

The next day, Tuesday, July 8th, she was brought to court to appear before a judge. Sandra was an unlikely murder suspect. She was just 14 years old, tall, thin, and had just past shoulder length dark reddish-brown hair. She wore the same outfit she did the day prior, blue jeans and a red shirt. And in a photo from that day, her lips, centered on her square jaw, were pressed together in defiance.

Her mother, Rosella Knowlton, wept and repeated, I'll stand by you, baby. It wasn't your fault. Her father, Everett Knowlton, sat separate from her mother and watched quietly. Due to her financial need, she had been provided a defense attorney, A.F. Martin, and as he had advised, she pled not guilty. Sandra was later indicted on a murder charge and held without bail until the September term.

Shortly after her initial appearance, her lawyer filed a motion to allow her to be voluntarily committed to a hospital in Augusta for a 30-day psychiatric evaluation. It was approved, and under the supervision of Dr. Francis H. Sleeper, she lived 24-7 at the hospital where he formed his medical opinion about her sanity.

On Tuesday, September 9th, two months after the incident, she was returned to jail along with Sleeper's opinion. His diagnosis? Sandra was sane and knew exactly what she was doing. Just one week later, on September 17th, her trial began. Fourteen jurors were impaneled, nine women and five men. And the first thing they did was take all the jurors to the site of the shooting.

Once again, Sandra's mother and father attended the proceedings, but they sat separately. Her mother was in the front row, just a few feet from her daughter, but her father sat on the opposite side of the courtroom. Sandra took the stand in her own defense.

She said she brought the rifle to, quote, End quote.

Sandra's mother also testified and said that Everett's temper was very bad. She said, He used to swear at us and hit Sandra on numerous occasions. She corroborated Sandra's account of family fighting the day of the shooting. Everett himself was part of the search party looking for Sandra that day, but he was hesitant to approach her for fear of his own safety. She warned him, I will not go back to have you beat me up again.

Sandra only put down her weapon when her mother promised her they would move to an apartment near Lewiston and live apart from her father.

Her defense attorney described her situation: "A scared little girl with a desperate and violent hatred for her father, who was in the woods defending herself against an ogre, a monster. That was the tragedy." He said that she had run away because her father had brutally beaten her and that he had tried to force her into unnatural sexual acts. He said that Sandra looked upon every policeman as an emissary of her father.

Sandra told her mother, "'I'd rather die than live with my father.'" The judge gave detailed instructions to the jury. He told them their verdict might be innocent, guilty of murder, or guilty of manslaughter. Murder, he said, involved killing with malice of forethought, while manslaughter involved killing in the heat of passion or upon sudden provocation.

On Friday, September 19th, after a brief three-day trial, the jury deliberated for almost four hours and delivered their verdict. They found Sandra Knowlton guilty of manslaughter. Sandra was relieved.

The judge adjourned the trial and said that he would have a sentencing hearing in a few days after a pre-sentencing report was prepared. In Sandra's case, the report was prepared by a probation and parole officer who interviewed both her mother and her father, visited her home, and looked into the details in her life.

On Monday of the following week, probation officer Raymond Nichols had completed the report and presented it to the judge. And the following day, Tuesday, September 24th, Judge Archibald held a hearing to announce his decision.

He said, I want no one under any condition to see that report, implying that the details of the report were very private and unfortunate. He told Sandra, Fundamentally, there are other people to blame for the situation you are in. You've got a cross to bear for the rest of your life, unless you overcome it yourself.

He sentenced her to five to ten years in prison and let her know that she would be eligible for parole in four years, when she was 18. He told her that she would be given special tutors who would provide her with her high school education. She would have started at Lewiston High School the month of her trial. Sandra smiled and said thank you. Ultimately, she served her sentence at the Skowhegan Women's Reformatory because of lack of facilities for lodging female prisoners at the state prison.

The jury decided that the crime Sandra committed was manslaughter, but the prosecution was vying for the charge of murder. I took a moment to imagine a different scenario. Suppose instead of Sandra, it was an adult male in his early 20s who had left home on foot and hid in some bushes. Suppose he was an experienced hunter. I think that a jury would quickly find him guilty of murder.

I thought about the differences between these circumstances and what other factors might be important to the jury and to the law in determining the difference between manslaughter and murder.

The law says that all unjustified homicides are considered murder unless the killer was adequately provoked, which would be considered a mitigating circumstance, reducing the crime from murder to manslaughter, still a serious crime. In Maine, it's classified as the highest degree felony and could result in a prison sentence of up to 30 years.

So what does the law consider to be adequate provocation? The most common one is catching a spouse in the act of adultery, for which some states have specific statutes. Another example is a severe assault. The law is clear on incendiary language. No provocation by words alone, however vile, will mitigate murder to manslaughter.

In addition to proving adequate provocation, the defense must also show that the defendant did not have time to cool off. They were in an uncontrollable rage and acting without thinking in the heat of passion. In Sandra's case, she left her home on foot and walked a couple of miles. She was reported missing a few hours later by her mother. She took shots at passing cars. Police were called and there was a 30-minute standoff.

If her defense was that the provocation leading to the death of Paul Simard was the beating her father delivered to her earlier that day, then it seems to me that there was more than enough time to cool off.

The defense said that Sandra looked at the police officers as emissaries of her father, suggesting that perhaps it was the cops themselves who provoked her. But the cops just talked to her. They spent 30 minutes trying to de-escalate the situation, repeatedly asking her to put down her weapon. And the law is clear that words alone do not constitute adequate provocation.

Suppose that Sandra was an experienced marksman and killed Paul Simard to prevent him from returning her to her family. In the Boston Globe's July 8th article about the case, Sandra was quoted as having said, you better get that flatfoot out of here or he'll get shot.

Would the fear of being taken into custody and returned to her abusive father be considered adequate provocation to kill a uniformed officer? It's a question whose legal answer puzzles me.

During trial, she testified that she fired the gun to scare people away from her hiding place, but didn't intend to hit anyone. If she only wanted to fire toward Paul Simard but not hit him and by accident took his life, what then would be an appropriate charge?

Firing a gun towards someone without the intent of hitting them with poor visibility and limited experience with firearms is criminally reckless and could be considered murder based on the depraved indifference to human life.

But the judge's words at the end of the trial speak to the terror that she lived with daily, and that, combined with her young age, her professed lack of intent to hurt anyone, and likely her inexperience with firearms, all persuaded the jury to find her guilty of manslaughter, and the judge gave her the lenient sentence of five to ten years.

I'm sending my brother money directly to his bank account in India because he's apparently too busy practicing his karaoke to go pick up cash. Thankfully, I can still send money his way. Direct to my bank account.

The newspapers stopped reporting on Sandra right after the trial happened, and many questions remained. What happened to Sandra Knowlton?

Sandra Knowlton has lived an entire lifetime since July 7th, 1958. She is still alive, and she's 77 and has a family of her own. We spoke with Sandra on the phone. She said she doesn't remember a lot from this time in her life. Perhaps she buried these painful memories. She declined to be recorded.

She said that she lived at the reformatory for four years, 24/7. And while she was there, a woman took her under her wing and taught her how to be a nurse's aide. When she was released, she got a job working for the woman's aunt.

She also earned her high school diploma in prison with the help of a tutor. Despite the dates in my sources saying she was released in 1966, which would have made the sentence 8 years, she said she only spent 4 years there and was released at 18. Sandra also gave me a conflicting account of what happened that day. She said that she wasn't shooting at cars, despite the papers saying that's one of the reasons the police arrived in the first place.

She also said she didn't think she shot Paul Simard. She said that her brother thought the same thing, that the bullet came from another officer and was an accident. She remembered the Waterville Sentinel reporting that Paul was killed by a shotgun round, which didn't match her small caliber rifle. The rifle was her mother's, and she took it from the house that day.

The Waterville Sentinel currently doesn't have digital access to their microfilm archives, so I can't verify what they printed historically. But I can confirm all the sources I used, including the Bangor Daily News and the Boston Globe, said it was a bullet from a rifle that killed Paul Simard. Still, Sandra questions whose bullet really took his life.

We asked her about her relationship with her family in the wake of this tragedy. And that's when we learned some really sad news. She said that after she was released from the reformatory, she wrote a letter to her mother, Rosella. But she never got a reply. And that was the last contact she ever had with her mother or father. Her father passed away in 2000, and her mother in 2005 at 92.

It appears that her parents stayed together for the rest of their lives. She never saw or spoke with them again. The MVP of this story is a woman who was referred to in all the historic newspaper coverage as Mrs. Paul Simard.

Her name is Anita. She's 92 years old and she's sharp as a tack. We were lucky to connect with Anita, who speaks both English and French. And through a conversation that wasn't recorded, she shared her memories from 63 years ago.

Anita met Paul in 1946, when he had just gotten out of the service. She was 18, and he was about 22. Anita said that she was working at the local pharmacy, which was also where the teenagers in town would hang out.

He came in one day and asked her if she'd like to go to the football game with him the following evening. They were married a year later in 1947. He was a very nice young guy, and we were just teenagers in love. He was very much a gentleman, and he was very devoted, she said. They had two daughters, Claudette in 1948, and then Pauline five years later.

Anita said her parents owned an apartment building in Lewiston on Bates Street, and that her sister and her parents lived in apartments on the first floor, and she and Paul lived on the third floor with the girls. She worked as a secretary at a local church, and around 1952, Paul started working as a cop for the Lewiston Police Department. Anita still attends the same church today.

Paul and Anita were building a camp on the Tacoma Lakes with her parents, and in his free time, he'd be out there working on it. Whenever he wasn't working on it, they'd take the girls to the beach or do something fun together as a family. Paul had only been working for the Lewiston PD for about five or six years when he was killed. I asked her about the moment she found out, and this is what she said.

Somebody knocked at the door and they said, have you heard? I said, what are you talking about?

"You haven't heard about your husband?" I repeated, "What are you talking about?" It was a reporter. The police were already talking to my parents and were getting ready to come upstairs to tell me and when the reporter heard that the police were downstairs, he ran off and left. I ran downstairs after him and that's when I saw the chief of police and my parents and my sister. That's how I found out.

She also said,

After Paul's death, things were hard for the young family. Anita was a widow at just 29 with daughters who were only 5 and 10 years old. I asked her how this was and she said, Very, very hard. I cried a hell of a lot. It was hard on all of us.

"We learned to do what we could, and I know it would have been different if he were alive, but we did what we could. I don't know what I would have done without my parents, sister, and good friends. They really helped me get through it." She said she didn't work for almost an entire year, and then she was offered a job at Claudette and Pauline's school as a secretary. She didn't think she'd be able to do it, but her mother encouraged her, saying they wouldn't be offering you the job if they didn't believe you could do it.

Anita took the job, and she worked there for the next 27 years. Anita remarried 20 years ago. Her husband is 93 and has dementia, and she helps take care of him. She said he's a very nice guy. The Maine Law Enforcement Officers Association immediately began raising money for Paul's family after his death.

Paul was the first Lewiston police officer who had ever been killed while on duty. After five months of fundraising, the association presented Anita with $700 just before Christmas, which is about $6,600 in today's money. Much later, in 2007, the city of Lewiston renamed a park in his name to remember his service and sacrifice.

Railroad Park was renamed Simard Payne Law Enforcement Memorial Park to honor Paul Simard and another Lewiston officer who was killed in the line of duty named David Payne. They also have installed a monument to Paul there.

In 2015, the Lewiston Police Department installed a memorial cross at the approximate location where Paul's life was taken, in Sabatus, just east of Lewiston. Anita expressed gratitude for the Lewiston Police Department for their efforts to keep her husband's name alive. They include her in all activities and events that have to do with Paul's memory.

Sadly, there are only victims in this story. Sandra's family was torn apart and she spent many of the formative years of her childhood in prison. She has lifelong trauma from abuse to deal with. Paul's two young daughters lost their father and Anita, her husband. The legal system has no answers for this pain.

Abused children are in a strange and difficult position. Rage against their situation, but helpless to make a difference. Are children expected to be versed in the law to know exactly what legal steps could be taken to remedy their situation?

Hardly. The only hope that abused children often have is that a sympathetic adult notices their situation, listens to their pain, injects themselves into the family trouble, and takes action. Parents have a duty to their children to provide a safe and supportive home life. And frankly, not all adults should be parents.

It was strange to read the language in the newspaper articles sizing up Sandra's beauty. They called her an attractive, tall, slender brunette and would regularly describe what she was wearing and that she posed willingly for photographers.

Precocious, youthful beauty is both a blessing and a curse. Perhaps her father targeted her for her beauty. Perhaps he retaliated against her when she resisted his advances. Her father drove her to desperation to escape. He was a predator. There is no silver lining to this story though. It's hard to imagine today that an armed teen could take 50 shots at 10 officers and live to tell the tale.

The police showed extraordinary restraint and patience in their negotiation with her, and their effort to de-escalate the situation saved her life. Sandra lived through her deadly encounter with the police, and got the chance to live, and for that, I commend the Lewiston Police.

Thank you.

Special thanks to Sandra and to Anita for sharing their memories with me, and to Pauline for her assistance. All links for sources and images for this episode can be found on MurderSheTold.com in the show notes.

Special thanks to Byron Willis for his research and writing support. 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 are connected to this story, you are more than welcome to reach out to me at [email protected]. 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.

In season one, the host TZ Borden investigates the curious case of a missing 13-year-old boy and the father suspected of murder. Please go search Tapes from the Dark Side on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Tapes from the Dark Side. You should give it a good listen.

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