Ashton L. Moores has lived in Tenants Harbor, Veazie, Augusta, Orono, Port Clyde, Bangor and Belfast.

He has been connected to crimes that killed people in Orono and Bangor.

And he left a mark in Belfast a decade ago that reverberates today among the city’s police and fire officials.

Over the course of a year in the mid-1990s, Moores set about a dozen fires in buildings in downtown Belfast, spreading fear throughout the community.

“The city was just basically on edge, on pins and needles, every time the fire alarm sounded,” recalled Allen Weaver, the retired city police chief who was the lead investigator of the arsons.

“We felt if he wasn’t stopped, he was going to burn the city down,” Weaver said Thursday.

The fires caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, people were left homeless and one firefighter was injured while helping rescue a woman from a burning building.

More than 20 years earlier, Moores was living on Margin Street in Orono, out on parole from a state correctional center.

A police investigator said Moores went to the home of Edmund LaPointe, 76, on Aug. 27, 1972, and asked the man to hire him to level his driveway. When LaPointe said no, Moores departed. On his way out, Moores poured liquid onto the ground and lit it with a match.

LaPointe tried to escape his burning home. His clothing caught fire and he was burned over more than 50 percent of his body. He died the next day.

After serving eight years for that crime, Moores was released from prison and within months was charged with setting five fires in Waterville. He completed his sentence in that case in 1989.

Next, Moores wound up in Belfast.

He was arrested in 1994 and pleaded guilty the next year to setting two fires, though he had been charged with more. Under a plea bargain, Moores received a 20-year sentence with all but 15 years suspended and six years’ probation. He was released from prison in 2003, according to the state Corrections Department.

“He was involved in making the community nervous for a very long time,” Waldo County Chief Deputy Robert Keating recalled Thursday.

“We had a pretty good idea who was setting the fires, but it took us a while to get the evidence to charge him,” Keating said.

Keating, who was Belfast’s police chief in the mid-1990s, remembered that he and Weaver conducted an interview with Moores at the same time the Belfast Fire Department was fighting a fire a few doors down that they were convinced had been set by Moores.

They were close to making an arrest, Keating said, but Moores managed to set one more fire on June 27, 1994, before he was stopped.

Moores was arrested that night and made a full confession.

In the run-up to the trial, Moores’ defense attorney, John Harrington of Winterport, filed a motion to suppress the videotaped confession. Then-Superior Court Justice Donald G. Alexander, who now sits on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, granted the motion.

Alexander ruled that Moores’ confession was tainted because at one point during the interview with Weaver and then-State Fire Marshal James Ellis, there was some discussion about Moores receiving psychological assistance for his problems.

Although it was Moores who raised the issue of his mental state, Alexander ruled that for a confession to be considered voluntary, there must be no “direct or implied threats, promises or inducements.”

Waldo County Deputy District Attorney Leane Zainea’s motion to reconsider the suppression ruling was denied by Alexander.

Having lost Moores’ confession, Zainea was left with the choice of going to trial without a key piece of evidence or offering him a deal. Under the plea bargain, Zainea agreed to dismiss nine of 11 counts in return for Moores pleading guilty to two counts of arson.

“Once we lost his statement it was an extremely difficult case. We would have had to prove that those fires were intentionally set without the use of his confession,” Zainea said Thursday.

“After the motion to suppress was granted by the court, the sentence that was recommended and imposed by the court I believe was appropriate. Had we gone to trial he could have gotten 40 years, which was the maximum at that time,” she said.

Moores was held at the Waldo County Jail for 526 days between the day of his arrest and his guilty plea on Dec. 7, 1995. Credit for that time already served, along with good time earned while incarcerated at the Maine State Prison, led to his early release, she said.

Fire Chief James Richards recalled that fires started occurring in Belfast shortly after Moores moved there when he had been released from serving time on the Waterville fires.

“We were having fires quite frequently, and we had an idea he was involved because he had a history,” Richards said. “First he was starting them in closets and then in barns connected to buildings. It was a bad time.”

Weaver described Moores as a violent person who would take his revenge on anyone who angered him by setting fires of retribution on their property. He said Moores set fires at his parents’ apartment and at locations where his girlfriend or other people he was upset with lived.

Weaver said some fires were not deemed suspicious at first, but it wasn’t long before a pattern began to be established. He said police determined early on that they had a serial arsonist on their hands and that Moores was a likely suspect.

“He wasn’t six months out of prison when the first fire started,” Weaver said. “I began charting each fire and came up with more and more similarities that these fires were being set by the same person. Moores was a suspect for some time but we could never get enough evidence to charge him. It was after the last one that we got him.”

1947

Born July 8, Ashton Leroy Moores is originally from Trescott Township, a community southwest of Lubec in Washington County.

1961

Referred to Bangor State Hospital (now Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Institute) by juvenile court. Years later, a psychologist testifies that Moores suffered from “mild mental retardation,” but was “far too capable” to be admitted to short- or long-term treatment.

1966

Charged with arson, Moores serves time in Men’s Correctional Center in South Windham. Location of arson and length of sentence unknown.

1972

Sets fire Aug. 27, 1972, at Orono home of Edmund LaPointe, 76, who dies of injuries the next day. Moores is sentenced June 27, 1973, to 8-20 years in Maine State Prison.

1981

Arrested May 24, 1981, for fires in Waterville, Moores is convicted in May 1982 and sentenced to eight years in Maine State Prison. Released in 1989.

1991

Indicted in Waldo County for alleged sexual contact with boy under 14, Moores is convicted of misdemeanor assault Dec. 18 and sentenced to 30 days in jail.

1993

Arrested Aug. 20 after more than a dozen Belfast fires, Moores pleads guilty to two counts and is sentenced Dec. 7, 1995, to 20 years with all but 15 years suspended at Bolduc Correctional Facility. Released in 2003.

2007

Bangor police charge Moores, now 59, with the murder of Christina Simonin, 43, after evidence found in his First Street apartment and cameras allegedly show him using a wheelbarrow to move her body from his apartment.