Jury selection is set to begin Thursday in the trial of a Bangor man accused of the 1984 slaying of an 18-year-old Calais woman.
Raymond Brown, 67, was charged with murder last year in the death of Linda Maxwell, whose body was found Aug. 25, 1984, along the St. Croix River shoreline in Robbinston, a small Washington County coastal town.
Jury selection will take two days and opening statements will begin Monday, Oct. 5, according to a spokesperson for the Maine Judicial Branch. The trial is expected to last two weeks, the spokesperson said.
Brown’s trial in Machias will be the latest chapter in a cold case that has spanned more than four decades. The case remained unsolved for years until a recent investigation by the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit led to the grand jury indictment.
If found guilty, Brown could be sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
A local man discovered the teenager’s naked body near Robbinston Boat Landing two days after she was last seen out with friends in Calais, according to the Bangor Daily News archives.
The state’s chief medical examiner ruled her death a drowning, police said at the time. Maxwell didn’t have any visual wounds or bruises on her body, and her clothes were never found.
Maxwell, the daughter of the late Cleveland and Nancy Maxwell and sister to Patricia, Frank and Wayne Maxwell, was a member of the Woodland Baptist Church in Baileyville.
She was described as a “sweet, quiet girl” by Heather Henry-Tenan, who was among the last people to see Maxwell alive outside a local teen hangout in Calais, two days before her body was discovered. Henry-Tenan, who began reporting for the Calais Advertiser in 1991, annually recapped the cold case, pleading for anyone with information to come forward.
Brown, who was living in Pembroke at the time of Maxwell’s death, had five criminal convictions prior to the slaying, including felony burglary and simple assault. In the mid-1980s, he twice was charged with gross sexual misconduct and also was accused once of rape, according to BDN archives.
A gross sexual misconduct charge was dismissed in September 1984 after a grand jury declined to indict Brown. He was found not guilty in July of the same year on the rape allegation. A second gross sexual misconduct case against Brown was dismissed in September 1985.
In October 1977, Brown escaped from Washington County Jail shortly after his first arrest for felony burglary. Brown and two other inmates employed spoons and a metal pipe to carve a hole in the Machias jail’s ceiling and roof during their escape, though he and one other man returned to the jail the next day.
Attorneys Steve Smith and Justine Berry of Augusta, who are representing Brown, did not respond Monday to inquiries from the Bangor Daily News.