Wendy Richardson Picked the Walk Herself. Her Boot Was Ninety Feet Away.

Wendy Richardson marked every piece of her work gear with a single letter: a W. On a March morning in Maine, a man who knew every crack in the Breakwater Path found one women's work boot standing upright in the middle of the pavement, laces still tied, with no second boot anywhere near it. Her roommate was brought out to look at a photograph, and she recognized the letter on the heel. Wendy had been missing since the night before. That boot had not fallen there.

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Wendy Richardson, twenty-six, was a marine equipment technician at Coastal Rigging in the harbor town of Harwick, Maine. She was reported missing at eleven forty-seven on the night of Monday, March thirteenth, two thousand twenty-three, and found the next day in the tree line behind a closed cannery, about ninety feet from the boot. An examination established that she had been strangled.

Dwayne Paget, thirty-eight, a property maintenance contractor she had been dating since February, was arrested on March twenty-fourth. In a recorded interview with counsel present he admitted killing her inside the cannery, opening the door with a key he had taken from the building's boiler room during a January inspection. He was convicted of her murder and sentenced in August two thousand twenty-four to forty-two years.

In September two thousand twenty-three, his reference DNA sample matched a profile taken from beneath the fingernails of Sarah Ellison, twenty-nine, who had died in a state park in Kennebec County in two thousand nineteen. A dried chrysanthemum had been recovered beneath her body, and another was found at the cannery. Paget was charged in October two thousand twenty-three and pleaded guilty the following October, receiving a second forty-two-year sentence to run concurrently with the first. He never gave an explanation for the flowers.

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This episode is fiction. Harwick, the people in it and both investigations are invented, and the story is told in the order its own records were made.