WARREN, Maine — A man who had served two years of a 20-year sentence for a 1976 homicide after being linked to the crime by his DNA died about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, according to the Maine Department of Corrections.
Gary Sanford Raub, 67, formerly of Seattle, died at Pen Bay Medical Center in Rockport, Jody Breton, deputy commissioner, said in a press release.
“Consistent with the department’s policy and the Maine attorney general’s office protocols, the Maine State Police and the medical examiner were notified,” she said. “Both are reviewing the death.”
Raub was arrested in October 2012 in Washington state in connection with the death of Blanche M. Kimball, whose body was found in her State Street home in Augusta on June 12, 1976. An autopsy determined she had been stabbed multiple times.
Raub’s arrest set a record for the oldest cold case arrest in Maine history.
In a plea agreement with prosecutors, he was sentenced in June 2014 in Kennebec County Superior Court to 20 years in prison for second-degree criminal homicide. That was the mandatory minimum for the crime 40 years ago when the state classified criminal homicides in six degrees, according to a previously published report.
Raub, who was going by the name Gary Robert Wilson at the time of the slaying, was extradited to Maine from Washington state in January 2014. He was linked to the cold murder case through DNA evidence after he took part in an undercover “chewing gum survey” in Seattle that police staged. He had rented a room from Kimball in 1976 and was the prime suspect in her murder from the beginning, according to the affidavit filed in the case. Raub denied involvement in her death and left the state a few years later.
He surfaced in fall 2012 in Seattle after he was suspected in the stabbing of another transient. Maine State Police Detective Abbe Chabot, who had taken over the cold case in 2003, worked with Seattle police to match blood from the knife used in the West Coast stabbing to blood found at the Augusta murder scene.
In July 2012, a Seattle police detective posed as a market researcher and asked Raub to participate in a “chewing gum survey,” for which he would be paid $5. Raub agreed, according to the affidavit. The gum he chewed was sent to the Maine State Police Crime Lab, where investigators concluded that the DNA matched a blood drop found on the kitchen drawer of Kimball’s residence after her murder.
Former BDN writer Alex Barber contributed to this report.