Orphaned children of slain woman to return to Calif.

LEWISTON – The two orphaned children of a woman who was slain at a bed-and-breakfast in Maine during the Labor Day weekend will soon be returning with relatives to California.

Leila Bullard, 11, and her 9-year-old brother Elliott were orphaned when their mother, Selby Bullard, was shot and dismembered at the Black Bear Bed and Breakfast on Sept. 3. Bullard, 30, and her mother Julie Bullard, 65, were two of four victims in the grisly wave of killings.

Also found dead were James Whitehurst, 50, who had been living at the inn in the western Maine ski town of Newry, and Cynthia Beatson, 43, who was a friend of Selby Bullard’s and lived in nearby Bethel.

Christian Nielsen, a local cook who had also been staying at the Black Bear inn, is being held on four counts of murder in the case. No motive has been given for the killings, which police say took place over a four-day span. Nielsen had no known record of violence before the killings.

The Bullard family had been victims of tragedy in the past. Selby Bullard’s husband was killed in a car accident years ago in California, where she grew up. Bullard moved to Maine in 2004 to help her mother run the Black Bear inn, and worked as a real estate agent in the area.

With both of their parents and their grandmother dead, Leila and Elliott moved in with a family friend in neighboring Bethel and will go to California on Tuesday to live with an aunt and uncle. The children are to stay with the relatives in San Francisco until custody issues are worked out.

The two children are in grief counseling, according to court records, and that will continue when they move to California. The family is hosting a celebration of the children’s mother’s and grandmother’s lives next Saturday in San Francisco.