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Hey.
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. This is part two of the Alice Hawke story. If you haven't listened to part one, I suggest going back and starting with that one first. Stephen Bouchard shouted, call the police.
His landlord, Bob, was nervous about touching anything in the apartment for fear of contaminating the crime scene. So he first knocked on some neighbors' doors, hoping that one of them would allow him to use their phone. When there was no answer, Bob returned to Alice's apartment. He went to the living room and used the apartment's phone to call the Westbrook police. While he was on the phone with police, it looked as though Stephen was bent over Alice.
Perhaps checking for a pulse? Stephen told him, "Don't touch anything." After he got off the phone, Stephen said, "Come here, Bob. There's something I want to show you." He asked Bob to follow him to the bedroom, which he did, and then Stephen pointed to a table and said, "That's why I couldn't get into the apartment." In the center of the otherwise bare table was a single key.
They returned to the living room, where Bob saw Steven going through Alice's purse. He also saw Steven touch what looked to be the murder weapon. Bob left the apartment, leaving Steven alone inside, and walked to the corner of Spring Street and Main to help direct the first responders to the building in the upstairs apartment.
While he was waiting, he noticed that Stephen too had left the apartment and went into the Big Apple gas station store that was on the same corner he was standing. Stephen opened the door of the Big Apple and started yelling right away, "Call the police! Call the police!" which was odd since he had just seen and heard Bob call the police. Westbrook Rescue Unit's first responders arrived and Bob directed them right away to the apartment.
The door was locked. Again. Evidently, Stephen had locked it by accident. Wasting no time, they broke down the door. Once inside, they realized they would be no help to Alice. She had long been dead.
Detective Peter Murray was on duty that Sunday morning working as a patrol officer, and he was at a home on Saco Street speaking with someone about a sheep that had been on the loose for several weeks when he was interrupted by the dispatcher and instructed to meet the rescue unit at Alice's apartment. He hurried over. After seeing the blood and the body, he established a crime scene perimeter.
Other law enforcement soon arrived and they instructed all non-law enforcement personnel to leave the apartment but stay on the grounds. The state medical examiner had been notified too, and he was on his way. When he arrived, there appeared to be a vote amongst the officers present as to the cause of death. Two for homicide, one for suicide, and one undecided.
Crime scene photographs were taken from every angle. State crime lab technicians arrived and took a large section of the living room rug as evidence. There was a bloody palm print on the front door leading into the apartment, and the whole door itself was taken as evidence. Once Alice's body had been repositioned under the direction of the medical examiner, Dr. Ronald Roy, it became clear what the cause of death was.
Alice had several large cuts to her neck. Roy completed his preliminary examination of Alice and officially pronounced her dead. Police believed that whoever did this would have gotten blood all over themselves and perhaps tried to wash up in the apartment. So the Maine State Police pulled the sink traps in the apartment looking for signs of blood. They also conducted blood tests on the fire escape and stairway leading downstairs.
Later that afternoon, Bob Blase, owner of the local funeral home, came to retrieve Alice's body. He came alone and was assisted by Westbrook officer Mike Sanfie. He was responsible for transporting her body to the medical examiner's office in Augusta. When they moved Alice out of the bathroom, he exclaimed, "'Jesus, he did a number on her!' It was around 3 p.m. when he left with her body."
There were no signs of struggle, except for one table slightly askew, no evidence of forced entry, no property missing, and no evidence of sexual assault. It seemed that the crime must be personal. It appeared that Alice had been attacked in the living room and she managed to make it to the bathroom on her own before she succumbed.
Later that afternoon, Stephen called Jim Hawks, Alice's brother who lived in Portland and was just getting ready to go out to his bowling league night, and broke the news about Alice.
He didn't give Jim any of the details, but let him know that he would be waiting at the Westbrook police station. Jim called his brother, Rick, who lived in Bangor, and asked him to inform the rest of the family in person. Rick drove to his mother's apartment and broke the news to Frances and to Alice's oldest sister, Rosemary.
Meanwhile, Jim headed over to the Westbrook police station, and by the time he arrived, Stephen's mother and stepfather were already there.
News was traveling fast between Alice's close friends. Debbie, Alice's close Velcro friend from college, remembers how she found out. So Bill Emery, he called me and I kind of collapsed or dropped the phone. So it was a corded phone at the time, landline corded phone. So I'm no longer on the line, but the line is off the hook. And
And so he called my parents' house who lived in Thompson. I was in an apartment. I had moved in. I had finally left home and I moved into an apartment. And so Bill called my parents. He was close with my parents and told my parents. My parents came to the apartment and found me on a coward in a corner kind of situation. And I just spent the evening with them.
And then, of course, Bill and I talked again. I was in shock, but it was through a college friend, he told me. After the investigators concluded their work on Sunday, they asked Bob to seal off the entrance into the apartment. The door had been removed, after all. So he got a sheet of plywood and nailed it to the jam.
Alice's body had made it to Augusta, and on Monday morning, the day after her body was discovered, medical examiner Dr. Ronald Roy conducted an autopsy. Her clothing was removed and turned over to the police as evidence. Her fingernails were clipped and bagged. A watch and a necklace she was wearing when she died were offered to the family.
They accepted the watch, but declined the necklace. It had been a gift to Alice from Stephen a month before, and they didn't want it. Dr. Roy finished his work by early afternoon and awaited results from some chemical analysis tests before releasing his report.
The Attorney General's office told the press that her death was a result of a cutting of some kind, but although officials were tight-lipped about specific details, the neighbors had heard rumors that there were knife wounds to her throat. That same Monday, the Hawks' family gathered in Bangor to be together to process this terrible loss, and Stephen, with his mother and stepfather, came to be with them.
Something that the Hawks family remembers from that day is that Stephen told them he had retained a lawyer. He said, I don't know why, but I have one. Alice's co-workers, who had plans with her that Saturday, heard the news when they got to work on Monday morning. One of them, Donna, remembered being annoyed with Alice, thinking, well, where did she go? I couldn't get a hold of her all weekend. Maybe she took an unexpected trip or something.
But when she got to the office and saw that people were devastated and crying, she said, it took a good 10 to 15 minutes to have it sink in. I had been calling her and while the phone was ringing, she was probably dead on the floor. That struck me pretty deeply. A couple days later, the results were in. Alice had several severe slash wounds to her throat, one which was called the big one.
The medical examiner estimated that she had bled to death on Saturday afternoon, about 18 to 22 hours before she was discovered Sunday morning. But more importantly, they pronounced her death a homicide.
Saturday, October 3rd, 1987 was a normal weekend day in Alice and Stephen's lives. It was a cool, breezy autumn day in the 50s and 60s, slightly overcast, and the leaves were turning, the perfect weather for an outdoor festival. Stephen had plans to go golfing with his buddy, Patrick Marastani, that afternoon at Twin Falls Golf Club, and Alice was planning to go to the Cumberland Fair with some of her girlfriends from work.
Sometime that Saturday, Stephen had dropped by Maine Savings Bank and withdrew $25 from their joint bank account. Since they didn't have a washer-dryer in their unit, Alice went to the local laundromat, a short drive down Main Street, to knock it out that morning. Though not confirmed, it's believed that it was Pratt Abbott.
A resident of the building saw Alice get out of her car with a large navy duffle bag full of clean laundry around 11 am. He helped her carry it up the front porch, where she took it the rest of the way up the stairs herself, and into the apartment. Some of her laundry was to be hung up, which she did right away. Some of the other laundry, which she had already folded, she put into neat piles to be put away later.
But there were some things that were still damp that needed to be hung to dry. And although she put some of those clothes on a drying rag, she left some of them in a bag. She wasn't quite finished dealing with her laundry when she picked up the telephone and called her mother, Frances, in Bangor, and spoke with her for about 45 minutes.
Frances said the call felt pretty ordinary and recalled that Alice was in a good mood. They made plans to do some holiday shopping the next weekend. Alice loved Christmas. Meanwhile, Stephen was out running errands and had inadvertently locked his keys in his car. Stephen called Alice from a payphone on Congress Street in Portland. Unfortunately, there was a spare key in the apartment. She ran it out to him and got the car unlocked.
From this point, the timeline gets fuzzy. It's not clear whether Stephen returned to the apartment after that point. He is quoted as saying that the last time he saw Alice alive was in his rearview mirror after she brought him his spare key. But it's otherwise reported that Patrick picked him up from his apartment for his golf game, suggesting he returned home. Police later verified that he had gone golfing. He even presented his scorecard.
Some residents also reported him cleaning his car on Saturday to landlord Bob Margoloff. It was around this time that Alice got a surprise call from an old college friend who had just moved into the neighborhood. I'll refer to her as Erica.
It had been about two and a half years since Alice had left USM, and Erica and Alice had been close friends at school. Erica had focused on her relationship with her boyfriend, and they had gotten engaged. She had just moved to Westbrook a few weeks prior and wanted to reconnect. She had gotten Alice's number from a mutual friend and dialed her apartment's landline, 854-5792.
Erica's wedding day was only 20 days away and things were in good order. She took a break from thinking about the wedding and looked forward to having a nice chat with her old buddy. But from the moment that Alice answered the phone, Erica could tell that something was off. Alice was distracted and clearly not in the mood to talk. She could hear something happening in the background.
She remembered that Alice muffled the phone and made some sort of comment to someone in the room in a tone that was out of character for her. This was not the light-hearted, upbeat, good listener that Erica had come to know. Detective Holt from the Maine State Police said this: "Someone was in the room with Alice then. Erica said she called sometime between 11 and noon, but she wasn't sure.
She described Alice as talking to that person in a very authoritarian manner, like she was talking to a dog, a very uncharacteristic and demanding tone. She thought maybe it was a child. Alice wasn't the angry type. It was rare for her to exhibit that behavior.
Erica figured it wasn't a good time to talk, so she gave Alice her phone number to ring her back. Alice's response was abrupt. Okay, yep, got it. Erica was worried that her friend wasn't paying attention, so she said, Alice, put the phone down and go get a pencil and paper. Alice got something to write with, and Erica repeated her phone number. Alice then said, got it, and after saying goodbye, hung up.
Erica thought to herself, wow, that was strange. The police believed that Alice was killed shortly after her call with Erica, with a sharp utensil retrieved from the kitchen of the apartment, either a pair of scissors or a kitchen knife.
Detective Holt, in an article for the Bangor Daily News, said, That task was interrupted. She was not the type of person who would have left wet clothes in a bag. She would have finished that task. Frank Manchester lived in an apartment near Alice. He worked weird hours as a baker and had gone to bed around 1 p.m. that Saturday. He was awakened by what he thought was a scream and loud words around 1.30 p.m.
Mary, a nine-year-old girl who was a neighbor and lived in a nearby house with her family, was playing with another girl on the porch of Alice's apartment house. The girls were making gimp bracelets, the colorful woven ones with flat plastic string that were popular in the 80s and 90s. While they worked and chatted, Mary caught something out of the corner of her eye.
A man had jumped over the porch railing to go inside the apartment door. She saw him go in, but didn't remember seeing him leave. She remembered he was a Caucasian male with brown hair, a mustache, and a brown suede jacket.
In an interview many years later, she said, We were sitting on the steps. He could have walked around us. The railing was a bit high and was just weird that he did that. I wouldn't have remembered him or thought anything of him otherwise. He didn't say anything to me or my friend. That day has stayed with me for all these years.
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When Stephen returned from his golf game with Patrick, he found the door to their unit was locked with the deadbolt, which was odd because they rarely used the deadbolt. They typically only used the bottom lock to secure the apartment. He had his key to the bottom lock with him, but not the deadbolt key. Alice's car, her Thunderbird, was in her parking spot, suggesting that perhaps Alice was home, but just not answering the door.
Instead of trying to gain access to the apartment, Stephen decided to go to Patrick's place in Portland, where he lived with his girlfriend. He phoned the apartment repeatedly that afternoon and evening without answer. He wasn't the only one calling either. Alice's work friends were trying to reach her to solidify their plans. They had already decided that they would all take one car, and that Alice would be driving, but the calls just rang with no answer.
After not being able to connect with Alice all evening, Stephen decided to spend the night with Patrick and try his luck in the morning. Erica hadn't heard about Alice's death. Monday and Tuesday came and went. She was getting ready for her wedding and training for her new job. She hadn't been watching the news.
On Wednesday, she bumped into a college friend who happened to work in her department who knew Alice too. He broke the news to her about Alice's death, and she was stunned. She felt immediately guilty about losing touch with her, wondering if she could have made a difference. Erica went home immediately.
As she learned more about the investigation, she realized that she had spoken to Alice on the day of her death. Erica contacted the police. She got the impression that they weren't taking her seriously. But when they discovered the scrap of paper at the apartment with her phone number on it, they called her back to get a complete account. She gave them everything she could remember.
She even underwent hypnosis to try and pull out any small detail, but her sense was that it wasn't enough. On Wednesday evening, three days after her body was found, the family held a wake at a local Bangor funeral home called Brookings Smith. Before the public arrived, the family wanted to see Alice's body, injuries and all, before closing her casket forever.
Rosemary and Alice's Aunt Jerry picked out her final outfit, a blue sweater and a skirt. Stephen and his stepfather went to the viewing as well. Stephen said he wasn't happy about the amount of makeup that had been used on her. He also inquired about the necklace he had given her, the one she was wearing when she was murdered.
He also asked the funeral director if he could place a photograph of him and Alice in her casket. He checked with Alice's mother, Frances, and she said no.
On Thursday morning, there was a mass held at the family's church in Bangor, St. Mary's Catholic Church. They then proceeded to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where a brief graveside service was held, and her body was buried. Everybody was very angry, too, at the same time. Like, Steve was there, and everybody wanted to have eyes on him and his reaction. And
I remember it feeling like you wanted to be grieving and sad, but there was so much anger and confusion about why.
And her childhood friend, Andre, when we got there, we were able to be close to her too. She clarified a lot of the stories that we had because we really didn't have any. We just had rumor of what had happened. And then when we got there at the funeral, Andre was clarifying a lot of the things that we didn't know. And so again, it
It was just more anger than sadness, confusion, and this wasn't supposed to happen.
Rosemary's daughter, Jamie, Alice's niece, who was just 16 years old, had come up from North Carolina for the funeral and stayed through the weekend. Though Alice was part of the next generation of the Hawks family, Jamie was actually quite close in age to Alice, and she was more of a big sister to Jamie than an aunt. She thought the world of Alice and wrote this note:
I really can't think of any person that she spent any amount of time with, whether it be as a co-worker, a dorm mate, classmate, or friend, who didn't feel touched in a special way by having her in their life. And it wasn't like she went out of her way to do it. It wasn't like she tried. It was effortless the way she made people feel special by being with her. She had this way with people where she truly cared and understood them.
She loved life, and I think that everybody could tell. It just sickened me that somebody could be around that type of person and want to take her away, because who would ever want to hurt someone as precious as her?
Jamie returned to Maine full-time in the summer of 1988, and a year later, in 1989, she was exploring near Lake Pushaw with some of her friends. They ended up at Camp Saison, the camp where Alice worked as a counselor for a summer job. It had been abandoned, but some things had been left behind.
Jamie found a cardboard box filled with old writing and paperwork and buried deep within the pile some photos. She pulled out a photo of happy young campers and was stunned to see Alice's smiling face. How strange and beautiful. Without saying a word, she slipped the photo into her pocket and later gave it to Alice's mother.
Standing graveside at Mount Pleasant Cemetery felt eerily familiar to the Hawks family. My dad passed away very suddenly, unexpectedly, in November of 1986. And then we lost Alice in October of 1987. And my mom just didn't miss a beat. She just kept on going. And
I think my brothers and myself were hanging in there because of the example our mom set. After the funeral, Stephen visited Alice's mother. He seemed to have something on his mind. He looked her in the eye and said, you can have the insurance money. Evidently, Alice had a life insurance policy, and her mother, Frances, was the beneficiary.
The family had covered all the funeral expenses, and Stephen and Alice weren't married, so there wasn't any confusion about who should receive the payout of the policy. He also mentioned something about credit cards, that he was going to cut them up. They had bought the blue Mustang together, so perhaps there was some debt that they had incurred together.
Perhaps Stephen was concerned about his financial situation. He could no longer share an inexpensive one-bedroom apartment and split utilities.
Police so far had named no suspects or persons of interest, and the only indication of their investigation that could be gleaned was who they had talked to. Among those questioned were Stephen, Bob, Patrick Marastani, an upstairs neighbor, a cable service technician, and a transient seen in the area the day of the murder. Bob Marguloff had a strong alibi and was very cooperative with police.
They dismissed him as a potential suspect. On Tuesday, October 6th, two days after Alice's body was found, Deputy Attorney General Fernand Larochelle, head of the criminal division, said Stephen Bouchard is not a suspect.
Steve had offered to the police a few different theories to explain her death. The first was suicide. Absolutely not one cell in anybody's body thought it was suicide.
None of us. We were all adamant that that was just not, not, not, not the case. We're positive of that, all of us. I think because we all really wanted to watch him, we all were suspicious, but we all just were positive it was not a suicide, which was one of the rumors that followed us as we went to Van Goren.
Before Alice's body had even been removed by the funeral director, Steve posited to the detectives that Alice had died by suicide, something at that point they couldn't rule out.
But aside from all the family and friends who found it impossible to believe that Alice had taken her own life, a spokesman for the Attorney General said it would have taken real guts for someone to have stabbed their own throat multiple times in the manner of Alice's wounds.
The second theory was that perhaps her male colleague at the bank, that had a romantic interest in her, was involved. This was quickly ruled out because he was in Minnesota at the time. The third theory was that perhaps someone was after Stephen, but got Alice instead. Stephen didn't offer any information to the press on any enemies that he might have had that could have wanted him dead.
The Hawks family felt that the police had been misled by Stephen and made some fatal missteps in the earliest stages of the investigation. At some point, this couple that he spent the night with were at the scene. And the police found Alice's body around 11. At one o'clock, Stephen and his couple that he spent the night with were dismissed. And Mr. Marguloff was dismissed. And I'm like beside myself because...
why weren't they not taken to the police station? Why did that happen? I was told they didn't have probable cause. And then I was told Alice was living with Steve. So I guess he was considered the next of kin at that point, I guess. And our family wasn't notified until around six o'clock. And that's when Stephen called my brother, Jim, and said there had been an accident.
Stephen cut off contact with the family merely weeks after Alice's death, even though lingering questions remained. Despite repeated attempts to try and reason with Steve, he maintained his silence, asking the Hawks family to refrain from contacting him again and referring the family to his lawyer instead.
The pain of losing Alice and not having any answers to point to was compounded by the frustration of Steve's ongoing silence. Frances Hawk's last attempt at getting Stephen to talk to her was in September of 1992. She felt he was the only person who might be able to connect the dots and help her understand what happened to Alice. With the blessing of the state detectives, Frances sent Stephen a letter by certified mail.
It was received and signed for on September 28th, 1992. Steve, I know you will be surprised to receive this letter, but hope that you will read it with an open mind. I would like to see and talk with you, just you and I as two adults. There are things I would like to go over with you,
You are the only person who can tell me the things I want to know. I believe out of respect for Alice and respect for me as Alice's mother, you could do no less. Alice was in my life for 23 years. She was in your life for a time. Your life is going on. Mine will never be the same because of the tragic way Alice died."
"I haven't asked much of you, Steve, in the last five years. When one of us called, you always said, 'Talk to my lawyer.' I hope that won't be the answer this time. I will meet with you at your home or mine, whichever will make you more comfortable. I will expect to hear from you in a few days with your answer. I think you owe me this much. Sincerely, Francis Hawkes." Francis never received a reply.
My mom was remarkable. She lost her husband and her baby in the course of 11 months.
And she had to deal with the police. And she was the one that was dealing with them. They would call her. They would set up the meetings. Obviously, when we would get together with them. But, I mean, she was doing all the estate stuff. Alice didn't have a will. She was dealing with all of that. I mean, we would help her when we could. But, I mean, it was on her, you know? I mean, I even remember her going Christmas shopping that year.
And I always, I just was astounded that she could even do it. But she had a tremendous faith, and she had a tremendous faith that it was going to be solved. She never wavered. She never wavered.
She went every year and did a memoriam in the newspaper. Alice's birthday every year. Alice's anniversary of her death every year. She did it. She didn't drive. My mother never had a license, but my aunt would take her and she would do that until she couldn't do it any longer. And she kept us straight.
She wanted everything above board and legal. She didn't want any shenanigans from us, maybe things we might have wanted to have done to aggravate people, but remarkable.
After four years of praying and hoping for that long-anticipated phone call from police that they'd made an arrest, the family began to explore other options. Francis hired private investigator Ralph Pinkham. You might remember his name from Joyce McLean's case. He was a lieutenant with the state police and the commander of the criminal division for Northern Maine.
He was obviously a respected member of the Maine State Police, now retired, and his involvement seemed like it could make a real difference in the investigation. His first meeting with the Hawks family was promising. He told them, I believe this case can be solved. And with that, he was hired. After a few months of work, the PI had changed his mind, and he stopped working on the case. We were doomed from the very beginning.
We had a sense of that doom. And my brother, Mike, Rick, and I met with people in 1988. We just talked to people. We talked to Alice's friends. We talked to Mr. Margalaw. We talked to the couple he spent the night with. We talked to the man that he named as a possible suspect. We talked to him. We had a pretty good sense of what Alice's life was like at that point.
My mom was waiting for the phone to ring to say there had been an arrest. My mom was waiting for the phone to ring in 1987-88. And here we are in 2021. In 2009, he was interviewed by Mark Sweat. And Ralph told Mark that he didn't have access to the state police case files and that he wouldn't comment on his work on the case.
The Hawks family later increased the reward to $10,000 and finally rescinded the offer after 10 years in 2002. Shopify's already taken the cash register online, helping millions sell billions around the world.
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Mom,
Mom approved the website. She didn't want people to forget Alice, so she was all on board with the website. That was in 2008. My mother passed in 2009.
They gave him their blessing, and in March of 2009, the
the website alicehawks.com was launched. Prior to the publication of the website, they coincidentally were contacted by the Maine State Police. They met with Detective William Ross in September of 2008, and he said that the case evidence was well-preserved and looked promising.
A formal case presentation is required before a cold case can take on new life. In January 2009, officials of the Maine State Police, the Maine Medical Examiner's Office, as well as the Attorney General's Office heard the presentation. They decided to allocate more resources to its active investigation.
Two months later, Attorney General Bill Stokes said that Alice's case was very solvable. Bill Ross came and talked to my brothers and I. My mother was having an operation on her ear and couldn't be there. So we were told there was a ton of evidence. You know, I'm getting all, like, naive. I can be sometimes thinking, oh, wow, wow, this is good. Something's going to happen here. And my brothers are like, oh, here we go again.
They were so right. They were so right. But after that, not much has been said by the Maine State Police. Not much contact has been made to the family. So where does that leave us? One of the biggest questions about this case is about the locked deadbolt.
The only person who verified that the deadbolt was locked was Steve Bouchard. He said it was locked when he returned from his golf game and that it was still locked on Sunday morning. He said that he finally unlocked it on Sunday morning once his landlord had provided him with a spare key. Supposing that the Doors deadbolt was in fact locked during that period of time, how could it have been locked?
Only four known copies of the deadbolt key existed. Two were in Bob's custody, one was Alice's, and one was Steve's. If Alice's killer took her key when he left in order to lock the deadbolt, then there should be one key missing. Alice's key. It has not been confirmed by the state police whether or not Alice's deadbolt key was missing.
If Alice's keys were in fact in the apartment along with Stephen's spare key, then how could the door have been locked from the outside? It suggests that either Bouchard or Margulof locked that door, or there was a mystery fifth key controlled by someone else who locked it. The Hawks family believes that Stephen Bouchard is responsible for Alice's death, and they have some reasons.
that on finding the deadbolt to his own apartment locked, he chose to stay somewhere else rather than gain access. Did he have a habit of staying away from home? That after seeing her car in the driveway, finding the deadbolt locked, and getting no response from knocking on the door and calling the house phone, that he wasn't concerned about Alice's well-being. He didn't call her friends to check on her. Did he think she was staying with someone else overnight?
If Alice had stayed with Stephen every night they'd been living together for the previous year and a half, wouldn't her absence raise serious alarms? That after discovering the death of the love of his life, he made a point to show Bob Marguloff a lone key sitting on an otherwise empty table to prove that he couldn't have gotten access to the apartment because his deadbolt key was locked inside.
that Bob saw Stephen going through Alice's purse after he exclaimed, don't touch anything. Would this have been the place where Alice kept her keys? That he had a lawyer the very night her body was found. That he went no contact with the Hawks family and was never forthcoming with them about his activities on Saturday, nor have his friends.
And strangest of all, there was no evidence of sexual assault or theft, suggesting that the crime was personal. And who but Stephen in her personal life had access to the apartment? There's no one-on-one, what do you do when a loved one is murdered, honestly. And it took family members different time frames to suddenly realize this is the person that killed Alice.
Beyond a reasonable doubt, we felt it as a family, but it didn't come all at once. And we were never, and this is my mom's word, we gave him every benefit of the doubt, the boyfriend, every benefit of the doubt. When you feel that way so strongly as a family, you know, you're like, why aren't they solving this?
And I don't want to know everything. I just want it solved. But, you know, even based on what we know, just from our conversations with people and, you know, why isn't this solved? Why is this person living his life?
And I went to one murder trial, not the whole trial, but Joyce McClain. And I do understand what the prosecution is up against and what the defense is capable of doing. I understand that. But still and beyond, it's just I just can't believe it hasn't been solved. Michael Westcott was the prosecutor in the attorney general's office. He was what they call what? Assistant Attorney General.
Michael Westcott visited my mom. He was the first one that came from the AG's office. Others came later, but he was the first one. And he said, this was a brutal, vicious crime, and he has a lie, an alibi for everything. Well, okay. If he has a lie, can't you, you know what I mean? Can't you get the truth? If you know there's a lie, can't you get the truth?
That was great. Before we even went on our journey to Portland and Westbrook and Falmouth and every other place we went down there to meet with people. A lie and an alibi for everything. So you get to hear a lot. My opinion is they choose what they're going to tell you and what they're not going to tell you.
And they choose, to me sometimes it's an emotional roller coaster to hear the things that you hear and know that they're not going to go and make an arrest after they tell you that. So the loss of our beautiful baby sister compounded with a person getting away with murder, he has the fundamental right to remain silent. And once he hired a lawyer,
he had the access to say, "Talk to my lawyer." Almost immediately, Stephen moved out of the apartment and stayed with Pat and his girlfriend for about a month or two. He became paranoid living at their place, and eventually they asked him to leave. He then moved back to Hudson, near Bangor, with his mother and stepfather. Stephen's mother and stepfather spoke about him since he refused to speak for himself.
She said that the murder happened just months before Stephen planned to ask Alice to marry him. She said, I'm sure there are those who don't know Steve and would think he did it. As his mother, that's hard to swallow. Steve would never hurt a fly. This has ruined his life. I don't know if he'll ever be the same.
Steve feels like he's become the victim too. I just pray all the time that they find out who did it, for the sake of their family as well as ours. In 2019, some peculiar graffiti popped up 300 miles away in Manhattan, New York City, on the outside of a building at East 36th and 3rd Avenue in Murray Hill.
The graffiti said, 1987, Who Killed Alice Hawks? Somebody who saw it googled Alice's name and the date, found the website, and reached out to Mark Sweat. The graffiti has since been removed, and nobody knows who wrote it or why it was written.
October 3rd marked the 34th anniversary of Alice's death, and though 34 years feels like a lifetime, this would not be the first main murder case that was solved decades after the fact. Just last year, Dorothea Burke's suspected killer was charged and arrested, and Joyce McLean's killer was convicted in 2018, 38 years after her murder.
The Hawks family is not going away, and the attention that this case is getting is picking up steam. Rosemary said, There is a killer out there, and he brutally murdered Alice. As long as there's a Hawks on the face of the earth, we're going to search for her killer. Sergeant Peter Murray, one of the first responders from the local Westbrook police, wrote an article about his experience as a police officer and touched upon the Alice Hawks case.
Nearly 23 years have passed. I am a grandfather. There are years of my children's lives that I cannot remember, but I shall never forget Alice. We found Alice on a quiet Sunday morning. She was smeared with dry blood, her body rigid and cold.
It was not the gruesome murder scene that unraveled me. No, I had seen my share of death. It was the diary, the pictures of her smiling 23-year-old freckled face, the fragments of her life that I had no business poring over except in the hope of catching her killer, that made Alice real to me. Her killer still walks among us, and I still fall asleep with Alice on my mind.
The morning of October 4th, 1987 was crystal clear with a chill in the air that conjures up bushels of freshly picked apples and a pumpkin pie cooling in the pantry. I had nothing more pressing on my morning patrol than checking on Polly Carmichael's runaway sheep.
Perhaps that day would have blended homogeneously into other unremarkable ones spent in my 23 years of patrolling in a police car had it not been for the call for an ambulance at 8 Spring Street. That beautiful Sunday morning of tranquility morphed quickly into a morning of horror.
Alice Hawkes lie dead on her bathroom floor. It is my fervent hope that the details of her death will be revealed at a trial. A hope that diminishes as the years pass. I will not divulge them here except to say that she did not die peacefully. She struggled for her life. I have relived that murder scene over and over again.
23 years later, I still see it vividly, with all its detail, all its questions. What I cannot square in my mind is what I saw compared to a photograph of Alice as part of a wedding party. She was beautiful, radiant, smiling, full of life.
While I could never bring Alice back or fill the emptiness of her mother's heart, I had hoped that one day I might call Frances with the news that her daughter's killer was in custody. I was to be denied that as well. Mrs. Hawkes passed away without that solace. Over the years, I have made a less than scholarly study of the Bible, trying to decide if evidence of an eternity in our fleshy bodies is the plan of the Creator.
Whether it be by flesh or spirit, I pray that the souls of mother and daughter are reunited. And perhaps, just perhaps, I might one day know it of a certainty. Of this, I am confident. Justice will be meted out in this world or the next.
If you or anyone you know has any information about the murder of Alice Hawks, I urge you to call the Maine State Major Crimes Unit at 207-624-7076 or leave a tip at the link in the show notes. ♪
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. My sources for this episode include the Bangor Daily News, the Portland Press-Herald, American Journal, and alicehawks.com and its research by Mark Sweat. Special thanks to Rosemary Hawks-Driggers and Debbie Dunn for sharing their memories with me and to Mark Sweat for his support and assistance.
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 support. If you loved this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend or on social media and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.
It's one of the best ways to support an indie podcast. 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 and keeping the names of your family and friends alive. I'm Kristen Sevey, and this is Murder, She Told. Thank you for listening.