Deaths of gunman, sex offenders probed

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BANGOR – State officials released no new information Tuesday about the Easter shooting deaths of two registered sex offenders and the suicide of the gunman.

“We are working with the Massachusetts authorities as well as the Canadian authorities to follow up and develop more as to who Stephen Marshall was as a person and what may have caused him to do this,” Maj. Tim Doyle of the Maine State Police said Tuesday at a press conference in Bangor.

The gunman, a 20-year-old man from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, committed suicide Sunday night in Boston after being cornered aboard a bus by local police.

Earlier that morning, Marshall gunned down Joseph Gray, 57, of Milo and William Elliott, 24, of Corinth in their homes as the women with whom they lived watched in horror.

Marshall had slipped away from his father’s Houlton residence, taking his father’s truck and three guns.

Investigators were still uncertain what relationship, if any, Marshall had with the two victims. The two men were among 34 names in five towns that he had looked up on the state Web site for registered sex offenders. Investigators said they discovered that he visited the Web site because he typed in his name to receive extra information online that includes street addresses.

As a safety precaution, authorities took the sex offender registry offline Sunday for about 24 hours to determine the number of sex offenders about whom Marshall had obtained information.

Police notified other potential victims, Doyle said Tuesday.

“Everyone is accounted for,” he said Tuesday in answer to a reporter’s question about whether there might have been more victims.

Family and friends of the killer and his victims apparently retreated from the limelight Tuesday as reporters from Maine and Canada continued to seek information about the three men and a possible motive for the crime.

Ralph A. Marshall, father of the shooter and an economic developer with the Houlton Band of Maliseets, did not answer the door Tuesday afternoon at his Houlton apartment. The blinds were drawn at the residence.

Canadian press and television representatives waited outside the house in which the apartment is located. No other vehicle was seen in the dooryard.

The Canadian Press reported Tuesday that no one answered the door Monday at the weathered, two-story wooden home where the younger Marshall lived with several roommates in North Sydney.

Gray’s funeral will be held Thursday at the Maine Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Augusta. He served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and was a member of the Disabled American Veterans, according to an obituary published today in the Bangor Daily News.

Funeral plans for Elliott and Marshall were not available late Tuesday.

A detective is scheduled Wednesday to bring Marshall’s laptop computer from Boston to Augusta, according to Stephen McCausland, Maine State Police spokesman. He said Tuesday that he did not know how long the forensic evaluation of the computer might take.

When he shot himself, Marshall had with him a laptop computer along with two handguns. A rifle also was found in the pickup truck Marshall abandoned behind Sawyer Arena in Bangor.

The .45-caliber handgun Marshall turned on himself was the same one used in the Maine killings, McCausland said Tuesday.

Marshall’s father told reporters Monday that his son, who had arrived by bus Thursday for a visit, didn’t appear troubled and never said he had been sexually abused. He was confident investigators would get to the bottom of the case.

Elliott’s mother told The Boston Globe on Monday that her son’s name was on the registry because of a 2002 conviction for having sex with a girlfriend when he was 19 and the girl was two weeks shy of her 16th birthday.

Penobscot County Deputy District Attorney Michael Roberts said Tuesday that was incorrect.

“The victim was 15 when the offense occurred in March 2002,” he said. “She did not turn 16 until October, and Elliott was 20.”

The definition of sexual abuse of a minor in state statutes states that the perpetrator must be at least five years older than the 14- or 15-year-old victim, according to Roberts. The crime is classified as a Class D offense, a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 364 days in jail and a fine of up to $2,000. Conviction requires registering as a sex offender for 10 years.

Gray’s name was posted on a state Web site because he had moved to Maine after being convicted in Massachusetts of the rape of a child and indecent assault and battery on a child under 14. He was sentenced to four to six years in prison, all of which was suspended, and five years of probation, a spokesman for the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office said Tuesday.

He did not identify the female victim or her relationship to Gray, but said the abuse occurred over a three-year period when the girl was between age 7 and 10.

The Maine shootings sparked questions around the country concerning what information, if any, about convicted sex offenders should be available online.

Efforts to reach staff at the Maine Civil Liberties Union in Portland were unsuccessful Tuesday.

The Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union called for that state’s online registry to be taken down because a similar situation might occur in the Green Mountain State.

“This is a stark reminder that there’s no evidence that online sex offender registries increase public safety,” Allen Gilbert, executive director of the Vermont ALCU, said Tuesday. “In fact, they might just do the opposite.”