Mystery poem sent to newspaper helps police solve cold case murder

Police cracked a cold case murder that had been left unsolved for 20 years thanks to a poem sent to a local newspaper.

For two decades, the question of who killed Cyrus Everett and Donna Mauch had gone unanswered. That was until a poem landed on the desk of Tom Harvey, editor of the weekly Fort Fairfield Review.

The paper boasted a circulation of around 2,000. The handwritten poem suggested the writer – who signed it as “The Mystery Guest” – knew something about the murders.

The poem read:

“At The end of the day, As the red ball sinks,

I know a man who sits and thinks,

Of The happening a score years ago

The clue to which is buried, where only he knows.

With this note, we tempt you to peek,

Searching in areas you first didn’t seek,

Perchance a answer you may uncover

To Two unsound corpses you did discover.”

Cryus, who was 14 at the time of the murders in the 1960s, was a newspaper delivery boy. While 24-year-old Donna was a cocktail waitress, and a twice-divorced single mother.

The victims were linked only by their hometown – Fort Fairfield in Maine – and the grusome way in which they met their demise. Their violent deaths were only two months apart. 

Cyrus’ mother told the cops the 5ft-tall and 100lb eighth-grader went out to pick up his papers at around 5.30pm on the Saturday after Christmas of 1964 but he never came home. 

Shortly after he went missing, a psychic delivered a lecture in which she said the boy was in a swamp. She said he was dead and his body was under a log.

Police however believed he was still alive. One theory was that he could have slipped into Canada in search for his father because his parents had separated. 

But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police turned up no trace of him, reports the Daily News. It was two months after Cyrus disappeared that the small town was rocked by Donna’s murder.

It happened in the apartment she shared with her brother and three-year-old daughter. Police say someone fractured her skull with a blunt instrument. 

“Certainly, it would look like murder,” the district attorney told reporters.

Officers initially believed one of Donna’s ex-husbands could have been her killer. While several men from the US Air Force base also came under scrutiny.

But they all had alibis. Authorities arrested and tried her boyfriend, believing her death was a crime of passion. 

There was no concrete evidence pinning the death on the partner. He was subsequently cleared of the crime. 

Cyrus meanwhile remained missing until May, when three children playing in a swamp found his body. The New York Daily News says he was lay on his back, fully clothed, with his arms stretched out.

His money pouch, which probably held around $12 was missing. In a scene eerily similar to what the psychic had described some months earlier, he was pinned down by a 600lb tree.

An autopsy said his body was too badly decomposed to reveal much. And his death was later ruled an accident.

The theory that was held suggested he had been playing on the tree trunk when it rolled over, killing him. However, few people in Fort Fairfield actually believed this.

So they chipped in together and hired private investigator Otis LaBree to examine the case. A retired state police detective, Otis pushed to have the boy’s remains exhumed.

A second autopsy revealed he too had died from a skull fracture. Otis found clues pointing to a known local troublemaker, Philip Adams, 22.

Phillip’s father owned the building where Donna lived, and Philip had an apartment there. That building was also the last stop on Cyrus’ paper route.

Otis LaBree had infact arrested Adams years earlier. He knew he had a history of violence and sexually assaulting an eight-year-old boy.

The ex-detective said the two cases were most likely linked, but authorities at the time paid no attention to him. And so, the investigation ground to a halt. 

Kingdon Harvey, editor of the Fort Fairfield Review, refused to let the killings and the fluffed investigation fade away. For years he would publish the victims’ names, birth and death dates on the front page with a border of question marks to remind townsfolk their killer was at large.

When Kingdon retired in 1979, management of the paper went to his son Tom. And five years passed before Tom received the poem from “The Mystery Guest”.

It was sent from a Connecticut prison. Tom immediately brought it to the attention of the district attorney.

It was then discovered Phillip Adams was an inmate at the prison, seving a prison sentence between 10 and 20 years for attacking a 10-year-old boy.

The Daily News says he had recently started talking about the killings.

In 1965, Adams had married and moved to Connecticut. One of his daughters from that marriage, which ended in divorce, received a handmade card from him on her 16th birthday. It sparked a correspondence, he said in an interview with the Hartford Courant.

He opened up to her about his troubled past, which included starting a fire when he was six that killed his mother. He also mentioned the Fort Fairfield murders. 

He said he had a “beast inside me,” which could be controlled only through his art. In prison, he spent his time making greetings cards and practising calligraphy.

His daughter, who had not seen him since she was four, took the information to police. “She betrayed me. She went to the authorities,” he grumbled, dubbing her “my little Delilah.”

Around that time he also gave interviews to the Fort Fairfield Review and other papers, where he talked about the killings to relatives. At Adams’ trial in January 1985, his brother Wayne told the court that Philip had called him and said, “Donna Mauch, I did it.”

The jury deliberated for three hours and found Adams guilty of Mauch’s murder. He received a life sentence but it was brief, cut short by a fatal heart attack nine months after the trial.

Everett’s murder was never officially solved.