Southwest Harbor still shaken by loss of former professor Undercurrents of confusion, sadness persist in spite of summer tourist activity

Southwest Harbor seemed a different town Friday than the one that woke up last winter to the news that one of their own had been murdered.

But even though the formerly quiet streets and shuttered shops now are bustling with tourists and summer residents, the chatter is the same: all about the brutal beating and death of Jacqueline Evans, and the arrest in the case that had just been made.

“I think everybody’s glad to have it resolved,” Nichols Fox, owner of Rue Cottage Books, said.

Though few of the folks working or shopping downtown would discuss Michelle Mills, who was arrested in Bangor Thursday in connection with the death, others remembered Jilly Evans with fondness.

Evans, 83, was a retired math professor who became a year-round resident of the village of Manset about 30 years ago, friends said. She loved walking her cocker spaniels by Seawall, sailing her dinghy in the bay and translating books for the blind into Braille. A lifelong teacher, she helped area youth learn to sail and gave financial assistance to some of them for their education.

“She liked to see people learn,” Linda Higgins of Tremont said. “Learning was very important to her.”

Evans’ quiet generosity helped send Higgins’ twin sons to computer camp in the 1980s, and helped one of them go to a technical college. It was a generosity that the family appreciated.

“She helped everybody,” Edward Higgins said. “She would have helped anybody. Even that girl.”

“That girl” is Mills, whose relationship to the retired professor has not yet been clarified by police.

Evans was known for her independence and her eccentricity as well as her love of education, Linda Higgins said.

“She didn’t really care what she wore or what she looked like,” she said. “Her cocker spaniels were her constant companions. At one point she spun her dog’s fur into wool.”

She also was known for her routines and an old-fashioned sort of frugality, according to Linda Higgins.

“She used to go swimming in front of her house at the ocean every day,” she said. “She drove a small, kind of economy car – nothing big, nothing fancy. … I don’t think she had any reason or feeling that she needed more than the basics.”

When townspeople heard that Evans had been attacked in her kitchen, and suffered alone from her injuries for an unknown length of time before she was discovered by a friend, it was very upsetting, Linda Higgins said.

Higgins said she wasn’t concerned for her own safety after the murder because she assumed it was not a random act of violence.

“I didn’t think that someone came in from out of town to do this,” she said.

Nevertheless, the violent act that took Evans’ life is hard for her friends to understand.

“She was a really nice lady,” Linda Higgins said. “Why did this happen to someone who was so nice?”