PORTLAND – The state game warden credited with creation of a search plan that led to murder victim Amy St. Laurent’s body has been named Warden of the Year.

Warden Kevin Adam, 37, of Dexter was honored for the job he did planning for search and rescue, said Maine Warden Service Maj. Thomas Santaguida.

Adam, 37, coordinated the search in December 2001 for the body of St. Laurent, a South Berwick woman who had been missing for seven weeks before her body was found in the woods in Scarborough.

Adam recalled how Warden Lt. Patrick Dorian contacted Maine State Police with an offer to help find the missing 25-year-old woman.

A group of wardens, including Dorian, Adam, Sgt. Roger Guay and Joel Wilkinson, met and formulated a search plan, based on information Portland police and state police investigators gave them.

“We talked among ourselves, discussed how a suspect might act at night, and then prioritized a number of potential search sites based on the likelihood of each for finding a body,” Adam said.

They focused on the wooded site in Scarborough behind a house where chief suspect Jeffrey “Russ” Gorman’s mother lived.

Adam said wardens theorized that a suspect looking to bury a body in the woods at night likely wouldn’t go far into the woods, because it would have been dark and hard to see.

They found St. Laurent’s body buried three feet below the surface, not far from the road.

Police said Gorman had shot St. Laurent after meeting her in Portland’s Old Port and then buried her three days later. A Cumberland County Superior Court jury convicted Gorman, 23, of murder Jan. 18 after a five-day trial.

To have finally found her, Adam said, made this one of the most satisfying searches in his 10 years as a full-time warden.

“To go from reading about that case every day, to finding her, that was just an incredible high,” Adam said. “That has been one of our greatest finds, finding someone buried, hidden.”