Marchese was responding indirectly to concerns raised by Kim’s sister Karen Dalot. Dalot said her family has been “denied outside help” by the attorney general’s office, including from the FBI, multiple times in the past. Marchese’s understanding of the case history differs from Dalot’s. She said, to her knowledge, investigating authorities haven’t previously nixed FBI assistance.
With so much time elapsed and no answers as to what happened to Kim back in 1986, the family wants the state to take advantage of outside offers of help. In addition to the FBI, Dalot mentioned a former detective working with a cold case squad from another state whose offer of free assistance was rebuffed.
The state views such collaboration differently than partnering with a law enforcement organization, Marchese said. She noted under Title 16, Section 804 of the Maine Revised Statutes, all of the state’s investigative materials are confidential. But it’s not only possible exposure of those materials to public view holding the agency back when it comes to allowing outside assistance in a case by persons who are not active members of a law enforcement agency.
“The integrity of any investigation is contingent on the careful approach to any and all witnesses,” Marchese said, “as well as the handling of any and all evidence.”
If an outside person or organization receives a tip or lead and passes it along to the investigators, “the Maine State Police would welcome that information and would certainly investigate it,” Marchese promised.
As the years pass and frustrations mount, Kim’s family continues its relentless push for answers. Why didn’t Kim come home one Saturday night in the spring of 1986, and who is responsible?
Changed plans
Kimberly Moreau and Mike Staples were high school sweethearts who lived in Jay. Mike gave Kim his class ring, engraved “Mike Staples” and “Mike ’87.” They planned to attend Jay High School’s junior prom together on Saturday, May 11, 1986.Jay is a western Maine town whose population today is still less than 5,000. Many residents of this predominantly blue collar community work at one of the two paper mills, International Paper’s Androscoggin Mill and Wasau Paper Mill. The Jay website boasts that while Jay’s roots are entwined in the industrial revolution, the feel of the town is rural, small-town, making it an ideal place to live, work, and raise a family. There are exceptions to the idyllic experience, of course, with Kimberly’s disappearance among them.
The day before the prom, Mike and Kim argued, and Kim canceled their prom date. That night and the next day, Kim spent time with various friends. Instead of dressing up and spending Saturday evening dancing with Mike as planned, she donned blue jeans, a white short-sleeved blouse, and white high-top sneakers and headed into town with her friend Rhonda Breton. There they encountered two 25-year-old acquaintances in a white Pontiac Trans Am, Brian Enman and Darren Joudry. About 11 p.m., after Darren left to go to work, the car pulled up in front of Kim’s house on Jewell St. Kim ran inside and told her sister Karen she was going out for a ride and would be back in one hour. She didn’t bring a purse or other belongings with her.
Kim did not return home. Later, Rhonda would tell police Kim was still upset over her fight with Mike and asked to be dropped off a half-mile from her home at 3:45 a.m., saying she’d walk the rest of the way. Brian said he dropped her on Jewel street a half-mile from her house and that’s the last time he saw her. Her dad, Richard Moreau, says that’s not believable; it was cold out, and Kimberly was afraid of the dark. Whatever happened to Kim that night, she was never seen or heard from again.
Jay’s official murder rate sits at zero. Its missing persons list consists of one name: Kimberly Moreau.
Delayed investigation
When Kimberly didn’t come home that Saturday night in 1986, police initially considered
her a runaway as was all too common nationwide at the time. It took four months before Kimberly was classified as missing and endangered and police launched an all-out investigation. Eventually, police would search party places where Enman and Joudry were believed to hang out. They searched abandoned wells and quarries, they searched the rivers and woods, following leads as to what might have happened to the missing teen. One popular hangout, Meadowview, was searched multiple times to no avail. Dalot said Kim didn’t typically hang out at Meadowview but the men she was with that night did.It took 18 years before investigators searched the Pontiac Trans Am which, by that time, had cycled through three owners. Although her body has never been found, Kimberly is now presumed by officials to have been a victim of foul play. After seven years without a sighting or communication, Kimberly was declared dead in 1993.
With the official investigation suffering from a “too little, too late” malaise, Dick Moreau has conducted his own inquiries, guided by friends with police experience. He has interviewed more than 100 people in his determination to find out what happened to his daughter, the Sun Journal reported in 2004. He is responsible for more than 50,000 posters about Kim’s disappearance being plastered across the state. Dick Moreau has turned up leads, but no answer.
Familiar refrains
Who holds the answer to what happened to Kimberly Moreau? And who else might have some tidbit of information that could set her family free of their 29-year torture of not knowing?In an interview marking the 25th anniversary of Kimberly’s disappearance in 2011, police mentioned Brian Enman and Darren Joudry by name in asking anyone with information to come forward, anonymously if necessary, to give the Moreau family some peace. Both men still live in the area.
“You know who you are and you know that we have a good idea of who you are,” Maine State Police Lt. Brian McDonough said about the person who can tell them what happened to Kim.
Maine State Police Detective Jeffrey Love expressed a similar sentiment a year later, in speaking with WABI TV. “We know who she was with, we’ve talked to those people, and we feel as though they do have some more information that would help us,” he said.
Police inability to pierce group silence is a common thread among some of Maine’s most notorious unsolved missing persons and homicide cases. In 1995, a baby named Aisha Dickson was beaten to death in her home, a home with three adults in residence.
“All three of those adults are still suspects,” Bangor police Sgt. Ward Gagner said a year later.
When the Aisha Dickson case remained unsolved after 20 years, Bangor police Sgt. Tim Cotton told the Bangor Daily News, “It’s a case where somebody needs to talk to us. It’s very frustrating… to have a grasp of what you believe happened. You can’t always confirm.”
The police posture is much the same in the case of 20-month-old Ayla Reynolds, reported missing from Waterville in 2011 by her father. Maine State Police repeatedly said the three people in the home with Ayla know more than they’ve told police and have not been truthful, but despite the baby’s blood being found in the house, there have been no arrests and few outward signs of progress in the investigation as it drags through its fourth year.
Search for answers
With so much time elapsed, potential sources of information about Kim Moreau have been lost. Rhonda Breton graduated from Jay High School the same year Kimberly disappeared and moved to California two years later. She died in a hit and run in 2009. Any unreported knowledge she may have had went to her grave with her.Besides Enman, and Joudry, the last living people known to have seen Kim, police have set their sights on others who might have information about Kim’s fate. Calvin Tidswell owned an arcade next to the high school back in 1986. Tidswell knew many of the local teens from the arcade and, Dalot says, was friends with Mike Staples. In a 2004 Sun Journal article, Moreau family friend Barry Romano described Tidswell as “a control freak” who exerted control over teens he befriended and said Kimberly and her friends may have visited with him between the time of her argument with Staples and her disappearance.
Tidswell has an extensive criminal record. He spent 12 years in a penitentiary on drug charges, and has been convicted of involuntary manslaughter and unlawful firearms possession. Kimberly’s father was so convinced Tidswell had knowledge of what happened to his daughter, he set up an interview with him in 2004. Before the interview took place, Tidswell, then on parole after serving his 12-year sentence, was jailed for violating his probation by selling cocaine.
On the day in 2004 when Tidswell was arrested for that probation violation in an undercover sting, he was quoted in a Sun Journal feature on ex-cons saying, “I’d rather starve than hustle drugs again.” The newspaper later acknowledged it had been snowed.
Another potential suspect is serial killer Lewis Lent. Police have said Lent, who was convicted of murder in nearby Massachusetts, is not high on their suspect list, but they haven’t crossed his name off, either. When Lent confessed to killing Sara Anne Wood of New York and James Bernardo of Pittsfield, Mass., he told investigators he attacked an
unidentified child in Maine. He did not provide the child’s identity, he did not specify whether the child was from Maine, nor did he explain whether the attack was fatal. The only child to go missing from Maine during the relevant time period was Kimberly Moreau.Lent was investigated for possible involvement in murders from New England to Florida, the Boston Globe noted. As for the killings he admitted, he blamed his actions on demons who allegedly inhabit his alter ego.
If you have any information that might shed light on the events of May 11, 1986 that culminated in Kimberly’s disappearance, please contact the Maine State Police at 207-743-8282.
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