Clue surfaces in boy's 1954 murder
Patty
Monday, April 7, 2003
Clue surfaces in boy's 1954 murder
By DAVID HENCH,
Portland Press Herald Writer (Maine)
GRAY — On a summer day in 1954, 12-year-old Danny Wood set out
with his fishing pole from his home to visit a friend a mile down
Route 100. Nine days later, his nude body was found in the Little
Androscoggin River, his skull smashed repeatedly, the shoestring that
had been used to bind him still dangling from his wrist.
It was an unspeakable crime that haunted the state for months.
Authorities traced dozens of leads, interviewed 900 people, offered a
$1,000 reward, and questioned child molesters from Michigan to
California. But over time, the leads dried up, the case grew cold, and
the murder of Danny Wood dissolved into local legend.
Until this winter. The Wood family's quest for justice was rekindled
when family members and others in town said they received letters
written partly in rhyme and ranting about Maine police.
The author, Ronald Ridge, said he was molested as a child by a man who
later lived and worked near the Wood homestead on Route 100. Ridge
says the man is a likely culprit in Danny Wood's murder, though it's
unclear whether the suspect is still alive. Ridge's letter, which he
says was sent to more than 200 Maine lawmakers and residents of Gray
and Portland, prompted the Maine State Police to assign a detective to
review the long-stalled case.
Whether the letter is credible or not, it has resurrected a painful
chapter in the Wood family history, bringing both hope and the
possibility of renewed disappointment.
"Even though I don't have any memory of him, sometimes I just choke -
break right down," said Danny's younger brother, Richard Wood, now 52,
who still lives in the family home. "He was just so young for
something so terrible to happen."
Even in the Wood household, where Danny was one of five children, his
death was seldom spoken of in the years afterward.
Richard Wood, who was 3 when his brother was killed, has just a single
memory of the boy the family called "Junior." He remembers his eldest
brother helping his father work the backyard sawmill, taking a break
to make faces at him through the window to make him laugh.
The killing had a profound effect on the Wood family, recalls Carol
Wood Durgin, who was 14 at the time of her brother's murder.
"My parents aged so much, you could almost see the life drain out of
their bodies," said Durgin, who now lives in Florida. "My father
couldn't talk about it much. He couldn't. He was the one that had to
identify the body. They had to get a dentist to identify the work that
had been done on his teeth."
Their mother died nine years after the killing, their father seven
years ago.
Durgin was visiting friends in Massachusetts when she learned that her
brother had disappeared. She still has a note that he sent to her just
before he disappeared, asking if she knew where a favorite key chain
was.
Durgin remembers the frantic searches for her brother in the days
after he disappeared, and the intensity of the investigation once his
body was found.
"It was a horrible, horrible time," she said. "We got so many phone
calls from people seeing him here or there. I remember either having
to wear gloves to get the mail or leaving it in the mailbox," she
said, explaining that police were hoping that correspondence from the
abductor might have fingerprints.
At one point during the investigation, authorities confiscated her
mother's dress for testing, and her parents were given lie detector
tests on a new polygraph machine that Auburn police had acquired just
for this investigation.
According to newspaper coverage at the time, Danny Wood was heard from
once, later in the day he disappeared. Wood called his mother from
Gray Center to say that he was going with a salesman to Lewiston,
where he would earn 50 cents an hour selling door-to-door. His mother
said that she warned him not to go.
For many, Wood's death stained the innocence of rural Maine with an
ugly reality. After the boy's murder, parents would take their
children to his grave site to warn against the dangers of catching
rides with strangers.
The boy's disappearance prompted a huge search almost immediately, and
authorities in 16 states were notified to be on the lookout.
In the days after his disappearance, several people reported seeing
the boy in Lewiston, in Portland, or riding in a car in Dry Mills. But
almost every report turned out to be mistaken.
Then, fishermen found his body in the Little Androscoggin River in
Auburn. A sweep of the area turned up some of his clothing, hidden
beneath a rock at the end of a secluded lane, leading police to
speculate that the killer knew the area well.
Police had no luck finding the murder weapon or the crime scene
itself. On a later search of the area, police found Wood's glasses and
belt hanging from branches.
That the glasses and belt were not found initially led investigators
to suspect that the killer was still in the area and had returned to
the scene to deposit them.
Police began interrogating every man in the area who had been
convicted of molesting children, and questioned suspects in other
child killings as far away as Florida and California, looking for any
connection to Maine.
Even as the Woods sought to lay the boy to rest, the criminal inquiry
intervened. The family had to cancel the funeral because investigators
wanted a Boston specialist to conduct another exam of the body. That
analysis determined that, contrary to the initial autopsy, there was
no evidence to show the boy had been molested.
Police questioned a music lesson salesman who had been in Maine that
summer and was later detained in Iowa as a suspect in the vicious
killing of a 7-year-old. A Pennsylvania magazine salesman who had been
in Maine at the time was cleared. Police tracked down a man who had
served time in prison for sexually assaulting boys, and had joined a
carnival that had been in Portland when the boy disappeared.
For the first time in the state's history, investigators held a public
roundtable broadcast on television as a way to stimulate leads in the
case.
Nothing panned out. Months became years.
A drifter charged in 1957 with killing a 12-year-old Boy Scout in
Michigan was found to have been in Maine at the time of Wood's murder,
though he refused to answer questions. The crimes were remarkably
similar, investigators said at the time. In his last public statements
about the case, 10 years after the killing, Auburn Police Chief Alton
Savage said he believed the Michigan killer was the most likely
suspect.
The case was briefly reactivated in 1992 after a Gray restaurateur,
Warren Cole, was charged with molesting a Portland boy and admitted to
having sex with young boys in Gray years before. Police said at the
time that there was no apparent connection between Cole, who was 74,
and the Wood case.
Now, the letter from Ridge claiming to have information about the
killer has resurrected interest in the case. Ridge, who lives in
Florida, says he sent the letter because as a victim of child
molestation, he could sympathize with Danny Wood.
"I know the experience I went through. I know exactly how scared Danny
K. Wood was when it happened," Ridge said. "I just feel this guy
should be brought in for questioning."
Maine State Police Lt. Brian McDonough says he has assigned a
detective to review the Auburn Police Department's files on the case
and take the physical evidence to the state crime laboratory to see if
new forensic techniques might yield clues that were undetectable in
the 1950s.
"We'll see if we can give the letter any credence or integrity," he
said.
Although state police now investigate almost all Maine homicides, in
the 1950s individual departments routinely did their own murder
investigations. "We didn't have any knowledge of this case until the
letters started coming in," McDonough said.
McDonough says so-called cold cases often must be set aside in favor
of new cases in which police have a better chance of finding the
perpetrator and getting a conviction. A man matching the name
mentioned in Ridge's letter died within the past 10 years.
Some investigators do relish the chance to solve an old case,
McDonough said.
"I think generally, people have a personal interest, particularly in
some of the older cases," he said. "I think there's a challenge
because they haven't been solved in a while and everybody would like
to have the chance."
Richard Wood's daughter Alisha, 23, has taken a keen interest in the
case, even though it was old before she was born. She contacted the
letter's author and has been urging action by authorities.
"You just think it would be every detective's dream to break the
50-year-old case," she said. "It feels like it should be on 'Unsolved
Mysteries' or a movie. It doesn't really seem that real, I guess."
But after more than a month with no progress reports from authorities,
her initial enthusiasm is somewhat diminished.
"If nothing happens out of these letters, it would have been better
not to receive them," she said.
Richard Wood clings to the belief that the case will eventually be
solved, that somebody is still alive who knows what happened.
"You know somebody has to know," his daughter added. "Even if the
person who did it is dead, I think finding the name would lay it to
rest."
tiny dancer
"Patty" <eartha...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:f0e77308.03040...@posting.google.com...
I'd think the person who did it has to be dead by now......interesting case
Patty.
td
crosem
"tiny dancer" <tinyda...@nospamhotmail.com> wrote in message
news:NLika.22$s25....@twister.southeast.rr.com...
hownow
> case
> | Patty.
> |
> | td
Except that deep into the story you read that there was no evidence
indicating molestation ... and if so that points to a thrill kill by
someone young, perhaps even a teenager.
Maybe some farm bumpkin driving daddy's half-ton truck.
Smalltown kids who would not enter a stranger's car would at that time
quite merrily climb in alongside a teenager wearing dungarees, sporting
a duck cut and with some straw and hogshit in the back.
He might have known his killer. And he thought they were off to do
something exciting that necessitated him calling home with a lie.
Back then, by the way, in more innocent days, an acceptable story for
not getting home for supper, or something, was to tell parents you were
doing some paid work for someone.
The killer likely told him what to say ... and that sort of eliminates
a magazine salesman.
- hm