The 1958 Cold Case of Dennis Down
Dennis and Edith Down’s home in Falmouth, ME, on the night of of his death (Portland Press Herald)
June 23rd, 1958
On the morning of June 23, 1958, Edith Down closed the door behind her as she left the home that she shared with her husband, Dennis. Their modest house was nestled in the woods off of a sleepy 2-lane country road in Falmouth. That summer morning, the sun fought against an unseasonal chill that had settled in overnight. Edith had a busy day ahead of her at the grocery store that Dennis and she had recently purchased in downtown Portland, Maine.
Though Dennis and Edith were both in their early 60s, they still possessed the energy necessary to run Emerson’s Market—the enterprise they had purchased just five months prior.
Since they both worked the floor, it was not unusual for one or the other to cover the morning shift while their spouse joined them later in the afternoon. Edith planned to see him later that day when he was scheduled to relieve her at Emerson’s.
Around 9:30AM, Edith called home... no one answered. The phone rang and rang in a house that was—in a manner of speaking—already empty.
The Life of Dennis Down
Dennis Down was born in England in 1894 to parents James Henry Charles Down and Jane Hawker Down As a boy he celebrated the dawning of a new century that would be filled with modern wonders. Dennis’s childhood coincided with the invention of the electric light switch, the first wireless transmission, and the rise of the automobile. These years also ushered in an era of unrest across the nations of Europe.
Dennis would have been about 18 at the onset of the Great War—a war we now know as World War I. By 1917, around the age of 21, he had enlisted with the Winnipeg Grenadiers, an infantry battalion of the CEF—the Canadian Expeditionary Forces—which were based in England.
Over the next two years, he served in England, France, Belgium, and Germany. The battlefields of WWI were a nightmarish landscape of new weaponry, trench warfare, and disease. Dennis doubtlessly encountered many horrors during his time in the field.
In 1919, Dennis crossed the Atlantic and began a new life in Maine, and it was there that he met and married a fellow English woman and expat named Edith Stittle, who was just one month older than him. The couple soon married—both of them in their late 20s—and, on January 28, 1920, they welcomed their only child—a son they named Gordon.
By the 1930s, they were living in Portland, ME, and Dennis was working as a sign painter at the John Nissen Baking Company, just three miles from their house on Edgewood Avenue. Dennis had an artistic side and beautiful penmanship, as evidenced by the elegantly curling script on his U.S. alien registration card. Nissen was a large bakery with a busy storefront and broad distribution across New England, making it a reliable employer during the Great Depression.
As Dennis grew older, he joined a veteran’s support group called the Canadian Legion and a local chapter of the Masons. He and Edith watched their son, Gordon, grow up, and with a mix of terror and pride saw Gordon enlist with the United States Air Force in 1942 at 22 years old. He returned to them safely at the conclusion of WWII in the fall of 1945.
With two wars behind them and an empty house, Dennis and Edith felt it was time for a new chapter. They moved to the neighboring town of Falmouth where they found on Windham Road their forever home—a modest 2-bedroom house in the woods a short drive from the city. Dennis quit his job at Nissen in 1956 after more than 20 years at the company. The following year, he and his wife were thrilled to welcome a new addition to the family—a grandson named Daniel.
In 1958, the couple purchased and became the proprietors of Emerson’s Market, a grocery store in Portland’s Munjoy Hill neighborhood. Dennis was described as a “very fine man” and “pleasant storekeeper” who interacted well with the children who frequented his market.
Dennis Down was a healthy and vibrant 63-year-old who was looking forward to the next chapter of his life.
The Murder of Dennis Down
When Dennis didn’t answer the phone around 9:30AM, Edith didn’t think much of it. As the hours of the day passed, the sun reached its pinnacle and then began to fall. Three o’clock came and there was still no word from Dennis, who was due to take the next shift at the store. It was unlike her husband not to follow through with plans.
Late in the afternoon, Edith called her son, Gordon. She asked if he would go to the house to check in on his father.
Around 5:30PM, Gordon arrived at his parents’ home on Windham Road and found the front door locked. His father’s car was home. An uneasy feeling crept over him. He checked the other entrances—there was no way in. After calling repeatedly for his father, he decided to break in. He forced his way in through the rear cellar door. He ascended the basement stairs, passed through the kitchen, and headed to the nearby bedroom door, perhaps not even noticing the drop of blood eyeing him from the floor.
When he entered the bedroom, the scene that greeted Gordon was one of blood and violence. Though media reports disagreed about the details, they were consistent on one thing: Dennis Down had been brutally murdered in his home. Some stated that Gordon found his father sprawled across the bloodied bed. Others depicted him as “propped against the wall with his feet facing the bed.” Details of Dennis’s body, his clothing, the weapons used to take his life—these have all become muddled across time and retelling. What remains in the narrative with absolute clarity is the blood.
Dennis’ body was clad in pajama bottoms and two layers of shirts—an undershirt and a dress shirt, as if he had been interrupted in the process of getting dressed that morning. Blood stained each of these garments. Gordon saw that his father’s face and head had been savagely beaten. The sheets, stripped from the mattress, were also soaked in blood. Red streaks were drying in wild splashes across the white plaster walls and bedroom door. Still more blood pooled on the floor near a bureau. An oval-shaped hole dented one wall, as if someone had been thrown into it or a heavy instrument had struck it.
In a state of shock, Gordon called the police. By a quarter past six, the house on Windham Road was no longer a home but a crime scene. Its rooms and yard were crawling with uniformed officers, crime scene technicians, and several local reporters. Detectives scoured the house for evidence.
In the bed, officers discovered two knives, one of which was broken, and a monkey wrench, a heavy tool often used by plumbers made of solid steel weighing more than 20 pounds. As a weapon, it would have been formidable. The home itself had not been ransacked, though Dennis’s wallet—typically kept in his jacket pocket—was nowhere to be found.
The police puzzled over the locked front door. From pictures of the house, it seems like there were multiple entrances into the home. We know that Gordon had to break into the basement, so it stands to reason that all of the doors on ground level were locked. We don’t know what kind of locks the Downs would have had. It might have been the type of deadbolt that is keyed on the exterior and could be turned from the interior, or it could be the type that was keyed on both sides. In addition, there may have been a lock on the knob itself, with a little button that can be turned to lock the door from the inside. It’s not clear whether or not the killer (or killers) would have needed a key to lock up when they left.
The savagery of the crime also left the investigators perplexed about the motive. The beating, the multiple knife wounds, the evidence of a fight… it seemed... personal. One officer on the scene, State Trooper Stephen Regina, noted of the killer, “He was sure mad about something. I’ve never seen anything so brutal in my life. Never.” Surely one wallet didn’t warrant this type of violence.
It was only after dawn, upon the arrival of Philip Wheeler, a special homicide agent from the attorney general’s office, that Dennis’s body, which had remained through the night as it was discovered, was finally moved onto a gurney and taken to Maine Medical Center in Portland.
The Investigation
At noon on Tuesday, members of the local police departments and the district attorney’s office held the first of several closed-door meetings in Cumberland County Courthouse in Portland. The clerks were given, “strict instructions not to interrupt the meeting under any circumstance.” The Portland Evening Express later reported that, “an attractive young woman” was called into the meeting room at one point, but police refused to identify her or her relationship to the case.
That afternoon, an autopsy of Dennis’s body took place at Maine Medical Center, conducted by medical examiner Franklin Ferguson. He believed that Dennis had died between the hours of 7:30AM and 9:30AM—after Edith had gone for the day but before her first call home. Dr. Ferguson found that Dennis had four stab wounds in his back and chest, including one in the upper torso that punctured his lung. But the ME believed that the blunt force impact to his skull was his ultimate cause of death.
The three days following Dennis’s murder were a flurry of activity as police in Falmouth and the surrounding towns began detaining anyone who appeared suspicious. Maine in the summer has always been a popular place for people passing through, whether they be tourists, travelers, or those who might have been dubbed “vagabonds” or “vagrants” in the 1950s. On Tuesday afternoon, police interviewed three individuals, including a married couple rumored to have been friendly with Dennis.
Later that evening, a young man was arrested for breaking into a home in Auburn, a town twenty miles from the Down home. Another man, picked up in Auburn for vagrancy, was questioned after it was reported that he had been seen in the North Falmouth area on Monday. Given the rapid-fire series of arrests and media reports, the residents of Cumberland County must have seen murder in the eyes of every stranger on the street.
The sun rose on another cool, clear day on Wednesday, June 25th. Dennis had now been gone for two days and investigators had finally returned the white house to the family. Carried on the momentum of the arrests made the previous day, police decided to narrow their suspect pool by making use of a relatively new piece of technology: the polygraph.
The trio from Portland, including the couple who were acquaintances of Dennis, were taken to Concord, NH—the location of the nearest functional polygraph machine. State Trooper Regina told reporters that the results were “inconclusive” and might need to be repeated. A source close to the case told The Portland Evening Express that the preliminary results indicated the trio might be “holding back something which might have some bearing on the case.” The source added, “We know something is troubling them, but we just don’t know what.” It’s unclear from news reports and limited police records whether or not this couple was polygraphed again.
On Friday morning, just four days after Dennis’s death, Edith and Gordon arrived at the offices of Cumberland County District Attorney Arthur Chapman. Gordon was asked to wait in a separate office while his mother was questioned by Chapman, his assistant, and various members of the investigative team. Gordon’s own interview came later that afternoon, when he was asked to return to the courthouse.
On Sunday, Gordon and Edith were asked to take polygraphs as well. Due to their emotional states, earlier in the week police had not wanted to jeopardize the results of the test. Chapman claimed that the authorities did not believe that the widow or her son were serious suspects in the case, but added, “We’re taking advantage of all scientific methods to eliminate all the possibilities we find.”
The results of Edith and Gordon’s polygraphs eradicated any lingering doubts that the police may have had about their involvement in Dennis’s death. Cleared of suspicion, Edith returned to the remnants of the life and the home that she had once shared with her husband.
The investigation fizzles
The early momentum of the investigation diminished with the passage of time and the elimination of suspects. The parade of vagrants and housebreakers detained during the week after Dennis’s death were ruled out one-by-one as alibis were confirmed.
1958’s cold June gave way to a mild July. Communication between the police and local journalists was open during the first week of the investigation, but these exchanges began to dry up along with leads.
The police were running out of straws to grasp. They circled back to employees at the bakery with whom Dennis had worked and residents of the Munjoy Hill neighborhood where Emerson’s Market was located. Every angle was explored.
1954 Murder of Daniel Wood
One investigator reflected that the only other case as baffling as the Down killing was the kidnapping and murder of a young boy four years prior. On July 22nd, 1954, 12-year-old Danny Woods departed his home in Gray, ME, with his fishing rod over his shoulder. Just minutes later, the bespectacled boy used a payphone in Gray Center to tell his mother that a stranger had offered him a job selling magazines. He was going with him to Lewiston to make some house calls, for a whopping 50 cents per hour. It was weeks before Danny’s body was found in the Little Androscoggin River in Auburn, about fifteen miles away from where he disappeared. His clothing was gone, his skull badly beaten, and the shoestring presumably used to subdue him still dangled from one wrist. The case remains unsolved to this day.
On Sunday, July 20th, nearly one month after the murder of Dennis Down, a young woman’s pajama-clad body was found in a Highland Lake cottage, just a mile and a half away from where Dennis had been killed. 29-year-old Marguerite Stevens had apparently taken her own life by plunging a knife into her throat. Because of the highly unusual manner of suicide, and because of the proximity to the Down murder, police ordered an autopsy.
Desperation drove police to explore any possible connection between Danny’s abduction, Marguerite’s suicide, and Dennis’s murder. After just a month, they were no wiser as to who killed the grocer or why. His murder seemed simultaneously both a senseless act of violence and a targeted attack.
Twice Cold, Forever Unsolved
Dennis Down’s case went cold and that was how it stayed. Years passed, people passed, and memories faded with time. The children of Munjoy Hill grew up and reared their own families.
At the end of the summer of 1987, Sgt. David Lyons of the Maine State Police received a call from an officer with the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office. The nature of the call was both business and personal; the man’s name was Daniel Down and he wanted to discuss the murder of his grandfather, nearly 30 years before.
Sgt. Lyons spoke with Daniel—or Dan, as he was called. The case was technically open since it was unsolved. However, despite extensive efforts and collaboration among the regional law enforcement, the person who had stabbed and bludgeoned Dennis Down had never been caught. It was entirely likely that the culprit—or culprits—were themselves dead or of advanced age. Still, Dan was a fellow officer, and the case was in their jurisdiction. Sgt. Lyons asked a young police officer with the Windham PD to follow up—Officer Jeffrey Smith was new to Windham, having just been hired that month. But he was from Cumberland County and had worked with the Falmouth PD for the last six years.
Over the month of September, Officer Smith reviewed records of the case. He met with US Marshall Jordan Emery, who had worked the case as a Maine State trooper, and with the former county prosecutor, Arthur Chapman. He requested and pored over the assessments of the polygraphs taken in 1958 and the newspaper articles covering the investigation. Smith even looked into the records of two individuals arrested on drug trafficking charges in the 1980s, at the request of Dan Down. Neither of these leads panned out. Dan also requested the opportunity to review the case records himself, which was denied. In April of 1988, Officer Smith recommended to the Attorney General’s Office that the case be officially closed, as, “all investigative leads had been exhausted.”
After a brief flicker of life, the Down case went cold again. And that is where it remains today.
Cold. Unsolved... and closed.
Semper Memento
Dennis, six decades in his grave in Pine Grove Cemetery, has never gotten justice for his brutal death. His grandson, Dan, retired in 2017 after a 30-year law enforcement career with Cumberland County. He spends his retirement working on his house on Little Sebago Lake and riding his motorcycle.
Though we tried, we were unable to reach Dan by the time of production. Dan, if you see this, we are still very interested to talk. Please feel free to contact me anytime. My door is always open.
In 2015, the Maine State legislature approved the creation of the Unsolved Homicide Unit, tasked with investigating any and all unresolved homicides in the state.
Their motto, semper memento, is Latin for “always remember.” The list of the state’s unsolved murders is 75 victims deep, beginning with the 1954 killing of Danny Wood. But nowhere on that list is Dennis Down.
This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, The 1958 Cold Case of Dennis Down. To Hear Dennis’s full story, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform.
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Dennis Down’s “alien registration” card, showcasing his neat penmanship
Map shows location of Down home in Falmouth and the nearby location of Marguerite Stevens’ death.
The crime scene in the bedroom
Dennis and Edith Down's home in Falmouth, ME, present day
Maine State Police document furnished in response to FOIA request; investigation closed as of 1988.
Sources For This Episode
Newspaper articles
Various articles from Bangor Daily News, Biddeford Daily Journal, Boston Daily Globe, Lewiston Daily Sun, Maine Sunday Telegram, Morning Sentinel, Portland Evening Express, Portland Press Herald, Portsmouth Herald, Recorder, Sun-Journal, The Barre Daily Times, and The Lowell Sun, here.
Written by various authors including Jay Flynn and Waldo Pray.
Photos
Portland Press Herald, Portland Evening Express, Records requested by Murder, She Told, Google Maps, FindaGrave and various newspaper articles.
Official documents
Office of the Adjutant General, State of Maine, “alien registration card” for Dennis Down
Maine State Police, investigation report, April 1988
Credits
Vocal performance, audio editing, and research by Kristen Seavey
Writing support, research by Byron Willis
Research by Ericka Pierce
Writing by Morgan Hamilton
Special thanks to Michelle Souliere for her support and research
Murder, She Told is created by Kristen Seavey