A judgment ignored, justice denied in Maine criminal case

The last time I saw Mikey was Oct. 17, 1991. I was a reporter who’d just covered a murder trial. He was a 12-year-old boy who’d just seen Richard Uffelman convicted for murdering his parents.

We sat in a Houlton diner, talking about the two-week trial just ended. About the horrible day two years earlier in Machiasport when a barrage of gunfire erupted from the house across the road. About how Mikey hid under the bed when the shooting started. About the despicable lies Uffelman told from the witness stand about Mikey’s parents. About how Uffelman terrified Mikey with a violent outburst during the trial. About how Mikey was making a new life for himself living with his grown sister in Indiana and how he couldn’t wait to get back to his friends and his undefeated sixth-grade football team.

I talked to Mikey, now Michael, on the phone the other night. He’s 21 now, engaged to be married. What little childhood Uffelman left him was rough – his sister’s marriage broke up, he couldn’t deal with his parents’ death, he couldn’t even cry about it. Therapy, a group home at 13, out on his own working at 18, a few college classes here and there, trying to scrape the money together to go full-time in the fall. He’s a well-spoken young man, fairly cheerful, very polite. He’s going to be OK.

But we were not talking just to catch up. First though, a refresher on that strange and abhorrent crime known as the videotape murders.

On Aug. 29, 1989, Michael and Florence Phillips left their modest Machiasport home and went for a walk along Route 191, something they did nearly every nice evening. Before leaving, they did something else they’d been doing of late – they set up a video camera in their kitchen and aimed it at the large white house with the Greek columns across the road to record for police the harassment, the threats, that had been coming at them from Uffelman’s stately “Five Posts Estate.”

For about 10 minutes, the camera records video that is nothing but a still life of the Uffelman house and audio that is idle kitchen-table chat between Mikey and two family friends who’d come over for supper. Suddenly, with his parents still out of camera view, the large picture window of the Uffelman house explodes, 25 shots are fired from the living room toward the road in just a few seconds. A boy is heard screaming for his mom. The audio is all commotion, the video again goes still. A few minutes later, Richard Uffelman, carrying a rifle, walks out of his house toward the road, then out of view. More shots are heard.

He goes back to his house. Then comes out again with his two sons, ages 10 and 12, all carrying rifles. Back to the road, out of view, more shots.

Later, police found in the Uffelman house loaded firearms at the ready in every room, even the bathrooms, 38 guns in all. Hidden passageways, secret rooms, barricades, multiple security systems. Outside there were floodlights, loudspeakers, a shooting range with human-shaped targets. When the house caught fire a few months later, strange chemicals in the basement produced fumes so noxious firefighters could only stand by and watch it burn to the ground.

At trial, Uffelman described himself as a super-patriot, an unpaid undercover government agent who’d fled his native New Jersey after exposing police corruption. In peaceful, innocent Maine, he found himself ferreting out a drug/espionage conspiracy at the nearby Cutler Naval Communications Station and he concluded the Phillipses were part of the conspiracy.

Uffelman described the military drills he led his family through daily and proudly confirmed that when he opened fire on the Phillipses, and when he made that second trip out to finish them off point-blank, so did his well-trained boys. When the prosecution played that videotape for the jury, he – timing it precisely with his wristwatch – leapt from his chair a second before the shooting started and lunged at Mikey, trying to distract the jury and succeeding in sending the terrified boy shrieking from the courtroom.

A year after the criminal trial, Mikey won a wrongful death civil lawsuit in Washington County Superior Court against the entire Uffelman family. In 1994, an award of $513,320 plus interest was ordered and Uffelman’s attempt immediately after the shooting to transfer ownership of his property to his father, Francis, in New Jersey was declared fraudulent.

And that’s why we were talking. Seven years after the award, Michael Phillips has received nothing. The assets were considerable – the $150,000 insurance settlement on the burned house, 38 top-quality firearms, five collector’s cars (funky but collectable Pacers), valuable coin and military souvenir collections, the estate (estimated at $250,000) Francis Uffelman left his only son when he died in 1992.

With all that, the young man who, according to a judgment by Maine’s highest trial court, owns the first $513,320 plus interest of anything the Uffelman family owns, has received nothing. For years, Michael’s sister, Sandra, tried to track down these assets and found nothing but dead ends, a complete lack of interest within the Maine justice system for upholding its court decisions. Now, Michael and his future mother-in-law, Brenda, are doing the same and getting the same results.

So I go to see Uffelman at Maine State Prison. As always, the passage to the visiting room – four steel doors, the one behind must slam shut before the one ahead opens – is chilling. We begin by talking about his sons.

I observe that they are, after Michael, the two greatest living victims of this tragedy. Missing my point, the imprisoned super-patriot adds himself to the list. I say I knew the boys did extremely well in high school and have no desire to ruin their new lives by revealing their whereabouts. Uffelman tells me both went on to college, one to what he described as “a top Ivy League school.” That, I think, is a lot of tuition for someone who owes Michael Phillips $513,320 plus interest.

During the conversation, I also learn that Uffelman collects a VA disability benefit and has a paying job as clerk for the prison chaplain. According to the judgment, that money belongs to Michael Phillips. Not that the judgment matters, apparently.

I ask what happened to the roughly half-million dollars in assets that are unaccounted for and I get the same answer I (and Michael, Sandra and Brenda) always get from anyone involved in the case, from the local law office to the top of the justice system in two states – Kevin Wall probably stole everything.

Wall was Uffelman’s trial attorney. He was disbarred in his home state of New Jersey in 1996 for various professional misconduct issues. He did take some of the guns to cover his fee, he once had control of a trust fund created by the insurance settlement and he had power of attorney for the ailing Francis after Richard went to prison, but the theft of all the assets has never been investigated, it is nothing but an unfounded allegation repeated so often it’s accepted as fact and used as an excuse for doing nothing. I am not surprised to hear it coming from someone who’s first thought upon slaughtering his neighbors was to shield his assets from his neighbor’s son.

Wall was in Maine just two years ago for a hearing on Uffelman’s motion for a new trial and, except for a hint made by the murderer’s court-appointed attorney, no mention was made by Uffelman or the state of the alleged massive theft, no complaint was filed, no investigation launched. Maybe Wall did steal everything and is just plain lucky that authorities in neither Maine nor New Jersey – or the IRS or the U.S. Attorney, for that matter – seem to care. Or maybe Wall, with his already damaged character, is a handy scapegoat. As long as the only people trying to find out are three legal novices in Indiana, we’ll never know.

There are, however, some Uffelman assets immediately available to Michael with just a little paperwork. One is the actual scene of the crime, the accursed Machiasport lot where the house with the columns once stood, and its value might, just might, exceed the back taxes due. The other assets are even more hideous, more grotesquely ironic. They are locked in an evidence cabinet in Washington County Superior Court. They are the guns that killed Michael’s parents.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.