The Maine Cold Case That Was SOLVED 36 Years Later

The Maine Cold Case That Was SOLVED 36 Years Later

36 years ago, a 20-year-old girl disappeared on the night before Christmas in Waterville, Maine, leaving behind no trace, no note, only her elderly parents waiting for their daughter in a house decorated with Christmas lights.

Authorities suspected the man last seen with her, even knew his full name from the first few weeks, but didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute, and the investigation gradually fell silent.

Five months later, that man killed another woman.

He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 75 years in prison.

And right at the sentencing hearing, when asked about the first girl, he looked the prosecutor straight in the eyes and said, “I know who did it, but I won’t tell.

” Through all those years, Janet Brochu’s parents never stopped waiting for an answer until they passed away one after another.

Then one day, a specialized cold case police unit reopened the file, ran old evidence through new generation DNA analysis, and what had lain silent at the bottom of the Sebasticook River for 31 years finally spoke in a way no one expected.

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To understand why this case is so haunting, you have to understand who Janet Brochu was.

She was 20 years old, an only child, the adopted daughter of Geraldine and Albert Brochu, two people who chose her, loved her, and built their entire lives around her.

She was 5’6″ tall with brown hair and suffered from severe diabetes that required insulin injections twice a day on schedule.

That meant if someone kept her isolated from her medication, even for just a few hours, her body would begin to shut down from the inside.

She worked as a dietary assistant at Seton Unit, Mid-Maine Medical Center for a year and a half.

A young woman steadily building her life, going to work, earning her own money, living with her parents on Cushman Road in Winslow.

No history of running away.

No [clears throat] reason not to come home.

On the evening of December 23rd, 1987, Janet left the house at 6:00 p.

m.

She told her mother she was going to pick up her paycheck and stop by McDonald’s.

The most ordinary sentence in the world.

Instead, she went to a bowling alley in Waterville with a friend.

Bowling, drinking, a normal night before Christmas.

At the bowling alley, her group met two men playing in the next lane.

The groups hit it off.

After bowling, they arranged to meet at T.

Woody’s Restaurant and Bar, 80 Concourse West, right in the Waterville Concourse.

A popular bar and restaurant in the city.

That’s where everything started to go wrong.

When Janet walked into T.

Woody’s, the bartender asked her for ID.

She was 20 years old.

Two years earlier, in 1985, Maine had raised the legal drinking age from 20 to 21.

A completely unrelated legal change for Janet Brochu.

But that night it pushed her out of the bar, out into the cold parking lot, alone.

One of the two men she had met that night offered to drive her home.

The two of them walked outside together, but then Janet realized she had left her wallet inside the bar.

The man went back in to get it for her.

And before going in, he said something to the people inside that would be repeated for decades in the investigation.

“I’ll take care of her.

” Out in the parking lot, Janet started feeling unwell.

She was drunk, nauseous.

Her body wasn’t cooperating.

The man looked at her and decided he didn’t want her throwing up in his car.

He refused to drive her home.

And that was the last moment anyone who knew Janet Brochu saw her alive.

Around midnight in the T.

Woody’s parking lot on the night of December 23rd, 1987 in freezing Maine temperatures below zero.

A 20-year-old girl with diabetes standing alone in a dark parking lot with no one she knew around.

On the morning of December 24th, 1987, Christmas Eve, Geraldine and Albert Brochu called the Waterville police.

Their daughter had not come home the night before, had not called, and had left no message.

For an ordinary young woman, police might have waited a few days, but Janet’s file didn’t allow that.

20 years old, severe insulin-dependent diabetes, no history of running away, no reason to disappear, and the previous night had been the coldest night of the year in Maine.

Every hour without insulin was an hour her body was gradually shutting down.

Waterville police immediately launched an investigation.

According to Detective Sergeant Lee Gilbert, Janet’s disappearance triggered a police alert stretching from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States.

Not because her family had influence, not because the case attracted media attention, but because a girl depended on insulin had gone missing overnight in a Maine winter.

No note was left, no phone call, no trace.

Only one sentence at 6:00 p.

m.

the previous evening about picking up her paycheck, stopping by McDonald’s, and then coming home, followed by complete silence.

In the first days after Janet disappeared, Waterville police did everything they could, issued bulletins, took statements, reconstructed her every move on the night of December 23, and from those statements, two names emerged, Jerry and Lou.

That was all the police had at first, no last names, no addresses, just two first names that witnesses at the bowling alley and T-Woody’s remembered.

More than a week after Janet disappeared, Detective Sergeant Lee Gilbert and Detective Everett Flannery finally tracked down the two men at the bowling center on West River Road, the exact same bowling alley where Janet had first met them on that fateful night.

Both men cooperated, answered questions, and gave the same version.

They left T-Woody’s in their own cars, did not go with Janet, and did not know where she went afterward.

The man named Jerry, later identified as Gerald Goodale, who lived on Water Street in the South End of Waterville with his parents, added one more detail.

He was the last person to see Janet alive.

According to him, she was standing in the parking lot outside T-Woody’s when he left.

He drove home.

She was still standing there.

That was all he said.

The detectives looked at Gerald Goodale and saw a man with no stable job, living off odd jobs, spending most of his time fixing cars in the backyard.

Neighbors described him as quarrelsome and irritable, but there was no evidence to hold him.

No witness saw Janet leave the parking lot with Goodale or anyone else.

There were no security cameras in 1988.

No physical evidence linking Goodale to her disappearance.

He cooperated, he answered, and he walked out of the police station a free man.

This was the first legal deadlock in the case, and it would not be the last.

The search quickly expanded.

From January 1988, the Maine State Police and the Maine Attorney General’s Office officially joined the investigation, but Janet remained missing.

No new leads, no new witnesses, only the long Maine winter and a family waiting on Cushman Road.

Then in April 1988, more than 3 months after Janet disappeared, a dive team was sent into the Sebasticook River in Pittsfield to search for her personal belongings.

It was slow, freezing, and often fruitless work.

But on the very first day of diving, they found something.

Ken Querion, a member of the dive team that day, later told the press, “What we found was very important to the case.

” He could not reveal what it was, and that silence would last more than three decades.

Because this was 1988, and 1988 DNA technology was not advanced enough to exploit the evidence the dive team had just found.

That evidence was placed into storage.

It lay silent.

It waited.

The answer to the Janet Brochu case had existed from that day, retrieved from the bottom of the Cold River in Pittsfield, placed into an evidence bag, labeled, and stored away.

But humans did not yet have the tools to read what it was trying to say.

On March 19th, 1988, nearly 3 months after Janet Brochu disappeared, Christopher Anthony, the owner of a dam on Waverly Avenue in Pittsfield, discovered the body of a woman floating in the Sebasticook River early in the morning, about half a mile from the center of town.

The body was unclothed.

Pittsfield police were called immediately, followed by Maine State Police.

Pittsfield Police Chief Spencer Havey at the time, who later passed away in 2016, was one of the first on the scene.

Identity was confirmed through dental records and jewelry she was wearing.

Janet Brochu, 20 years old, from Winslow, Maine.

She had been missing since the night of December 23rd, 1987.

From the moment Janet stood alone in the T Woody’s parking lot until her body was pulled from the Sebasticook River was 87 days.

Pittsfield is 20 miles north of Waterville, upstream along the river.

It was not walking distance, not bus distance.

This was the distance of someone with a car who knew the terrain and deliberately chose the location.

Janet had been taken far from the T Woody’s parking lot, far from Waterville, far from anywhere her acquaintances might have accidentally seen her.

The body was unclothed.

As for the specific cause of death, investigators chose to keep it confidential, a deliberate decision, partly a strategy to later filter out false confessions from people wanting to claim credit.

Those details were never released publicly and remained in sealed files until the 2023 trial.

The only thing publicly confirmed was that Janet was dead before entering the water.

She did not drown.

Someone had taken her to Pittsfield, someone had left her there, someone had driven back.

Meanwhile, in Winslow, on Cushman Road, Geraldine and Albert Brochu received the news.

For nearly 3 months they had lived in limbo between hope and fear, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for a knock at the door, waiting for someone to bring news.

And now the news had come in the worst possible way.

Their only daughter, the child they had chosen, raised, and built their entire lives around was gone.

Her body was found 20 miles from their home in a freezing river in a town they had probably never set foot in.

Geraldine and Albert Brochu had nothing but waiting, no media campaign, no famous lawyers.

They were two ordinary people in a small Maine town, and from that day forward all they could do was continue living and wait for the police to find the name of the person who had killed their daughter.

That question would follow them to the end of their lives.

Five months after Janet Brochu’s body was pulled from the Sebasticook River, the man named Jerry whom police had questioned since January was still living freely in Waterville.

His full name was Gerald Goodale, 29 years old, living on Water Street in the South End with his parents, supporting himself with odd jobs, spending most of his time fixing cars in the backyard.

He had been questioned, he had answered, and he had walked out of the police station a free man because there was not enough evidence to hold him.

Then on the night of August 9th, 1988, 23-year-old Geraldine Finn left Pete and Larry’s Lounge at the Holiday Inn on Main Street in Waterville with a man.

Geraldine Finn was a girl from Skowhegan who always called her mother every evening, sometimes twice a night, whether she was working or out.

Her friends saw her get into a blue Chevrolet Blazer.

The driver of that vehicle was Gerald Goodale, 29 years old.

Same city, same pattern, same man.

Five days later, on August 14th, 1988, Geraldine Finn’s body was found in a shallow grave along US Route 201 in Skowhegan.

The autopsy confirmed she had been strangled to death.

This time police had witnesses.

This time police had someone who saw her get into Goodale’s car.

This time there was no legal deadlock.

Goodale was arrested and charged in August 1988.

Before the trial, Goodale requested a trial without a jury.

The reason was that his defense lawyer told his client bluntly, “There is no way on Earth you are going to walk away without being convicted.

” The trial lasted 3 days without a jury, only a judge.

The court concluded that Goodale had taken Geraldine Finn to a remote location near Skowhegan, sexually assaulted her, and strangled her to subdue her resistance or prevent her from reporting afterward.

At the sentencing hearing on June 9th, 1989, Goodale stood before the court and said, “I am truly sorry.

This was not murder.

This was an accident.

” Judge Donald G.

Alexander did not accept that argument.

He sentenced him to 75 years in prison and called Goodale a remorseless, dangerous predator, the minimum necessary to protect society from him for the rest of his life.

But that was not the most memorable moment of the day.

On the same sentencing day, Maine Deputy Attorney General Fern LaRochelle stood before the court and revealed that investigators had questioned Goodale about the death of Janet Brochu.

LaRochelle was convinced Goodale had killed Brochu.

He had argued for a life sentence precisely for that reason, and Goodale, when asked about Janet, had responded with a sentence that LaRochelle read aloud in court.

“I didn’t do it, but I know who did.

I won’t say who it was.

” Let’s pause on that sentence for a moment.

This is not the statement of an innocent person.

An innocent person does not say, “I know who did it.

” This is the statement of someone who holds information and chooses not to give it.

Goodale knew that somewhere on Cushman Road in Winslow, Geraldine and Albert Brochu were waiting for an answer, and he looked the justice system straight in the face, knowing he was about to go to prison for 75 years, and still chose not to give them that answer.

Larochelle did
not have enough evidence to prosecute.

The law tied his hands.

Goodale was sent to Maine State Prison in Warren to serve his 75-year sentence for the Geraldine Finn case, while the Janet Brochu file remained open on the detectives’ desks with nothing to move it forward.

And one final detail about this case, the second victim’s name was Geraldine Finn.

The first victim’s mother’s name was Geraldine Brochu, and Geraldine is the feminine version of the name Gerald, the killer’s name.

On June 9, 1989, Gerald Goodale walked into Maine State Prison in Warren to serve his 75-year sentence for the murder of Geraldine Finn.

The prison door closed behind him, and the Janet Brochu file remained open on the desks of Waterville police, not closed, but without enough evidence to take another step.

Maine in 1989 had no dedicated cold case unit.

Detectives had to handle the Brochu file alongside hundreds of other active cases.

No one was assigned to sit down, open the old file, and work only on that.

New cases kept coming in.

Old files were pushed to the bottom of the paperwork pile, not because anyone deliberately forgot Janet Brochu, but because the system had no structure to maintain focus on a cold case when there was no new evidence.

The file was not dead, but it was not alive, either.

It just sat there.

In Winslow, Geraldine and Albert Brochu continued living in the house on Cushman Road.

They had no hotline to call, no lawyers to hire, no media pressure to create.

Geraldine Brochu told the press that Janet left the house that night with the words about picking up her paycheck, stopping by McDonald’s, and then coming home.

She remembered every word.

She would remember every word until the end of her life.

The only thing keeping the Brochu family connected to the investigation was one investigator, whom Janet’s cousin, Daniel Brochu, later told the press who visited Janet’s parents once a year.

Not to report breakthroughs because there were none, only to tell them that the case had not been forgotten, that someone was still following it, that small developments that could not be shared publicly were still happening.

He couldn’t tell them everything because it would reveal investigative information, but he knocked on their door every year.

He sat down with the two elderly people.

He did not let them be forgotten.

And every year when December came, Geraldine and Albert would relive the night of December 23rd, 1987.

The dinner table set, the Christmas tree decorated, the clock ticking, the phone silent.

Meanwhile, inside Maine State Prison in Warren, Gerald Goodale served his sentence.

Investigators questioned him many times in the years that followed about the Brochu case.

Not once, not twice.

Each time, Goodale gave the same answer.

He did not admit guilt, but he also did not completely deny it.

The statement he had made in court in 1989, “I didn’t do it, but I know who did and I won’t say,” remained the only answer he gave through decades of questioning.

No more, no less.

No new details, no names given.

That was the only thing left in his hands that no one could force from him, and he chose to keep it.

Years passed, decades passed.

Geraldine Brochu, Janet’s mother, grew weaker with age.

She had spent the rest of her life waiting for an answer that never came while she was alive.

She passed away at Mount Saint Joseph Nursing Home in Waterville in 2015 at the age of 87.

Albert Brochu, Janet’s father, lived another 6 years after his wife’s death.

He continued living in the house on Cushman Road, the house that Janet had left at 6:00 p.

m.

on December 23rd, 1987 and never returned to.

He passed away there in January 2021 at the age of 91.

Both of Janet Brochu’s adopted parents left this world without ever knowing the truth about what had happened to their daughter that night.

The Janet Brochu case did not go cold because the police gave up.

It went cold because Maine did not have the tools to keep it alive.

And in that gap, one thing remained unchanged.

The evidence that the dive team found under the Sebasticook River in April 1988.

The item that Ken Currier had called very important to the case was placed into storage, preserved, and lay silent waiting.

The problem was not that the evidence was lost.

The problem was that 1988 DNA technology was not advanced enough to exploit what it contained.

Forensic DNA analysis in the late 1980s was still very rudimentary, requiring large amounts of high-quality sample material, and was often unable to process samples that had been exposed to the natural environment for a long time.

What the dive team found at the bottom of the cold river in Pittsfield did not meet the technical standards of that era.

So, it was stored away.

In 2015, the Maine State Police officially established the Unsolved Homicide Unit, the first dedicated unit in state history focused solely on unsolved cases.

For the first time, there were detectives paid to do just one thing, open old files, apply new technology, and never give up.

The unit was given its own budget, specialized forensic support, and the authority to focus completely on cases that the regular system did not have enough resources to pursue.

That was the structure the Brochu case had needed since 1989, and it took 26 years for Maine to build it.

In 2019, the Maine State Police Unsolved Homicide Unit officially joined the Janet Brochu case.

This was the first time since 1989 that the case was assigned to a team with enough time, resources, and specialized forensic support to review it from the beginning, not in parallel with hundreds of other cases, but with complete focus.

The investigation team included members from the Unsolved Homicide Unit, the Major Crimes Unit Central, the Maine Attorney General’s Office, and scientists from the Maine State Police Crime Lab.

They reopened the file, reviewed every piece of evidence that had been preserved since 1988, and applied new generation forensic technology to items that 1988 technology could not handle.

The DNA analysis results revealed a direct genetic link of Gerald Goodale to the murder of Janet Brochu.

Because Goodale was directly indicted through a grand jury while he was in prison, no police statements were released, and the specific technical details about the type of DNA evidence and the analysis method were never publicly disclosed.

On May 13th, 2021, the Somerset County Grand Jury officially indicted Gerald Goodale, 61 years old, for the murder in the Janet Brochu case.

The indictment had actually been ready 7 months earlier, but the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the grand jury from meeting, and the file had to wait.

The next day, two Maine State Police detectives went to Maine State Prison in Warren to personally notify Goodale of the new charges.

At that time, Goodale was 61 years old, serving a 75-year sentence for the murder of Geraldine Finn, and now faced a second indictment for a second murder that that occurred a year earlier.

Goodale appeared in court and pleaded not guilty.

He hired new lawyers.

He was held without bail, but that in reality changed nothing since he was already serving 75 years.

Witnesses were summoned.

Prosecutors Laura Namani and Megan Elam from the Maine Attorney General’s office prepared the case file.

Ken Kyriacou, a retired fire investigator from Winslow and a member of the 1988 dive team, was contacted to testify.

He met with the prosecutors 2 weeks before the scheduled trial date, reviewed the entire plan, and prepared to appear in court on March 5th, 2023.

The court session that day at Somerset Superior Court in Skowhegan was supposed to be just a routine arraignment, an administrative procedure, nothing special.

No one in the courtroom knew what was about to happen.

Goodale walked into the courtroom and instead of sitting down to wait for the procedure to continue, he pleaded guilty without prior notice, without any publicized lengthy negotiations.

After 35 years of silence, after dozens of interrogations where he had given only the same single answer, Gerald Goodale stood in the courtroom in Skowhegan and admitted to killing Janet Brouchu.

Kyriacou heard the news from outside and could not believe his ears.

“I was shocked,” he told the press afterward.

“I thought, wow, everything changed so fast.

I think this surprised everyone.

” The judge sentenced Gerald Goodale to 32.

5 years in prison for the murder of Janet Brouchu.

The sentence would run concurrently with his existing 75-year sentence.

Maine State Police Detective Jason Andrews issued a statement.

“Janet Brouchu was killed 35 years ago.

Thanks to the persistent efforts of the investigative team, people who never gave up on this case, Gerald Goodale will be held accountable for his actions.

” At the sentencing hearing on March 3rd, 2023 in Skowhegan, Geraldine and Albert Broschu were not present.

They had passed away long before, the mother in 2015, the father in January 2021.

But Janet’s family still had someone there.

Her cousin, Daniel Broschu, sat in the courtroom and watched Gerald Goodale plead guilty.

After the hearing, Daniel told the press, “Justice has been served in part.

Of course, we will all die and we will all be judged, but I have forgiven him for what he did to me and my family.

” He spoke about Janet’s parents, the two people who never lived to see this day, with the voice of someone who had learned to carry that pain with him through decades.

Then he spoke about the investigators.

“They are wonderful, persistent, and never gave up.

Someone came to visit my aunt and uncle every year to update them on the situation.

They couldn’t tell everything because it would reveal investigative information, but they kept in touch, and that really meant a lot to me.

” Cath Veer Welsh, a friend the same age as Janet, also spoke after the hearing.

Welsh and Janet were the same age.

In 2023, Welsh was 57 years old, and she said it had been a long time since she had opened the box containing Janet’s mementos.

“Time passes.

People gradually forget.

But I am very grateful to the State Police for reopening this case and closing it,” Welsh said.

“Taking a life is terrible, but taking a life on Christmas Eve is unimaginable.

What her parents had to go through, sitting and waiting for their daughter who never came home.

” Then she added, “I think we always knew he did it.

He was questioned and she left with him.

But to get the conviction, that is closure.

” When Gerald Goodale pleaded guilty in March 2023, the Maine State Police Unsolved Homicide Unit still had 69 other cold cases on their desks.

69 other families were still waiting.

69 other files with preserved evidence, with unanswered questions, with elderly people counting the years they had left.

L Teet, Thomas Pickering of the unit said, “We work on cases until we reach some kind of conclusion, and we come back to review them when new technology becomes available.

The Brochu case is the clearest proof of that statement.

The right evidence, properly preserved, and enough patience will eventually tell the truth, even if it takes 31 years.

” But this case did not close completely.

Goodale pleaded guilty and did not explain why he suddenly did so after 35 years of silence.

No one knows what happened inside his head between the last time he said no and the day he stood up in the courtroom in Skowhegan.

No one knows exactly what happened to Janet in the hours between the time she stood in the T Woddy’s parking lot and the moment her body appeared in the Sebasticook River.

The specific details of the crime were never publicly released.

And the 1989 statement is still there, still not fully explained.

“I didn’t do it, but I know who did, and I won’t say.

” Now we know he lied about the first part, but why did he say that? Why not stay completely silent? What did he want to protect? Or did he just want everyone to know that he was holding on to something they couldn’t take from him? That question has no answer.

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