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City Confidential Season 8 Episode 9
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00:00People are saying this happens in a big city like Chicago, but East Millinocket, me? No way.
00:18We were just very afraid that something would happen again, that we didn't know who it was.
00:25I was stunned. I was numb.
00:28I just couldn't grasp the thought, couldn't process it.
00:34It went from the town that paper-making made to the town that murdered me.
00:43My dad came into the kitchen and told me they had found her.
00:48Just the way he said it, I knew.
00:50From the pulsating streets of big cities to Main Street USA, no neighborhood is safe from the unthinkable.
01:02These are the stories of innocence lost, of communities changed forever.
01:06This is City Confidential.
01:11Tucked away in the country's northeasternmost corner is East Millinocket, Maine.
01:27This tiny town on the edge of the state's vast forest was founded by farmers in 1829.
01:34It didn't take long for the people who settled here to realize they weren't just surrounded by beauty, but also resources.
01:42In the late 1800s, while famed author Henry David Thoreau was boasting about East Millinocket's splendor in his popular book, The Maine Woods,
01:53Workers were busy constructing a paper mill in the Great Northern Paper Company, and the majestic birch trees and rushing Penobscot River provided all the tools needed to keep it churning and the economy booming.
02:13Soon, it was known as the busiest paper mill in the world, and its top customers were the most prominent newspapers along the East Coast.
02:21There was a tremendous amount of pride in the town, and hardworking, blue collar, working in the mill.
02:29It was just very common, you know, when you graduated, that's what you were going to do.
02:35You're going to work in the mill, you're going to have a good job, you're going to be secure in employment, and that carried through multiple generations at that time.
02:45At the turn of the century, the town that paper made continued to flourish as the community took shape.
02:53But hardworking New Englanders learned that even though they were successful, living in this isolated area took teamwork.
03:02Through icy winters, the flu pandemic of 1918, and even the Great Depression, where mill workers volunteered to give up shifts so no one would get laid off, locals always had each other's backs.
03:16And as a typical Maine town, with a paper mill, the houses were close together, the families were close together, they went to ballgames on Friday night, they went to church socials on the weekend, they just were hardworking, very close-knit community.
03:37A great way to describe East Wallnock, it would be one big family.
03:43Absolutely, it was a place that you trusted everyone, you didn't ever feel like you didn't know someone in town, you knew people, you knew the children growing up.
03:59Today, the 1,600 people who live here still put each other first.
04:03And even though the mill closed back in 2014, it stands as a rusted symbol of East Millinocket's celebrated past.
04:12But tucked inside this town is another reminder of the past, a sad one, that haunted the place for more than 30 years.
04:21It's a hot summer weekend, the biggest and busiest the town has ever seen.
04:39The paper mill has just hired 300 new workers to rebuild a boiler.
04:45And the high school is hosting a girls' state softball tournament.
04:48People are flooding the area from every pocket of New England, and the town is buzzing with excitement.
04:57There was some parties going on in town, and there was a lot of mischief-type things with some of the kids, and there was also more serious things.
05:07But the story that stands out the most is the one where a team goes out on the town and drinks too much, and takes a dangerous joyride at 2 a.m. that ends in a violent crash with a parked car.
05:20He had gone to the garage, broken to get inside, got in an oil truck that delivered all home-eating oils to homes, drove it through the doors, and continued down the road for a short ways and rolled the truck over.
05:37He was injured pretty severely, had head trauma, broken bones, and was taken to the local hospital in Bangor, where he was in a coma.
05:53Police spend the night cleaning up the wreck.
05:55Then, just after 1 p.m., the emergency line at the East Millinocket PD rings again.
06:05Local resident Pam McLean says she didn't sleep a wink all night.
06:10She's been out looking for her 16-year-old daughter, Joyce, who went for a jog around 7.30 p.m. and never came home.
06:17It's a fairly regular thing to have young people leave home, and parents obviously become concerned, and if they're not back exactly when they're supposed to, they would call.
06:29Generally, we wait for a period of time to see if they come back.
06:35But Pam says there's cause for concern.
06:38This is out of character for her responsible daughter, an athlete who's getting ready for the upcoming soccer season.
06:44We'd learned that her usual jog would be jogging out behind the school and jogging around the soccer field a few times, consistent with a cross-country loop.
07:01Pam believed Joyce was wearing a pink terrycloth jogging outfit, two-piece top and bottom.
07:07Police quickly issue a teletype alert to every state and local agency, advising them to be on the lookout for Joyce.
07:16Then they begin a search for her in town.
07:20The police start talking to everybody and anybody that knows Joyce, anybody that saw Joyce that night, anybody that might have talked to Joyce.
07:32And all of East Millinocket wants to help.
07:34Her reputation was well-known throughout the community as, you know, just an all-American great girl, very popular.
07:44One neighbor tells police he saw Joyce jogging toward the high school at 7.45 p.m.
07:51Around the same time, another neighbor says there were some kids hanging around the high school.
07:56But the neighbor didn't get a good look at any of them.
07:58And cops broke up the group pretty quickly, so he doesn't know if Joyce was there.
08:05Cops head to the high school, but there's no sign of Joyce.
08:10Everybody was on pins and needles and people were visibly upset because they all knew Joyce.
08:18And Joyce was a very well-known and very well-liked member of the town.
08:24Joyce grew up here.
08:28She is the older of two girls.
08:31Her family, like so many others in the area, are honest, hardworking, and happy, but not without some sadness.
08:39When Joyce was just two years old, her father died in a construction accident.
08:44A few years later, her mother remarried Mike McClain.
08:50He adopted Joyce and her sister as his own.
08:53And Joyce blossomed.
08:56She was a scholar.
08:58She was very bright.
08:59She was a cheerleader.
09:01She was very gifted musically.
09:04Joyce always wore the coolest clothes.
09:06I do remember thinking she, when the Earth shoes were in style, and she had the brand Earth shoes, and I think I had the Woolworth brand or something.
09:19But Joyce always had the name brand, and she did have a great sense of style.
09:23But for the past few months, teenage Joyce was dealing with some adult things at home.
09:33Her mother and her stepdad's marriage had crumbled, and Joyce took it hard.
09:38We were afraid she ran away, that she had had some fight with her mom, or something had happened that she just wanted to get away.
09:46As the hours ticked by, police realized it's crucial to put eyes on Joyce, fast.
09:54But this is New England, and Mother Nature has other plans.
10:01The weather turned, and it rained hard, and it rained hard for a long time.
10:06And there was a formal plan made to go out first thing Sunday morning on an organized search.
10:16Early the next day, family, friends, and neighbors form a volunteer search party to find Joyce.
10:24But before they can make any headway, another 911 call comes in.
10:29And suddenly, the town that paper made is ripped to shreds.
10:34Just 18 hours after Joyce McClain was reported missing, police get a phone call.
10:50A young man named Peter Larley was checking out a wooded path behind East Millinocket's high school and made a gruesome discovery.
10:58He came across a body that he believed to be Joyce McClain.
11:06Police immediately respond.
11:10She was nude.
11:12She was face down.
11:14And she had a ligature tied around her wrists.
11:18Her hands were bound behind her back.
11:20It was obvious that she had received a severe injury to the back of her skull.
11:32These are uncharted waters for local police.
11:35They haven't seen a murder here in more than four decades, so they want to move quickly and carefully.
11:42Within an hour, more than two dozen investigators from all over Maine begin pouring over the scene.
11:48The first thing they determined, this was not a body dump.
11:54Joyce was killed right where she was found.
11:58There was an area near the discovery of the body that was matted down that looked like it was a location of a potential struggle.
12:08In this area, they did find some of Joyce McClain's bobby pins and hair ties and hair ribbons as well.
12:15Near the body, they find a broken ceramic insulator, commonly used to protect electric wiring and phone lines from shorting out.
12:27It had a piece missing out of it, and the marks on her head matched the insulator.
12:33So we're quite certain that was the murder weapon.
12:39They located Joyce's clothes down a rock wall a short distance from the scene.
12:47It was a terrycloth.
12:50As I recall, it had blue stripe and a yellow on the shorts, and then the tank top.
12:56It matched exactly in Pam's description when she left.
13:01So that was a very strong indicator that that was her clothing.
13:07Cops take pictures and draw sketches, but know they're handicapped by the weather the day before.
13:14If the killer had been injured during the attack, his blood evidence had most likely been washed away.
13:19As police continue searching for clues, news of Joyce's murder rockets through town.
13:32I'll never forget, I was emptying the dishwasher, and my dad came into the kitchen, and then that's when he told me.
13:41His words were, they found Joyce, and just the way he said it, I knew.
13:57Not in a million years would I ever thought that someone that I grew up with was, you know, murdered right there in East Wollinocket.
14:11It was just, I was stunned.
14:14I was numb.
14:15I was, just couldn't grasp the thought, couldn't process it.
14:20People are saying, this happens in a big city like Chicago or Boston or, you know, somewhere like that.
14:34But East Wollinocket, Maine?
14:36No way.
14:38So they're all going, what's behind this?
14:42I mean, how could this happen?
14:43It became easier to say, well, listen, these people were up here for the ball tournament, and now you've got these people working at the mill.
14:56So would it be somebody that's, for whatever reason, happened to be in East Wollinocket that weekend?
15:05And according to that logic, there are a lot of potential suspects.
15:09Between the new mill workers and the softball tournament visitors, East Wollinocket's population nearly doubled over the weekend Joyce was murdered.
15:20Of course, we're going to have to get lists of people from the motels and so forth, people who are in the area.
15:25Do some background on some of those folks.
15:28Were any of them known pedophiles or other people who have been involved in criminal activity?
15:35And try to weed those folks out as best you can.
15:43Investigators spend the next two days staking out the softball tournament.
15:47They question groundskeepers and snap pictures of fans and players to document anyone new in town.
15:54After a grueling review, detectives strike out.
15:57It seems everyone who's here has good reason to be and can be accounted for during the time Joyce was murdered.
16:03So police head to the paper mill to vet the new workers.
16:09I know that there was some people of interest that they had to talk to.
16:15And I know that there was some people that they talked to more than once.
16:22In the end, each of the workers was either at the mill or had another confirmed alibi for Friday night.
16:28This tells cops this cold-blooded killer wasn't a visitor.
16:34He is local, living right here in East Millinocket.
16:38And he used the excitement of the town's biggest weekend ever as a cover for murder.
16:43Two days after Joyce McClain is found murdered, the coroner's report comes in.
16:58It reveals a clear case of overkill.
17:00There was significant blunt force trauma to her back, her chest, a skull fracture, laceration to her brain.
17:13She also had a broken jaw and significant bruising on her face.
17:19The mechanism of death was the insulator.
17:25But the biggest find was the fact that she had a tampon still in, which indicates that she wasn't vaginally assaulted.
17:36There was no indication that there was any anal penetration either.
17:40The time of death was estimated to be somewhere probably between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Friday evening.
17:52Turns out, during the time Joyce disappeared, most East Millinocket teens were at a party near the high school.
17:58It was crucial for the investigators at the time to go talk to these young people.
18:05What did they see? What did they hear?
18:08Try to get a timeline for each and every one of them, where they were throughout the evening, who they saw, who they associated with.
18:15Did anybody see Joyce McClain?
18:17One of the first people that would need to be ruled out as a potential suspect would be the person that found the body, Peter Larley.
18:26There was some concern within the community that he had set out on his own to look for Joyce McClain, rather than waiting for the rest of the search party.
18:39Peter Larley was a few years older than us.
18:42He was a big guy, but he seemed like the life of a party.
18:46You know, he was very, he was kind of goofy.
18:49He wasn't someone that I would have thought anything of.
18:54Being any part of something that had happened, but seemed strange that Peter Larley wasn't like a close friend of the family's, that he would do this, you know, on his own, because he was so worried about Joyce, and that he went to the exact location where she was.
19:14It wouldn't be uncommon for suspects to involve themselves in an investigation to keep an eye on what's going on, where the investigation is going.
19:29And there have been, you know, cases where the suspect is the one that found the body.
19:37When law enforcement brought him in, he said he just decided he wanted to go out and look, because he was concerned for Joyce.
19:44Detectives pressed Peter on his whereabouts the Friday night, Joyce went missing.
19:52He said, I was out with friends.
19:54We were out four-wheeling, mudding and all this stuff that people, young people do, and drinking, and he didn't hide any of that.
20:02And when they went and talked to the people that he said he was with, they all confirmed it.
20:05While Larley gets scratched off the suspect list,
20:13East Millinocket residents file into the Calvary Temple Assembly of God Church to say goodbye to Joyce McClain.
20:23Joyce's funeral was heart-wrenching, of course.
20:29It was packed, and yet you saw TV cameras, and there was that whole layer of the media.
20:35Being there, too, that just didn't feel right.
20:38But it reminded you that this wasn't, not that any losing a young life is normal at all, but this had a different edge to it.
20:48And wondering if whoever was a part of it is here, it felt like a blur.
20:55I just remember it just being this wave after wave, and there were just so many people, and we sat up front right behind Pam like we were the family,
21:11and people just kept walking by and by and by, and just that's what I remember, so many people, and so many tears.
21:22And still, so many questions.
21:32After just one week, it feels like police have looked at or talked to every East Millinocket resident or visitor, and still nothing.
21:40The only local who was out and about that night that they haven't talked to is Phillip Scott Fornier.
21:48He's the 19-year-old who stole and smashed that oil truck the night Joyce was killed.
21:53Maybe he knows something.
21:56But Scott's been in a coma ever since.
21:59Then police get word.
22:01He's awake.
22:02Five weeks after Joyce McLean was found murdered, East Millinocket police sit down with Phillip Scott Fornier.
22:21They hope he might have seen or heard something the night she was killed.
22:27Phillip Scott Fornier had dropped out of school.
22:30So he was a little older than Joyce McLean.
22:34You know, had a reputation in town.
22:37He was known to drink a little heavily.
22:40Being a little different than a lot of the other kids.
22:45When Scott was questioned by police, he said he didn't remember anything because he had this brain injury.
22:53He just remembered wrecking the truck.
22:57And that he never knew Joyce McLean.
23:00For police, it's just another dead end.
23:05The case grinds to a halt.
23:07When you get these investigations, it's not just paper you read and you go, okay.
23:12And then you go home and you forget about it.
23:14You go home and you're up nights.
23:16And you're saying, oh, man, did I miss something in that interview?
23:20Or what else could we have done?
23:23So, yeah, it affects us.
23:25And for the first time anyone can remember, folks aren't as friendly, especially to outsiders.
23:34It was just different.
23:35It was just different.
23:36There weren't as many kids out and about.
23:39The tennis court wasn't as busy.
23:41The basketball court wasn't as busy.
23:43Things had changed.
23:45People were fearful, especially parents.
23:51I think they became a lot more vigilant of where their children were, especially the teenagers.
23:57As the days wore on, we were just very afraid that something would happen again, that we didn't know who it was, that someone else was going to get killed.
24:11Were we safe?
24:12Months pass.
24:21Another freezing Maine winter comes and goes.
24:26But just like the crocuses that sprout from the hard New England earth in May of 1981, the case springs back to life.
24:34A local minister, Vinyl Thomas, calls the cops to report an alarming visit with one of his church members.
24:40This person was going through some personal turmoil and told his stepfather that he needed to go talk to somebody.
24:51And he specifically requested to go talk to Pastor Vinyl Thomas.
24:57Vinyl said that he admitted to killing Joyce McClain.
25:03And then the good pastor tells police his young confessor gave a very specific detail about the crime.
25:10He said that Joyce's murder was a sexual assault gone wrong because she had her period that night.
25:17And there was a tampon there and that prevented him from doing that.
25:23So when the investigators looked at that, they're like, how would this guy know that?
25:30Right.
25:31Those were details police never released to the public.
25:36So Pastor Vinyl's troubled parishioner shoots straight to the top of the suspect list.
25:42His name?
25:43Philip Scott Fornier.
25:46The same teenager who smashed the oil truck into a parked car and ended up in a coma.
25:53Fornier is immediately brought to the station for a formal interview.
25:57Now he's saying, well, I didn't do, I, I, I, I didn't do this.
26:04I didn't kill her.
26:05I wasn't involved in all this.
26:08Fornier has an explanation for everything.
26:11He says he's been having terrible nightmares ever since the truck accident.
26:15Some include Joyce.
26:16And he's not sure what's real and what's not.
26:19So he wanted to talk to the pastor to help sort things out.
26:23But considering Fornier knew such intimate details about Joyce, cops aren't letting him off the hook.
26:31They began to test his knowledge of the scene and ask him questions.
26:37And his details weren't correct.
26:40Didn't seem factual.
26:41Didn't seem to be relevant.
26:42After a long interview, investigators determined Fornier got lucky with one piece of information being right.
26:51But the rest of his account seems like the ramblings of a teenager who really did suffer some brain damage.
26:57They scratch him off the suspect list.
27:00For East Millinocket, hope that Joyce McClain's case will ever be solved is almost gone.
27:16Meanwhile, Pam McClain quietly holds her own private vigil for her daughter every night.
27:22Pam always had a picture of Joyce in the window and a candle.
27:27And the candle was always on.
27:30So you drive by and there's your reminder.
27:32You didn't have to be thinking about Joyce to go by and then, oh, there's the light.
27:39I felt bad for Pam.
27:41She was a beautiful lady and just, but you could see it.
27:44You know, you know somebody's troubled, you see it on their face and it was always there.
27:49Everybody has a heart locker.
27:53And when we don't have things and the answers that we need to find, we put things in our heart locker.
28:02And it builds up.
28:05Pam's heart locker was full and banging.
28:07Years go by.
28:14Pam's candle still burns like an eternal flame.
28:17She forms an organization called Justice for Joyce to keep her daughter's unsolved murder case in the public eye.
28:27Meanwhile, cops chase any lead they can.
28:31Someone says there was a strange white van driving through town back then.
28:35Maybe Joyce got in.
28:37There was a serial killer racing up and down the New England coastline.
28:43Perhaps he made it up to East Millinocket.
28:46Or maybe one of the many temporary mill workers hired that summer never punched in and slipped out of town with blood on their hands.
28:55All theories go nowhere.
28:57What happens with these cases, even though we never stop investigating them, as people move on, people retire, people get promoted, people take different positions, the case will go from one detective to another.
29:15Then, in 2005, it lands in the hands of two dedicated investigators, Darryl Peary and Brian Strout.
29:27Like all the others, they hit the ground running, determined to finally solve this case.
29:32But unlike all the others, they do.
29:35In East Millinocket, Maine, two state police detectives are taking another crack at the decades-old unsolved murder of Joyce McLean.
29:54And judging by the mountain of files in that murder book, looks like that old paper mill was working full-time just to keep up with the investigation.
30:03I think when you first, you know, receive a case like this that has a lot of moving parts, you really need to break down and go through all the old case files.
30:14How do we get this case to a point where we can move forward?
30:18And who do we have to rule out?
30:21And how can we narrow our focus on who did this and who's responsible?
30:27People will continue to torment Peter.
30:57Calling and threatening him and putting things up in the local supermarket and doing all these little things to him because his actions made him a person of interest.
31:08And he accepted that.
31:10But he also accepted the challenge that that was his town and he wasn't going to leave.
31:21To be sure he's in the clear, Strout and Peary recheck Peter's alibi.
31:25His friends all say the same thing 25 years later.
31:30They were off-roading the night of the murder and Peter never left their sight.
31:35There's no way he did this.
31:37They turned their attention to the only other solid suspect, Philip Scott Fornier.
31:43As far as this small community, you know, and the timing of the oil truck, you know, being stolen.
31:52I mean, why?
31:52Why does anybody...
31:54What's the purpose of stealing an oil truck at three in the morning?
31:57And so, based on everything that happened with him, Daryl and I are both going, yeah, we want to talk to him.
32:06The now 46-year-old tells detectives he clearly remembers going to a party that night.
32:13But he says his memory is still fuzzy about what happened after he crashed the oil truck.
32:19A moment later, he says he was never at a party.
32:22He's making it very confusing.
32:25The fact that he did have a head trauma at the time of the accident.
32:30Did he truly have some brain damage, you know, at the time?
32:34While Peary and Stroud try to work the old case files, across town, Pam McLean focuses on new technology.
32:47She starts a fundraiser, hoping to bring in enough to pay for newly developed scientific testing.
32:54Pam is a force of nature, and she, tenacity, sheer tenacity.
33:02She's very driven.
33:05Maybe they would find someone's DNA on Joyce or on, you know, under her fingernails, in her hair, who knows.
33:14East Millinocket residents open their hearts and pocketbooks.
33:18Money pours in, and Pam uses $20,000 to fund a private exhumation.
33:23And in conjunction with that, they had received participation by Dr. Henry Lee, a renowned forensic scientist, and Dr. Michael Bodden, you know, a renowned medical examiner.
33:39And so, all of a sudden now, it's like, wow, now these guys are involved.
33:45This is going to, you know, we'll get to the bottom of it now.
33:49Right.
33:50On August 29th, 2008, 28 years after she was murdered, Joyce McLean's body is unearthed.
34:00We're here today because of the efforts of a very dedicated mother who's here today to try to get justice for her daughter.
34:07God only knows how preserved she is down there, so we have a 50-50 chance here, and I'm betting on the upper 50.
34:15The remains are rushed to the lab.
34:23Analysts comb the body for DNA.
34:25They find three stray hairs.
34:28When the community hears the news, they hold their collective breath.
34:33They hope the secret to closing this agonizing case has been buried right here in East Millinocket the whole time.
34:45After two weeks of testing the three stray hairs found on the exhumed body of Joyce McLean, scientists know who they belong to.
35:03They're Joyce's.
35:04And worse, thanks to that New England storm that blew in the day after her murder, there's not a single shred of the killer's DNA to be found.
35:17It's extremely frustrating, but now we have this exhumation, we've got this excitement.
35:21So we use that as the opportunity, as a catalyst to start from scratch and see where it takes us.
35:30They decide to bring in Philip Scott Fornier one last time.
35:35We found three hairs.
35:38Three hairs.
35:40They were Joyce's.
35:43Scott didn't know that.
35:46Scott didn't know what we found.
35:49Scott, all I told him was, you know, we dug the body up.
35:55And you know what?
35:57Now we know who killed Joyce.
36:00And now all of a sudden, he's not the master deflector so much.
36:04Now he's backtracking.
36:07He suddenly remembers he was in the woods behind the high school the night Joyce was murdered.
36:13He said that he, he lost his glasses, um, there, he was back there looking for his glasses when he fell on the body, was traumatized by seeing Joyce's body, and, um, you know, stole the oil truck out of fear.
36:33He was asked if his DNA was present at the, at the scene, and he kind of indicated that was kind of a tough question because he believes he did fall on our body.
36:46So, yeah, his DNA could have been there.
36:49Fornier's put himself at the scene.
36:52But there's no solid evidence tying him there.
36:54And with all his changed stories over the years, and his head injury, cops worry charges won't stick.
37:02It's extremely frustrating when you believe in your heart that this is the guy, and all the information that, that you have leads to him, but, you know, there's still so much noise around the investigation that we're not able to move forward.
37:24Detectives go back to the murder book and read through every interview police did from the moment Joyce disappeared in 1980.
37:36It takes months, but they finally find a simple, one-paragraph report where a young man told police he was part of that group of teens hanging out of the high school the night Joyce was murdered.
37:50He said before cops broke up the gathering, one kid took off.
37:54His name?
37:56Philip Scott Fornier.
38:08And what time was that?
38:10It was around 8 o'clock.
38:12And in that time frame is the time Joyce disappears.
38:16It was huge.
38:18You know, again, Daryl and I are looking, going, oh, yeah, now we've got witnesses that put him there.
38:23At the time, in the neighborhood, right.
38:28So that was a real biggie.
38:31At that point, we were fully confident that Philip Scott Fornier was responsible for Joyce McClain's murder.
38:38State police have arrested a 55-year-old East Millinocket man and charged him in the connection of the beating death of 16-year-old Joyce McClain of East Millinocket in the summer of 1980.
38:53Charged with murder is Philip Scott Fornier, who is better known as Scott Fornier, who was 19 at the time of Joyce's death.
39:00I was so elated.
39:04It just made my friggin' week.
39:08I was just so happy.
39:09Because there was finally going to be justice for Joyce.
39:12And for Pam and for East Millinocket.
39:20I had the TV on, and I was doing stuff in the kitchen, and it was breaking news.
39:26And it came, interrupted the soap opera I was watching, and said that he'd been arrested.
39:33And I, I couldn't breathe.
39:39Stunned, stunned, stunned.
39:42But I couldn't breathe.
39:43I just remember it very clearly.
39:51My phone was just blowing up, and somebody's text just said they've arrested Scott Fornier, and I just, the emotions just came right back.
40:00Like, that, it just felt like a blow.
40:05I just was like, wow.
40:07I was just floored.
40:11It was just an incredible feeling.
40:14And I immediately grabbed my phone and texted eight or nine in a group text of my tight, close-knit friends that I grew up with to tell them.
40:25So.
40:25My hands were shaking, trying to text the message.
40:37In January 2018, nearly all of East Millinocket packs into the courtroom for Scott Fornier's highly anticipated trial.
40:47After 11 days of testimony, the verdict is handed down.
40:50The state has proven to defend his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
40:55The court finds the defendant guilty.
40:58You could hear an audible sound of relief.
41:03And I just thought, finally, finally, let's be done.
41:10Couldn't believe it.
41:11Could not believe it.
41:12You're holding your breath for 40 years and can let go.
41:15And, and it's done.
41:18It's finally done.
41:22On April 27th, 2018, Philip Scott Fornier is sentenced to 45 years in prison for the murder of Joyce McClain.
41:35Pam McClain never gave up hope.
41:38Now, at the age of 71, she can finally close that chapter.
41:42You never see a happier mother than this one is right here, right now.
41:52It's been years, and Pam McClain's candle has been safely tucked away.
41:57But the memory of that tiny flame in the window, and what it meant, will never be forgotten by anyone who lives here.
42:09They lost their innocence, because they never, ever looked at people the same way after that.
42:23And that's a tragedy for East Millenocket.
42:27It went from the town that paper-making made to the town that murdered me.
42:34It went from the town that murdered me.
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