Police investigate alleged gunman's motives in killings
MILO, Maine -- The first man was shot to death in the early-morning darkness, as he began to rise from the couch where he had fallen asleep. His wife, awakened by the barking of their dogs, saw a man in a dark jacket outside the living room window, and then the shots came through a window, five quick bullets into Joseph Gray's torso.
Then five hours later and 25 miles away in Corinth, someone knocked at the door of the second man, William Elliott, rousting him and his girlfriend from sleep. Elliott poked his head out the back door of their ramshackle house, but didn't see anyone. The knocking persisted, so he pulled on a pair of sweatpants and opened the front door.
''I heard a couple of shots," said his girlfriend, Ann Campbell, her voice cracking with grief in an interview yesterday. ''They sounded like paintball gun shots. The last thing I heard was, 'Honey, help me.' "
Campbell found Elliott lying on the ground dead. She pushed open the front door and saw a man in jeans and a tan shirt standing there.
''He just looked at me straight in the eye," she said. ''There was no expression on his face at all. I don't think he thought someone would be there with him."
Yesterday, police probed the mystery of why Stephen A. Marshall, a 20-year-old dishwasher from Nova Scotia visiting his father in northeastern Maine, allegedly gunned down the men, both registered sex offenders. Marshall fatally shot himself in the head Sunday night when MBTA police officers stopped the bus he was riding outside South Station.
Investigators said Marshall had looked up Elliott and Gray and 32 other sexual offenders on the online Maine Sex Offender Registry. But police said he had never been in trouble before.
''Never even had so much as a parking ticket," said Staff Sergeant Russell Ivey of the Cape Breton Regional Police Service North Division.
Marshall grew up in the town of Little Bras-d'Or, a village about 6 miles from North Sydney where he had recently been living, Ivey said. Marshall had lived for about a year with his father in Maine before returning to North Sydney, a port city of 9,000 where his mother lived.
He worked for about a year at Canton Restaurant in North Sydney. He took a few days off last week and told coworkers he was going to visit his father in Maine. But Marshall, who always had been reliable, surprised his coworkers when he did not return to work as scheduled on Saturday.
''It wasn't his nature not to show up," said Charlie MacArthur, assistant manager of the restaurant.
They tried his cellphone, but got no answer. On Sunday, a waitress from the restaurant called Marshall's mother, who said he had car trouble in Maine and still was at his father's house.
Police say Stephen Marshall arrived Thursday in Houlton, a town near the Canadian border, and planned to spend a few days visiting his father, an economic developer for the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians. But when Ralph Marshall woke up Sunday morning, his pickup truck and his son had vanished, said Houlton Police Chief Daniel Soucy.
Ralph Marshall said that he and his son had planned to go target shooting at a nearby range Sunday and that he thought his son might have left without him, Soucy said. Stephen Marshall had three guns with him, two handguns and a rifle, that belonged to his father, Soucy said.
Reached at his home last night, Ralph Marshall called the last 48 hours ''a devastating experience." He referred all questions to police.
The first killing took place about 3 a.m. in Milo, about 100 miles from Houlton. When Gray's wife saw the man lurking outside the living room window, she jumped into the hallway and screamed her husband's name, said Gray's daughter, Wendy Colby, 33, who lives in Attleboro, Mass., and drove here Sunday. The shots were fired, and her father, 57, uttered his final words, ''Call an ambulance."
Gray's wife crawled to the kitchen to pick up the phone hanging on the wall. A bullet flew by the phone, barely missing her. Since she had barely seen the shooter, she didn't have much of a description for police.
According to Gray's posting on the online Maine Sex Offender Registry, he was convicted in Bristol County in Massachusetts in 1992 on charges of indecent assault and battery on a child and rape of a child and was sentenced to four to six years in state prison. The registry was shut down Sunday during the search for the suspect but reactivated yesterday. Courts were closed yesterday in Massachusetts, and details of Gray's crime were unavailable.
Gray's brother, Leonard, said he did not know the details of his brother's death in Massachusetts and that his brother was living on disability for ''all kinds of problems, stomach and liver problems."
The second killing took place around 8:15 a.m. in Corinth. After Campbell looked into the eyes of the shooter, he started walking up the driveway and climbed into his truck. He then stopped at the top of their driveway and gestured to her, either making an obscene gesture or the motion of a gun shooting; she couldn't tell which. He drove away, but Campbell got the license plate.
''I just kept repeating it in my head while I was screaming for help," she said. Neighbors from the trailer park across the street heard her shouts and called 911, she said.
Elliott had pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts in 2002 of sexual abuse of a minor in an intimate relationship he had at 19 with a girl two weeks before she turned 16 years old, according to state records and his parents.
On Sunday afternoon, Stephen Marshall boarded a Vermont Transit Line bus from Bangor bound for Boston, investigators said. Investigators found his truck abandoned in Bangor, and bullets linked to him in a bus station toilet.
MBTA police were called by Maine State Police, who said they believed Stephen Marshall might be on a Vermont Transit Line bus on its way to Boston. Around 8:15 p.m. Sunday, just outside South Station, MBTA police stopped the bus, MBTA Transit Police Deputy Chief John Marino said.
Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said Stephen Marshall did not speak before he shot himself once in the head with a .45 caliber handgun seconds after the driver turned on the interior lights. A .22 caliber pistol was found on his body, Conley said.
Stephen Marshall did not leave anything in writing that could explain his actions, Conley said. However, State Police recovered a laptop in Marshall's backpack.
Maria Cramer, Mac Daniel, John Ellement, and Michael Levenson of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com. 