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Start a 30-day free trial at walmartplus.com. Paramount Plus, a central plan only. Separate registration required. See Walmart Plus terms and conditions. During the winter of 1941, the death of the man found in a downtown Portland, Maine alleyway left investigators divided by two very different theories. Was it an accident or was it murder?
Every once in a while, I like to go way, way back and unearth cases that might otherwise be lost with time. Given its age and the circumstances you're about to hear, it's unlikely that any investigative resources will be devoted to this case ever again. But that's exactly the kind of story that deserves to be told. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Philip Wendell Boyce on Dark Downies.
Around 2 a.m. on Sunday, February 16th, 1941, a tenant of the Metropolitan Apartments at 439 Congress Street in downtown Portland, Maine, stepped outside into the harsh winter air with his dog, who was in need of a middle-of-the-night potty break. As they rounded the corner to walk down an alley behind the building that led to Elm Street, they stopped short at the sight of a man laying in their path.
It looked like he might have been sleeping or passed out. The man walking his dog would later say he suspected that the guy on the ground was intoxicated and had fallen down on the icy path. So he called Portland Police. Portland Police Captain Harold McGuire arrived at the scene within 15 minutes. But no sooner did he give the man on the ground a once-over did he realize that this guy was not passed out. He was, in fact, deceased.
When the medical examiner, Dr. Wilbur Layton, arrived, his first assessment was that the man couldn't have been dead long, maybe an hour at most. He was laying on his back about two feet from a brick structural column in the covered alleyway behind the Metropolitan Apartment building.
He was about a foot from a fence that separated the alley where he was laying from another lower path along the back perimeter of Portland High School. I'll include a map at darkdowneast.com so you can visualize the scene. Now, the man's left leg was crossed over his right leg, with his left arm outstretched and his right at his side. He had blood coming from his right ear and a pool of it had collected beneath him.
His clothing didn't appear to be ripped or amiss in any way, but his coat was slightly rolled up beneath him, and the leather of the heel of one of his shoes was scoffed. As the area was secured and a team of local police officers began to take photographs and measurements, a police inspector took the victim's fingerprints and later checked with cards on file with the Portland Police Department.
The man found dead in the alleyway was 24-year-old Philip Wendell Boyce. I contacted a number of agencies as part of my research on this case, including the Portland Police Department, the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office, and Maine State Police.
These days, Portland police handle their own unattended or suspicious death and homicide investigations. Portland is one of only two cities in Maine where Maine State Police doesn't have jurisdiction over potential homicide investigations. Bangor is the other city where local PD handle their own cases.
So, I assumed if any records about this case still existed, the most likely place to start would be Portland PD. But I sent off FOAA requests to other agencies as well, just in case. The officials I worked with at the Portland City Clerk's Office were very prompt in responding to my request, but unfortunately, a check of the physical card file didn't turn up any cases under the name Philip Wendell Boyce.
It's unclear if the file was lost or if it had been destroyed at some point. There was just no record of that case in the Portland PD file system, so dead end there. And no luck with the sheriff's office either. They don't retain records of that vintage, nor was it likely that agency assisted in the investigation.
Although it wouldn't have been typical for Maine State Police to assist in a Portland case of this nature, some source material indicates that State Police did offer specific resources to the investigation. I requested any existing case documents from Maine State Police. However, their records only appear to date back to the 50s, so we're one decade short of seeing a case file from that agency.
With that, much of the information I have about Philip's case comes from the archives of local newspapers at the time. It always amazes me how much investigators were willing to share with journalists back then in contrast to the crumbs we're given about cases today.
But of course, a lot has changed since then, period. Protecting the integrity of an investigation by not divulging every update and development to the public seems to be a more contemporary concept, and an important one despite the frustrations it can cause. But knowing that the original case file was lost with time, I'm grateful the journalists who came before me did get investigators talking.
It's the only record of Philip's case we've got now. Philip Wendell Boyce was born November 5th, 1916 and grew up on Orr's Island in Hartswell, Maine with his mother, father, and three siblings. He later attended Portland High School and after graduation, he worked as a machinist in South Portland for about six years.
Philip had a few run-ins with the law during his adult life. According to the police court column in the Portland Evening Express, in 1939, Philip was arrested for breaking and entering with intent to steal and received probation for that offense. In April of 1940, he was arrested for attempting to steal a car. So that would explain why his prints were on file with the Portland Police Department.
Philip had been living in Portland with the family of his wife, 16-year-old Louise Nickerson, at their home on St. Lawrence Street in a neighborhood known as Munjoy Hill. Philip and Louise were married just five months earlier, and she was due to give birth to their first child any day.
I get the sense that the circumstances of Philip and Louise's relationship were complex, and we don't have the full picture here. But when police went to notify Louise of Philip's death, she explained that the last time she saw her husband was about a month earlier. Philip gave her $4.50 and left. Louise hadn't seen him since, and she didn't know where he'd been or who he was with on the night he died.
And so the investigation into Philip's suspicious death started from nothing. Portland police processed the scene in the alley behind the apartment building, photographing the spot where Philip's body lay in a pool of blood and measuring the distances from the brick column to the iron fence to the victim's body, trying to make sense of what happened there.
Philip was still wearing a gold wristwatch and had about $18 in change on him, so police quickly ruled out the motive of robbery. Investigators also found a small glass liquor bottle in one of Philip's pockets, completely intact without a crack to speak of. There was no obvious signs to suggest that a fight or struggle had preceded Philip's death. And there was nothing that resembled a weapon at the scene either.
However, police did find a small red handkerchief laying on a stone step five feet away from Philip's head, and that was collected as evidence. The autopsy performed by Dr. Layton noted that Philip had visible scratches on his hands, a cut on his lip, a swollen left eye, and a scratch on his right shoulder. One or two of his teeth were loose, as if he'd been hit in the mouth.
Additional toxicology tests performed at Maine General Hospital indicated that Philip had significant levels of alcohol in his bloodstream and brain, leading the pathologist to believe Philip was intoxicated at the time of his death. Dr. Layton determined that Philip's skull was fractured in several places, including the back of his head, which ultimately caused his death.
He estimated Philip's time of death to be between midnight and 2 a.m. However, the medical examiner could not conclusively determine exactly what caused his injuries, only that Philip suffered a blow or blows of terrific force.
Although the medical examiner couldn't yet make a call as to Philip's manner of death, County Prosecutor Albert Knudson suspected that Philip's death was the result of violence inflicted by another person. Knudson ordered a full and thorough investigation of Philip's suspicious death. According to reporting in the Portland Press-Herald, police questioned at least 20 people within the first 48 hours of the investigation.
These witness interviews allowed police to assemble a rough timeline of the hours leading up to Philip's death.
Around 7.30 p.m. on that Saturday night, a man showed up at Philip's wife's parents' house on St. Lawrence Street looking for him, but it was unclear why the guy was trying to find him or if he ever spoke to Philip. Later on that night, Philip was seen alone at a nearby cocktail lounge, but he reportedly chatted with several men and women during the three hours he was there.
Though I can't find a specific address or name of the establishment he was patronizing that night, reports say it was close to the alley where he was eventually found. And the alley, by the way, would have been about a mile from Louise's parents' house on St. Lawrence Street. So all very walkable distances.
As interviews continued, some witnesses placed Philip in the alley where his body was discovered as late as 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, which would have been within 90 minutes of the time he was found dead.
Any speculation about why Philip was in the alley is absent from the source material I've been able to find. But the more people that police spoke to, the more they heard about suspicious activity and sounds in that alley within the same window Philip was believed to have died.
Follow-up on information from an earlier witness statement led police to a man from New York, who was supposedly seen within a block of where Philip's body was discovered around 11:25 p.m. and again just after midnight. Police took this lead pretty seriously and brought the guy in for an interview. They pummeled him with questions for over three hours, even brought him into the autopsy room as an interrogation technique, but he was eventually released.
Another witness, a man who was dropping off his date near Congress Street around 12.45 a.m., had just returned to his car when he saw someone running out of the alley towards Elm Street. He didn't get a good look at the person, but they seemed to be coming from the direction of where Philip's body was found around the same time police believed he died. There were other witnesses who heard conversations happening in the same alley in the middle of the night.
A tenant of the Metropolitan apartment building, whose unit was about 50 feet above the alley, said that around 1:30 in the morning they heard the voice of a man loudly and clearly saying, "Don't leave it there." The voice was followed by the sound of a car ignition turning over and then driving away out of the alley. Several other tenants remembered hearing a car in the alley around the same time too,
Yet another tenant of the building reported to police that she heard a crash sometime around 1.45 a.m. She said it sounded like someone had fallen. Without a conclusive decision from the medical examiner regarding Phillip's manner of death, whether it was an accident or a homicide, these varying witness statements only muddled the waters more.
Portland police were transparent about the lack of progress in the case after the first few days of an investigation that was starting to feel like a wild goose chase. Police Chief Edward Dodwell told reporters for the Portland Evening Express that they had no tangible clues, but they were sifting through all evidence to establish new angles, a working theory, some sort of story that made sense with all the clues they had before them.
Was it murder? Did someone cause Philip's death? There was no weapon at the scene, and the autopsy hadn't offered any theories as to what kind of weapon might have been used, but Portland Police Captain Harold McGuire openly speculated that Philip's injuries could have been caused by someone grabbing Philip by the hair and hitting his head against something.
He suggested the skull fractures were caused by repeated blows to the head against the concrete sidewalk. Captain Maguire's comments in the press seemed to propel the theory that someone killed Philip, that this was no accident. Maguire felt that the position of Philip's body, with one leg over the other and an arm outstretched, looked like someone had placed his body there.
The tenant, who said she heard someone saying, don't leave it there, gives a little more weight to this theory too, like two or more people were arguing over whether to leave something in the alley. However, Dr. Layton had concluded that Philip had died right where he was found and hadn't been moved after the fact. The other details, like Philip's loose teeth, swollen eye, and scratched shoulder, those all sound like they could have been caused by a scuffle.
So maybe Philip got into a fight with one or more people before he was killed by fatal blows to the head. Definitely a possibility. But again, there was no overwhelming evidence to make the final call on the homicide theory. The other theory was that Philip's death was the result of an accident, perhaps a fall, that he hit his head hard enough to cause multiple skull fractures so severe it killed him.
But Dr. Layton wasn't so sure this was the answer. The skull fractures could have been caused by the force of a fall, yes, but Philip didn't have any other broken bones that he expected to see from a fall of that force. Plus, the fact that there were multiple skull fractures suggested that there were multiple blows to his head.
You'd think that if Philip fell and hit his head, that was that. There wouldn't have been repeated strikes to his skull after the initial impact. Also, and this is a small detail, possibly a red herring, but there was that intact glass liquor bottle in his pocket. It's likely, or at least probable, that the bottle would have shattered if Philip had fallen. However, there was other evidence that did suggest Philip's death was an accident.
According to Charles Maxwell's reporting for the Portland Evening Express, the instep and sole of Philip's shoes looked like they had flakes of paint stuck to them. And so scrapings of the material were sent to a chemistry teacher at Portland High School for comparison to samples of black paint taken from the iron railing near where Philip was discovered.
Investigators theorized that Philip was standing on the railing when he slipped and fell, hitting his head on the way down. The county prosecutor, once confidently on the side of this case being a murder, now suggested that the scrapings, if a match, along with Philip's jacket being rolled up beneath him plus the scuffs on his shoes, were all evidence of a fall.
So, the Portland High School chemistry teacher performed comparison tests on the samples from Philip's shoes and the railing alongside investigators at the Maine State Police Crime Lab. The results came back within a few days, and the scrapings on Philip's shoes did, in fact, match the paint from the railing and the fire escape in the alley, not far from where his body lay.
With that, Portland police decided to ask for a second opinion on Philip's injuries. They called on renowned Boston medical examiner Dr. Timothy Leary to determine if Philip's injuries could have been caused by an accidental fall and not homicidal violence. But even though Dr. Leary would offer a confident opinion about the cause and manner of Philip's death, it did not put the case to bed, not even close. ♪
Dr. Timothy Leary was clear in his assessment. The injuries that caused Philip Wendell Boyce's death were, quote, beyond human strength to inflict, end quote. He believed that Philip died from a headlong fall striking the side of his head near the crown. According to reporting in the Portland Press-Herald, Dr. Leary also found that bones at the top of Philip's spine were compressed.
It was Dr. Leary's opinion that this was only possible if Philip fell head first, causing significant vertical pressure to his skull and spine. The source material that exists on this case does not go into much more detail of Dr. Leary's conclusions. I don't know how or if he was able to explain Philip's one or two loose teeth, the unbroken liquor bottle, his swollen eye, or the position of his body.
it all seemed to come down to the skull fractures for him, too severe to be caused by human strength alone. But Dr. Leary's determination that Philip died from an accidental fall didn't close the case. Around the same time he offered his opinion, police were receiving new leads and new stories from witnesses that had the scales tipping back towards this being a homicide.
On Monday, February 24th, a week after Philip was found dead, three postcards addressed to three different recipients arrived in mailboxes around Portland. The first was sent to Portland Police Headquarters, the second to the Office of County Prosecutor Albert Knudsen, and a third to the Portland Evening Express newspaper.
Details about the postcards are scarce. All the source material says is that they were postmarked somewhere in New Hampshire, and all three were determined to be connected to Philip's case in some way. But their content and possible significance weren't shared with the public. Again, this is where having a case file would have been really great.
I would love to know if the postcards contained a tip or a lead, or if they were just a distraction created by someone who wanted their 15 minutes of fame. Sending one to the press certainly raises an eyebrow for me. But anyway, investigators were working with postal officials to learn more about where specifically they came from and who might have sent them. Portland police didn't have any updates to share about the postcards or any other aspect of the case in the following weeks.
Police spoke with a new witness who said she saw an unknown man weaving in and out of the shadows near the alley on the night of Philip's death, but she couldn't give any defining characteristics about this guy to track him down, so that didn't go anywhere. The case was at a standstill, and it stayed that way for about two months, until an arrest in another main city led to a shocking confession.
25-year-old John Fullerton, who also went by Jack, was originally from the small down-east main town of Calais, but he'd been living and working between Portland and Auburn for about a year as of 1941. He had just moved into a new place with his roommate, Irving, in early April of that year.
Around 7 p.m. on the night of April 16th, Jack came down the stairs and announced to Irving that he wanted to confess to a murder. Jack told Irving that he had killed a man in Portland. Not only that, Jack revealed he was in Portland earlier that same afternoon and he broke into a house where he used to work on Cumberland Avenue and stole a gun. The stolen revolver was at his side as he confessed to Irving.
Jack was in an obviously agitated state, but Irving was able to get him to the Auburn police station. Jack told Auburn police the same story he told Irving with a little more detail. He said he was in Portland one night that past February, and he ran into a guy on Congress Street who asked if he wanted to have a drink down an alley. As they were passing the bottle back and forth, the man got mad at Jack for taking too big of a swill and they started fighting.
They struggled for a bit, he said, throwing punches in each other's direction, before Jack picked up a wooden club that happened to be in the alley and swung it at the other man. Jack thought he'd only knocked the man unconscious and went to rob him of whatever he had in his pockets, but realizing the man wasn't breathing, Jack took off with the club and later threw it away. Jack said he thought the man he killed was named either Bassett or Boyd.
Auburn police contacted Portland PD to let them know there was a man in custody claiming responsibility for a homicide in their jurisdiction, and they hurried over to Auburn to speak with the suspect. However, when Portland investigators started questioning Jack Fullerton themselves, his story didn't hold as much water as they first thought.
Portland police brought Jack back to Portland and walked him around the alley so he could more specifically point out how things went down on the night he allegedly killed Philip. The more questions police asked, though, the clearer it became that Jack didn't know much more about the events of February 16th than what he could have gleaned from newspaper articles.
He couldn't place things in the alley. And what investigators knew to be true about the circumstances of Philip's death didn't line up with the version Jack was sharing with them now. When police returned to the station to continue questioning Jack, he began to recant everything he'd just told them. He said he actually had no idea what happened to Philip and he just wanted to confess as a way to gain sympathy and attention from someone he had an argument with recently.
He denied having any involvement with Philip's death. Two officers were in the interrogation room with Jack, listening to his flip-flopping story, when one decided to step out for a moment. Left one-on-one with a single officer, Jack became even more agitated and suddenly lunged towards the wall where a police pistol in a holster hung on a hook.
The officer struggled with Jack and was able to get the weapon free from his hands as the other officer returned to help subdue him. Jack's flimsy confession and then reversal, his outburst in the interrogation room, and the persistent, agitated state he was in led Portland police to discount anything Jack had to say about the death of Philip Wendell Boyce.
The evidence they had did not support any charges against him relating to Philip's case. However, Jack was charged with larceny for the attempted theft of the police pistol while in custody. He was given probation for that offense. The next year, in February of 1942, Jack was convicted of breaking, entering, and larceny and sentenced to one to two years in state prison.
From what I can gather in the available source material, Jack lived a life free of crime after that. He died at the age of 64. I don't know what, if anything, happened with Philip's case after Jack Fullerton's presumed false confession. It only took about three months for his name to disappear from public consciousness.
Once the uproar surrounding Jack Fullerton died down, police weren't talking about Phillips' case in the newspapers anymore. But it's not because his case was quietly solved and a suspect arrested without fanfare, or because it was closed by some other method. Phillips' case remained open nearly two decades after the fact.
In 1960, a headline in the Portland Evening Express read, quote, unsolved county murders of three decades seem likely to stay that way forever, end quote. The article by Waldo E. Prey lists off a dozen murder cases still unsolved in Cumberland County. Despite never having been officially ruled a homicide, Philip Wendell Boyce is among the 12 names in the article.
By the time it was published, nearly 19 years had passed since Philip's death. Now, it's common for investigating agencies tasked with reviewing unsolved cases to develop a solvability index. That is, based on the evidence, information, and circumstances of the case, how likely is it to be solved? That ranking helps determine which cases will receive the most attention and resources.
The age of the case plays a role in determining solvability. The older the case gets, the more likely it is that witnesses have left town or passed away, memories fade with each passing year, and turnover within police departments leads to investigators without any prior knowledge of the investigation. Then the case gets so old that records are destroyed according to preset retention schedules, or they're simply just lost.
I don't know if Philip's case was ever evaluated for its solvability at any point, but I do know that the truth has yet to be revealed, and it may have been lost or destroyed with the case file. But maybe there's another way to learn more. Maybe there's a descendant of Philip's out there, who has heard the story of their distant family member's suspicious death back in the 40s,
For good measure, I did some digging on genealogy websites and learned that it's very likely Philip's siblings are all deceased, as are his widow and his son, Philip Jr., who was born just after he died. I haven't been able to figure out if Philip has any grandchildren, but I'm throwing this out there because I know there are many Dark Down East listeners with deep roots in Maine who might be able to help with this.
If you have any familial connection to Philip Wendell Boyce, whose immediate family was from Oars Island in Maine, please reach out to me at hello at darkdowneast.com. I'd love to hear from you.
For now, I'm still very much teetering between the accident and homicide theories. It's hard for me to ignore the multiple skull fractures which Dr. Layton, the Maine-based medical examiner, thought might be indicative of multiple blows to the head. That, to me, says homicide. Philip was beaten or struck.
I wish I knew if any conclusions were ever reached about Philip's loose tooth or teeth, like if past dental work could have shined a light on that detail, or if his loose tooth was also the result of a beating. And I can't stop thinking about the small red handkerchief found at the scene. Whatever became of that? Did the killer or killers drop it, fleeing from the scene? Or was it just a random object blown in by a gust of winter wind?
And what about the postcards? Those three postcards received by three different people within a week of Philip's death? What did they say? Who sent them? Did they ever figure it out? We may never know. As for the accident angle, the fact that scrapings from Philip's shoes were proven to match paint from a fence railing in the alleyway is certainly a compelling piece of evidence, but is the only explanation that he was walking along it and fell.
At first I wanted to say this doesn't make any sense. For what reason would he be walking on the fence? And then it hit me in a silly way one weekend while I was at a playground with my daughter. I was walking along a railroad tie laid as a barrier to keep wood chips in the play area, like I was an Olympic gymnast performing a balance beam routine. I was doing it because it was fun and I wanted to.
Maybe that was the simple explanation for Philip, hypothetically, walking along a railing and his shoes having paint on them. Maybe he'd had some drinks at a bar and decided it would be fun. Or maybe Philip, with a history of breaking and entering, was trying to scale the fence to reach a fire escape leading to an apartment above. Or perhaps he was leaving an apartment via the fire escape and fell from a considerable height.
Dr. Leary had said that Philip died of a headlong fall, that is, head first. If he fell from the height of a common fence, let's say 36 inches, is that enough distance to fall directly on the top of your head? The questions just keep coming.
The Metropolitan Building still stands on Congress Street in Portland today. The name is carved into the stone facade above a big green arched door. The street-level units are home to a collection of businesses that have rotated over the years. On the corner is now a Salvadorian restaurant, where a bank once offered mortgages. What was once a donut shop in the 1920s is now a cannabis store.
There's a tailor that sells formal wear and a fourth unit that used to house a guitar shop. Though a lot has changed in and around the Metropolitan Building, there's a lot that hasn't too. The upper floors are still rented out as apartments and many of them still retain a lot of the original architecture from when the building was first built. The alleyway where Philip's body was found that cold February night in 1941 is still there too.
the same brick pillar, the same covered pathway, it's all still there. Every day, locals and tourists alike walk by that building, unaware of the still unsolved mystery that unfolded there, unfamiliar with the name Philip Wendell Boyce. As life continues to flow around it, the echoes of unanswered questions and forgotten stories linger, waiting to be rediscovered and remembered.
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? Walmart Plus members save on meeting up with friends. Save on having them over for dinner with free delivery with no hidden fees or markups. That's groceries plus napkins plus that vegetable chopper to make things a bit easier. Plus, members save on gas to go meet them in their neck of the woods. Plus, when you're ready for the ultimate sign of friendship, you can go to Walmart.com.
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