Five years after a 'heinous crime' in Old Orchard Beach

By Kate Irish Collins - Keepmecurrent.com

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

OLD ORCHARD BEACH – Five years after the brutal murders of Carol, Josh and Christopher Bolduc in Old Orchard Beach, the details are still fresh in the minds of the law enforcement officials involved in the case, as well as the community at large.

By pleading guilty to the killings of his mother, brother and stepfather, Matthew Cushing avoided a trial. But that choice has also left unanswered the question of what could have led him to commit such heinous acts on Feb. 20, 2008.

Cushing, 26, is serving a life sentence at the Maine State Prison in Warren. The family home on Birkdale Circle has been leveled and a memorial placed to the Bolduc family. The Old Orchard Street storefront that housed the family business, Blustery Day Flags, is now occupied by Christina’s Classic Cookies.

The investigation into the triple murder showed that Cushing laid in wait for his family, first killing his younger brother Josh, 15; then killing his mother, Carol, 42; and then his stepfather, Chris, also 42, as each of them successively came home on that tragic day.

Authorities said Cushing used a stun gun to incapacitate his victims. He then stabbed them all to death, including the family dog, and then set the family home on fire. It was smoke from the fire that first brought firefighters and police officers to the scene, Detective Sgt. David Hemingway, the lead investigator in the case for the Old Orchard Beach Police Department, said this week.

He called the murder scene, “one of the worst I’ve seen in my career,” and added that because the Bolducs were so well known in town, the brutality of their deaths hit the first responders hard since many of them knew the victims personally.

“That family was known, they owned a local business, their kids went to the local schools and they were active in the community,” Hemingway said. “Because of that there was widespread grief on scene.”

He said it didn’t take long for authorities to zero in on Cushing as a possible suspect because the local police were able to determine that he had been in town that day, and Carol Bolduc’s car, which contained blood and DNA evidence, was also located near Memorial Park and not in the driveway, as would have been expected.

Hemingway said the Maine State Police and the Maine Attorney General’s Office took the lead in investigating the murders, which is standard practice since most local police departments don’t have the crime scene investigators and other equipment necessary.

Even so, the help of the Old Orchard Beach police was key to the investigation and Cushing’s ultimate arrest, Hemingway said. Cushing pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and one count of arson in late March 2009.

Hemingway said it was local police who first made contact with the parents of Chris and Carol Bolduc, who first canvassed the neighborhood to find out whether anyone had seen anything suspicious and who first learned from Cushing’s friends that he had been in town that day.

While there have been murders in Old Orchard Beach since the Bolduc family were killed – most notably that of Winston George, who was ambushed, strangled with a rope and suffocated with a plastic bag on June 20, 2008 – Hemingway said he’s seen nothing as horrible as the killings of the three Bolducs in his 21-year career.

“In a community like this you don’t see things on this scale that often,” he said. “It was really a wake-up call to the community and to the police department that you never really know what’s truly going on behind closed doors and in families.”

Hemingway said the local police had never responded to the Bolduc home for any type of domestic dispute or other issue.

“They were not on our radar. It was (not a situation) we were trying to triage. It was really out of the blue,” he added. “And because we’re such a close-knit, small community, something like this does have a ripple effect.”

Hemingway said for some people, including the remaining members of the Bolduc family, the fact that Cushing pleaded guilty and avoided a trial might have been a relief. The problem, he said, is that the plea leaves so many questions unanswered.

While he couldn’t say much about the surviving family members, Hemingway did say they were “extraordinary to work with and helped us out in any way they could.” He also said the remaining members of the family were well aware that the whole town shared their shock and their grief.

“There is no doubt that this is one of the most heinous crimes in recent memory,” prosecutor Lisa Marchese, who handled the murder case for the attorney general’s office, said this week.

And that’s one reason why Cushing was sentenced to life in prison by Superior Court Justice Paul Fritzsche. At Cushing’s sentencing hearing, the judge said his crimes met the criteria for the state’s harshest punishment, which includes unusual cruelty, multiple killings and some degree of pre-meditation.

Fritzsche agreed with Marchese that Cushing had planned the murders, especially since he had time between each of the three killings to reconsider his actions and because evidence suggested he had researched the best way to stab someone to death before arriving armed at his family’s home in Old Orchard Beach.

“Most people when they want to have a family conversation do not come armed with a stun gun and knife,” Fritzsche said during the sentencing hearing.

At the time of the murders, Cushing was a student at the University of Maine and he lived in an apartment off the Orono campus.

While Marchese agreed with Hemingway that no one may ever truly know what drove Cushing to kill his family, she said during the plea hearing that he may have been motivated by anger at his stepfather.

In 2009, Marchese said interviews with an employee of Chris Bolduc’s at Blustery Day Flags, William Huntington, revealed that Bolduc was gay and intended to divorce his wife and move to South Carolina to live with another man.

Cushing, she said, was purportedly angry about that revelation, and worried that his mother would have trouble supporting herself if the divorce happened. He was also upset with what he regarded as Chris Bolduc’s treatment of the family as a whole.

Early on in the investigation, another possible motive surfaced, which involved Cushing’s desire to leave school and backpack around Europe, a plan that his parents did not support and which caused ongoing arguments among the three of them.

However, at the time of Cushing’s arrest, Marchese said, “I don’t put much stock in the Europe story. This is clearly a very complex situation and much more was involved.”

Cushing’s attorney, Joel Vincent, advanced even a third possible motive, stating in 2009 that Chris Bolduc’s homosexuality and the breakup of his parents’ marriage was not the only reason Cushing was upset.

At the time, Vincent said his client may have been experiencing abandonment issues from not knowing for much of his childhood that Bolduc was not his biological father.

In terms of Cushing’s actual motive, Marchese this week said:

“It is my experience that we don’t always know, even after a trial, the motive behind a crime. The state does not have to prove motive for good reason – that is, there is rarely direct evidence of the workings of the human mind. There are theories and those were disclosed to the court, but only Matthew Cushing himself knows the motive behind these murders.”

In the end, Marchese said, while Cushing’s decision not to go to trial means the murders of the Bolducs may never be totally solved, she also said, “Any time a defendant accepts responsibility by pleading guilty, it is the right thing for the family and the community. Trials can be very difficult on a family and this trial would have been excruciating for family members.”

Cushing never said much publicly during his various court hearings, but during the sentencing he did read a statement apologizing for his actions and saying the world was a worse place because of his deeds.

When asked about her thoughts on the surviving family members, Marchese said, “It really isn’t my place to discuss my impressions of the victim’s family other than to say that they suffered unimaginable pain and loss with grace and dignity.”

While Cushing once had dreams of hitting the open road, his life is now strictly regulated by jailhouse rules.

Jody Breton, an associate commissioner at the Department of Corrections, said a typical day at the Maine State Prison begins with reveille, followed by breakfast. After breakfast, prisoners return to their respective cells and are then released for either a morning work or a morning recreation period.

Then, there is a recall of prisoners and they are released from their housing unit for lunch. After lunch, prisoners return to their cells and then have either afternoon work or an afternoon recreation period. Each work or recreation period is approximately 2½ hours, Breton said.

At the end of the day, prisoners have an evening meal and then are allowed to play cards or board games, to use the exercise equipment or take a shower.

Breton said she doesn’t know if Cushing shares his cell with another prisoner, but said that some inmates do. And, although he is in jail for life, she said counseling and rehabilitation services are available to Cushing as part of his individualized treatment program.

Breton also could not say whether Cushing gets any visitors, since visitor records are kept confidential.