LaBree, legendary lawman, dies at 88 45-year career lauded by friends, family

BANGOR – One of the state’s most beloved, controversial and legendary lawmen died Tuesday after a 45-year career that included 10 years as sheriff of Penobscot County.

Otis LaBree died Tuesday afternoon. He was 88.

LaBree died quietly and peacefully in Bangor of old age, his son, Wayne LaBree, said Wednesday evening. But if the irascible cop died quietly, it was certainly in contrast to the way he lived his life, according to friends and family.

From brawling with belligerent drunks as he patrolled the rough and tumble streets of Old Town as a rookie cop in the 1930s and 1940s, to bickering with public officials on the front page of the newspaper while he was sheriff of Penobscot County in the 1970s, LaBree was not one to back down from a fight.

“He had quite a healthy ego, which made him very good at his job,” said Carl “Bucky” Buchanan, who worked as a state police detective with LaBree.

LaBree’s career started in the 1930s when, at the age of 21, he became a fingerprinting expert and pestered the Old Town police chief into giving him a job.

“They dressed me up in a fancy uniform, and stuffed newspapers in my hat because it was too big,” LaBree recalled a few years ago. “I looked like General Custer. If I fell down, I wouldn’t have been able to get up.”

Working 10-hour days for 25 cents an hour, LaBree admitted that he “got the hell kicked out of” him more than once as he cut his teeth in the mill town to which he eventually would return as chief.

In 1940, he married Beatrice Rice, joined the Maine State Police and found himself patrolling the roads from Fort Kent to Limestone.

“I had a motorcycle and a car with no lights, but the words ‘State Police’ written on it,” he recalled a few years before he died.

In 1954, he became the first detective for the state police, and over the next eight years solved 38 murders.

He retired from the Maine State Police in 1962 and returned to his hometown of Old Town as chief of police.

“Otis and I grew up in the same neighborhood,” said Eugene Beaulieu, former U.S. magistrate judge. “I think the people of Old Town have always taken a great deal of pride in Otis. Everyone has heard of him. I mean, when you say LaBree in Old Town, you’re either talking doughnuts or Otis.”

In 1970, LaBree ran and was elected sheriff of Penobscot County and remains credited with transforming the Penobscot County Jail from a fledgling facility that still threw misbehaving prisoners into a “dog hole” into a jail that became a model for others throughout the state.

LaBree was known as a bulldog who refused to give up on even the most challenging cases. Perhaps his most notorious case was one that would take decades to solve. It was the deaths of a teenage newspaper carrier and a cocktail waitress who were murdered within a short time of each other in the mid-1960s in Fort Fairfield.

The state was convinced the boy’s death was an accident and that the two deaths were not connected. Town leaders hired LaBree, retired from the state police, to check into it. The boy’s body was exhumed and it was determined he had been beaten to death. LaBree walked the boy’s route and found out that his last delivery was to the very house where the cocktail waitress was found with her skull crushed.

Though there was never a conviction, LaBree always said he knew who was responsible. That very man, Philip Adams, would confess 20 years later to killing the watiress and was found guilty of the crime. He died in the Maine State Prison in Thomaston.

Once when asked to describe himself, LaBree said, ?”I’m a humanitarian. I like to help people, and I don’t care who they are as long as they don’t step on my toes.”

LaBree was predeceased by his wife, Beatrice, and a son, David James LaBree. He is survived by three children.

A celebration of his life will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, July 6, at the Bangor waterfront on the cruiseship Roxy Lee. Interment will be Aug. 17 at the Catholic Cemetery.