Scarborough’s connection to murder unfolds

Published in the Current; co-written with Kate Irish Collins and Brendan Moran

A Scarborough man who was linked to the murder of Amy St. Laurent by court documents left few footprints in town.

Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood refused to name Jeffrey “Russ” Gorman as a suspect in the case Wednesday and said, “We’re not looking for him.”

But a handwritten note written at the bottom of a request to revoke Gorman’s probation on unrelated charges of burglary and theft, stated that he was a “prime suspect” in the case – a connection first reported by the Portland Press Herald on Monday and verified by documents obtained by the Current.

Police have one strong suspect and believe others may have helped conceal the body, according to Chitwood. He said he expects to make an arrest in the case “soon,” but declined to give a timetable.

Portland Police have not contacted Scarborough Police for information on Gorman, 21, or told them he was a suspect in the case, according to Scarborough Police Chief Robert Moulton. Moulton said police have stopped Gorman in the past, but only for traffic violations.

While court documents identify Gorman, whose last known address was 68 Country Road in Scarborough, as “dangerous, may be armed,” Chief Chitwood said Gorman is not believed to be in Scarborough or posing a danger to Scarborough residents.

Searchers discovered St. Laurent’s body Saturday afternoon just a few hundred yards from 68 County Road, which is Route. 22. Gorman’s home is less than a half mile from the intersection of County Road and Saco Street and less than a mile from the Westbrook line.

Police weren’t the only ones looking for St. Laurent in Scarborough.

Dennis St. Laurent, Amy St. Laurent’s father, was searching the Haigis Parkway four to five weeks ago, according to Michael Anton, the owner of Admiral Fire and Safety, which is on Haigis Parkway and where Dennis St. Laurent came asking permission to search the area.

A source close to the family confirmed that St. Laurent’s father and other family members had been looking for her in “various places at various times.”

“It’s really too bad,” said Anton. “It turns out, in the end, he wasn’t
that far off.”

St. Laurent, of South Berwick, disappeared in the early morning hours of Oct. 21, after a night of dancing in the Old Port. Her picture has appeared on the news and was posted around Portland after her disappearance.

A possible suspect
Gorman “is prime suspect in missing St. Laurent girl case. Is believed to be in Florida, having taken off (Nov. 16). Request this be placed in system as soon as possible, as Florida (police) are attempting to locate,” read a note at the bottom of a request to revoke Gorman’s probation, signed by David Redmond, Gorman’s probation officer.

Redmond refused comment Tuesday and referred calls to the Associate Commissioner of Corrections, who did not return calls from the Current.

Gorman’s probation resulted from the theft of a car stereo in September of 2000. Authorities issued three warrants on separate occasions for probation violations, recalling two of them.

Gorman had failed to notify his probation officer of a change of address. He also had failed to tell him he had been contacted by police on five separate occasions. The document does not indicate why police contacted Gorman.

In addition to those violations, Gorman failed to pay $500 restitution on the earlier charges and to report to his probation officer on Nov. 19.

The first warrant was issued Nov. 20 and recalled the next day, at the request of Portland police. The warrant was again issued Nov. 29, and recalled Monday, this time at the request of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office. The warrant was issued Tuesday, once again, on the same charge.

Clifford Strike, the lawyer who represented Gorman in the burglary and theft case, last heard from Gorman in August or September. He said he remembered Gorman as a young man without much of a criminal record.

Westbrook Police Chief Steven Roberts refused to comment on Gorman.

“I don’t have any intent of jeopardizing an investigation that’s ongoing at this point,” said Roberts.

A woman who answered the door Tuesday at 68 County Road, Gorman’s address according to court documents, said “no comment.”

Few footprints
The house is a few hundred yards down the road from the wooded lot where St. Laurent’s body was discovered.

Wanda Donovan, whose home is right next to the property where St. Laurent’s body was found, said the dirt road there can be busy.

“I see a lot of activity down that road,” she said. It’s mostly hunters, but she said she had heard that there is an old gravel pit back in there.

Donovan was unsettled by the discovery.

“I’m trying not to think about it too much,” she said.

Scarborough’s Chief Moulton said the area is not a so-called “dumping ground” for evidence criminals want to conceal. He recalls that there was a chicken coop in the area, where a runaway would hide years ago, but hasn’t heard anything suspicious about the property since.

Joan Deveau owns the house at 68 County Road, according to town records. Although neighbors said Gorman had been in the neighborhood for a couple years, none of the neighbors interviewed by the Current knew Gorman or his relation to the Deveaus.

Gorman, who was born in Troy, Ala., didn’t attend high school in Scarborough or Westbrook, according to school records.

Richard Hillock, who lives across the street from 68 County Road, said he had seen Gorman around, but never spoke to him. He said he hadn’t seen him in the last couple of weeks.

Although Hillock said he had spoken to the Deveaus on a few occasions, he didn’t know how Gorman had come to stay at the house across the road.

Gorman worked part time at 1st Stop convenience store down the road for a couple of weeks “a year or two ago,” according to Don Cook, the owner.

Cook couldn’t remember any details about Gorman. “I wouldn’t recognize him if he walked in here today,” said Cook. “You could be him.”

Cook couldn’t remember whether Gorman had quit, but he couldn’t remember firing him. “I think he just didn’t show up,” he said. Cook hasn’t seen him since then.

A fortunate find
The discovery of St. Laurent’s body came as a result of the efforts of the Maine Warden Service, according to Chitwood.

Wardens provided about 85 volunteers and several cadaver search dogs. They also used computerized search-planning software to design a search of the area in question.

“The warden service was unbelievable,” Chitwood said.

On Saturday afternoon, a volunteer came out of a line of trees and had to step down a bit. He put his foot into an area of soft dirt and took a step back to look more closely. He realized the area there was disturbed, according to Chitwood.

The searcher called others to the area. A Portland police detective got on his knees in the dirt. Digging carefully, the detective went down about 18 or 20 inches, at which point he felt a sweatshirt.

It was then that they knew they had something big, according to Chitwood. They set up lights and brought in a medical examiner, an archaeologist and other police officials to photograph and document the scene and recover evidence.

Three to four hours later, after dark and just before snow began to blanket the area, they were finished and removed St. Laurent’s body.

“Had we not found her body that day, we would probably have never found it,” Chitwood said.

Bottomline delivers for UPS, gets resale help from Unisys

Published in Interface Tech News

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. ‹ Continuing its march to prominence in the electronic payment and invoicing sector, Bottomline Technologies will be providing the back end for Atlanta-based United Parcel Service's (UPS) electronic billing system. The company also expects a November reseller agreement with Unisys, of Blue Bell, Pa., to really get rolling in January.

"We have implemented an electronic invoice delivery system for (UPS)," said Bottomline CEO Dan McGurl.

Clients using UPS' Web site will be able to register to receive invoices on-line and make electronic payments, including viewing billing summaries and details of specific invoices.

McGurl described the deal as "a multi-million dollar one" that is part of a continuing relationship between the companies.

It is another step in Bottomline's efforts to support the increasing demand for electronic invoicing and payment. McGurl said the recent uncertainty about the safety and reliability of the U.S. postal system has pushed more companies into exploring alternatives to paper invoice and payment systems.

Another boost for Bottomline in the New Year will be the resale of Bottomline software by banking and financial services giant Unisys. The agreement was made in November, but the ramp-up period lasted through late December, paving the way for sales this month.

"This product that we've developed," McGurl said, "is something that (Unisys) didn't have." He expects the company to integrate Bottomline's electronic payment-to-invoice matching software into its own offerings, saving time for both payer and payee, and allowing better control of cash flow for both parties.

Avivah Litan, vice president and research director at the Gartner Group, said Bottomline is thriving even as the economy slides. "The truth is it's doing pretty well," Litan said.

She said electronic invoicing is growing, with about 20 percent of all business-to-business invoices already electronic.

The advantage for companies like UPS, who are Bottomline clients, Litan said, is the adaptability of the software packages.

"They allow the customers to live in the paper world and the electronic world at the same time," she said, making migration a comfortable process for the client.

And closing the deal with Unisys will provide a big boost for both companies. "Unisys has been trying to penetrate this market for a while," Litan said, adding that Bottomline's small sales force "needs all the partners and resellers they can get."

Capitol Computers expands training facility

Published in Interface Tech News

AUGUSTA, Maine ‹ Responding to rapid growth in demand for its services and projected expansion in the future, Capitol Computers is expanding its training space from 30 to 50 workstations and hiring two additional instructors.

The company will continue to provide sales, maintenance, and technical support to businesses and educational institutions, but sees the most growth potential in the area of computer-based training, according to vice president and general manager Paul DeSchamp.

DeSchamp said the company's revenue increased 18 percent from 2000 to 2001, and projected it will increase a further 40 percent by 2002. Those figures are driven by a 200 percent increase in offerings of career-based, self-paced training classes from 2000 to 2001. DeSchamp expects the class offerings will double again in the next year.

Capitol's biggest client is the state of Maine, to which it offers employee training and serves the state's career counseling program, retraining workers laid off from other industries. Among the services Capitol offers are certification programs for computer technicians and network engineers.

The new space, with 20 additional desktop machines, all with high-speed Internet connections and access to networked printers and file servers, is scheduled to open Dec. 1. DeSchamp added that there is more room for expansion, should it be needed.

He admits that mill closings and other layoffs around Maine have boosted his business, but stressed that, while he is happy to help people learn new skills, "we don't want to see more closings."

Katherine Jones of the Boston-based Aberdeen Group's education and e-learning research section said that, while computer-based training is nothing new, computers are being used more and more for educational purposes.

In the current economic slowdown, Jones said, people need to retrain or improve their skill sets to get and keep jobs ‹ that means more business for training centers. Added to that can be state or even company programs offering financial incentives to laid-off workers learning new skills.

According to Jones, one area of significant promise is certification for industrial workers. There are programs which train people to handle hazardous material, operate heavy equipment, or perform other tasks, offering certifications at the end of the process.

"You need about five of them to run a backhoe," Jones said. And the certifications expire, bringing people back every year or two to keep current. "Most of the stuff is learnable online and testable online," she said. "That's a perfect thing for training companies."

Remember Christmas in Thailand

Published in the Current

In Thailand, Christmas isn’t the national holiday it is here in the U.S. In the mostly Buddhist country, only a small percentage of people are Christians. But the Rev. Phil Gage said the country is increasingly embracing the commercial aspects of the holiday.

“You hear Christmas carols, you see Christmas lights,” on the streets of the major cities, he said. Part of that is because the king’s birthday is Dec. 5, and that is a cause for great national celebration.

Christmas, he said, “sort of fits right into that.”

Gage, now the pastor of Scarborough’s Free Baptist Church at Eight Corners, and his wife spent 25 years as missionaries in Thailand.

They were there for four years at a stretch before returning home to the U.S. for a year of traveling to speak at various churches.

They served as spiritual advisers to villagers, city-dwellers and other missionaries, and helped make Christmas a special time.

“Here we’d normally gather as families,” Gage said. In Thailand, “people come together and celebrate as a church family.”

Many Christians in Thailand are not estranged from their Buddhist families, Gage said, but they have big church community events to celebrate the holiday.

There are pageants, caroling and worship. And while Christians make up less than five percent of the population of Thailand, they travel to the houses of church members, singing and having fun at each home. One year, Gage said, they took two minivans and started caroling at 10 p.m. They finished the next morning at 5 a.m., when they ate a giant meal of boiled rice with all sorts of side dishes, a favorite Thai meal.

The Thais don’t tend to exchange gifts, but they will give each other cards, Gage said. And decorations aren’t the same as we would expect. “It is more apt to be the traditional sort of decoration,” Gage said.

In his time in Thailand, Gage traveled all over the country. Some tribal groups, he said, have converted to Christianity en masse, but in a way that has allowed them to retain tribal customs.

Before they became Christian, they would hold large parties for each new year, but would get drunk and fights would erupt.

After they became Christian, they stopped having the celebrations for a time, but realized they missed dressing up in traditional costumes and doing their dances and other cultural performances. So they decided to have their traditional celebrations but substituted tea for the alcohol, making the events more peaceable.

Thais, he said, tend to focus more on people and relationships than on material objects the way Americans do, especially around the holidays, but Gage has also seen parallels between Thai Christmas celebrations and the way his church members observe the occasion.

“(Thais) will act out the birth of Christ a lot,” he said. Recently some of the members of his church wanted to do a live nativity scene outside the church. “That really clicked with me,” Gage said.

But Thais also will bring their own culture to church. “They would perform their cultural dances,” he said, as well as songs.

Like in the U.S., Thai holiday church services often feature children performing.

Gage and his wife adopted two Thai children, who are now 30 and 25. Gage became a grandfather for the fourth time Nov. 30, when his daughter gave birth to his first granddaughter in Massachusetts.

His daughter, Missy, makes crèches for the holidays, including a special Maine themed one, with a fisherman and woodsman, among other figures. She also makes crèches or ornaments that she gives to each family in Gage’s church during Advent.

And now, back in the states, Gage has an easier time decorating his home and the church as well. Over there, he said, “you had to really be creative in terms of decorating.”

But even so, lights and candles were common, and through the 1980s more and more Christmas decorations came to Thailand, appearing in storefronts and advertisements, primarily in cities around the Buddhist nation.

Mainers remember Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941

Published in the Current

Infantryman Albert Riopel
Albert Riopel, 84, spends most of his days in the Maine Veterans Home on Rt. 1 in Scarborough. And though he is in the company of a great many veterans of World War II, he hasn’t found anyone else who was at Pearl Harbor the day the Japanese attacked.

He volunteered for the infantry in 1940 and after training he went to Pearl Harbor, to prepare for an attack on Japanese positions on Corregidor, an island stronghold in the Pacific.

Preparations were under way as negotiations deteriorated between the Japanese and U.S. governments, and war appeared more probable. But nobody expected the attack that peaceful Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941.

He was just getting up when the attack began.

“It was a fiasco. (The Japanese) knew what they were doing,” Riopel said. They bombed the harbor, the barracks and the airfield, destroying much of the military hardware in Hawaii.

Riopel’s unit was sent to Clark Field to defend it from attack.

Everyone expected the Japanese to land and try to take the island, and Riopel thinks they might have succeeded. But they didn’t try.

“They wanted to cripple the Navy,” he said. “It was over in no time at all.”

After the attack, the invasion force, including Riopel, headed for Corregidor, but found it surrounded by enemy submarines.

So they invaded New Guinea instead. Fighting in the jungle was merciless, he said, and difficult because of the thick underbrush.

The Japanese would hide all over the place and attack from any direction, Riopel said.

“Every time we’d go on patrol the first one (in line) would get killed—the first one and the last one,” Riopel said.

He doesn’t like to remember the scenes he saw, but did say he watched many of his friends die over the four years he spent fighting in the jungle.

“It was rough,” Riopel said. “I lost a lot of my friends there.”

He said fighting in the Pacific was brutal. “Many times I wished I was in Europe,” he said, where soldiers would capture a city and then celebrate.

Riopel especially envied the access to wine the European soldiers had.

But in the Pacific things were different.

“You capture one island and you go on to the next,” he said.

Even worse, General MacArthur wouldn’t let his unit go back to the U.S. “He wouldn’t let us leave because we had experience,” Riopel said.

He especially respected the Australian soldiers, whom he described as tough and skilled fighters, though they would stop for tea twice a day, he said, “no matter where they were.”

He wasn’t a career soldier, and after the war ended he came to Maine and worked in mills for more than 40 years. He lived in Westbrook and two weeks ago sold the house he owned in that town for over 55 years.

His daughter lives in Cape Elizabeth, and he gets a lot of visits from his family, but when he sits alone sometimes, he said, memories of what he saw in the war come flooding back.

Nurse Revella Guest
Revella Guest was born Nov. 8, 1912, in Brownville Junction to a Canadian mother and an English father. She went to high school in the town, and then went to Portland to study nursing at Maine General Hospital, graduating in 1935.

Her papers, now in the care of a relative in Scarborough, tell the story of her life, including her experience as a nurse at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Restless with private duty work around Portland, she became an Army nurse on Jan. 30, 1930. By March of 1941 she was heading to Tripler Army Hospital near Honolulu, the capital of the then-territory of Hawaii. She was lodged at Hickam Field, which would suffer serious damage in the Dec. 7 attack. On Dec. 5, though, the nurses were moved from their four-person apartments back to rooms at Tripler.

That night, she and some of her nursing friends went to dinner on the battleship USS West Virginia with some warrant officers serving
on that ship.

As they ate and watched a movie, it never crossed their minds that Japan could attack. “Everybody was just having a good time and doing their duty. We never thought anything about that,” Guest said.

On Dec. 7, just like the day before, she was scheduled for the morning shift.

The attack
At 7 a.m., Dec. 7, she reported for work at the hospital, and was doing routine work on the ward, when it happened.

“All of a sudden the radio started blaring for all military people to report back to their stations. We had porches and I was out looking on the back porch, and I saw some, heard some guns, and I saw black smoke coming up. I thought, ‘My goodness! I’ve never seen that before!’” she said.

“Then the radio started to blare that we were being attacked by the Japanese. Then I called down to my friends where they were, and I told them to get up and get dressed because everybody was going to be working, because we were being attacked by the Japanese,” Guest said.

The hospital had fewer staff on duty over the weekend, with some people having time off and even some patients out on a pass. But she knew it would be a busy day.

“We knew that when we were being attacked that we were going to have casualties because we were the largest general hospital on the island. In fact, we were the only general hospital,” she said.

She spent the first few minutes getting the walking wounded out of the hospital to make room for more seriously injured people. When she was done, only two patients remained, both of whom were in traction, but they were not about to let that stop them.

“I had to watch those guys like a hawk,” she said, “because they were going to cut themselves out of traction and go to war.”

Her ward became a post-operation ward, where patients went after surgery. “You had amputees, abdominal wounds, head injuries. You name it, and it was there,” Guest said.

She and one other nurse were racing around caring for 65 patients, changing intravenous fluids and providing other care to the men, as
they came out from under anaesthesia. They didn’t have time to do proper charts, but instead scribbled the time of the last morphine injection a patient received on a scrap of paper at the head of each bed.

As night fell, the hospital was blacked out to protect against air raids. She needed to give a shot to a patient on the porch, and removed the piece of blue carbon paper from the front of the flashlight, so she could see the vein. “I’d take that thing off and some guard would holler, ‘Put out that light or I’ll shoot!’ I’d yell, ‘Shut up until I give this shot!’” she laughed.

She worked through the whole night and into the next day without any sleep. She was first able to change into a clean uniform at 6 a.m. Dec. 8.

A few days after the attack, she and a friend went to the local telegraph office to deliver their first news to their families that they were OK. Her telegram just said, “Revella.”

The first shipload of patients headed back to the mainland on Christmas Day, after Guest and her colleagues spent a lot of time Christmas Eve bandaging patients to be ready for travel.

Still tied to Maine
Her family remembers her as having loved Maine and returning as often as possible.

Her papers and other effects were distributed among the family. Many of her World War II records and items are now with her sister-inlaw’s
cousin, Ken Dolloff of Scarborough.