Thirty years ago today the body of 68-year-old Emile “Andrew” Marten was found bound and bludgeoned in his cabin in the woods off U.S. Route 2A about 40 miles south of Houlton.

There were a number of suspects, but budget and other problems interfered with the investigation. As a result, the case has never been solved.

Marten was last seen alive by his friends and neighbors in the sparsely populated township near Macwahoc on April 10, 1963, when he stopped into Merle Clifford’s store for some food, according to accounts by Ken Buckley, a reporter with the Bangor Daily News. The store was about 100 yards from Marten’s cabin.

Two days later 80-year-old Mitchell Arsenault became concerned that he hadn’t seen Marten and went over to the cabin. He found his friend dead.

Clifford, who went to the cabin after Arsenault informed him that Marten appeared to be dead, reported that he found Marten lying face down with his hands and feet trussed, and a large bath towel wrapped around his head.

The autopsy made it clear that Marten was the victim of foul play. The report stated that Marten had died from broken blood vessels when his skull was fractured. It said that Marten had been hit on the top of his head four or five times with a sharp-edged instrument, and also struck across the bridge of his nose.

Both the Maine State Police and the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department investigated the murder, together and then separately. Most of the people who worked on the case cannot be located or have died.

One man who does remember the case, however, is John O. Rogers of Patten, who was Aroostook County attorney at the time of the murder.

He recalled during a recent interview that an investigator from his office, together with a state police investigator, found two men they came to believe were connected with Marten’s death. The men were from Connecticut.

According to Rogers, the two men were questioned by police in Aroostook County and then by state police in Augusta. Although the two investigative agencies didn’t immediately share the results of their interviews, Rogers said he eventually got a call from the state police pointing out that the story the pair had told in Augusta was different from what they had told police in Aroostook County.

An arrest warrant was issued for the men, and they were subsequently arrested in Connecticut. Unfortunately, Rogers said, the Maine State Police did not have any money to go to Connecticut to get them.

Realizing how important it was to question the pair again, Rogers said he arranged to have Aroostook County foot the bill for a county deputy and a state police trooper to go to Connecticut.

He said that on the day the trip was scheduled, however, he learned from the deputy that the state police had called it off.

“That was the last I ever heard of the case,” he said. “There were no (other) leads and we had nothing to go on. I was very irritated when that took place. I think those fellas from Connecticut did it and they got away with it.”

Much remains unsolved about the case in addition to who killed Marten. Some people speculated that Marten, a retired carpenter, had been killed elsewhere and then brought back to his cabin. Other evidence suggested there was a struggle in the cabin. Blood was found on some chairs and the refrigerator, and the television was still on when Marten’s body was found.

Some theorized that the slaying might have occurred after a party at the cabin. Joan Emery of Wytopitlock, one of Marten’s daughters, was 29 when her father was killed. She said in a recent interview that her father, who was divorced from her mother, was an alcoholic and that when he was drinking, “anybody was his friend.” She added, however, that she was told by investigators that at the time of his death her father was “absolutely sober.”

“I didn’t know much about (the murder) at the time,” she said. “They questioned a lot of people. They never kept us informed, (but) I was very naive at that time. I thought it would all be solved right away.”

Besides the two men from Connecticut, police also considered at least two other men as suspects at different points during the investigation.

Less than two weeks after the murder, authorities turned their suspicions toward a man who had recently been released on parole from the Maine State Prison in Thomaston, where he had been serving a sentence for a 1933 murder in Blaine.

He was arrested by police in Las Vegas, Nev., on suspicion of bank robbery. A later newspaper story noted, however, that police in Maine were “not too concerned about the man.”

A Wytopitlock man who was wanted by police for illegally shooting a moose, was questioned by police in July after he led Portland police on a high speed chase that was punctuated by gunfire. He was charged with several offenses stemming from the chase, but there was apparently no evidence to connect him with Marten’s death.

One of the most popular theories concerning what happened at Marten’s isolated cabin involved a car that was seen parked about 100 feet north of Clifford’s store on the day that Marten was last seen alive. The car was seen again that same evening parked about 100 feet south of the store.

Footprints from the first parking spot led to the cabin, while the return footprints went to the car’s second parking spot. They were the only footprints around the cabin that could not be identified.

Recently, at the request of the NEWS, state officials looked for, but were unable to find, any material in the state archives concerning the case. Steve McCausland of the Department of Public Safety commented that records were not kept as well 30 years ago as they are today. A similar response came from the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department.