Fort Kent, ex-manager’s estate reach settlement

FORT KENT – Municipal officials approved a settlement Wednesday night that gives the town $179,845 from the estate of a former town office manager who embezzled more than $500,000 from the town and then committed suicide.

The money, already received by the town, involves funds from assets of Marilyn Deschaine.

The town could receive more money once other assets clear the court system.

“It’s been nearly five years since this started,” Donald Guimond, Fort Kent town manager, said Thursday. “It’s a done deal, finally.

“The town may get more money once the courts settle her estate,” Guimond said. “It’s been a long road for the town and the family.”

Deschaine was 49 when she committed suicide on Mother’s Day weekend, May 10, 1997, by jumping into the Fish River,swollen by spring runoff, at Fort Kent.

Deschaine had been a town employee for almost 30 years and was supervisor of the town office staff when she took her life. The money stolen from the town, which the town claimed amounted to more than $508,000, came from excise tax collections.

Deschaine’s body was recovered more than a week later at Fort Kent Mills, about 1,000 feet down river from the Fish River Bridge from where she had jumped.

On the night she took her life, Deschaine left two handwritten notes at the Fort Kent town office exonerating any other municipal employees in connection with the missing money. They were both signed with her first name.

When Deschaine died, she left three handwritten, or holographic, wills given to her son Craig Deschaine on the morning of May 10. The wills were declared valid by Probate Judge James P. Dunleavy in the fall of 1997.

Two days before her death, town office employees were told of a discrepancy discovered in the municipal books during an annual audit. A subsequent audit of the previous seven years was finished in July 1997. It showed that $508,154 was missing from town excise tax collections from Jan. 1, 1990 to May 1997.

After the audit, the town filed a claim against Deschaine’s estate for the money that auditors found missing. The town said its claim was for money Deschaine “had converted from the town” to her own use.

Neither Gary Severson, a Houlton attorney who was named personal representative of Deschaine’s estate by the Aroostook County Probate Court, nor William Smith, a Van Buren attorney representing the town in the case, returned telephone inquiries about the case Thursday.

The amount received by the town is about 35 percent of the claim it had against Deschaine’s estate. Since Deschaine’s death, the town has paid $51,870 in audit and legal fees attributable to its claim.

Ten months after Deschaine’s death, court records showed that her estate could be worth more than $700,000, including $496,260 in investments and real estate appraised at $218,796.

Officials working on the case had found 36 joint investments, all bearing Deschaine’s name, and the names of several of her family members living both in Maine and out of state. Many of the investments, in and out of the state, were certificates of deposit. The investments also included several bank accounts.

Her real estate holdings included a home in St. Agatha, four acres of land in Lebanon, Maine, and the Deschaine family homestead in Fort Kent. Those were left to different members of her family in her handwritten wills.

Several lawsuits were filed in Aroostook County Superior Court in the year following her death by the town of Fort Kent against members of Deschaine’s family and by the family against the claims of the town and an insurance company which paid the town $50,000 in connection with the embezzlement.

The Hartford Insurance Co. also had filed a claim against Deschaine’s estate to collect its $50,000 loss.