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When a fire destroyed the home of respected local innkeepers, leaving it in ruins and revealing the horrifying aftermath of a double murder, the close-knit community of Jackson, New Hampshire faced an unthinkable tragedy. As detectives looked into the lives of the victims, they discovered years of conflict caused by the older man that their daughter had fallen in love with.
This story begins in New England, but it ends almost 1,500 miles away in Florida with two more deaths. But did it really end? Doubts lingered among some of the original investigators, casting skepticism over the closure of the case and the true fate of the suspect. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Malcolm Elizabeth and Paige Jennings, part one on Dark Down East.
It was 5.17 a.m. on January 16th, 1985, when a truck driver hauling a load of steel down Route 16 through Jackson, New Hampshire, was startled by the sight of bright, leaping flames. They were coming from the Keeper's house behind the popular Dana Place Inn. The trucker continued a bit further down the road until he reached a store with a phone to call the fire department.
Crews from Jackson, Glenn, and Bartlett responded to the scene, blasting water onto the burning structure in treacherous zero-degree temperatures with wind gusts near 40 miles per hour. The blaze was almost out when firefighters made a discovery in one of the home's bedrooms. A body.
Just after 8 a.m., Sergeant John Healy of New Hampshire State Police arrived at the Dana Place Inn. By 8.50, the fire was fully extinguished and the scene was turned over to law enforcement. As investigators from local and state police, the fire marshal's office, and the Carroll County Sheriff's Department walked through what remained of the house, they entered a second bedroom. There on the floor, they discovered another body, that of a woman.
Around 10.20 a.m., the mattress upon which the first body was found began to smolder. Because of the high winds still whipping through Jackson that morning, the entire structure was at risk of reigniting, so arrangements were made to remove the bodies for transport to a funeral home. But as investigators began to examine and photograph the scene around the victims, they began to realize the fire may not have been the cause of their deaths.
The man and woman's hands were bound and mouths taped. They had visible wounds near their throats. Jackson, New Hampshire was a tiny village, less than 700 residents in the 80s. The firefighters tasked with putting out the blaze and law enforcement first at the scene were locals. They knew exactly who the man and woman were, and dental records confirmed their tentative identifications.
The victims were the inn's owners, 47-year-old Elizabeth Jennings and her husband, 52-year-old Malcolm Jennings. Elizabeth, who went by Betty, and Malcolm, sometimes called Mal, were seasoned innkeepers. Malcolm previously managed the Bethel Inn in Maine and prior to that, the New England Inn in New Hampshire.
They bought the Dana Place Inn during the winter season of 1975, and within a year, their stewardship was earning the praise of travelers from all over. The Dana Place Inn was a welcome respite in the valley for outdoor adventurers after long days on the slopes or navigating the endless miles of trails along the Ellis River and beyond.
The inn offered a restaurant and bar for refueling mid-track or unwinding apres-ski with comfortable accommodations for overnight guests who returned season after season. Outside their careers in the hospitality industry, the Jennings' also raised two children, a son, Christopher, and a daughter, Paige.
Both were adults and out of the house by 1985, so the small single-family cottage located just behind the Dana Place Inn was plenty of space for just Betty, Malcolm, and their cat.
Malcolm was known as the quieter of the two, and Betty much more social, but both were active in the Chamber of Commerce and other local organizations that supported the tourism industry of the area. After almost a decade with the Dana Place Inn, Malcolm and Betty had earned a reputation as hospitable hosts, well-liked bosses, and respected business owners.
As the investigation into their murders began in full force and news got around Jackson, the entire community was left slack-jawed. Everyone who knew them found the couple to be genuine, hardworking, and respectable people. Not the type you'd ever expect to be the target of a killer. But following the autopsies, there was no denying that's exactly what happened.
The autopsies revealed that both Malcolm and Betty had a long slash-like wound on the right side of their throats, and they'd been stabbed multiple times in the chest and abdomen. Both Malcolm and Betty's hands were bound by a length of heavy-duty rope, and their mouths were covered with tape. Though their bodies were badly burned in the fire, the medical examiner determined that Malcolm and Betty Jennings died from excessive blood loss.
As for the house where Malcolm and Betty's bodies were found, it was a total loss by the time the fire was put out. The fire marshal's report indicates that the dining room, bathroom, and kitchen was mostly consumed by the fire except for the flooring. In the living room, there was a section of floor right in front of the fireplace that had burned through, and investigators believed this was the point of origin.
The fire crews found an electric clock that looked like it had fallen from above the fireplace. The hands stopped at 2.45. Fire investigators collected samples of the rug, rug padding, and flooring underneath the carpeting immediately beneath the area where Betty's body was found, and later removed wood from the frame and the flooring in the living room for analysis.
Based on what those samples showed, the fire marshal's office suspected this was an incendiary fire, an arson. As police further processed the house, they found a roll of medical tape on a small table in the corner of the bedroom where Malcolm's body was recovered. In the same room, they also found the remains of a cat on the floor near the foot of the bed. In the second bedroom, they discovered a knife that was either stuck to a mattress or possibly frozen there.
It's unclear from the case file if that knife was found to be connected to the homicide, though. There was nothing glaringly obvious at the scene to help point police in the direction of a motive. Though there's mention of receipts missing from the inn, those could have been destroyed in the fire, and there didn't seem to be any actual money or valuables missing from the Jennings' home. So a burglary didn't seem likely.
Investigators hoped that interviews would be more revealing. Maybe the Jennings did have enemies that no one knew about. Or maybe an inn guest or employee had a violent history. And so they started talking to witnesses who may have seen suspicious activity on the night of the fire, as well as those who knew Malcolm, Betty, and the Dana Place Inn best.
According to transcripts of witness interviews in the case file, Malcolm Jennings was last seen alive late on January 15th, the night before the fire was reported. He and his friend Raymond had both attended a meeting that night for a ski touring organization they were both members of. And though Raymond left first, he told police that soon after he pulled into his own driveway a little before 10 p.m., a car drove by and honked as it passed.
He assumed it was Malcolm, because that's usually what Malcolm did if he saw Raymond outside his house, which was about three miles away from the inn. Betty was also last known to be alive around 10 o'clock that night, following a phone call with a friend.
A witness told police they saw a small red vehicle speeding up Route 16 away from the area of the Dana Place Inn around 12.30 a.m. on the night of the fire. About two hours later, around 2.30 a.m., a trucker traveling northbound on Route 16 told police that he saw a small salt-covered vehicle parked on the side of the road, right beside and pointing towards the Dana Place Inn.
The car had its parking lights on and the motor might have been running, but there was no one in or around the vehicle. The trucker described the car as possibly a dark-colored Datsun or Toyota, but unfortunately couldn't recall a more specific make and model. Police also spoke with guests at the inn that night. A couple traveling with their infant son said they saw a few people in the lounge when they checked in around 5 p.m. on the 15th.
Malcolm was at the desk when they arrived and informed the couple that the kitchen was already closed for the night, so they had to get their dinner elsewhere. The couple said that the heat in their room stopped working sometime around 2 a.m., and then they woke up to the sight of a raging fire outside their window around 5 a.m. and fled their room as crews were arriving at the scene.
The couple had also told police that they tried to reach an inn employee earlier in the night to see if they could use the hot tub, but no one was at the desk and they could hear the phone ringing and ringing in the office with no one there to answer. Other than the people in the lounge having drinks around the time they checked in, it didn't seem like anyone else was milling around the inn at the time, neither employees nor guests.
When police spoke with current staff as part of the investigation, asking about disgruntled past employees or someone with a grudge against the inn's owners, there really wasn't much dirt to dig up. But there was a little. According to statements by the inn's day manager at the time, Malcolm fired one person in the previous year, a man I'll only refer to by his first name, John.
Now, many of the employees at the inn were locals, some of them teenagers who waited tables and washed dishes and helped clean the rooms. Occasionally, as is pretty common in the New England hospitality industry, Malcolm and Betty hired out-of-towners to support operations during a busy season. John was one of those out-of-towners.
John was in his late 30s and reportedly from Massachusetts. He'd been hitchhiking through town when a Dana Place Inn employee passed him and decided to pick him up. John explained he had a family, but his wife wouldn't let him see the kids anymore, so he'd been living between his mother's house and camping in the woods while he tried to find work.
At the time, Malcolm happened to be offering a bonus to any of the inn staff who found a new dishwasher for the restaurant, so the employee brought John in to meet Malcolm, and he was hired a few days later.
Malcolm also helped John find a stable place to live, setting him up with an apartment at a nearby complex. However, John got himself kicked out of that place for throwing a big party, so Malcolm then moved John into the basement of a condo that he managed. Soon after that, though, things started to go south and John wasn't doing his job, so Malcolm fired him sometime around the end of the season in October of 1984.
The employee who initially introduced John to Malcolm and Betty described him as intelligent and well-read, but, quote, a little weird, end quote. He said that John would jump around the kitchen and wave his arms and legs like he was doing karate.
Police later learned that John had a criminal record, and he drove a car the same color as one seen speeding away from the Dana Place Inn in the wee hours of the morning before the fire was reported. So he was definitely on their radar as someone who deserved a closer look.
However, as the background investigation on the former inn dishwasher continued, interviews with Malcolm and Betty's friends and family began to raise suspicions in a different direction. Betty talked to her friend Betsy on the phone around 8.45 p.m. the night before she died.
Their conversation weaved between topics of Betty's love life, of a friend who was in the hospital, and then landed on a frequent subject of their talks. Betty's daughter, Paige. For the last two-plus years, Paige had been dating an older man named Daniel Michael Daniels, who went by Mike. And for those two-plus years, Mike was a constant source of conflict in the Jennings family.
Betty told Betsy she'd just found out that Paige and Mike were on a trip to Miami and they'd probably come back married. Betty didn't know how she was going to tell Malcolm. It was going to break his heart. Betsy sensed that Betty was angry about it too, but after what they'd been through trying to get Paige away from this Mike guy, she seemed resigned to let Paige figure it out herself now. She told Betsy, quote, It's her life. She's got to live with it.
Betty often described the last few years between Paige and Mike as a dramatic soap opera. But the more police learned about Mike and the dynamics of his relationship with Paige and the rest of the Jennings family, a much darker narrative unfolded.
Malcolm and Betty's son, Chris Jennings, sat down for an interview with New Hampshire State Police investigators on January 17th, the day after he arrived in New Hampshire from Florida, where he was living at the time. Investigators asked Chris about the inn and his parents' business dealings and details about their social circles. But the primary focus of that conversation became his sister Paige and her boyfriend Mike.
So, Chris started at the beginning, when his sister dropped out of college and moved to Alaska. It was the summer of 1983, and 19-year-old Paige Jennings had just finished her freshman year at Simmons College in Boston, when an advertisement in a magazine caught her attention. The ad promised adventure and opportunity working at a lodge in Alaska. It was exactly what Paige was hoping to find.
Page got the job and packed up for the last frontier, arriving at the Gracious House Lodge in Cantwell early that summer. The lodge is where Page met a man who introduced himself as Daniel Michael Daniels, but everyone called him Mike. He was almost 28 years older than Page and living with his common-law wife, Debbie, at the time, but Mike was clearly interested in Page. One witness later described it as an infatuation.
They soon started up a romantic relationship. Mike, Paige, and Debbie all worked at Gracious House Lodge together until issues with their love triangle forced them to leave before the summer was over. All three of them took off together heading south in a converted Greyhound bus. The plan was to try to sell the camper bus along the way and then fly the rest of the way to Tucson, Arizona, where Mike and Debbie lived before moving to Alaska.
When Paige had first moved to Alaska for the job at the lodge, Betty, Malcolm, and Chris heard from her all the time. She regularly wrote them letters or called to check in. But suddenly, their regular contact stopped, and weeks went by without a word from Paige, until one day they finally received a letter, postmarked somewhere in California.
Paige wrote that she'd met someone, an older man, and fell in love, and she wasn't working at the lodge anymore. Malcolm and Betty were upset, not just by the news of their daughter's new relationship with some unknown older man, but also because they couldn't get a hold of Paige for days after they received that letter. Chris explained to police that about a week later, in September of 1983, Paige finally called.
She told her parents she was in Arizona and she was in trouble and wanted to come home. They told Paige to get herself on a plane and they'd pay for the flight. When she returned to the Northeast, Malcolm and Betty drilled Paige with questions about the last few months of her life, but Paige wouldn't say much. She later explained that it was her boyfriend who wanted her to leave Arizona, but she didn't want to go. From the start, the relationship between Mike and Paige raised a million red flags.
Paige's parents always felt Mike had a level of control over her. In fact, they saw it as, quote, a Jim Jones ability, end quote. A reference to the cult leader responsible for the Jonestown massacre. Mike was also in his 40s, and Paige was still a teenager when they started dating. He appeared to be a drifter with no real job who just floated from place to place, crashing with friends instead of getting his own place.
Wanting to know more about the person his daughter was dating, Malcolm tried to get a background check on the guy, but he didn't find much. It was almost like Daniel Michael Daniels didn't exist at all. Paige called Mike all the time while she was back in New Hampshire. In Paige's absence, Mike first tried to reconcile with his wife Debbie, but that wasn't working out, so he turned his attention back to Paige.
Mike told her that as soon as his quote-unquote business was taken care of in Arizona, he was going to come to New Hampshire to be with her. Sometime in October of 1983, Mike showed up in Jackson, much to the dismay of Malcolm and Betty. They were clear with Paige and with Mike that they did not approve of their relationship, and so they weren't welcome to stay at the inn together.
Paige and Mike floated around motels in the valley for a few days until one night Malcolm and Betty tried to get their daughter back. On October 31st, 1983, Betty and Malcolm showed up to a motel where Paige and Mike were staying and said that as Paige's parents, they had custody of her and she needed to go with them.
The incident escalated and Conway police responded to the motel, but no charges were filed. Paige didn't end up leaving with her parents that night either. She was 19 years old, no longer a child, and so custody, in the sense of parental rights and responsibilities, did not apply. It was the first of many disputes between Paige and her parents regarding Mike and the choices she was making with her life.
Chris said in his interview with state police in January of 1985 that he met Mike while he was in New Hampshire, and although Chris was surprised by just how old the guy was, he seemed like a quiet, laid-back, unthreatening cowboy type. Even still, Chris told his sister that they'd better not hang around New Hampshire much longer because it was only going to cause more issues between her and their parents.
So, Paige and Mike left town and headed for Rockport, Texas, where Mike had some friends. Over the course of the next two years, Paige and Mike's relationship was extremely volatile. Chris heard bits and pieces, mostly from phone calls and letters that he and Paige exchanged.
There was one night in February of 1984 when an argument got violent and Mike threw Paige against the side of a waterbed. She had a cut deep enough that she should have gotten stitches, but didn't. After that, Paige moved out of the place she shared with Mike and into a house with a male roommate. One morning, she walked out to her car to find a pack of Mike's Camel cigarettes tucked under the windshield wiper.
She called Mike to confront him about it, and what Mike said left Paige absolutely terrified. He said that he'd been sneaking into her room at night to hold her hand while she slept. Mike told Paige to go look under the fishbowl in her room. Underneath was a photo of Paige that she didn't put there herself. The thought of Mike sneaking in undetected and sitting there while she was asleep left Paige feeling vulnerable and scared.
The next time she talked to her parents, she let them know she was no longer living with Mike, and they were done for good. On March 26th, 1984, Betty got Paige a plane ticket back home from Texas to surprise Malcolm for his birthday. Before Paige made it to Jackson from the airport, though, the phone rang at the Jennings residence. It was Mike looking for Paige.
The birthday surprise was ruined, but the bigger surprise of it all was that Paige had reconciled with Mike. Paige left New Hampshire soon after she arrived and returned to Texas and Mike once again. Later that spring, in May of 1984, Paige and Mike traveled back to Alaska, the place they first met, for a new job opportunity near Kodiak Island.
According to case file documents, an argument between them while in Alaska resulted in another physical assault on Paige. Paige called her brother Chris for help this time, and together they devised a plan to get Paige away from Mike. Paige talked Mike into driving her back to the lower 48 from Alaska. Once she was close enough to an airport, she broke up with him and hopped a pre-booked flight to Boston.
Paige stayed with Chris at his place in Maine for a few months after that. She adopted a dog, a black lab mix she named Chelsea, and became super attached to her new four-legged best friend. She also started seeing a therapist and was working on her relationship with her parents. But Paige was stuck in a cycle with Mike, unable to free herself from whatever hold he had on her. But she started calling him again, unbeknownst to her family.
In November of 1984, Chris got a job offer in Florida, and Paige decided she'd go with him when he moved. She asked her parents to look after her dog Chelsea and promised to pick her up when she came home for Christmas. But Paige didn't return to New Hampshire for the holidays after all.
In December of 1984, Mike showed up at Chris's apartment in Florida unannounced. Mike and Paige were back together once again. Chris allowed them to stay at his apartment, along with Mike's multiple dogs, for a little over a week until Mike said he had to go back to Louisiana. He explained that he'd been in a car accident there recently and claimed he had to go back to square up with the insurance company.
When Mike returned to Florida about a week later, he had a diamond ring for Paige. The news of Paige and Mike's renewed relationship and apparent engagement was devastating for her parents. Malcolm told Paige it was best if she didn't return to New Hampshire for Christmas. She could send them money to have the dog flown down to Florida instead.
Paige was extremely hurt by this, not just about the dog or missing Christmas, but their grandfather was terminally ill at the time and she really wanted to see him for the holidays. Paige called her grandmother for support, thinking maybe she'd let Paige visit, but even her grandmother told her not to come to New Hampshire. Chris left Paige and Mike behind as he traveled home for Christmas without his little sister.
Just before the new year, Mike left Florida for Louisiana again, saying he had to finish up those insurance claims he started when he went to Louisiana the first time. He drove off with his dogs in his white Mazda truck. When Mike finally returned to Gainesville on January 9th, 1985, he was driving a different car than when he left. This time, he had a blue Fiat, and his two dogs were gone.
He told Paige that they'd attacked motel staff when he was out of his room and police had the dogs destroyed. Around midnight the same night Mike returned, Chris was startled awake by Paige yelling for help. He ran into her bedroom to find Mike with his arms wrapped around Paige, restraining her on his lap. Paige said that Mike was going to sexually assault and beat her.
Chris entered the room to intervene and Mike loosened his grip on Paige. She escaped to the kitchen to talk with Chris about what was going on. Even though Chris could see that she was trembling and genuinely frightened, she returned to Mike's side not long after, writing off the incident as an alcohol-fueled misunderstanding. Mike was just upset over the death of his dogs, she said. But Chris didn't sleep a wink that night, afraid of what might happen if he did.
The next morning, he decided he'd seen enough of his sister's toxic relationship and told Paige and Mike they needed to move out. On January 11th, Chris stopped home from work to find Paige and Mike packing up their belongings. When everything was out, Chris brought Paige into the apartment manager's office to have her name removed from the lease, and then off she went. When Chris returned to his place later that evening, he found a note, apparently from Mike.
It read, quote, your sister and I are going to Miami for our honeymoon. You all have really hurt her this time. I'll make sure she calls, end quote. But Paige never did. The morning they moved out was the last time Chris saw or spoke to his sister. However, on January 13th, Mike called to inform Chris that they were in Miami and they were getting married.
He also told Chris to ask that his parents not send the dog down from New Hampshire yet, because they wouldn't be back from Miami until Wednesday the 16th. Chris asked to speak to his sister, but Mike said Paige didn't want to talk to him. In the background, Chris could hear the voice of someone else, but he couldn't be sure it was Paige.
Chris told police that before he left to fly back to New Hampshire on the day he found out about the murders of his mother and father, he scrawled a hurried note and stuck it on his apartment door. It said, He wrote two phone numbers where she could reach him in New Hampshire and signed it,
He said in his interview with New Hampshire State Police on January 17th that he hoped to finally hear from Paige that day, since Mike claimed they'd be back from their trip to Miami by then. But she still hadn't called.
One of the last things Chris told investigators during that first interview was that as far as he knew, Mike had a Texas driver's license and his full name was Daniel Michael Daniels, with Michael spelled M-I-K-E-L. One of the detectives asked Chris if he knew Mike to use any aliases. Chris said no.
The next day, January 18th, Chris called his friend Rita back in Florida to ask if she'd go over to his apartment and forward his phone to a New Hampshire number in case Paige called. He also wanted Rita to check if Mike's blue Fiat was in the parking lot, and if so, to give him the plate number so police could get more info about his sister's boyfriend-slash-fiancé-slash-maybe-now-husband.
When Rita went by Chris' place in Gainesville, the blue Fiat wasn't in the lot. However, she did find something strange. The note that Chris left on his door for Paige before he left was altered. In the top right corner of the paper, the word NO was written in big letters and underlined several times.
New Hampshire police had Rita turn the note over to the Alachua County Sheriff's Department in Florida so it could be processed for prints. But just looking at the two bold letters, it was impossible to tell who wrote them. Was it Paige? Was it Mike? Where were they? Two days had passed since the murder of their parents, and Chris still hadn't heard from his sister.
Chris had given investigators a lot more background on the root cause of the tumultuous relationship between Paige and their parents. So, detectives did a little more digging on the guy who called himself Daniel Michael Daniels. Chris said that Mike didn't have any aliases. But that wasn't true. Chris didn't know that Mike actually had at least 20 different aliases. And he was a wanted man.
When New Hampshire State Police ran their own background check on Daniel Michael Daniels in January of 1985, they located a report out of Louisiana from just a month and a half earlier. On November 29th, 1984, a man by the same name had been arrested by Acadia Parish Sheriff's Department following a car accident.
He was driving a 1980 Audi filled to the brim with all sorts of stuff. Battery cables, power tools, saws, sanders, mechanics tools, you name it. When the officer ran the VIN on that car, he realized it was reported stolen from Tucson, Arizona, and placed Mike under arrest. Mike was booked and fingerprinted, and his prints came back as belonging to a different name, Glide Earl Meek.
According to an Associated Press report published in the Concord Monitor, when Daniel Michael Daniels was a teenager and still went by his real name, Glide Earl Meek, he was known as a quiet, clever, and likable guy. His classmates called him shorty because he was short and muscular. One classmate called him, quote, the strongest man I've ever met in my life, end quote.
Glide was raised by his uncle after his mother left, and his father was unable to care for him and his two younger brothers due to substance use disorder. Glide would eventually assume his brother's name as one of his many aliases. In 1962, Glide received a 15-year prison sentence for burglary.
He escaped from Walla Walla State Penitentiary sometime during his sentence, but was eventually returned to custody and had a few years added to his sentence. He was paroled in 1970 for that offense. It's unclear when exactly Glide got married for the first time, but he had two children from that marriage, but stopped having contact with them in 1975.
His first wife said that he was charismatic at the beginning of their relationship, but then became cruel. She later described him as scary. After divorcing his first wife, Glide got married again to a woman he met in Washington, but then got another divorce sometime around 1974. He met a woman named Debbie in 1975, and after several years of living together, they were considered common-law married.
A suspect outline of Glide Earl Meek describes his view of relationships as quote-unquote traditional, where his wife was expected to carry out all of the domestic duties and he, as the man, had all the power. He told Debbie she should leave all of her friends and family behind when they started dating and forced her to burn anything that connected her to her past life, everything except her birth certificate and passport.
The suspect outline also says that Mike slash Glide was a storyteller and loved to be the center of attention with his exaggerated stories. He had an unrealistic view of life with big dreams of getting rich. He made money a few different ways, not all of them legitimate.
He had some sort of sign-making business, he also sold Herbalife products at one point, and he was known for stealing cars, filing off the VIN, and reselling them. He put a lot of planning into the car thefts too, often researching the make and model of his intended target before hot-wiring it and driving away. With those activities, his criminal record was long, with several convictions for theft and burglary.
In 1976, he was still on parole in Washington state when he was arrested again for shoplifting. Mike said he didn't want to go back to prison, so he hightailed it out of there with Debbie, first heading to Arizona and then to Alaska. That's when he started using the alias Daniel Michael Daniels.
Mike's plan for Alaska was to strike it rich panning for gold, but when that didn't work out, he ended up at the lodge where he first met Paige Jennings during the summer of 1983. Amidst all of his criminal tendencies, the suspect outline for Glide, aka Mike, also indicates he had a soft spot for dogs. At one point during his relationship with Paige, Mike had four or five dogs living with him.
When one of his dogs named Bugs died, he had the pup cremated and carried the ashes around with him in a leather pouch everywhere he went. A love of dogs was one thing he had in common with Paige.
And speaking of their shared love of dogs, as Chris told investigators, Paige's dog Chelsea was supposed to be flown to live with her and Mike in Florida. But around 8.30 p.m. on the night before his parents' murders, Chris was on the phone with his mom, and Betty said that Chelsea was still in New Hampshire. Betty actually wanted to keep the dog, but Malcolm wasn't as open to the idea. And plus, Chelsea didn't get along with their cat.
Betty told Chris that the dog had just jumped on the cat again while they were on the phone. So as late as 8.30 p.m. on the night of January 15th, Paige's dog was still at her parents' house. Knowing that, investigators returned to the scene of the murders, scrutinizing the charred rubble for any evidence that a dog had died in the fire. But they didn't find anything.
So where was Chelsea now? It was just one of the dozens of questions investigators were trying to answer. But the one answer they knew for sure was that Daniel Michael Daniels was not the guy he claimed to be.
With the 700-plus pages of the case file provided by the New Hampshire State Police, certain initial investigative hypotheses appeared tinged with potential bias on part of the investigators. Notably, numerous interviews broached the topic of Betty's social circle, emphasizing her friendships with gay men, but nothing came of that angle.
And it seems nothing further developed with that hitchhiking dishwasher who Malcolm fired the previous fall, either. After the interview with Chris Jennings, though, all of the subsequent conversations with other witnesses eventually steered to the topic of Paige's boyfriend and all of the trouble he caused the Jennings family. Nearly everyone investigators talked to knew something about the saga of Paige and Mike.
When investigators spoke with Chris again on January 18th, they asked him if he believed Paige would ever do anything to hurt their parents. Following the argument before Christmas, Paige's relationship with her parents was the worst it had ever been. She was all but estranged from her family. So could Paige have been pushed to do something like kill them both and that was why no one could find her now?
Was it possible that Paige and Mike killed Betty and Malcolm together and then disappeared with Paige's dog? Investigators asked Chris about this hypothetical scenario, but Chris explained that even though Paige could get mad at Betty and Malcolm, he didn't consider his sister to be violent, and he didn't think she had the capacity to harm their parents, and he wasn't convinced that Mike had the capacity to murder them either.
The version of Mike that Chris saw was, in his words, mild-mannered and low-key. He disagreed with his mother that Mike was some sort of clever manipulator. To Chris, he was just a man who took advantage of vulnerable situations. Interviews with family, friends, and the inn's employees continued over the following days.
Meanwhile, Chris waited and waited to hear from his sister, hoping she'd call, hoping she'd turn up back in Gainesville from that supposed trip to Miami. But when the phone rang with a call from Florida, it wasn't Paige or Mike. It was the Alachua County Sheriff's Office.
On January 25th, 1985, the Sheriff's Office in Alachua County, Florida received a report about a suspicious vehicle parked in a field off State Roads 236 and 93 in High Springs, just outside of Gainesville. A deputy went out to investigate but was unable to locate the vehicle due to dense fog and rain in the area. The next day, the Sheriff's Office searched the same area again but still couldn't find anything.
On January 28th, following another report of a suspicious vehicle in the same location in High Springs, a deputy was finally able to locate the car in question. It was a blue Fiat, apparently abandoned in a field. But that's not all he found. Not far away from the car, in the middle of a clearing amongst a small patch of trees, was a tin roof shack, or what remained of it. It had been burned to the ground.
with two people inside. When investigators ran the plates on the abandoned car, they came back registered to a Daniel Michael Daniels. Inside the car were photographs and clothing and other items that appeared to belong to Mike and his fiancee, Paige Jennings. On the dashboard, there was also an envelope addressed to the Gainesville Police Homicide Division.
When police finally opened that envelope and read the letter inside, it revealed Mike's plot to kill not only Malcolm and Betty Jennings, but Paige Jennings, her dog, and himself too. But is that really what happened?
On the next episode of Dark Down East, you'll hear the case of Paige Jennings and the movements of Daniel Michael Daniels from the day they moved out of Chris Jennings' apartment to the murders of Malcolm and Betty, right up until Mike penned the letter that seemed to seal the case shut.
But just when investigators believed that they were on the brink of closure, attempts to identify the remains in that burnt-out shack sent shockwaves through the investigation. Police couldn't be sure their suspect was actually dead. Part two of this story will be out next week on Dark Down East.
Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at darkdowneast. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.
Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audiocheck. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?