Take the Elkhart exit off the Indiana Toll Road and you come to Cassopolis Street. For the first half-mile or so, before it devolves into just another strip of convenience stores and fast-food joints, it is a broad, elevated boulevard, offering a panoramic view of the rolling northern Indiana countryside.

A notable feature of that stretch of Cassopolis is that it is lined with high hanging banners, easily more than a hundred, each with a word describing a virtue – Faith, Hope, Courage, Determination, and so on.

I follow the banners, and the directions I’d been provided, and soon am parked on a side street of tidy little homes. I get out of the car and shake hands with Mike Phillips.

It’s been nearly 10 years since we last met – Houlton, the fall of 1991. I was there to cover the murder trial of Richard Uffelman. He, then a boy of barely 12, was there to see justice done to the man who’d led the massacre of his mom and dad two years earlier in Machiasport.

Mike’s 21 now, a handsome young man with a nice smile. He’s introduces me to his fiancee, Shelley, and his future mother-in-law, Brenda. I know how much they’ve done for Mike, so I like them before even knowing them. I wonder if they still, as I do now, look for the sadness that must be there behind Mike’s nice smile.

A lot of Mike’s story I already knew. He was born here in Indiana, moved to Maine when he was 5 so his mom, Florence, could be back near her family. His dad, Michael, after lots of looking, finally found a decent job and a house, modest but nice enough, on the ocean, on Route 192. At first they were friends with the family across the road in the big house with the pillars and the enormous picture window – New Jersey transplants Richard and Anita Uffelman and their two sons, about Mike’s age, Ricky and Jerry.

The friendliness didn’t last. The Uffelmans accused the Phillipses of throwing bottles in their yard and retaliated by shining a spotlight on their house most nights and yelling threats at them over a loudspeaker most times they’d leave the house. The rural setting made immediate police response impossible, so the Phillipses set up a video camera in their kitchen window to record the harassment, to document the threats, the spotlight, the brandishing of guns by Richard Uffelman and his two sons.

On the evening of Aug. 29, 1989, Michael and Florence Phillips went for their regular after-supper walk and, after recording about 10 minutes of stillness at the big house across the road, the camera caught the enormous picture window exploding outward in gunfire, dozens of shots in just a few seconds. Off camera, Michael and Florence lay dying. On camera, Richard Uffelman crosses toward them, carrying a rifle. More shots are heard. His sons, also armed, join him. Still more shots. Throughout, Mike screams for his mom.

That I already knew, it all came out at the trial. Here are some things I didn’t know until I went to Elkhart.

Even at the age of 6 and 7, Mike wondered why the Uffelman house was so full of guns (38 according to police). No one else had a house with secret passageways in the walls, tunnels from the basement to the outside and a shooting range with human-shaped targets. No other family was so obsessed with war and weapons and death as the Uffelmans. No other family had withstood the harassment targeted at the little house that interfered with the big house’s view of the ocean as long as the Phillipses.

He always had to play at other kids’ houses. No parents in Machiasport would let their kids play at Mike’s because of what was across the road.

He never got to have a birthday party because nobody would come, so in early July 1989, when he turned 10, the Phillipses went to Indiana to celebrate with friends and family there. On that trip, Mike heard his mom whisper something to his grown sister, Sandy, that she should take care of Mike if something happened to her.

On that horrible day some seven weeks later when something happened, his mom kissed him before her walk and told him to have fun in Indiana with Sandy. When the shooting started, his Aunt Vanessa and Uncle Colby, over for supper, shielded him with their bodies. That night, when it was all over and somebody had to call Sandy with the horrible news, he heard her shrieks of grief through the telephone.

The bizarre story Uffelman told at trial about Michael and Florence being part of a drug and espionage gang and about him being an undercover government agent seems absurd now but it was profoundly hurtful to a 12-year-old boy. When Uffleman lunged and screamed at that little boy in the courtroom to distract the jury from the crucial moment on the videotape, it reopened a wound that tormented Mike throughout what Uffelman left him of his childhood.

But I didn’t go to Elkhart merely to get more details about a 12-year-old solved murder. I went to meet the victim of a crime that continues today.

In 1994, Mike won a wrongful death suit against the Uffelman family, with an award of $513,320 plus interest. The award, set by a justice of the Maine Superior Court, was based upon clearly identifiable assets: the insurance settlement on the Uffelman house (which mysteriously burned to the ground about a year after the murders); Uffelman’s large collections of coins, military souvenirs, cars and, of course, guns; the estate of Uffelman’s deceased father.

To date, the amount of that award paid to Mike is zero. Nothing. With Sandy’s help, and now with Shelley and Brenda’s, he had accumulated a six-inch stack of legal documents about a trust fund that was there and, now that he’s 21 and of age to collect, isn’t. Uffelman says his New Jersey lawyer stole everything and Maine authorities, without even a perfunctory investigation, choose to believe a man who has lied about so much. Meanwhile, authorities in New Jersey at least are looking into helping Mike through a compensation fund for victims of legal malpractice.

Through a lot of digging, Mike has learned that the total of the Uffelman assets available to him now consist of: The vacant lot where the Uffelman house once stood (if Mike can pay the back taxes); the murder weapons stored by the state (if someone at the state will bother to tell Mike exactly how to get them); and one-fourth of Uffelman’s prison account (although Mike has to hire a lawyer to get it and no one will tell him how much is there except to suggest that since Uffelman has never held a prison job it probably isn’t worth hiring a lawyer to get).

While Mike’s digging, and working at a fast food joint to scrape enough together to go to trade school and to get married, he’s learned that Uffelman’s sons, Ricky and Jerry, both went to college – one goes to a very expensive college and also enjoys a very expensive hobby. That may appear odd, considering the Uffelman family’s debt to Mike and their lack of visible income, but not odd enough to spark the interest of anyone in Maine government who might be expected to have an interest in such things as fraud or tax evasion.

In fact, the interest of Maine government has been so scant that Mike’s last hope of any assistance at all seems to be a new effort by a group of Washington County legislators to talk a law firm into providing him with some free legal help. Given the considerable state resources, begging for a lawyer seems pathetic, but, Mike observes, since no one at any level of state government has ever reached out to him before, it’s better than the nothing he’s grown used to.

(Mike’s not eligible for the free legal aid Maine usually provides to those in need because he’s not a Maine resident. Of course, he’s not a Maine resident because Uffelman murdered his parents and he had to move away. Uffelman, however, did get free legal aid for his retrial attempt.)

Mike has to get to work and I’ve got to get going. I’ve not yet quoted Mike directly because I wanted to save it for this – other than the usual good-byes, the last thing he said: “Uffelman took my family from me, now he’s taking care of his family, sitting in prison and laughing at everybody. If this had happened in any other state than Maine, I wonder if he’d get away with it.”

As I head back to the Toll Road, up Cassopolis, under all those banners and past all those virtues, back to Maine and the scene of a crime that continues, I wonder, too.

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