Crime&Stuff

Maine has one of the lowest murder rates in the country. For the past couple of decades, there have been between 20 to 25 homicides a year in the state. In 2016, there were 16.

Yet, the types of murders Maine has are telling — murder victims are most likely to be killed by someone who professes to love them. We take a look at three of 2016’s Maine homicides on this week’s episode.

We also learn not to take presumption of innocence lightly from a fired-up Matt Nichols in Ask a Lawyer, and what do Abe Vigoda, Prince and Harper Lee all have in common? Come on, we know you know the answer. We take a last look at some of the famous people who died last year on this week’s Crime & Stuff.

It’s been 20 years since the body of JonBenet Ramsey was found in the basement of her parents’ Boulder, Colorado home. She’d been bludgeoned to death and strangled. The case has, to quote one documentary “haunted America” ever since and, America being what it is, spawned a variety of documentaries over the past months, some good but most not so much.

We discuss some of the docs, as well as the “evidence” and evidence of the crime, including the implausible intruder story and the role of her parents, John and the late Patsy Ramsey in keeping the investigation from ever reaching a realistic result. The story has everything: sexploitation of a cute kid, rich white folks, dueling investigators, lies and videotape.

We make hay of it all.

The day after Christmas in 2000, a disgruntled IT professional at a Massachusetts company shot to death seven coworkers. His defense that he believed he was killing Nazis to get his soul back didn’t wash, and Michael “Mucko” McDermott is serving seven life sentences for the massacre.

No, we don’t talk about JonBenet Ramsey (next week!), the Grinch, or the dipshit in the Santa suit who held up the 7-Eleven, but these two “Christmas crimes” had a lasting impact, and are the focus of a very special Christmas episode of Crime & Stuff.

What happened to Cheiker from the time she met Nicholas and Barbara Davis in the mid-2000s to when she was found in Maine in 2011 will make your hair freeze.

We discuss her long strange trip on this week’s Crime & Stuff, and then have attorney Matt Nichols clarify some of the nuances of multi-state crime in Ask a Lawyer.

We also trash Santa Claus, moon over Dennis Lehane and discuss Tig Nataro’s “One Mississippi.”

On the morning of December 17, 2011, Justin DiPietro called the Waterville, Maine, police to report his 20-month-old daughter, Ayla Reynolds, missing. That was the spark to what eventually became the biggest criminal investigation in Maine’s history. Five years later, Ayla is still gone and no one has been charged in her disappearance, which police quickly termed a criminal investigation and made clear that they believed she’d been killed. Ben McCanna, a former reporter with the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, whose beat was all Ayla all the time in the months after she vanished, talks about his experience, which includes access to the toddler’s parents that no other reporter at the time had.

Matt Nichols, of Nichols & Churchill, explains, in our Ask the Lawyer segment, why charges are sometimes not brought even when “everyone knows” someone is guilty of a crime.

Want more? We also eviscerate the new Gilmore Girls.