The Murders of Gloria Gough & Evelyn "Penny" Deans (Maine and South Carolina)

In August of 1972, 44-year-old Gloria Gough left her home in Gardiner, Maine after a late-night phone call and vanished. Two days later, more than a thousand miles away in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 52-year-old Evelyn “Penny” Deans was shot to death inside her home. Then police looked in Penny’s driveway. Sitting there was Gloria’s car. Inside were blood-soaked towels, clothing, and a map pointing toward yet another state. What followed was a multistate investigation, a murder case built largely on circumstantial evidence, and a second murder case that never reached trial – not because investigators walked away, but because the family asked for something different from the justice system.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Kylie Low?

  In August of 1972, 44-year-old Gloria Goff left her home in Gardner, Maine after a late-night phone call and vanished. Two days later, more than 1,000 miles away in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 52-year-old Evelyn Penny Deans was shot to death inside her home. Then police looked in Penny's driveway. Sitting there was Gloria's car. Inside were blood-soaked towels, clothing, and a map pointing toward yet another state. What followed was a multi-state investigation, a murder case built largely on circumstantial evidence, and a second murder case that never reached trial, not because investigators

• 1:18Kylie Low?

  walked away, but because the family asked for something different from the justice system. I'm Kylie Low, and these are the cases of Gloria Goff and Evelyn Penny Deans on Dark Down East.

• 1:41Kylie Low?

  Mount Pleasant, South Carolina sits low along the coast, where tidal creeks cut through broad stretches of marsh grass and warm salt air hangs heavy in late summer. It is more than 1,000 miles south of New England's northernmost state, where the landscape is quite different, with its pine forests, rocky ground, and small towns built along cold rivers. On August 20, 1972, there was no obvious reason that a quiet house in Mount Pleasant should have anything to do with an unexplained disappearance in Gardner, Maine, but that was about to change. Just before midnight that Sunday, William Bill Deans and a friend had driven by Bill's mother's home, who lived in the same neighborhood as him, and noticed the lights were on and

• 2:26Kylie Low?

  there was a strange car in the driveway. According to the book, A Courageous Fool by Todd C. Peppers and Margaret A. Anderson, Bill's mother, 52-year-old Evelyn Penny Deans, and her young daughter weren't expected back from vacation for a few days, so everything about the house and the car didn't make sense. Bill pulled in to take a closer look. Penny and her daughter must have returned from vacation earlier than expected because Bill heard voices as he approached the house and figured she had a friend over or something. He turned to leave, but just as his back was to the house, he heard gunshots. Bill rushed to the front door, pounding on it, trying to get inside, while his friend

• 3:10Kylie Low?

  rounded the back of the house just in time to see an unknown man running from the garage. Bill found his mother lying on the floor of her home. She had been shot. Penny's young daughter was inside, physically unharmed. Police descended on the house and the surrounding area, and they didn't have to look far for a major piece of evidence. In Penny's driveway was the strange car Bill had seen, a Volkswagen car that didn't belong to her. It had main license plates. The out-of-state plates were strange enough. What investigators found inside made the Volkswagen impossible to dismiss.

• 3:51Kylie Low?

  There was a woman's purse and a rain hat, along with men's pants and a jacket, a radio, and a flashlight. There were also two towels soaked with what appeared to be blood. A map inside the car had Fayetteville, North Carolina circled. And tucked into the men's pair of pants was a piece of paper containing a list of names. At the top was the name Gloria Goff. Police ran the Volkswagen's registration and found that it belonged to Gloria, a 44-year-old woman from Gardner, Maine. A missing woman from Maine. Two nights earlier, on Friday, August 18, Gloria's sister was visiting from Boston when the telephone rang sometime around 9:50 or 10 o'clock that night.

• 4:36Kylie Low?

  Gloria answered, and her sister would later say that Gloria told the person on the other end that she would come pick them up. About 10 minutes later, Gloria put on her rain gear, climbed into her new Volkswagen, and drove away. She never came home. By Saturday, Gloria had been reported missing. Now Gloria's Volkswagen was sitting in the driveway of a woman who had just been murdered, but Gloria wasn't there. Police in South Carolina were trying to determine who shot Penny Deans. Police in Maine were trying to determine what had happened to Gloria Goff. Almost instantly, they would realize these weren't two separate investigations.

• 5:19Kylie Low?

  According to reporting in the Morning Sentinel, on Saturday morning, August 19, a cook's helper at the Kennebec County Jail went looking for one of the inmates who worked in the kitchen. His cell was empty. Jail officials found a window between the officer's mess hall and the sheriff's apartment, which was adjacent to the jail, pushed open, the likely escape route. The missing man was 38-year-old Lloyd Wayne Northup Jr., who went by his middle name Wayne. Wayne had been at the county jail much longer than was typical. He was in the middle of appealing earlier convictions, and while those cases moved through the appellate process, he remained in county custody rather than being transferred to Maine State Prison to begin his given sentence.

• 6:04Kylie Low?

  Jeff Seidman reports for the Kennebec Journal that for 14 months, Wayne had worked as the jailhouse cook and was considered a "trustee," an inmate given certain responsibilities and privileges because jail officials believed he could be trusted. That status gave Wayne considerably more freedom than most of the people held there. He slept in an unlocked cell adjacent to the kitchen, and his job allowed him access to areas of the jail other inmates generally wouldn't have. Nothing the night before had apparently caused anyone to think Wayne was planning to leave. On Friday night, August 18, he told the dispatcher who would be coming on duty the following morning that he should tiptoe into the office because Wayne would be sleeping

• 6:49Kylie Low?

  and didn't want to be disturbed. The dispatcher last remembered seeing him at about 9 o'clock that night. Sometime after that, Wayne disappeared. Sheriff Stanley Jordan was reportedly away on vacation when Wayne escaped, but his son had been in the sheriff's apartment that night from about midnight until 3:00 in the morning and said no one came in or out during that time. So investigators believed Wayne may have escaped much earlier, sometime around 9:15 PM, while a movie was being shown for the inmates. The theory was that he simply made his way through the window to an unlocked door and left the jail. Under normal circumstances, the dispatcher's office door was open, giving whoever was

• 7:33Kylie Low?

  on duty a clear view of the jail's front entrance, but the investigation found that on the night Wayne disappeared, the office door had been closed for a period of about five minutes. Investigators believed Wayne may have used that brief window to leave without being seen. For hours after, no one noticed. By the time the empty cell was discovered Saturday morning, Wayne had a significant head start. That same Friday night, less than an hour after he was last seen at the jail, Gloria Goff had received a phone call at her home in Gardner. She told her sister she was going to pick someone up, put on her rain gear, and drove away in her Volkswagen.

• 8:17Kylie Low?

  Now both Gloria and Wayne were missing. By Monday, August 21, whatever connection existed between Maine and the murder in Mount Pleasant no longer looked coincidental. Kennebec County Sheriff Stanley Jordan traveled south to join the search. When the sheriff examined the belongings recovered from Gloria's Volkswagen, some of them were immediately familiar. He identified the men's pants and jacket as belonging to the escaped inmate, Wayne Northup. The flashlight found inside the car was familiar for an even more specific reason. It belonged to Sheriff Jordan himself and had been taken from the mantel inside the sheriff's apartment at the jail.

• 9:01Kylie Low?

  The sheriff also discovered that his home in South Gardner had been burglarized sometime Friday night. According to court records, a gun was gone, along with possibly other items from the garage, including a spool of wire. Police searched the marshy landscape around Mount Pleasant from the ground and from the air. During one surveillance flight, a plane spotted a man in a creek near the eastern end of the Grace Memorial Bridge, and search teams concentrated on that area. Charleston police set up a roadblock across the bridge, stopping vehicles and searching the cars that passed through. But Wayne wasn't anywhere to be found. As the search continued through the creeks and marshes, police considered another possibility.

• 9:45Kylie Low?

  Maybe the man they were looking for hadn't made it out at all. Authorities theorized that Wayne could have drowned somewhere in the swamp. That explanation didn't last long, though. Wayne's own sister contacted police with very different information. She told investigators that her brother had shown up at her home in North Carolina, in the same town circled on that map found in Gloria's car, and that she had bottom a bus ticket headed north back toward Portland, Maine. She also said Wayne had blood on his clothing, but he told her it was from a car accident. The search that had been concentrated around the marshes of coastal South Carolina abruptly changed direction.

• 10:29Kylie Low?

  The man suspected of killing Penny Deans was making his way back toward the state where Gloria Goff was still missing.

• 10:43Kylie Low?

  Every small town has a local legend. The house no one drives past after dark, or the woods that hold secrets. Every October, I like to add something a little more spooky to my playlist, stories that blur the line between what's imagined and what might be waiting in the dark. Full Body Chills returns with more strange coincidences, unsettling confessions, and stories where danger may be closer than it seems. Listen to Full Body Chills all October long, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 11:21Kylie Low?

  On the afternoon of August 22nd, Kennebec County Sheriff Stanley Jordan called Gardiner Police Chief William McDonald with a hunch. He suggested police look for Gloria behind the Lipman Poultry Company plant. Jeff Seidman reports for the Kennebec Journal that the sheriff later explained he'd once brought Wayne Northup to the plant to collect bricks, so he was familiar with it. Gardiner Police Sergeant Craig Marshall headed towards the plant, but perhaps operating on his own hunch, he didn't drive directly there. Instead, he checked the quiet dirt roads along the route, weaving the back lanes in search of the missing woman. He never made it to the location Jordan suggested.

• 12:04Kylie Low?

  About two miles south of Gardiner, roughly 50 yards off River Road, Marshall found Gloria's body. An examination would later determine that Gloria had suffered a stab wound to the heart, the blade passing through both ventricles. The pathologist estimated the weapon had a blade at least four and a half to five inches long, and Gloria died from the resulting blood loss. There was also a piece of broken wire around her neck with slight hemorrhaging in the area, but there was no fracture of a bone sometimes associated with strangulation, and so the pathologist could not determine with certainty that Gloria had been strangled. Her exact time of death was also difficult to establish.

• 12:45Kylie Low?

  Based on the condition of her body, the pathologist could only place it within a broad window of roughly four to five days before she was found. At nearly the same time police were recovering Gloria's body, another operation was unfolding about 50 miles south in Portland. For three hours, police officers and FBI agents had been watching two bus terminals, waiting for Wayne Northup to arrive. Around 7 o'clock that evening, about an hour after Gloria's body had been found, passengers were stepping off a bus on Congress Street that had originated in New York City. Wayne was among them. Brian Carter reports for the Portland Press Herald that police were concerned that their

• 13:30Kylie Low?

  suspect might put up a fight or even take another passenger hostage if they moved in while he was still surrounded by people, so they waited for him to cross the street before approaching. Thankfully, Wayne was arrested without incident. At that point, he was being held on an escape charge and a federal warrant for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for murder. He was not under arrest for anything related to Gloria's death. Once Wayne was in custody, officers discovered something else. He had a gunshot wound in his leg. Maine officials said the injury was already there when they arrested him, but they didn't know when or where he had been shot. Wayne was taken to Maine Medical Center for treatment.

• 14:14Kylie Low?

  Within about an hour, Wayne was back in custody, and Gloria's discovery had changed the nature of the investigation entirely. And there was plenty of reason for investigators to eye the suspect in Penny's case closely in Gloria's case, too. Wayne and Gloria were not complete strangers. Gloria was a friend of Sheriff Jordan's wife, and she had visited the Jordans at the jail and the adjoining sheriff's apartment before. Exactly how well she knew Wayne is less clear. According to some reporting, Gloria had encountered him only once in her life, when she attended a 25th wedding anniversary celebration for Sheriff Jordan and his wife at the county jail.

• 14:57Kylie Low?

  According to Sheriff Jordan himself, though, Gloria had met Wayne perhaps six or eight times. As the jailhouse cook, Wayne had also acted as a waiter in the guard's mess room, and the sheriff said Wayne had served Gloria when she visited the jail or the sheriff's apartment next door. So, however limited their acquaintance may have been, Gloria and Wayne knew each other, maybe even well enough for him to know her phone number. The brewing theory was that after leaving the jail, Wayne somehow contacted Gloria and convinced her that he was with Sheriff Jordan, giving her a reason to come pick him up. In the days after Wayne's arrest, though, his own statements would make the circumstances

• 15:39Kylie Low?

  around Gloria's death both more suspicious and more complicated. On August 25th, Sheriff Jordan spoke with Wayne at the Cumberland County Jail. Jordan would later testify that he advised Wayne of his rights, but Wayne indicated that he wanted to talk. During that conversation, according to the sheriff, Wayne said something to the effect that if he had to, he would probably plead guilty to Gloria's death rather than going down south. Wayne hadn't been told that Gloria was dead. No one told him that investigators considered him a suspect in her death, and he wasn't facing any charges in her death at that point. His seemingly spontaneous statement about Gloria raised an eyebrow.

• 16:23Kylie Low?

  Wayne also admitted to the sheriff that he had stolen a gun belonging to the sheriff's son from the Jordan home in South Gardiner, and he also confirmed jail officials' suspicions that he escaped the jail by going through the window into the sheriff's apartment and then out the front door. But here's the thing. In his burst of apparent honesty, Wayne said he escaped the jail around midnight. If the fledgling theory of Gloria's murder was the right one, and if Wayne was telling the truth, the timeline of the phone calls she received didn't fit with a midnight escape. Maine State Police Detective Martin Greeley also met with Wayne on August 25th. Greeley advised Wayne of his rights, and again, Wayne wanted to continue the conversation.

• 17:08Kylie Low?

  This time, Wayne reportedly posed a question. If he were to admit to Gloria's murder, would South Carolina still want him for the other case? It wasn't an outright confession, but it was cause for more scrutiny when taken with everything else. Investigators had Gloria's car connected to Penny Dean's murder scene, evidence that suggested Wayne had been inside that car, a prior connection between Wayne and Gloria, and statements that seemed to put Gloria's death squarely on his mind. Now, this was hardly Wayne's first encounter with law enforcement. In fact, one of the more difficult questions raised by his escape was how a man with Wayne's

• 17:50Kylie Low?

  criminal history had ended up with so much freedom inside the Kennebec County Jail in the first place. Wayne's record stretched back at least 16 years. In 1956, Auburn Police arrested him on charges of aggravated assault, rape, and robbery. He was convicted and sentenced to serve at least 20 years in Maine State Prison, but Wayne was paroled in August of 1964, though he wasn't out for long. That December, he faced another rape charge. He was convicted again and sentenced to another five to 10 years in state prison. Then, in July of 1970, probable cause was found in yet another case involving allegations of rape and sodomy.

• 18:33Kylie Low?

  Wayne was held at the Kennebec County Jail on $20,000 bail while the case moved forward. He was convicted that November and sentenced to state prison, but Wayne appealed. That appeal is the reason he was still sitting in the county jail nearly two years later instead of serving his sentence at Maine State Prison. The man who had been given an unlocked cell, a job in the kitchen, and enough freedom to move through parts of the jail had a long history of convictions for serious sexual offenses. But that wasn't necessarily the version of Wayne that jail employees felt they knew. Inside the Kennebec County Jail, Wayne had developed a very different reputation.

• 19:15Kylie Low?

  He was considered a model prisoner, and one deputy described him as a hell of a nice guy. One deputy recalled taking Wayne outside the jail to get haircuts and even to shop for presents for his children. Looking back after the murders, the deputy struggled to reconcile the inmate he knew with the violence Wayne was now suspected of. From his perspective, Wayne simply hadn't seemed like someone capable of homicide. Sheriff Jordan had trusted him outside the jail, too. Wayne was sometimes allowed to do supervised gardening at the sheriff's family home in South Gardener. Now, the garden produced food for inmates at the jail, but it still meant Wayne had spent time on the very property he later admitted burglarizing after he got out.

• 20:00Kylie Low?

  By August 24th, any trust in Wayne had ended spectacularly. He was facing the charge for escaping the Kennebec County Jail, a federal unlawful flight warrant, and a murder charge in South Carolina for the death of Penny Dean's. And it wasn't long before the evidence was enough to add yet another murder charge to the list. After Wayne was released from the hospital for the mystery gunshot wound, the origin of which was never really resolved in the source material I have, by the way, he appeared in district court and was ordered held without bail while the cases against him moved forward. South Carolina authorities were expected to seek his extradition for Penny Dean's

• 20:41Kylie Low?

  murder, but in Maine, investigators were still trying to determine whether they could prove what increasingly appeared to be the connection between Wayne and Gloria's death. The strongest connection between Wayne and Gloria's murder remained her Volkswagen in South Carolina. So, physical evidence recovered from Gloria's car and her body, as well as items connected to Sheriff Jordan, were sent for forensic examination. The FBI determined that the broken wire found around Gloria's neck had come from a spool of wire in Sheriff Jordan's garage at his home in South Gardener. Wayne had already admitted to breaking in there after his escape. The towels found inside Gloria's Volkswagen were confirmed to contain human blood, and

• 21:26Kylie Low?

  investigators noted that they were similar to towels used at the Kennebec County Jail. Hair recovered from the towels was also examined. At least one strand was considered similar to Gloria's hair, though the comparison was tentative and could not provide a definitive identification. Investigators also looked at tape found on Gloria's body and compared it with tape recovered from a gym bag Wayne had. Again, the connection was only tentative, but it was there. One piece of evidence offered a more direct link to Gloria's car. A fingerprint expert with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division examined a print found inside the Volkswagen and identified it as Wayne's.

• 22:10Kylie Low?

  On October 11th, 1972, a Kennebec County grand jury determined there was enough evidence to move forward and indicted Lloyd Wayne Northup Jr. for Gloria Goff's murder.

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• 22:58Kylie Low?

  Every small town has a local legend. The house no one drives past after dark, or the woods that hold secrets. Every October, I like to add something a little more spooky to my playlist. Stories that blur the line between what's imagined and what might be waiting in the dark. Full Body Chills returns with more strange coincidences, unsettling confessions, and stories where danger may be closer than it seems. Listen to Full Body Chills all October long, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:36Kylie Low?

  The trial of Lloyd Wayne Northup Jr. followed not long after. In December of the same year, prosecutors tried to reconstruct for the jury what they believed happened on the night of August 18th. Their case was that Wayne escaped from the jail, contacted Gloria, and ultimately gained possession of her Volkswagen. The state argued that Wayne knew Gloria's phone number and emphasized the timing of his disappearance alongside hers. The medical evidence could narrow the timeline only so much. Dr. Irving Goodoff testified that, based on the decomposition of Gloria's body, she had likely died sometime within roughly four or five days before she was found, which loosely aligned with Wayne's disappearance.

• 24:20Kylie Low?

  He described the stab wound to her heart that caused her death, as well as the evidence suggesting there may have also been an attempt to strangle her. Prosecutors tried to account for a possible murder weapon, too. One man, who had been incarcerated at the jail around the same time Wayne escaped, testified that he believed a knife may have been missing. The judge struck that testimony from the record, however, because no one could establish that the knife hadn't already been gone before Wayne disappeared. Other witnesses helped reconstruct Wayne's movements. Wayne's sister told jurors that her brother showed up at her home in North Carolina on August 20th and again on the 21st. It was the first time

• 25:02Kylie Low?

  she had seen him in 15 years. When Wayne returned the second time, she noticed blood on his pants and saw that he was limping. She offered to get a medical attention, but Wayne told her the injury wasn't serious. Eventually, she gave him $10 and bought him the bus ticket that sent him back toward Maine. Another witness testified that she had encountered Wayne before his escape. The woman said she visited the Kennebec County Jail with a friend whose husband was incarcerated there, and during one of those visits, possibly the same week as his escape, she spoke to Wayne. She testified that Wayne told her he would be getting out that Saturday and

• 25:44Kylie Low?

  asked whether she would pick him up when he got out at midnight. Wayne did not have a pending release, so the request suggested he was trying to make plans to get out anyway. Then there was a witness from South Carolina, the friend of Bill Dean's who had been outside Penny Dean's home when gunshots rang out. He testified that he saw a man run from the garage and come within about 20 feet of him. At Wayne's trial in Maine, the witness pointed to the defense table and identified Wayne as the man he saw that night. There was another witness from South Carolina, too, though she didn't really testify. Prosecutors

• 26:25Kylie Low?

  called Penny's young daughter to the stand, apparently intending to ask her about the man she had seen the night her mother was killed. The scene is described in writings by Penny Dean's daughter-in-law, Marie Deans, included in the book A Courageous Fool by Todd C. Peppers and Margaret A. Anderson. The young girl stepped up to the witness stand, took one look at Wayne Northup, and crumbled into tears from the trauma of it all. Penny's son Bill took her from the courtroom and left. Marie Deans later wrote that she felt Bill was manipulated by the Maine prosecutor. Wayne's defense attorney attacked the state's case, emphasizing how much of the prosecution's

• 27:06Kylie Low?

  theory relied on inference rather than anyone actually seeing Wayne with Gloria. And there was one problem with the state's case that the defense seized: the timeline. Wayne claimed he escaped around midnight. If that was true, then he couldn't have placed the call Gloria received around 9:50 or 10 o'clock that night. Of course, other estimates put Wayne's escape closer to 9:00 or 9:30, which fit much better with Gloria's phone call. But even that version left questions. If Wayne walked out of the jail around 9:15, where did he go next? Where did he find a telephone? And could he have contacted Gloria quickly enough

• 27:49Kylie Low?

  to set everything else in motion? Wayne admitted stealing a gun from Sheriff Jordan's home in South Gardner, meaning investigators knew he had made his way there at some point after the escape. A telephone there could potentially explain the call, but the Jordan home was at least 10 miles from the Kennebec County Jail. The prosecution could offer a sequence of events, but it could not account for every minute, at least not in the records I have. The trial lasted only seven days. After the attorneys finished their arguments, the jury deliberated for about four hours. On December 9, 1972, Lloyd Wayne Northup Jr.

• 28:31Kylie Low?

  was found guilty of murdering Gloria Goff. The court sentenced him to life in Maine State Prison, but under Maine law at the time, a life sentence did not necessarily mean spending the rest of his natural life behind bars. According to contemporary reporting, Wayne could become eligible for release after roughly 12 and a half years with credit for good behavior. Wayne's conviction for Gloria's murder didn't end the legal fight, though. Almost immediately, he began challenging the verdict, first seeking a new trial on the grounds of jury misconduct. The judge denied that request. Later, Wayne appealed his murder conviction to the State Supreme Court. His attorneys raised several issues

• 29:14Kylie Low?

  with the trial, arguing that the court should have granted a change of venue, that Wayne's statements to Sheriff Jordan and Detective Greeley while he was being held in county jail should not have been admitted at trial, and that the evidence against him was insufficient to support a murder conviction. The court rejected those arguments and denied the appeal. Wayne's conviction for Gloria Goff's murder stood. The conviction for Gloria's murder was only one part of what Wayne was up against. At the same time, the appeals that had kept Wayne at the Kennebec County Jail in the first place were reaching their own conclusion. The Maine Supreme Court denied his challenges to his earlier rape convictions, meaning those sentences would stand as well. Wayne

• 29:58Kylie Low?

  was facing another 12 to 24 years for those crimes. Then there was the escape itself. In June of 1973, Wayne was sentenced to a minimum of seven years for walking out of the Kennebec County Jail on the same night Gloria disappeared. By then, Maine courtrooms were sick of Wayne's face. But there was still one pending charge against him more than 1,000 miles away.

• 30:24Kylie Low?

  Wayne remained charged with Penny's murder in South Carolina, but despite everything investigators had assembled against him, he would never stand trial there. Penny's family didn't want him to. The trauma of the trial in Maine had been enough for them, and the prosecutor in South Carolina agreed. Wayne would not be extradited after all. But their wish to avoid a trial for Penny's murder grew into much more than that for Marie Deans, Penny's daughter-in-law. According to Doug Struck's 1990 story published in The Baltimore Sun, Marie Deans remembered sitting outside Penny's home as police tape

• 31:05Kylie Low?

  went up around the scene. At some point, an officer approached and tried to reassure her. He told her, "Don't worry, we'll catch the man who did this and fry him." If Wayne had been extradited to South Carolina and faced trial for Penny's murder, he may have faced the death penalty. That's true. But the thought of killing someone else, regardless of the pain he'd caused for their family, didn't compute for Penny's loved ones. Marie later explained their position to Margaret N. O'Shea for the state, saying, "How could we teach Penny's grandchild that life is sacred if we allowed anyone to be killed in her name and in ours?"

• 31:47Kylie Low?

  It would be easy to hear that and assume Penny's family was offering Wayne forgiveness or minimizing what had been done to her. That wasn't it. For Marie, her views of the death penalty became something much bigger than the suspect in her mother-in-law's case. She founded an organization called Murder Victims Families Against the Death Penalty, later known as Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation. Kirk Macon reports for The Globe and Mail that in 1977, an attorney contacted Marie about a man facing execution who wanted to abandon his appeals and go directly to the electric chair. He was reportedly overwhelmed by remorse for what he had done to the victim's family and believed his own

• 32:30Kylie Low?

  death might somehow make things right. Marie agreed to speak with him and argued that dying would not provide the family with any greater justice. The conversation changed his mind, and he continued his appeals. That was the beginning of another part of Marie's life: fighting for those facing death.

• 32:53Kylie Low?

  She began working with more people staring down the death penalty, first in South Carolina and later in Virginia, where she became deeply involved in cases involving defendants who were often lacking sufficient legal representation. She created the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons and worked to find attorneys willing to take murder cases, often seeking lawyers who would provide their services for free. One account described Marie as essentially pestering attorneys until she found the help she needed. She built a reputation as something of a life preserver for people facing execution, and eventually became regarded as a national expert on capital sentencing procedures. The numbers give some sense of the scope of that work.

• 33:37Kylie Low?

  Between 1986 and 1989, Marie worked on 79 cases in which the death penalty could have been imposed. One defendant received a death sentence. One was acquitted. The rest received life sentences instead. Marie's opposition to execution didn't translate into leniency towards the people she worked with. By some accounts, she could be tougher on them than the wardens responsible for their custody. She expected them to confront their crimes. Marie told The Baltimore Sun in 1990, "I want them to take responsibility. I want them to know what they have done." To Marie, recognizing their humanity and demanding accountability from them

• 34:22Kylie Low?

  were not contradictory ideas. She believed both things could be true at once. Her work wasn't limited to arguing over punishment after guilt had been firmly established. In at least one extraordinary case, Marie helped uncover that a man facing execution had been wrongfully convicted. According to Coleman McCarthy's reporting for The Bulletin, Earl Washington Jr. was on Virginia's death row for the sexual assault and murder of 19-year-old Rebecca Lynn Williams in 1982. He was a black man with an intellectual disability who could not afford an attorney for his appeals, and the state of Virginia would not provide one. Marie reviewed records from his arrest and trial herself

• 35:07Kylie Low?

  and saw problems. She helped assemble a legal team to investigate the conviction, and eventually, DNA evidence excluded Washington as the perpetrator. He had come within nine days of being executed. Washington was eventually released from prison in 2001 and pardoned in 2007. Marie continued doing this work for decades, often for very little money. Her salary from the organization was rarely more than $13,000 a year. And when the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons ran out of funding in the early 1990s, she kept working through other efforts, including the Virginia Mitigation Project,

• 35:48Kylie Low?

  which sought to persuade juries to choose sentences other than death. Marie Deans died in April of 2011 at 70 years old, following a battle with lung cancer. Her life's work had grown out of one terrible night in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Penny's murder gave Marie every reason to understand the devastation of violent crime personally. And the conclusion she reached from that experience was not that another death would balance the scale. It was that Penny's name should never be used to justify one.

• 36:24Kylie Low?

  Gloria Goff was 44, the mother of a daughter, an employee of the Gosline Mercy Insurance Agency, and a member of Riverview Congregational Church. Penny Deans was 52. Marie remembered how thrilled she was to be welcoming her first grandchild. Two women, killed within days of each other and more than 1,000 miles apart, became connected through one extraordinary chain of events. What followed their deaths continued shaping lives and institutions long after the criminal cases themselves were over. In Gloria's case, the person ultimately convicted of killing her had a long history of serious offenses. Yet jail officials came to trust him enough

• 37:06Kylie Low?

  that he benefited from unusual freedom while in jail. His escape exposed weaknesses in the jail's security and prompted changes intended to lower the risk of it happening again. Penny's case left a powerful legacy of its own. Even without a courtroom conclusion, her family was confronted almost immediately with the idea that justice for Penny might mean putting the man accused of killing her to death. Her daughter-in-law rejected that idea, and that opposition eventually grew into decades of advocacy, including the exoneration of a wrongfully convicted man. Penny's family offered an important reminder that victims' families do not all want the same thing,

• 37:50Kylie Low?

  and that their grief should not be used to assume an answer for them. More than half a century later, that may be the clearest reason these cases are still worth sharing and understanding. Together, they show how the decisions made around a crime, who is trusted, how institutions respond, and what justice is allowed to mean can carry consequences long after the crime itself is over.

• 38:27Kylie Low?

  Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram, @darkdowneast. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Low, and this is Dark Down East.

• 38:59Kylie Low?

  Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and AudioChuck. I think Chuck would approve.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And they said, "Maybe she'll find out where this girl is."

• 39:31Speaker 05

  I saw him violent. Backhanded her. Pow!

• 39:37Speaker 06

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season 2, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.