When Jack Caron became the pastor of the Passadumkeag Baptist Church a few months ago, he thought he should learn something about his adopted town and the ancestry of his new flock.

As he read through the history that the townspeople had put together in 1985, Caron came across the brief account of a man named Maurice Beane, a Passadumkeag constable who was gunned down by a young outlaw in 1913. Caron then found the original story in the Bangor Daily News archives and read the vivid and dramatic “Details of a Thrilling Affair” about the events leading up to Beane’s death.

Caron, who is from the Aroostook County town of Eagle Lake, has always had a soft spot for law enforcement officers and the highest regard for the dangerous work they do. His father and grandfather were game wardens in Eagle Lake, and his uncle is Bangor Police Chief Donald Winslow. Caron worked as a dispatcher for the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Department before going to Ukraine as a missionary with his wife and two children in 1999. He also maintains a memorial Web site for David Payne, a Lewiston police officer who was shot and killed in the line of duty in 1988.

But when Caron checked the Maine Law Enforcement Memorial roster he was surprised to discover that the Passadumkeag lawman was not listed with Payne and the other 75 Maine men who had died in the line of duty.

“Constable Beane had been overlooked by history, and his sacrifice for our community had gone unnoticed all these years,” Caron said. “So I thought I’d try to do something about it.”

And he did, with the help of Anita Haskell, a state senator from the area. In a ceremony to be held on May 15, during National Police Week, Constable Maurice Beane’s name will finally be inscribed on the law enforcement memorial wall near the State House in Augusta. Next year, it will be added to the national register, which includes some 14,000 law officers.

“The whole family is excited about it,” said the constable’s 70-year-old grandson, Maurice D. Beane of Milford, a retired cartographer and appraiser for the James W. Sewall Co. of Old Town. Maurice’s brother, Stanton Beane, lives in Steuben.

Maurice Beane said he grew up with little knowledge of his grandfather’s life, except that he had been shot dead by Edward Duplissis, a 25-year-old Milford man and Navy deserter with a criminal past. Beane’s father, Dudley, never talked much about it, nor did his grandmother, Elizabeth, who remarried after her husband’s death.

“I never knew all the details growing up,” Beane said.

“The murder of Constable Beane, unparalleled in several features, caused great excitement through Penobscot County,” began the exuberant BDN narrative published Jan. 20, 1913, “and suicide added more sensation, so that the affair will be a noted one in criminal annals.”

On Jan. 17, 1913, a year after deserting from the U.S. Navy while awaiting court martial, Edward Duplissis and a young woman checked into Lancaster’s Hotel in Passadumkeag as Mr. and Mrs. Harry E. Robinson. It was one of several aliases Duplissis had used in a life of crime that dated back to his childhood, when he was twice sent to the State School for Boys. He had once made a “sensational” escape from the sheriff in Newport by jumping from a train traveling at 25 miles an hour.

Duplissis’ criminal specialty was passing forged checks. His intention was to use one of them in Passadumkeag to cheat a former employer, lumber camp operator C.D. Whittier, out of some cash. But Whittier was onto the scam, having been burned by a forged check from Duplissis a couple of weeks earlier. He quickly devised a plan for the criminal’s arrest. Whittier said he would get his checkbook and meet Duplissis back at the hotel to make the transaction. Duplissis went to his upstairs room and strapped on a holster that held a .32-caliber revolver loaded with six bullets.

“What do you want that for?” asked his girlfriend, whom Duplissis had promised to marry when they got to Van Buren.

“I might as well take it now,” he told her, “as we want to be all ready to go.”

In the meantime, Whittier had alerted Constable Maurice Beane to position himself in the front parlor of the hotel. Beane, who also worked at Leonard’s Mills when he was not enforcing the law, was a friendly family man and a dedicated civil servant. He had been the town’s truant officer and its clerk for years. When Whittier and Duplissis appeared in the doorway of the hotel, Beane was sitting in a chair to meet them.

“Officer, here’s a man who forged an order on me and is now trying to pass another one,” Whittier said. “I hand him over to you.”

Duplissis reached for his gun just as Beane leaped from the chair and bounded toward him. The men struggled, the gun fired, and Duplissis ran outside with the weapon clutched in his hand. Constable Beane, with Whittier close behind, began to chase the assailant across the half-frozen ground but soon collapsed. Blood poured from his mouth. Whittier then saw the bullet hole in Beane’s chest.

When the sheriff and the county attorney in Bangor were called about the shooting, they headed by automobile to Passadumkeag, assembling a posse of several deputies and eager woodsmen from towns all the way up to Lincoln.

“Few more thrilling chases than that of Duplissis have taken place in this State,” the BDN reported.

The posse tracked Duplissis for miles through slush and mud. In Enfield, Duplissis skirted the shore of Cold Stream Pond to Lowell, where he begged food from a frightened woman in a farmhouse and then ran off into the woods. The posse closed in, firing their rifles in warning when Duplissis appeared momentarily in the distance.

The desperate and exhausted murderer eventually took cover in a clump of bushes near John Fox’s farmhouse. As the posse approached warily, rifles aimed, they heard a shot. The men found Duplissis lying dead in a patch of blood-red snow with a self-inflicted bullet hole above his right ear. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and white tie, a golf cap and a new pair of shoes that he’d bought in Bangor the day before. When the killer died in a blacksmith’s shop an hour later, “the concluding chapter in one of Maine’s most thrilling murders had been written,” the newspaper reported.

“Well, that must have been a pretty big adventure for a small town back then,” said Constable Beane’s grandson, “and I’m glad my grandfather will finally be recognized for his part in it. It’s absolutely a nice honor for him, his family and the town.”