Daughter finds ‘sense of peace’ in murder arrest

PORTLAND – The daughter of a woman found slain 22 years ago in the bathtub of her Portland apartment says she is finding “a sense of peace” after this month’s arrest of a suspect in a case she once thought police had written off.

Roger Bernier, a 60-year-old disabled veteran, was indicted July 11 on a murder charge in the strangulation of Mary Kelley, 33. Bernier, of Manchester, N.H., pleaded not guilty last week and is being held without bail in the Cumberland County Jail.

Kelley’s daughter, Myava Escamilla, lives in California and was told of Bernier’s arrest by Portland police detective Karl Rybeck, one of the investigators handling the latest effort to solve one of the city’s coldest cases.

“In the past week or so, I did not expect to have peace from his arrest. The story has just kind of begun. I don’t know if he will plea out or if there will be a trial,” Escamilla, 31, told the Maine Sunday Telegram. Still, she has felt a change.

“There is already a sense of peace that is blossoming in me, that I could have never expected,” she said.

Escamilla was 9 when two police officers showed up at her grandmother’s house in Boothbay on April 26, 1986, with the news that Kelley had been killed.

From an upstairs bedroom she peered through a dusty heating grate to the kitchen below and saw her grandmother, Hazel Kelley, slumped over the table, weeping.

“The thing I remember most was that singular sob. I had never heard her cry before,” Escamilla recalled. “It was a sob that was the heart of a stoic woman breaking.”

Escamilla had been living with her grandmother while Mary Kelley worked in Portland during the week and drove to Boothbay to spend weekends with her daughter.

Escamilla, a recent law school graduate, said investigators “have all worked very hard on this, for somebody that I thought nobody cared about. That has set a lot of things right for me.”

She said her mother, who also was studying to be a veterinarian’s assistant, was friendly with homeless people who congregated near her Congress Street apartment building.

“Mary wasn’t a street person. She had a job and an apartment,” Deputy Police Chief William Ridge said. “She was a friend to many of the people who hung out down there.”

A top student at Boothbay Region High School, Escamilla went to Smith College, then moved to California, where she eventually reconnected with her estranged father. In 2003, she wrote to investigators, suggesting that her mother’s case had been written off because Kelley was considered eccentric and hung out with people on society’s edge.

Offended by her letter, Rybeck responded with an angry phone call.

“He said, I’m telling you, the foot soldiers have never given up on this case. I don’t appreciate those comments,” Escamilla recalled. “I said, then prove me wrong.”

The two stayed in touch, developing a rapport, and what she now calls something of a friendship.

Police and prosecutors have not commented on the specific evidence used to seek the indictment of Bernier. They said the investigation involved advances in forensic science, paired with old-fashioned police work.

Escamilla plans to travel to Maine for some of the court proceedings, depending on the direction the case takes. If Bernier pleads guilty or is convicted at a trial, Escamilla wants a chance to address him and the court.

“It has been a long time I have been waiting to look this person in the face,” she said. “In a public forum, I want to explain the impact that violence has on an individual, a family and a community.

“To be honest, he could have been in jail for every single day of the past 22 years, and it still wouldn’t have made up for that sob I heard in the kitchen that night.”