Neighbors react to news of nearby murders

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While police continued to search and keep people away from the properties of the murder victims in Milo and Corinth on Monday, residents and neighbors talked about the shocking events of the weekend.

At the home of victim William Elliot, crime scene tape stretched across the driveway and a state police trooper was stationed throughout the day in a car at the edge of the road to watch the East Corinth property.

The house is about 18 miles northwest of Bangor in a town with a population of about 2,500.

“My husband thought he heard a couple shots,” Stefanie Kepple, who lives near Elliott’s home, said Monday as she stood in her kitchen. “But he didn’t think much of it.”

Every once in a while, Kepple said, she and her husband, Eric, would hear gunshots coming from the Elliott property because the residents were trying to get rid of or scare off animal pests.

Stefanie Kepple said she had never talked to her neighbor and had only seen him coming and going from the property.

“We never had problems with him,” she said. “I think he kind of kept to himself.”

The Kepples didn’t think much of the vehicles in the roadway on Sunday morning either.

“They don’t drive in the driveway,” she said.

There had been tow trucks and police vehicles at the property recently because the town was trying to work with the owner to clean up vehicles, tires and other car parts strewn over the property.

“All I know is they told him to clean it up,” Kepple said, adding that she knew Elliott wasn’t obeying the town’s instructions because she saw a bus being brought onto the property last week.

“I think more people were concerned about the mess than him being a sex offender,” said Mary Hadley, who lives across the road.

Corinth town officials earlier this year hired a Portland attorney to try to force Elliott to clean up the unlicensed junkyard, according to Mike Polyot, the town’s code enforcement officer. The owner of the property, Oscar “Billy” Tate of Corinth, had agreed to cooperate with officials, Polyot said Monday.

“We had cited him for being an unlicensed junkyard, having too many unregistered vehicles, being too close to the road and too close to the stream,” he said. “We’ve been talking to [Elliott] for about a year.”

Polyot said the town was interested in cleaning up the site, rather than fining Elliott for being out of compliance with state statutes and town ordinances.

“Until the [state police] investigation is over, we can’t do a thing there,” he said. “Once that’s over, we’ll do whatever we can to get it cleaned up.”

As for Elliott’s status as a convicted sex offender, the Kepples, who have two small children, said they were aware he was living down the road. But Stefanie Kepple said she wasn’t sure of what he had been convicted.

“Thinking that somebody would just take matters into their own hands kind of worries me,” she said of Sunday’s shooting.

Kepple noted that some sex offenders aren’t guilty, and there are others whose offenses don’t rise to a level that would be considered violent or dangerous.

“To randomly pick [someone] off the Internet – what if they’re not guilty or just were dating a younger girl?” she said, thinking out loud.

A few towns away, Maine State Police officers continued Monday afternoon to search the property surrounding Gray’s house in Milo.

“We’re just trying to see where this guy came from,” state police Detective Jay Pelletier said as he walked along the edge of a field at Gray’s house Monday afternoon.

Pelletier and state police Trooper David Yankowsky were walking the property one last time before releasing the scene.

The crime scene tape had been removed from the edges of the property, but a line remained stretched across the driveway. State police Detective Stephen Pickering sat in an unmarked police vehicle at the end of the driveway to ensure that the scene remained secure while police finished their search.

Police found a few items on the side of the road that they wanted to collect, Pickering said.

Gray’s wife, Janice, hadn’t been allowed to stay at the property since her husband was killed. But she was permitted to return Monday when police had finished their work at the scene.

The couple moved from Massachusetts a couple of years ago to Milo, a town of about 2,400 residents, according to Kenny Hudak, a local police sergeant who isn’t involved in the case. Hudak said Gray had lived a “reclusive life.”

A waitress at The Restaurant on Main Street in Milo, who asked that her name not be used, said that she had heard the police call from Gray’s house over the scanner at about 3:15 a.m. Sunday.

She was up to take some cold medicine and paused to listen to the scanner when she heard that Gray’s wife had just reported that her husband had been shot and he was on the couch, not responding.

According to the waitress, the ambulance had to wait for a deputy from the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Department to come to the scene and check the property to make sure the shooter was gone before medical personnel could enter the house. The deputies walked down the driveway and made sure the scene was safe before allowing the ambulance to drive in, she said.

The Milo waitress said she stayed awake listening to the scanner for almost two hours before returning to bed.

Gray’s nearest neighbors, Jennifer and Michael Cail of Milo, said they didn’t hear anything the morning of the murder.

“The phone woke me up,” Jennifer Cail said Monday sitting at her dining room table. Her neighbor called at about 7:50 a.m. to ask what the “ruckus” was next door.

“I didn’t hear or see anything that morning,” Jennifer Cail said.

The couple, who live with their three children a little more than 100 feet from the Gray residence, described their neighbors as quiet people who kept to themselves.

“They were real private,” Michael Cail said. “They kept to themselves a lot.”

Cail said he talked to Gray a couple of times outside, but never had been in the Grays’ home.

“I don’t really know much about him,” he said, adding that Gray’s wife may have worked but as far as Cail knew, Gray was on disability.

The part that upset the couple the most was that they’d never been informed they were living next door to a sex offender.

“We weren’t notified,” Michael Cail said.

“We had no idea,” his wife added. “Now that I know … it’s just crazy.”

Eric McLeod, the Cails’ friend, was at the couple’s house Monday and said he also was concerned.

“I’ve got a boy, too, so that’s kind of creepy,” McLeod said. “I’m going to go down to the police station and see their list [of sex offenders] now.”

For the first time ever, the Cails locked their doors Sunday night.

“I was very nervous all day yesterday. We didn’t know who [or] what,” Jennifer Cail said. “We never locked our doors until last night.”

Jennifer Cail said her phone has been ringing off the hook for two days, and the murders were the talk of the town Monday in Milo and Corinth.

The big question for neighbors and residents appeared to be why.

“It doesn’t seem quite as random as the cops say it is,” McLeod said.

McLeod said it would have been random if two sex offenders had been shot in the same town, but two murders in small Maine towns 18 miles apart “just seems strange.”