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Hey.
This is Murder, She Told. True crime stories from Maine, New England, and small town USA.
I'm Kristen Sevey. You can connect with the show at MurderSheTold.com or on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast. This episode contains descriptions that are graphic in nature and also describes attempted suicide. If this is a trigger for you, please listen with care.
"'It is undoubtedly the most hideous and dastardly crime I have ever known,' the medical examiner, Dr. Weissman said, as he left the autopsy room. Sheriff Ludwig agreed, "'It's the worst thing that's happened in Knox County while I've been here.'" Leaves crunched under his shoes and the sun's last rays pried their way into his squinted eyes as John walked down Crescent Street.
He had an errand to run. John and Albert lived on the same street. Merely its name changed as you crossed Main Street. John knocked on his neighbor's door. He had gotten fed up with his stepdaughter's long absences. It had been a week since he'd seen Pauline.
Albert came to the door and John asked for her. It's time to come home, Pauline. She was just 16 years old but had a mind of her own and John was growing impatient with her. She obliged and they walked home, their backs to the setting sun. It was Halloween night. When they arrived home around 5.30 p.m., John asked his daughter, Rachel, who was 11, to call his wife at work and let her know that Pauline was back.
Rachel got her on the line, and Thelma asked to keep Pauline at home until she could get there at 7 p.m. Then the kids, Rachel and her younger brother Bernard, went out trick-or-treating, leaving Pauline and John alone.
John, in his authoritarian way, said that her days of staying overnight away from the house were over and that her wings were getting clipped. She was livid. She said that she was going back to Albert's, saying, "'To hell with supper, to hell with you, and to hell with mother.'" John locked all the doors, daring her to try and leave.
Pauline grabbed a knife from the kitchen and came at John. He grabbed the closest weapon, a hammer, and threw it at her, hitting her in the forehead and rendering her instantly unconscious. She crumpled to the floor, face down. John rolled her over, checked her pulse, checked her breathing, and discovered that he had killed his wife's daughter with a single blow.
He panicked. Who would believe that a husky stoneworker like him could have felt threatened by a 16-year-old girl? Who would believe that he acted in self-defense? He had to think fast. He picked up her body and moved it downstairs in the cellar as a temporary measure. He cleaned up the kitchen from their struggle. He'd figure out what to do with the body later.
When Thelma got home from work at 7 p.m., John told her that Pauline could not be reined in. He recounted her angry tirade and said that she refused to stay at their home any longer, that she was running off to get married. He said that she left, probably to Albert's, and Thelma accepted her daughter's decision, saying, if she felt that way, perhaps it was for the best.
Their children had gotten back home from playing in the neighborhood. They had supper together, and then Thelma and the kids went to a Halloween party, leaving John alone with his thoughts. It was a Thursday evening, and John knew that the following day his wife would be at work at Rockland's Almshouse, a town-subsidized home for the poor, and the children would be at the elementary school on Purchase Street. He would have more time to work without interruption then.
Thelma, Rachel, and Bernard went to bed that night, but John couldn't sleep, knowing what he had done and what gruesome task awaited him tomorrow. When he shut the door to his home after ushering his children off to school, he breathed a sigh of relief. His family hadn't discovered his secret. But what now? John lived in a duplex at 28 Crescent Street, right in the heart of Rockland, Maine.
He couldn't just carry a body to the ocean. He had neighbors and foot traffic on all sides. So he improvised. He gathered up some sharp tools and went to work, dissecting Pauline's 16-year-old frame into pieces that would fit into burlap bags. Using an axe and a kitchen knife, he cleaved her body into six parts, placing each in its respective container. He buried some of them under his porch, which he cleverly accessed through a basement window.
He worked in the shallow crawlspace beneath the porch deck, which was concealed by a wooden trellis, dug a trench, and buried two of the bags there. He covered them with dirt and placed two wooden planks on top to conceal the disturbed soil. He had four to go.
There was some cover in the backyard where there were some outbuildings. At first, he considered working within the buildings, but the shed was chock full of coal and the henhouse had a wooden floor. But there were a few feet between the shed and the henhouse where he wouldn't be too exposed to nosy neighbors. He grabbed his shovel and went to work. When he finished, he made three trips inside, bringing one sack per trip and deposited them into the earth.
He covered the soil and then asked a couple of neighbors to move his children's playhouse into the tight spot and conceal the turned soil. The final sack would have to wait for the cover of darkness. His family returned home from their routine daily schedule, and he tried to maintain normalcy, but he felt nervous and wild.
After they went to bed, John picked up the final sack and walked to the salty shore of Rockland Harbor. He picked up a heavy rock and stowed it in the bag next to Pauline's head. He cinched the bag shut, bound it with rope, and walked it to the end of the pier by Rackleth and Witham Lobster Company. With his considerable strength, he hurled the bag into the harbor and collapsed. What had he done?
On Tuesday, November 5th, five days after he'd killed Pauline, John went to the police and reported her missing. He had a part to play, the concerned father. The chief of police remembered Thelma telling him to have Pauline picked up if he found her on the street. Little did John know, neighbors were growing suspicious.
His neighbors Marion Allen and her boarders Ruel and Ruby were only separated from John's family by a thin wall, and Marion had been home all Halloween night.
She remembered hearing a woman scream four times, and then a heavy fall, after which all was quiet except the radio. She then heard Thelma return from work and say to John three times, I can't, Daddy. Thelma was accustomed to calling her husband Daddy. After all, he was 21 years her senior, she being 33 and he being 54. What terrible thing had John asked his wife to do?
and Marion heard John pacing all night, walking up and down the stairs. She could feel the heat radiating from the walls. He had built two heavy fires, one in the kitchen range and another in the parlor stove. She was suspicious of the purpose of those fires. The next day, Marion was home again and thought John was acting wild.
She saw him carefully studying every car that approached the vicinity. She remembered him busily washing clothes and cleaning, paying particular attention to the floor. And she watched John prepare a fire in his driveway, which in addition to the ordinary wood and refuse, he also burned some clothes. Ruel, Marion's boarder, saw John carrying bags between the henhouse and the duplex, and he heard him working in the cellar.
And aside from the direct observations, Albert Wilson, at whose home Pauline had been staying, was incredulous of the story that he'd been told, that Pauline had run off to get married. He started asking about her around town, alerting others to her disappearance. Alice Rich, from nearby State Street, happened to drop by the Phelps' home, and John asked her if she, quote, noticed an awful smell. She took note of this strange question.
Stories were circulating around the Phelps' home, and on Thursday, a week after the killing, Marion decided to act. She went to the sheriff of Knox County, Earl Ludwig, and told him everything she knew. The sheriff recalled Marion coming into his office and opening up about her fears that something terrible had befallen Pauline. She became so unglued during her telling that he fetched a doctor to treat her.
Moved by her impassioned plea, Earl called up the county district attorney and asked him to hold the grand jury, which had been convened that week for another couple of days. He thought this might be an open-and-shut case. He figured if he could present evidence to a jury in the next day or two, he might just have an indictment within days. The wheels of justice moved a lot faster in 1940.
The sheriff, a deputy sheriff, and a Maine State Police lieutenant, Leon Shepard, all went to the Phelps' home that evening to look into the matter. John was home and answered the door.
Earl recalled that he was very calm and invited them to search wherever they liked. Following the tip from Marion, they made an especially careful search of the two stoves. But Leon believed that neither would have been large enough to dispose of a 130-pound body. They went to the cellar and John invited them to use the short-handled shovel that was laying against the foundation wall to dig around. He fetched them a pickaxe that was out in the shed.
They used the tools to poke around for a bit, but their thorough search revealed nothing unusual. John said simply that she had gathered her clothing and run away on the night of Halloween. After further routine questioning, the officers left. That might have been the end of the story of Pauline, if it hadn't have been for what happened on Saturday morning.
It was the early morning hours of Saturday, November 9th. The temperatures had dropped in the 20s, and what little moisture was left had been wrenched out in the still air. Fog had settled in overnight. Rockland patrolman Ronald Suckeforth was doing his rounds on the cobblestone streets and dirt roads when he came across a middle-aged man covered with blood. His left wrist was slashed with a razor.
He was wandering dazedly near the police station on Union Street. The officer took him straight to Knox County Hospital, where Dr. Weissman took over his care. The man said that he had taken five poisonous tablets, mercury bichloride, and that when those failed to work, he tried to take his own life by cutting his left wrist. He also told the doctor that there was an important note in one of his pockets, a truth he wished to tell.
Dr. Weissman searched his pockets and discovered a slip of paper, scrawled with a handful of simple words, that revealed that the man before him, John Phelps, had killed his stepdaughter. He immediately notified the sheriff of his discovery.
The sheriff, the Knox County District Attorney, and Police Chief Arthur Fish were all roused around 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning and made it to the hospital shortly after 4 a.m. Dr. Wiseman had sent word that his patient was in poor shape and there was no telling how long he might survive. They rushed to the hospital.
John told the three of them what he'd done, that he had killed Pauline with a hammer, divided her body into parts, stashed them into gunny sacks, and buried them. He even told them where he had hurled the last one into the harbor. The men summoned additional help and made their way to the Phelps' home on 28 Crescent Street, where they arrived just before sunrise. First,
They removed the latticework from below the front porch and shimmied into the crawlspace below the wooden deck. They found the boards that John had used to cover the disturbed earth and started digging. It wasn't long before they found the first two sacks. Dr. Weissman, borrowing a knife from a newspaper reporter, slit the ropes that bound the sack and revealed the right thigh and groin. The second sack contained both legs, still clad with stockings. They
They staged them in an ambulance. Other officers searched the interior of the house, hoping to find a murder weapon. John had said he used an axe, but no axe was discovered. They found a razor though that they thought might have been used in the butchery. By this point, Ruhle told the cops that he believed the sounds that he had heard coming from the cellar must have been digging.
and two neighborhood men, Leroy Firth and Harvey Curtis, came forward to tell police that John had asked them to help him place the playhouse in a strange spot. They went in the backyard and dug in the henhouse, but found nothing.
They then considered the coal-filled shed, but doubted that all the coal had been moved. They then looked at the strange location of the playhouse wedged between the other two buildings and decided to move it. Several officers lifted it up and revealed that the earth had been recently disturbed. A foot and a half under the surface, they discovered a third sack, then a fourth, and then a fifth.
Dr. Weissman again cut the rope securing the bags and found first the left arm and upper left half of the body cut down a center line. In the fourth bag was the other thigh, and in the fifth was the right half of the body. According to the Portland Press-Herald, Dr. Weissman ordered the parts to be taken to Burpee Funeral Home, where he assembled the parts like a ghastly jigsaw puzzle.
He later told reporters that some of the internal organs were never found. While the search was underway, Thelma and the two children went to the Almshouse where she worked to try and shield Rachel and Bernard from the gruesome scene. That afternoon, Dr. Weissman told reporters that he believed John wouldn't live more than a week. He was in critical condition.
Police headed to Witham's Wharf and started dragging the bottom of the harbor with grappling hooks, hoping to snag the bag that contained Pauline's head. They worked systematically, pulling up the hook from the cold water and plunging it back hundreds of times. They called the Coast Guard from Whitehead, and they came to help. There was an urgency to the search. The sooner they recovered the bag…
the better the condition would be, and the sooner they could examine the head to determine if John's story of a single hammer blow was truthful. Thelma and the children returned to the house where she had to tell them the horrific news about their half-sister Pauline.
Dr. Weissman conducted an autopsy on the remains the same day, and while he was occupied at the funeral home, police officers kept a 24-hour watch over John. Their concern was threefold, keeping him safe from some vigilante, keeping him safe from further self-harm, and preventing his, albeit unlikely, escape.
The county attorney had been unable to keep the grand jury any longer, and they had dispersed. Indictment would have to wait until the next time they met in February.
As the sun rose on Sunday, Thelma contemplated how much her life had changed in a single day. Her daughter was dead, her husband was infamous, and the search was still underway. Reporters grilled Thelma. What did she know and when? She told them, quote, "'Pauline was accustomed to visiting the Wilsons and other families and not returning home for a few days at a time. I didn't suspect anything was wrong.'"
The fishing boat, called the Althea J, continued combing the harbor's waters. But the chief of police told reporters that he had hired a diver from another town that would be able to do a more thorough search. Though he was in dire health, police helped John from his hospital bed to a police car and drove him to the wharf. They wanted to see exactly where he had thrown the final bag.
Reporters watched as he pointed out the spot in the silent waters before collapsing into tears. And just like that, he was whisked away, back to Knox County Hospital, and the men on the Althea J were left to their grim task.
The next day, Monday, November 11th, Dr. Weissman became more optimistic about John's prognosis, and Police Chief Fish said that John would be arraigned on a murder charge as soon as his condition permitted. The next day, John's condition worsened. Dr. Weissman explained that infection had set in where he cut his wrist, and his hand was badly swollen. The slow-acting poison exacerbated the situation.
If he made it through the next day, he would likely survive. But he was on the precipice of life and death. Police did another search of the property and discovered the head of an axe that was in the shed in the backyard. There was no handle, and the steel was badly damaged by fire. Reporters reasoned that the wooden handle had been burnt out of it. Police suspected it was the axe used to dismember Pauline.
A southeast storm rolled into the harbor and heavy seas put a temporary halt to the dragging operation. Marion Allen and her two boarders had packed up their things and moved to a nearby vacant home on South Main Street in Rockland. They were too disgusted by what had transpired on the other side of the thin walls of their duplex to live there any longer. Pauline's remains were transported to a tomb in Thomaston, where her burial would be.
Her biological father, Lowell Young, had died three years prior, and he had been buried in Thomaston Cemetery, where he was from. But it's strange that she would be returned to her father, because in his obituary, Pauline wasn't even mentioned as a surviving daughter. A headstone marked Lowell's grave, and she would be buried right next to him. On Wednesday in Rockland, Dr. Weissman told reporters that John continued to heal, but would uncontrollably burst into tears.
Dragging operations continued in the harbor, and they waited for the contracted diver to arrive. Skepticism grew amongst the searchers and the community as to whether the head was actually where John said it was.
On Thursday, the fever had finally broken. Dr. Weissman shared the news that there was much improvement in John's condition. And on Friday, John was discharged from the hospital. At the same moment, an arrest warrant was issued by local judge Zelma Dwinnell. John was taken to the county jail and booked on a charge of murder.
The next day, John was brought up the basement stairs at the courthouse to face Judge Dwindle. His face was covered with several days of stubby beard growth, and he wore working clothes. When he spotted the photography apparatus of cameraman, he shielded his face with both of his hands.
He'd been assigned an attorney, Harry Wilbur, a judge in the probate court system. John faced Judge Dwindle as he read the charge, the murder of his stepdaughter, Alzada Pauline Young. John pled not guilty. The judge ordered him held without bail for the next three months, when the grand jury would convene in February for the next term of superior court. And better late than never, the diver, Frank Hansen,
arrived to search the harbor. Frank got his preparations underway, working with Captain John Snow and his boat called Hugh. He recruited a couple of local men to operate the air pump that would be stationed on the boat. And on Sunday, he got in the water and started looking around, connected to the surface with an umbilical cord.
By Monday afternoon, though, they threw in the towel. The Bangor Daily News stated that the bag might have been carried a considerable distance by tidal currents, or even currents generated by the large tankers of Standard Oil Company, which operate out of the company's plant at the Atlantic Wharf near the search area.
On November 30th, the Rockland Courier-Gazette published a story that revealed that Thelma and her two remaining children planned to move to Danforth, John's hometown, a tiny town near Holton, Maine, on the eastern border of Canada. By the time the story appeared, she had already resigned from her job at the Almshouse.
The reporter pressed her again on her potential involvement with Pauline's murder. She insisted, When Pauline went to a neighbor's home a week before Halloween, it was the last time I ever saw her. I asked the authorities to help find her in connection to that previous disappearance, and if she could have returned at that time, this dreadful thing probably never would have happened.
The night she did come home, I returned between 6 and 7 p.m., and John told me that she'd gone away to get married. On the following Monday, December 2, 1940, Thelma left Rockland, never to live there again. She had divorced John and would remarry again in 1942 to Frederick Mailman.
After holding her remains for a month, Pauline's body was buried in Thomaston on December 14th next to her father. A reverend at the local federated church officiated the ceremony. Her mother was not present, but two of her uncles were there.
Her body had only been resting for 40 days when Maine's Attorney General, Frank Cohen, ordered the medical examiner's office to perform a second autopsy. On January 23rd, her remains were disinterred and another examination was done at the local funeral home. All of the key players from Rockland and Knox County law enforcement were there to attend, including Dr. Wiseman, who performed the initial autopsy.
Her remains were immediately reburied. Officials were tight-lipped with the press about what they hoped to determine. John's trial was imminent.
There must have been some concern about John's defense succeeding because the Knox County District Attorney wanted to see a change in the law. State Legislator Representative from Rockland, Cleveland Sleeper, told reporters that he was drafting a bill that would make it an automatic charge of murder against anyone who dismembered or disposed of a human body.
On February 9th, Portland Press published an article hyping up the trial. John was reported to be well-behaved in jail.
On Tuesday, the first session of 1941 of Knox County Superior Court began. They had a new judge, Raymond Fellows, and he had a cheeky sense of humor. He said to the esteemed gathering, I know I shall enjoy the term. And with a twinkle in his eye, he said, time will tell whether or not you do.
That same day, the grand jury convened and handed up three indictments against John. The murder charge, obviously, but also dismemberment of a body and abandonment of a body. Two weeks later, John appeared before Judge Fellows for his second arraignment. He was escorted through the courtroom by Sheriff Earl Ludwick and another deputy. The courtroom was filled to overflowing. John wore blue jeans, a blue shirt, and horn-rimmed glasses.
As part of the typical questions of identification, John began to sob when requested to give the name of his ex-wife, Thelma Phelps, who was in fact present at the time in another building next to the courthouse. John, officials said, had refused to see her or their two children, Rachel and Bernard, who had come from Danforth to support him. Judge Fellows read the charges against him and asked how he pled.
And to the surprise of everyone present, John replied, "'Guilty, Your Honor.'" The judge asked if John wanted to make any statements before being sentenced. John just sobbed convulsively and said that he never intended to kill his stepdaughter, saying, "'That kid came at me with a knife. I didn't mean to hit her.'" He then sobbed so loudly that reporters couldn't understand the rest of his speech.
The prosecutor motioned for sentence to be immediately imposed and Judge Fellows obliged. He imposed a sentence of hard labor at the Maine State Prison in Thomaston for the rest of John's life. The entire proceeding only took five minutes, and then John was returned to the county jail to await transportation to Thomaston.
That afternoon, Earl and his deputy took him to prison. With him was a box of candy and some small packages that had been sent to him by his sister in Connecticut.
A smug editorial appeared in the Rockland Courier-Tribune three days later, in their Sunday edition. It read, "...the County of Knox, the men and women who pay the taxes, and the citizens at large, are to be congratulated upon the capable manner in which the Phelps murder case was handled by the city and county authorities, and the speedy manner in which it was disposed of by the Superior Court."
A protracted trial would have drawn countrywide attention to the shocking case, for which nobody was responsible except an enraged man, upon whom remorse fell quickly, and which would have placed a heavy burden of expense upon the county. With nothing to gain by further publicity, Phelps did the right thing in pleading guilty, and the sordid story has become a closed book.
John had been in jail in Thomaston for 23 years when in 1963 he petitioned Maine's governor and the executive council for a pardon. He said that he was 73 years old, in poor health, and had spent much of the last 15 years in the prison hospital. He said he felt sufficiently punished, fully rehabilitated, and wished to spend, quote, his last few days with his family.
On February 6th, the attorney representing him went to the hearing and explained that John had an acute bronchial disease, and what he termed rheumatism, which likely referred to rheumatoid arthritis. He said that John's only prayer was to, quote, return home and try to live like a decent citizen. He told the council that John had been a model prisoner, and that his daughter was willing to give him a home.
A few weeks later, the council responded, rejecting the petition. But he tried again the following year in 1964, and the council relented. John was paroled officially on March 17, 1964, and taken in by his daughter, Rachel Rainey Phelps, who was just 11 when he went to prison.
According to prison records, he was re-paroled a year later, on March 6, 1965, which suggested that he had somehow violated his parole conditions and was re-incarcerated. Three years later, on August 28, 1968, John died at the age of 81 in East Hartford, Connecticut, near where Rachel lived, and he was buried in Summers, Connecticut, in West Cemetery.
Pauline's headstone in Thomaston, which was installed right next to her father's, no longer stands today. According to a comment on Find-a-Grave, her stone was destroyed and removed.
Pauline's life was likely a difficult one. Her mother got married at just 15 years old to 26-year-old Lowell Young, and Pauline was her mother's second child at just 17. When she was a toddler, her parents got divorced, and it's unclear whether she ever even knew her father. Judging by the omission of her name in his obituary, likely not.
Her mother remarried when she was just four years old to John Phelps, a man with two previous marriages and seven biological children, none of whom lived with him. One of his sons had reportedly disowned him. Pauline was forced to drop out of school in the fifth grade to stay home and help with housework while her mother worked. She was only 10 years old. Her biological father, if she ever knew him, died in 1937 when she was just 13.
Pauline, by her early teens, was doing everything she could to stay away from home and from her stepfather, John. And by 16, she was killed in either a tragic accident or a homicidal rage.
A strange coincidence was noticed by Rockland residents and reported on by the Bangor Daily News. There was a classified ad that appeared in the Rockland Courier Gazette for a girl's bicycle right around the time of Pauline's death. Upon closer inspection, we discovered that the ad was run on four dates over the period of a week. The first one was on the night of Halloween, the same date that John killed Pauline.
We believe, at the time, a Courier Tribune was printed in the afternoons and distributed in the evening. The classified ad read, It then listed the Phelps address and, presumably, a phone number.
The cost for classified ads was 25 cents for a single print and 50 cents for three. For it to have appeared in the Halloween evening paper, the ad must have been submitted no later than that morning, perhaps by noon at the latest, which was five hours before Pauline's death. Is it a coincidence? Or was John planning to get rid of any trace of Pauline, including her bike?
This story became a legend in the Rockland community. People comment on it even today on blog posts about the murder. They always thought it was a myth and were stunned to learn that it's true. The house became known as a haunted house. Kids were fearful of going near it. There was speculation of what happened to Pauline's head. Perhaps it was not discarded in the bay. Some people hated Halloween from that night on.
One longtime Rockland resident wrote, "'My mom lived nearby on Thomaston Street when this happened. She was about eight years old, and she said to me she believed he threw her head in the quarry behind the church. He passed by my mom and her younger sister carrying a bag that resembled a human head.'"
Another woman wrote, My father told me that his mother saw John walking down Thomaston Street with a burlap bag. She asked him what he was doing, and he said he was going to drown kittens in the quarry. That same woman said, I actually lived in that building when I was about 17. I hated being home alone. I always got an eerie feeling about the place.
In a Rockland history book covering the 1940s, which was published in 1991, one of the authors, Theodore Sylvester, wrote in a chapter entitled Youthful Recollections the impression that the tragedy left on him. "'I grew up playing on the streets of the neighborhood. There was a lot of speculation and stories going around. The one that impressed us most was that the Phelps' home was forever haunted and that the head was buried under the porch.'"
It was literally years before any of us would walk past the house, day or night. Sometimes we would race past the house on our bicycles, but that was the extent of our courage. If you take a trip to Rockland today, it's beautiful. The harbor is filled with sailboats and lobster boats. The streets are lined with beautiful brick buildings. But underneath the surface is a dark chapter and a haunting mystery that still lingers today.
I want to thank you so much for listening. I am so grateful that you chose to tune in and I couldn't be here without you. Thank you. If you would like to support the show, there's a link in the show notes with options. Another way to support is telling a friend, sharing on social media, or leaving a review. A detailed list of sources and photos can be found at MurderSheTold.com. Thank you to Byron Willis for his writing and research. Additional thanks to Michelle Soulier for her research support.
If you have a story that needs to be told or a correction, I would love to hear from you. My only hope is that I've kept the memories of your loved ones alive. I'm Kristen Sevey, and this is Murder, She Told. Thank you for listening.