A former East Holden man serving a 70-year sentence for the 1983 murder of a hitchhiker died Tuesday morning at the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, according to the Maine Department of Corrections.
Harold Glidden, 74, was one of two men convicted of murdering Orono resident Justine Renee Gridley in LaGrange.
Joseph Albert, now 77, pleaded guilty to the murder and is serving a 70-year sentence, according to the Bangor Daily News archives. He is incarcerated at the Maine State Prison in Warren.
Glidden’s death was not related to COVID, the department said in announcing his death.
At a trial on burglary and theft charges in March 1984, Glidden testified that on March 17, 1983, he and Albert picked up a girl, wearing a McDonald’s restaurant uniform, hitchhiking along Route 2 in Veazie. Albert, Glidden said, drove to a woods road in LaGrange, where he raped her, killed her with two blows from a brass hammer and dragged the body to a clearing off the road.
Glidden was convicted by a jury on the murder charge in May 1984.