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Missing Children, Part 4

Twenty Years And No Answers

By Kevin Canfield
Originally published in The Hartford Courant, April 15, 2001
Part 4 of 5

James Rodney Hicks strangled his first wife in Maine in 1977. Recently he pleaded guilty in a court there to killing two other women.

Hick’s admission closed a pair of old cases, but added another name to the list of suspects in a 20-year-old murder.

Joyce McLain, 16, was killed behind her high school in East Millinocket, Maine, on a steamy summer night in 1980. She was an accomplished musician and popular honor student, and her death stunned the mill town of 2,000 people.

Police, already taking a hard look at imprisoned serial killer Joseph Albert for Joyce’s slaying, say they now must also consider Hicks a suspect. They have, after all, little in the way of physical evidence and no witnesses.

The fact that authorities are even looking at Hicks and Albert illustrates the desperate measures police sometimes take to solve abductions like McLain’s.

“Anybody who’s committed three murders doesn’t value human life and could have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and could have murdered Joyce McLain,” said Lt. J. Darrell Ouellette, commander of the Maine state police criminal investigation division.

Joyce was a cheerleader and a member of the soccer and tennis teams who stayed in shape by jogging regularly. On Aug. 8 she had gone for a run at around 7 p.m. She was expected home within an hour, but didn’t show up.

“By 9 o’clock I was uptight,” recalls Joyce’s mother. “By 10 it was worse, and by midnight I was like a mad lady running around this town.”

Pam McLain’s search for her daughter in those early morning hours of Saturday, Aug. 9, turned up nothing. By sunup, she had called the police.

Local officers, friends, family and neighbors searched for Joyce all day. A few people had seen her running by the previous night, her blond hair pinned up off her shoulders.

Joyce’s nude body was found early Sunday, Aug. 10, near one of Schenck High School’s soccer fields.

Her head was smashed in. The murder weapon was so unusual that police have never said what they believe it is, assuming the killer would be the only one with knowledge of it.

Pam McLain was sitting quietly in her bedroom on that muggy Sunday morning. She knew the next time she saw the local police chief he would not be bringing good news.

“If I don’t go downstairs,” McLain remembers thinking, “I won’t ever have to hear anything bad.”

But the voices of friends who had gathered outside the house were growing louder, and McLain broke the pact she had made with herself. She went downstairs to hear the awful news: Her daughter was dead.

A Disadvantage

To this day police who investigated the crime differ on who they believe killed Joyce. Some think it’s Albert.

Albert served five years in prison after shooting his girlfriend in 1974 in South Brewer, Maine. He was paroled in May 1980—three months before Joyce was killed. Three years later, in March 1983, Albert beat a female college student to death in LaGrange, Maine. He was subsequently sentenced to 70 years in prison.

Police say he has denied killing Joyce McLain.

Hicks, meanwhile, claims he was 100 miles away the night McLain was slain. Police concede he probably isn’t the killer—at least not the one they’re looking for—but they are reluctant to rule him out.

Others, including Pam McLain, are convinced a local person committed the crime. But torrential rains that weekend might have washed away clues that would lead to the killer.

“Maybe some trace evidence—hairs, fibers from the killer—could have been washed away. Right from the start we were at a disadvantage,” said Barry Shuman, one of the original state police investigators, who has since retired.

Complicating matters was the fact that construction crews and softball teams preparing to play in a big tournament had almost doubled the number of people in town that weekend.

Police thought they had a break in the case when a young local man who had been injured when he smashed up a truck the night Joyce disappeared awoke from seven weeks in a coma.

The rumor spread around town that the man had crashed deliberately because he was guilt-ridden over killing Joyce. When he regained consciousness he confessed to the crime. But he had all the details wrong.

“He was off-base enough so that we knew we were talking with the wrong individual,” Ouellette said.

On a recent chilly night Pam McLain dug out box after box containing newspaper clippings about the crime, as well as Joyce’s personal items, including report cards, sneakers and commendations for her proficiency on the tenor saxophone.

Pam McLain rarely visits Joyce’s grave these days.

A picture of her daughter that was attached to the headstone a few years ago has started to fade from the sun, and Pam says it just causes her too much pain.

“I can handle her being there, but I can’t handle the picture fading away,” she said. “It’s like I’m losing her twice.”