November 27, 2025 • 44 mins
On a snowy November morning in 1975, 25-year-old hunter Ludger Belanger stepped into the woods with his .30-30 and the hope of backstraps for dinner. But what started as a simple deer hunt quickly became one of Maine’s oldest—and most haunting—unsolved cases. At first, game wardens thought Ludger had lost his way. But the tracks in the snow told another story: a shot deer, a missing rifle, tire marks on a back road, and two strangers in a green Buick. Join host Jordan Sillars as this episode of Blood Trails follows a path that twists into drunken parties, threats, explosions, and suspects who always seemed one step ahead. Nearly fifty years later, Ludger’s wife, children, and grandchildren are still searching for the truth—and for the body of the man stolen from them.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
It was the first snow of the season when Lujia
Bilander disappeared into the woods of rural Maine. He'd gone
out hunting, just like he had one hundred times before,
but this time you didn't come home. His wife Linda
thought maybe he'd gotten lost in the storm. But what
game Wardens uncovered over the next few days would lead
them through a maze of violence, drugs, and deceit that
(00:22):
no one could have predicted.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
That's next on Blood Trails.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Twenty five year old Luja Bolanger was what you might
call a typical main whitetail hunter. He went out on
November twenty fifth, nineteen seventy five, armed with his thirty
thirty lever gun to track a deer through the snow
in hopes of bringing home enough meat to feed his family.
He wasn't chasing big antlers, and he didn't sit in
a tree stand all day hoping a buck would walk past.
He went out and found one, and even though we'll
(01:02):
never know how big it was, I like to think
it was a giant. Lujia, his wife Linda, and his
brother John had all gone out that morning to look
for deer, but the falling snow hid the previous night's activity,
and the trio didn't have much luck as the gray
dawn illuminated the winter landscape.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Here's Linda and then about nine o'clock we just said, well,
we're gonna go home, and I had to get ready
for work, and John was going home, but Luji wanted
to get off at the top of the hill and
walk down through the field in the woods to the
county road and then home. It was heavy snow that morning.
We'd head heavy snow all night.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Lujia had been dropped off about a mile from the
home he shared in Washington, Maine, with Linda and their
three young children. He only planned to hunt for about
an hour before returning home and driving Linda to her
waitressing gig, but he didn't show up, and after another
hour had passed, Linda's annoyance turned to concern.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
Ere so I called next door and said luj home yet,
So they went looking on smobiles following his name stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
As nightfall approach and the search party still hadn't found
any sign of the missing hunter, they called the game ardens.
The state police wouldn't get involved until Ludra had been
missing for seventy two hours, but Since the incident involved
a hunter, the wardens were happy to help with the search.
You might assume that Lujia had just found a deer
track and lost track of time, but Linda wasn't buying it.
(02:30):
She knew right away that something terrible had happened.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I kind of got a little messed up emotionally, and
they sent me to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
In any movements, Linda's reaction to her husband's disappearance might
sound extreme, but keep in mind that Linda was only
twenty years old. She and Lujia already had three daughters
between the ages of three and a half years and
three months. The prospect of those girls losing their father
was unbearable, and one of Linda's most vivid memories from
those difficult days is of her middle daughter, Angel, happily
(03:01):
playing around the feet of the game wardens and neighbors
who were searching for her father.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
I remember getting up the next morning, is what I remember,
and the house had game wardens and trackers and family
all through it. They must have given me something that
I just was out of it. But Angel was eating
snow off from one of the game wardens boots. That's
(03:26):
the memory that I have in my.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Mind, the friends and family who filled that house knew
that losing Lujia would be a blow not only to
his wife and kids, but to the larger Washington community.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
No, he was a down to earth guy. He would
have done anything for anybody, anything, He'd be there for.
He loved life, he loved his family. We were building
a house and making memories and making plans for the future,
but that all got taken away.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Luja Blanders disappeared, and which remains one of Maine's oldest
unsolved cases. But this isn't your typical cold case, with
scant clues, no suspects, and more questions than answers. The
game wardens who investigated Lucra's case believed they knew what
happened to him, but the trail got wilder and more
unexpected with every twist and turn. It led them from
(04:19):
Maine's big woods to drug fueled parties, to threatening suspects,
to a house explosion.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
To insurance fraud to murder.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
It's a story of great detective work, even more devious suspects,
and ultimately a family who never got to say goodbye
to the father and husband they loved well.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Had three children together. Now nineteen grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
He wasn't here for the moments, the special times, the
daily times. He just he was robbed of them.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
I'm Jordan Sillers and this is Blood Trails, a Big
Woods Cold.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Case, Part one Deer Tracks.
Speaker 5 (05:06):
Speak.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
When Linda called to report her husband missing, the main
Warden Service sent out two officers to investigate, Lieutenant Warden
John Marsh and District Warden Dick Hennessy. Though they were
joined later by other wardens and Maine State Police officers,
Marsh and Hennessy were the two primary investigators of Luger's disappearance.
The problem from where we're standing in twenty twenty five
(05:28):
is that Hennessy passed away in twenty twelve and Marsh
followed him in twenty twenty three. Since this is still
an open investigation, the Maine State Police can't release any
case files, and they declined to sit down with us
for an interview. We wouldn't know much more about this
case than I've already told you if it wasn't for
an author by the name of Darren Woocester. Darren published
(05:49):
a book in twenty seventeen called Open Season, True Stories
of the Main Warden Service, which is a great book
that I highly recommend. Darren spoke with twelve game wardens
about the two cases he covers in that book, one
of which was Lugers.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
It happened to be that my father in law was
a game warden and he would always tell me stories,
and I got to thinking that this would be a
great way to write a book. And he would give
me some of his stories and we would slowly chip
away at it, and he would always encourage me, Hey,
I know a lot of people who were wardens, and
they've got great stories too, Like, you shouldn't just have
(06:25):
stories from me, We should get others involved.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
One of those wardens was John Marsh, who gave Darren
an inside view into this investigation. This isn't information that
was ever made public, but since Marsh was already retired,
he apparently wasn't too concerned about explaining what happened. Now,
normally I'd be skeptical about reporting secondhand information, but Darren
did his homework. I sent his chapter to Detective Sergeant
(06:49):
Josh Haines, who is currently in charge of Lujra's case
with the Main State Police. Haines told me in an
email quote. This information in the book is very accurate
to the facts I know of the case. Names have
been changed, and some of the other minor details are different,
but the majority of the narrative and content is factual.
Darren was kind enough to sit down with us and
(07:10):
walk us through what he found, and let me tell you,
you have no idea what's coming over the next hill.
When Marsha Hennessy arrived at the Blanger home, they had
some theories as to what might be happening, and they
weren't overly concerned. The area Looser was hunting was basically
his backyard. He knew it well, and there were no
real dangers in those woods, no mountains, cliffs or rivers
(07:33):
for him to get swept away in.
Speaker 5 (07:35):
When the wardens came in, they just didn't I don't
want to say they didn't take it seriously, but they
had done this a thousand times before. He was a
young man. He was twenty five. They figured he probably
just went out partying. The most plausible thing was that
he wasn't. You know, he didn't report home because he
was out doing something that he didn't want to tell
his wife about.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
To their credit, the wardens didn't let their personal opinions
keep them from doing their job. In fact, they spent
the entire night of November twenty fifth and into the
twenty sixth scouring the woods where Lujra had been hunting,
but they couldn't find it. By the next morning, they
began to be really concerned. If he was still in
those woods, he was almost certainly hypothermic and might not
(08:15):
last much longer. The first snowstorm of the year was
in full swing, and the wet, slushy precipitation had turned
light and fluffy as a cold front rolled through. The
Warden service was stretched thin after the snowstorm and calling
a full on search party would take time, maybe more
time than Lujra had, so they kept at it, and
before long they caught a break. As they were pacing
(08:37):
the side of the road where Linda had left Lujra
to go hunting, a neighbor approached them.
Speaker 6 (08:42):
They caught a lucky break, you know.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
They found a neighbor who when they knocked on his
door the night before, nobody had answered, but he had
come out and said, yeah, I saw where Luja went
in I was about to go hunting myself.
Speaker 6 (08:53):
I can He's a good kid, I can take you
right where I'm willing to bet he was.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
He was hunting this neighbor, A guy named Clayton Crosby
said that he hunted and trapped that section of the
forest all the time, and he knew a ridge along
a stream that was a good place to look for
deer tracks. If Lujira knew the woods as well as
he did, that would be a place to start. The
wardens accepted Clay's offer to accompany them, and when they
reached the spot Clay led them to.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
They searched through the fresh.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Powder for tracks Lujra had made in the slushy now
frozen snow underneath. It didn't take them long to find
Ludra's boot prints, and as they followed his trail a
spent thirty thirty cartridge, they found blood spatters in the
snow a short distance away, and as they continued to
follow Lujra's footprints, a dark pool of frozen blood and guts.
(09:41):
At that point it was easy to see what had happened.
Lujira had shot a buck and had gutted it there
in the woods. Then, instead of dragging it back towards
his house, he had pulled it about a quarter mile
through the woods to an old road. It was a
shorter distance to drag the deer, and he figured he'd
walk back home, get the car, and pick up the
animal along the road. It was a good plan, but
(10:02):
it hadn't worked. Lujia was still nowhere to be found,
and neither was his deer. Rather than give them an
answer for Linda about what had happened to her husband,
but they found along that forest road raised even more
questions and gave them the first suspicions that Lujia was
in more trouble than they had ever imagined. Linda credits
the game wardens for always treating her with kindness and
(10:24):
keeping her in the loop on the latest developments in
the case. But those days were still incredibly hard.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
The sick field, being alone with my kids, not having
my husband around, I think and somebody heard him. I
was twenty years old, very scary, very that wrote it
was got wrenching. I There weren't a day go by
(10:56):
that I didn't just sit and cry.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Part two Clues in the Snow. To the trained eye
of the game wardens, the snow along.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
The road told a clear story.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
The car had driven in at some point before the
cold front. The driver and passenger had gotten out to
take a leak, and from that the wardens knew both
were mail. The driver was a smoker and had left
two cigarette butts along the road, while the passenger appeared
to be walking with a cane. The pair had gotten
back into the car and driven about one hundred yards
down the road, which is when they met Lujer. They
(11:36):
had helped him load the deer into the trunk of
the car, and then Lujer got into the back seat.
There were no signs of a struggle anywhere along the road.
It took me only a few seconds to explain what
they found, but I want to highlight how difficult it
was to decipher the criss crossing footprints and tire tracks
along the road. Remember, all of these prints were covered
in a layer of powder, and they had to figure
(11:58):
out which prints belonged to which mail and construct a
timeline of who did what and when. Their findings told
them that Lujia hadn't spent the night in the woods.
Maybe Lujia had met some guys he knew, and the
trio had gone out to celebrate a successful hunt. A
discarded Budweiser can indicated that the car's occupants had been drinking,
but Linda had been insistent that her husband wasn't a drinker.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
No, that's not him. He wouldn't do that. No, he
wouldn't even think to do it. He'd come home and
celebrate with his brothers probably and his dad and the kids.
But he wouldn't take off and go somewhere. He didn't
have people like that. He wasn't a heavy conture anyway.
He might have a beer on the weekend if my
(12:41):
dad was around, but I don't think I ever saw
him intoxicated.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Ward and Marsh also noticed something that ignited his suspicions.
As they'd been tracking Luja through the woods, they noticed
that before he began dragging the deer, he walked a
little ways ahead, leaned his gun against a tree, and
came back to pull the deer with both hands free.
He repeated this pattern until he got to the road
where he'd left his thirty thirty. As he started to
walk out, but Marsh noticed that after Lujira had gotten
(13:11):
into the back seat of the car, the driver had
gotten out, walked around the car to the other side
of the road, and retrieved Ludra's gun from where it
was leaning against a tree ward. Marsh was an avid hunter, angler,
and outdoorsman. If you're a hunter as well, you know
how weird it would be to let someone else get
your gun for you if you're capable of doing it yourself.
(13:33):
But what if, Marsh, wondered, Luder wasn't capable of doing
it himself. That thought worried him more than any other.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
But he knew that.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Finding the car and its driver was going to be
a serious challenge. But that's when they caught their second
big break in the case, this one also thanks to
the neighbor hunter and trapper Clay Crosby.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
The receipt that was found was really a lucky break
on their part in that it was actually found by
the neighbor who had kind of shown him around and
shown him to where Luja was probably hunting, and they
had asked him to kind of stay out of the
way to make sure he wasn't trampling any evidence. So
as this person was stepping back to get out of
(14:15):
the way, he felt something crunch under his shoe and
looked down and it was the receipt to a local garage.
And the receipt was found under four inches of powder
but above like the thick, heavy wet snow that had
come down early and then froze. So that really meant,
you know, with the timeline of how everything went and
(14:35):
when the snow came in, that the receipt was really
at the same wayer of the snow as the tracks
were right, so it clearly was tied to the vehicle.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
The receipt was dated for the previous day, the day
Luja went missing. But this wasn't just any old receipt.
I don't know if they made receipts differently in nineteen
seventy five, but this thing was like an identity thief
stream come true.
Speaker 5 (14:58):
Because the receipt had the suspects resonents on it, their
phone number, everything was right there. It was sort of
like a handwritten note of here's your suspect, here's where
you go and find them. Like that just never happens, right,
That in itself was a pretty lucky break.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
The snow along the road told them Luja was alive
when he got into the car and that he might
be in trouble, but it also showed them what to do.
Next Part three, Sully's Marsha Hennessy knew the names of
the guys they were looking for, but they wanted more
(15:33):
information before confronting them, so they went to the auto
garage listed on the receipt in the nearby town of Union.
The owner, a guy named Sully, was more than happy
to talk to them about the two men who had
visited his shop the day before.
Speaker 5 (15:47):
The guy at the garage was all bent sideways over
these guys coming in. He said that they were drunk,
intoxicated on whatever drugs too. They had a radiator issue
with the car, I think a crack and was leaking,
and he just wasn't equipped at that garage to handle that.
And he had told him that, and they yelled at him,
they swore at him, and he just kind of did
(16:08):
some quick fix to get him out of there, just
to get him going and get him away from him.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Selly thought he'd gotten rid of these two yahoos. But
then later that same day they came back to the
garage again after they had picked up Blue.
Speaker 5 (16:21):
Jerk, and he said when they came back in, the
car was just white walled with steam. It was completely
filled with steam. These guys were sitting in the car.
They were even drunker more intoxicated than when they had
been in that morning, and they just drove the car
right in on the left. They didn't they didn't get out,
they didn't park outside. They just drove it right into
(16:43):
the garage, right on the lift, and were yelling out
the window and demanding that he fixed it, that he
was a crook, that he had cheated them before, even
though he had told them, guys, there's nothing I can
do here.
Speaker 6 (16:53):
You know, I can't fix this.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Selly told the wardens that at this point he was
actually kind of nervous. These guys were clearly intoxicated, clearly angry,
and he also spied a shotgun in the front seat
of the car and a box of shells on the dashboard,
but he said he didn't see anyone in the back
seat even after all the steam from the radiator had cleared,
and he didn't try to open the trunk. He just
(17:15):
wanted them out of a shop as quickly as possible,
So once again he fixed them up the best he
could and probably breathed a sigh of relief as.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
They drove away.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Josh Haynes with the Main State Police confirmed to me
that the car in question was a nineteen sixty five
Uwick Special. Haynes told me that the two men driving
the car have been identified, but their real names haven't
been released. Since they've never been officially named as suspects.
Darren used fake names in his book, and we're just
going to call them Suspect A and Suspect B. Suspect
(17:47):
A is the smoker, the driver of the car, and
Suspect B is the passenger and the one who walks.
Speaker 6 (17:52):
With a cane.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
At this point, Martia and Hennessy knew a few things,
and none of them spelled good news for lujer The
men were not in their right mind. They were armed
and had almost certainly picked up Lujra from the road
in the woods. But Lujira wasn't in the back seat
when they arrived at the garage the second time, and
there were at least a few hours between when they'd
picked up the Hunter and when they drove onto the
(18:16):
lift at Sully's, plenty of time to do who knows
what with Lucher Blanger Part four Suspect A. After confirming
with Linda that Lujier didn't know either of the men
in the car, the wardens made their way to Suspect
(18:36):
A's house in Camden, about half an hour from Washington.
They arrived around one in the afternoon, but based on
the appearance of the man who answered the door, it
could have been six in the morning or eleven at night.
He was wearing pajama pants and his disheveled hair made
it seem like he'd just woken up, but the beer
can in his hand suggested that maybe he'd just never
gone to sleep, and the bloodshot eyes peering out from
(18:59):
the bushy, dark eye browse told the wardens that he'd
much rather be left alone. He was also about six
foot two, and the wardens later learned a US Marine
who had served in Vietnam. He'd survived a grenade blast and,
along with a silver star and purple heart, had earned
a metal plate in his head. For his trouble, he'd
been arrested several times for barroom boxing, along with two
(19:21):
dui charges, and to complete the picture public urination point is,
this wasn't some schlub they could push around. If he'd
done what they thought he'd done, they had to be careful.
Speaker 5 (19:34):
He was home alone, and he stonewalled them at first,
basically just said he hadn't been hunting that day, hadn't
been to Washington, didn't know where Washington.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Was, but Warden Marsh wasn't someone to be trifled with either,
and he was in no mood to play games.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
The warnings at that point they had been they'd pulled
an all nighter, you know, they'd been up for probably
thirty six hours or something. At that point, his patience
was wearing thin, and he just bottom lined. It was
the guy that, look, we know your car was there.
We found this receipt. We know you were there, so
you better start telling us the truth. Because there's the
two ways to do this. It's going to be the
(20:10):
easy way of the hard way, and the way this
is going it sounds like it's going to be the
hard way.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
The way things turned out, the wardens should have gone
right to the hard way, but they didn't know what
was going to happen. So I'm sure they were relieved
when suspect A let them into the house and they
sat down with him at the kitchen table. After telling
a BS story about selling the buick the night before,
suspect A eventually admitted that yes he had visited Selly's garage,
and yes he'd been hunting near Washington, but he claimed
(20:37):
never to have met or even seen Lujer. He said
they saw his tracks in the snow, but that a
second car must have picked up the hunter before they
got there. The wardens didn't believe this story either, because
there had been only one set of tire tracks on
that forest road, but Suspect A stuck to his story,
So the wardens asked to see his hunting clothes and gun.
They figured that if the suspects had done something to Luger,
(21:00):
there would likely be evidence on their clothes or equipment.
Speaker 5 (21:03):
And he said it was down in the basement. So
what they ended up doing is the warden split up.
Speaker 6 (21:08):
You know.
Speaker 5 (21:08):
One of them asked to use the restroom, so.
Speaker 6 (21:11):
He stayed upstairs.
Speaker 5 (21:12):
Well, the other warden went downstairs with the suspect. In hindsight,
that kind of turned out to be probably something they
regretted to not both being there. So the other warden
goes downstairs. This would have been Warden Hennessy, and the
guy shows them around and shows him the hunting gear
that he was wearing. It had all been cleaned already,
(21:34):
shows him his rifle already cleaned.
Speaker 6 (21:37):
They see there's a room down there with.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
The padlock on it, that's locked up, and the warden
asks to see inside there, and Suspect Day tells them
I can't get in there myself. I don't have the
key to it or the combination, whichever one it was.
You know, the guy bought the house from gave it
to me. I lost it, like, I don't even know
what's in there myself, he tells.
Speaker 6 (21:57):
Them, which and of itself.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
That's pretty sketchy and hard to believe, especially from a
guy who had just lied to them for a few
minutes before that.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Meanwhile, upstairs, ward and Marsh was poking around. He noticed
a box of federal shotgun shells on the table, which
matched what Selly had said he saw on the dashboard
of the buick. When he peeked inside, he saw that
one of the shells was missing. He also noticed a
knife on the table that had already been cleaned, which
made him start to wonder. So he walked over to
(22:29):
the refrigerator and opened the door to the freezer.
Speaker 5 (22:32):
Anyone who hunts will know what I mean when I
say there were a bunch of packages of meat wrapped
in white freezer paper. He went and tested one of
the packages with his hands and it was still soft,
so you know, they hadn't been.
Speaker 6 (22:47):
In the freezer for long. It wasn't frozen through.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Clearly, according to Selly's Suspectey had made a point to
complain about how there weren't any deer left in Maine
and that they hadn't had any luck the previous morning.
He also told the wardens that even though he'd been
hunting in the Washington area, he hadn't killed anything, but
the still warm packages of deer meat and his freezer
proved he'd been lying about the deer, and Marsh wondered
(23:10):
if that meat had come from the one Luger had killed.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
The suspect and Warden Hennessy came back up and basically
he could tell for Mordon Hennessy's demeanor and the things
that he was saying is let's get out of here,
like we got to go tomic.
Speaker 6 (23:25):
So you know, they got out of there.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
The pair exchange information once they were back in their cruiser,
which is when ward and Marsh pulled one of those
packages of deer meat from his pocket.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Warden Hennessy was a bit freaked out over that because
obviously it would never be admissible in.
Speaker 6 (23:39):
Court and ward and marsh.
Speaker 5 (23:41):
Didn't care, you know, at that point he basically just said, look,
this guy's dirty.
Speaker 6 (23:46):
We're gonna get a lot on him. But if this.
Speaker 5 (23:49):
Package of meat helps us identify that these are the
guys and helps us find Lujah Blander or his remains, like,
I don't care.
Speaker 6 (23:57):
Like we need to get this in the lab weed
to figure this out.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
What Marsha and Hennessey discovered inside that house was only
the beginning. The deeper they dug, the more perilous the
trail became. Evidence destroyed, witnesses intimidated, a home burned to
the ground, and a shocking confession that would take years
to surface. That's after the break on Blood Trails.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
Part five.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
The party the evidence of the Wardens had collected thus
far was either circumstantial or, in the case of the
deer Meet, inadmissible. They knew they needed more, so they
took the case to the main state police and applied
for search warrants for the homes of Suspect A and
Suspect B. The state police sent them officers to assist,
and the local judge granted them the warrants they requested,
(24:58):
but that process took time. Luja went missing the day
after Thanksgiving, and I'm sure there were people in government
offices taking long weekends. The wardens and state police continued
to investigate. They drove the various routes the suspects may
have taken to see if they could decipher where they
had gone between picking up Lujer and Selly's garage, but
they didn't find anything, and they weren't able to execute
(25:20):
the search warrants on the suspects homes until the next Friday,
a week after Lujer went missing. Destroying evidence of a
murder or kidnapping is tough for even the smartest criminals,
and investigators figured they'd be able to pull trace amounts
of blood from hunting clothes or hares from hack saws.
But when Marsha and Hennessy pulled up the suspect A's
home along with two state police officers, they realized they
(25:43):
should have tried to search the home sooner.
Speaker 5 (25:45):
When they showed up, they were cars all up and
down the road. The guy was having a rip roaring party.
The place was packed with people all throughout the house,
and they're looking at it like, is this guy he's
the lead suspect and potentially a murder case, and he's
having this huge party, and you know, whether it was
(26:08):
intentional or not, in some ways, potentially was a smart
thing for him to have done, because it showed that,
you know, he wasn't worried, he didn't think, you know,
he was in trouble. But also if there was evidence,
you know, blood splatter on the floor, things like that,
he had forty fifty people tracking dirt all through the
house and covering it up.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
To make matters worse.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
All the potential evidence the wardens had seen on their
previous visit was gone. The hunting clothes, the deer meat,
the knife, the gun, the gear, all of it nowhere
to be seen. They hadn't seen the buick in the
driveway on their previous visit, but it could have been
somewhere else on the property, or they could have found
information in the house that led them to it. But
(26:51):
the car had also been disappeared without a trace. To
add insult to injury, suspect A had taped a newspaper
article on Lujer's disappearance to the door of the upstairs freezer.
Speaker 5 (27:04):
He was mocking them, and he was being quite obstinate
and basically When they were confronting him, they asked him
where all the hunting clothes were. He said he didn't
know what they were talking about.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
There were no hunting clothes there.
Speaker 5 (27:18):
He had never had any, because he knew that Ward
and marsh never came downstairs and never saw it, so
it was just his word against Ward and Hennessy.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
There was no smoking gun, either literal or figurative. But
no criminal is perfect, and suspect A was no different.
They noticed that the padlock on the door in the basement,
the one that the suspect claimed he'd never opened, had
been turned around.
Speaker 5 (27:44):
So clearly Suspect A was going in and out of
the room and he had carelessly switched the direction of
the lock.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
They cut the lock off the door, hopeful that Suspect
A had failed to clean up all traces of his crime.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
They were right, but not as right as they had hoped.
Speaker 5 (27:59):
The only thing they found in there is on a
bench that you could see markings in the dust where
looked like a gun had been laid there, and potentially
a thirty thirty because it wasn't too long, and that
was the gun that Lujiah Blanger had been hunting with
and they found a broken piece of a v notch
site that they got it tested and it was consistent
(28:23):
with the type of site that was used on A
thirty thirty at that time.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
They noticed the light bulb had been changed recently, but
other than that, it didn't seem like Suspect A used
the room very often. They didn't find any evidence that
anyone had been locked in the room or a body
had been kept there. They came up empty at Suspect
Bee's house as well, which a different team had searched
at the same time. Both men stuck to their story
and without any additional evidence, the wardens were forced to
(28:51):
drive away empty handed. Part six. To any investigator, the
primary crime scene is of utmost importance, but in this case,
that crime scene was mobile, and the fact that the
suspects tried to hide the buick was reason enough to
(29:11):
assume it held key evidence. That's why I'm sure Warden
Marsh was excited to hear that just a few days
after they searched the suspects homes, the Forest Green car
was spotted on a residential road in the town of Northport,
about twenty miles from Suspect A's home and the Vin
number was registered to the same man Warden. Marsh rushed
out to the scene to inspect the car himself, but
(29:34):
what he saw made his stomach drop. The car's headliner,
floor mats, and rear seat had all been removed. The
trunk had been cleaned with heavy duty cleaner, and Marsh
could still smell the pungent sterile aroma. The trunk, matt,
spare tire, and carjack had also been removed from the
wheel well. But when Marsh looked up as he inspected
(29:55):
the trunk, he noticed something on the lid, a deer hair.
It wasn't the evidence they were hoping for, but again,
suspect A had claimed he never brought home a deer.
That hair was enough to impound the car, so the
state police forensic team could get a closer look.
Speaker 5 (30:10):
When they did find the car and they impounded it,
one of the things that they also found was a
bullet hidden way down in the wheel well or where
the spare tire well, excuse me would be, and it
had a beard hair attached to it. And Lujah Bolanger
at that time had a semi goo tea.
Speaker 6 (30:31):
I guess you could call it. It was more chin
than let.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
The bullet was actually a buckshot pellet of the same
kind that would have been loaded in the twelve gage
shells Marsh saw on Suspect A's table. How it came
in contact with a beard hair, and how that beard
hair and pellet came to be in the trunk of
Suspect A's car is perhaps the most disturbing piece of
evidence the wardens had uncovered thus far. Unfortunately, it was
(30:56):
still inconclusive. Forensic DNA testing wasn't really an option nineteen
seventy five, and when they sent the beard hair to
the FBI lab in Washington, d C. Investigators weren't able
to use its color or dimensions to match it with
Luger or either of the suspects. It was close, but
it still wasn't quite enough to make an arrest. Part
(31:21):
seven Suspect B. Suspect A gets a lot of attention
in this story, and he still has one more act
to play, but Suspect B is also important. In fact,
he's the reason we know much of anything about what
happened to Luger on that road. He also may have
been the one to pull the trigger. Suspect B was
(31:41):
also a Vietnam veteran, who had been wounded in battle,
which is likely the reason he walked with a cane.
The pair shared experience of war apparently brought them together
because they didn't have much else in common besides a
love of alcohol. While Suspect A was large and imposing,
Suspect B was short and slender. Suspect was married, but
Suspect B lived alone, and while Suspect A is never
(32:04):
known to have told anyone about what happened that day,
Suspect B just couldn't keep the story to himself. A
few months after Lujire's disappearance, a man came to the
police with what he said was important information. He had
been partying with Suspect B, and in a drunken stupor,
Suspect B told him the entire story. According to this informant,
(32:25):
Suspect A and B had seen Lujer on the road
with his deer. Not having had any luck themselves, they
decided to steal logers, so they pretended to want to help,
got the deer in the trunk and invited Luger into
the back seat, But when Suspect A told Lujer they
were keeping the deer as a quote. Shipping and handling
fee Lujer pushed back. He said he needed the deer
(32:47):
to feed his family and asked to be let out
of the car. That's when Suspect B turned around into seat,
lowered the shotgun at Luger, and pulled the trigger. We
can assume that the pair spent the next hours days
hiding the body and cleaning the car, but the informant
says he was afraid to ask where they had buried
Lutra's remains. Linda has a similar, though slightly different theory
(33:10):
about what happened to her husband.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
I believe that when he got into the car, they
got the deer in the trunk. He got in the
back seat of the car, and they got to the
end of that road. They turned left instead of right
to bring him home, and I think that's where he
might have made a stink when he sat it, getting
(33:33):
anxious that they were one wrong way, and then he
realized they weren't taking him home. Ah. I don't know,
but that's where I think they shout him in the
back seat. Was there.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Why Suspect B would admit to doing such a thing
over something as trivial as a deer has baffled investigators
not to mention Lucre's family. The pair of men were
obviously intoxicated and not in their right minds, but there's
a giant gap between being drunk or high and murdering
a stranger over some venison. The details of Ludra's case
were well known at the time, so it's possible the
(34:08):
informant was fabricating a story for some ulterior motive. Maybe
the gun went off by accident, there was a fight
in the car, or a third party was involved. Marsh
and his colleagues knew the informant's testimony would never hold
up in court. They needed more details from a more
reliable witness than one of suspect.
Speaker 4 (34:27):
Bee's drinking buddies.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Ideally, they wanted him to confess in a less alcohol
soaked setting, and a short time later they got their chance.
Suspect Bee had been incarcerated for stealing in an effort
to fund his drug habit. Law enforcement told Suspect Bee's
cellmate that they'd let him go early if he could
get Suspect Bee to tell him what happened, but the
alleged murderer stuck to his original story. He didn't know
(34:52):
anything about Lujier's disappearance, and that original informant died of
a drug overdose a short time later. With Suspect B
refusing to speak, investigators remained hopeful that Suspect A would
one day crack. They sent undercover agents to the VFW
where Suspect A hung out, and while these agents were
successful in befriending him, they never got him to talk
(35:14):
about the case. Suspect A was obviously smart. He hid
or destroyed all the evidence that could have sent him
to jail, and maintained his innocence even while dealing with
severe drug and alcohol addictions. But you know that old
saying about being too smart for your own good, Suspect
A may have been too smart for his own good.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
In July of.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Nineteen seventy six, about seven months after Lujer went missing,
Warden Marsh got a call Suspect A had blown up
his own house in what was probably an attempt at
insurance fraud and, according to Darren, possibly an attempt to
kill his wife. Suspect A had filled a bunch of
washtubs with gasoline and lit a candle as a fuse.
(35:58):
He'd purchased a plane ticket to Orlando, and his plan
was to be out of the state when his house
went up in flames, so the insurance company couldn't accuse
him of starting the blaze himself. But there was a
flaw in his plan.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
It is believed that his refrigerator, with all the fumes
in the air, triggered the explosion prematurely before he.
Speaker 6 (36:17):
Got out of the house.
Speaker 5 (36:18):
He did have an air ticket that day to take
him to Orlando, Florida, so he was trying to make
it look like he wasn't at home at the time
of the explosion, But the explosion went off when he
was in the house. It blasted him clear through the
picture window and outside into the yard.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Suspect A suffered severe burns and was taken to a
military hospital in San Antonio. Doctors didn't expect him to
last long, so the state police rushed down to Texas.
They wanted to see if Suspect A would confess on
his deathbed and maybe tell them what he'd done with Lujer,
but they were too late.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
Suspect A died before.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
They could get there, taking what he knew about the
young Hunter's disappearance to his career. Suspect B, however, is
still alive. Tracy Luja and Linda's youngest daughter told me
he's not in good health, but he's remained in the
area since nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 7 (37:12):
He went on, he had children, and he continued with
his life.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Tracy and Linda believe there are people who might know
where Ludra's body was buried, but they're too afraid to come.
Speaker 7 (37:22):
Forward because there's definitely people all did that.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
No, but it's as scared of the family too, their sons,
even the kids. For a cry of interest. People are
scared of him, as scared of them. Intimidation, I suppose, yeah.
I mean they're very threatening. They would come on to
our page and be very nasty, you know, threatening. So
(37:48):
we had to block a few of them. And I
can't blame him for sticking out for the dad. But
they don't know.
Speaker 4 (38:02):
Part eight. The search continues.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
It's tempting to think of this case as solved, or
that justice, at least in the case of suspect A
was somehow served, but the family is far from feeling closure.
They never got the chance to face in court the
person who killed their husband and father, and they've never
been able to put him to rest in the way
he deserves.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
Above all, we just want to lay him to rest
our way, not throw him like a bag of trash somewhere.
We want to lay him to rest with what love
and dignity, you know, because that's what he deserved. He
didn't deserve what he got, No one does.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
You might expect Linda and her children to want an
explanation for why their husband and father was murdered, but
Linda and Tracy say answering that question isn't important to
them at this point. They don't buy the excuse that
the suspects were drunk or high or suffering from PTSD,
and given Suspect a's attempt to kill his wife, they
don't leave it was an accident.
Speaker 7 (39:01):
You're not going to get a why that you go, oh,
that makes sense, because you'd have to be psychotic to
agree with that. So a why is never going to
be good. It's never going to be okay, it's never
gonna be right. That's never going to ring closure or
feel like an answer.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
They also aren't motivated by a desire to see suspect
be behind bars.
Speaker 7 (39:19):
The only remaining suspect is not well and probably not
long for this world. And so as far as like
getting justice that's not going to happen.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
All they really want is to find Lugers remains, not
only for themselves, but for the grandchildren and great grandchildren
who never got the chance to know him.
Speaker 7 (39:35):
The family goes on, and I don't want it to
always be like, oh, this story that's in the fam
and never been solved. They've never been a saying. So
they still hear about, you know what going on, and
they know that that's their grandfather, and the little ones
eventually will know that that's their great grandfather. And so
I just feel like it's just an important to have
(39:55):
an end.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
The mission to find Loudiers remains has been top of
mind forever investigator assigned to this case. That's just as
true today as it was back in the seventies.
Speaker 5 (40:05):
In the years that followed, they did anything and everything.
The next spring they had a huge search at the
scale that the Warden Service had never done before.
Speaker 6 (40:15):
They literally brought in all wardens.
Speaker 5 (40:17):
My father in law recalls being a part of this too,
and it wasn't in his district.
Speaker 6 (40:22):
They brought him volunteers.
Speaker 5 (40:23):
They filled up a couple hotels, you know, they had
aircraft flying around looking for Crow circles things like that
that would suggest that animals are gravitating towards remains in
certain areas. They drained one farmer's pond because there was
a tip that the body was in there. And this
is an area down eastern Main where there's a lot
of quarries, So they sent divers into a whole bunch
(40:46):
of quarries and different bodies of water. Suspect A himself
lived on a pond. They dragged the pond, they sent
divers in the pond, They looked everywhere, and unfortunately all
that came up handed.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Warden's Marsha and Hennessy won't be able to see it,
but bringing this case to a close would mean more
to them than most other investigators.
Speaker 5 (41:09):
One thing that really struck me, you know, with jarn
and with a lot of these wardens in particular, is
that they all seem to have experiences and stories that
sort of haunts them and they can't put away with.
This was the case that for Jarh and I could
tell he really had some misgimmings about and really just
have that personal drive. I know he's stayed in contact
(41:31):
with a family for years after the case was over
because he just He really personally just wanted to help
bring closure for them, so he was really motivated.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
The State police have continued to search as additional tips
have come in. In fact, according to a June email from
Detective Haynes, ground and water searchers have been conducted in
recent weeks and additional searches have been planned. They're especially
interested in the back seat from the buick. There's a
reason that suspects got rid of it, but it may
still be around somewhere, sitting in an old barn.
Speaker 4 (42:02):
Or garage collecting dust.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Modern forensic techniques can do things detectives in the nineteen
seventies could only dream of, and that seat may hold
the clues to finally solving this case. If you know
or know someone who might know anything about a back
seat from a green nineteen sixty five Buick, special, get
in touch with the Maine State Police at two O
seven six two four seven zero seven six and ask
(42:27):
for the Major Crimes Unit Unsolved Division. Detective Haines would
ask the same of anyone who might know anything about
lujires disappearance, no matter how minor. Again, that number is
two O seven six two four seven zero seven six
part of The reason Detective Haines has resources to investigate
lujres disappearance is thanks to Linda's advocacy. Linda worked with
(42:50):
a group called the Main Cold Case Alliance to lobby
the state legislature to provide funding to solve cold cases.
Many states have a dedicated cold case division, but until
twenty fifteen, Maine didn't.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
It was a group of us. We were at Statehouse
and we were pushing. It was a law we just wanted.
We wanted a cold case unit. It was really great
to watch all those lights light up green. Nobody was
against it, you know, all the Senate, it all lit
up in our favor, and it was really a great
feeling to get it approved.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Linda is hoping that fifty years after her husband's disappearance
and ten years after she helped fund a cold case unit,
someone will have the courage to come forward and give
the Belander family the closure they've been searching for.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
Fifty years is a long time. It's been a never
ending nightmare. Some days are okay, some days aren't. But
to find his remains, no matter what it is, and
we want to land to rest the right way. I
can't explain the feeling It's something that we've always wanted
and never gone and something that we've always wanted to
(43:57):
do for him, and he got dealt a radio and
UH just want to bring him home.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. If
you'd like to see images from this case, head over
to the meeater dot com slash blood Trails and click
on the case file for this episode. A big thanks
to Darren Wooster, Linda, and Tracy for their time and
willingness to speak with me. I also appreciate Detective Josh
Haynes for verifying the details of Looser's disappearance. If you
(44:25):
have a tip about this case or another case you
think we should cover, send us an email at blood
Trails at the meeater dot com.
Speaker 4 (44:32):
That's b l O O D.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
T R A I L S at the meeater dot com.
Speaker 6 (44:38):
See you next time.
Speaker 4 (44:40):
Stay safe out there.
It was the first snow of the season when Lujia
Bilander disappeared into the woods of rural Maine. He'd gone
out hunting, just like he had one hundred times before,
but this time you didn't come home. His wife Linda
thought maybe he'd gotten lost in the storm. But what
game Wardens uncovered over the next few days would lead
them through a maze of violence, drugs, and deceit that
(00:22):
no one could have predicted.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
That's next on Blood Trails.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Twenty five year old Luja Bolanger was what you might
call a typical main whitetail hunter. He went out on
November twenty fifth, nineteen seventy five, armed with his thirty
thirty lever gun to track a deer through the snow
in hopes of bringing home enough meat to feed his family.
He wasn't chasing big antlers, and he didn't sit in
a tree stand all day hoping a buck would walk past.
He went out and found one, and even though we'll
(01:02):
never know how big it was, I like to think
it was a giant. Lujia, his wife Linda, and his
brother John had all gone out that morning to look
for deer, but the falling snow hid the previous night's activity,
and the trio didn't have much luck as the gray
dawn illuminated the winter landscape.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Here's Linda and then about nine o'clock we just said, well,
we're gonna go home, and I had to get ready
for work, and John was going home, but Luji wanted
to get off at the top of the hill and
walk down through the field in the woods to the
county road and then home. It was heavy snow that morning.
We'd head heavy snow all night.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Lujia had been dropped off about a mile from the
home he shared in Washington, Maine, with Linda and their
three young children. He only planned to hunt for about
an hour before returning home and driving Linda to her
waitressing gig, but he didn't show up, and after another
hour had passed, Linda's annoyance turned to concern.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
Ere so I called next door and said luj home yet,
So they went looking on smobiles following his name stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
As nightfall approach and the search party still hadn't found
any sign of the missing hunter, they called the game ardens.
The state police wouldn't get involved until Ludra had been
missing for seventy two hours, but Since the incident involved
a hunter, the wardens were happy to help with the search.
You might assume that Lujia had just found a deer
track and lost track of time, but Linda wasn't buying it.
(02:30):
She knew right away that something terrible had happened.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I kind of got a little messed up emotionally, and
they sent me to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
In any movements, Linda's reaction to her husband's disappearance might
sound extreme, but keep in mind that Linda was only
twenty years old. She and Lujia already had three daughters
between the ages of three and a half years and
three months. The prospect of those girls losing their father
was unbearable, and one of Linda's most vivid memories from
those difficult days is of her middle daughter, Angel, happily
(03:01):
playing around the feet of the game wardens and neighbors
who were searching for her father.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
I remember getting up the next morning, is what I remember,
and the house had game wardens and trackers and family
all through it. They must have given me something that
I just was out of it. But Angel was eating
snow off from one of the game wardens boots. That's
(03:26):
the memory that I have in my.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Mind, the friends and family who filled that house knew
that losing Lujia would be a blow not only to
his wife and kids, but to the larger Washington community.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
No, he was a down to earth guy. He would
have done anything for anybody, anything, He'd be there for.
He loved life, he loved his family. We were building
a house and making memories and making plans for the future,
but that all got taken away.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Luja Blanders disappeared, and which remains one of Maine's oldest
unsolved cases. But this isn't your typical cold case, with
scant clues, no suspects, and more questions than answers. The
game wardens who investigated Lucra's case believed they knew what
happened to him, but the trail got wilder and more
unexpected with every twist and turn. It led them from
(04:19):
Maine's big woods to drug fueled parties, to threatening suspects,
to a house explosion.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
To insurance fraud to murder.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
It's a story of great detective work, even more devious suspects,
and ultimately a family who never got to say goodbye
to the father and husband they loved well.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Had three children together. Now nineteen grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
He wasn't here for the moments, the special times, the
daily times. He just he was robbed of them.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
I'm Jordan Sillers and this is Blood Trails, a Big
Woods Cold.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Case, Part one Deer Tracks.
Speaker 5 (05:06):
Speak.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
When Linda called to report her husband missing, the main
Warden Service sent out two officers to investigate, Lieutenant Warden
John Marsh and District Warden Dick Hennessy. Though they were
joined later by other wardens and Maine State Police officers,
Marsh and Hennessy were the two primary investigators of Luger's disappearance.
The problem from where we're standing in twenty twenty five
(05:28):
is that Hennessy passed away in twenty twelve and Marsh
followed him in twenty twenty three. Since this is still
an open investigation, the Maine State Police can't release any
case files, and they declined to sit down with us
for an interview. We wouldn't know much more about this
case than I've already told you if it wasn't for
an author by the name of Darren Woocester. Darren published
(05:49):
a book in twenty seventeen called Open Season, True Stories
of the Main Warden Service, which is a great book
that I highly recommend. Darren spoke with twelve game wardens
about the two cases he covers in that book, one
of which was Lugers.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
It happened to be that my father in law was
a game warden and he would always tell me stories,
and I got to thinking that this would be a
great way to write a book. And he would give
me some of his stories and we would slowly chip
away at it, and he would always encourage me, Hey,
I know a lot of people who were wardens, and
they've got great stories too, Like, you shouldn't just have
(06:25):
stories from me, We should get others involved.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
One of those wardens was John Marsh, who gave Darren
an inside view into this investigation. This isn't information that
was ever made public, but since Marsh was already retired,
he apparently wasn't too concerned about explaining what happened. Now,
normally I'd be skeptical about reporting secondhand information, but Darren
did his homework. I sent his chapter to Detective Sergeant
(06:49):
Josh Haines, who is currently in charge of Lujra's case
with the Main State Police. Haines told me in an
email quote. This information in the book is very accurate
to the facts I know of the case. Names have
been changed, and some of the other minor details are different,
but the majority of the narrative and content is factual.
Darren was kind enough to sit down with us and
(07:10):
walk us through what he found, and let me tell you,
you have no idea what's coming over the next hill.
When Marsha Hennessy arrived at the Blanger home, they had
some theories as to what might be happening, and they
weren't overly concerned. The area Looser was hunting was basically
his backyard. He knew it well, and there were no
real dangers in those woods, no mountains, cliffs or rivers
(07:33):
for him to get swept away in.
Speaker 5 (07:35):
When the wardens came in, they just didn't I don't
want to say they didn't take it seriously, but they
had done this a thousand times before. He was a
young man. He was twenty five. They figured he probably
just went out partying. The most plausible thing was that
he wasn't. You know, he didn't report home because he
was out doing something that he didn't want to tell
his wife about.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
To their credit, the wardens didn't let their personal opinions
keep them from doing their job. In fact, they spent
the entire night of November twenty fifth and into the
twenty sixth scouring the woods where Lujra had been hunting,
but they couldn't find it. By the next morning, they
began to be really concerned. If he was still in
those woods, he was almost certainly hypothermic and might not
(08:15):
last much longer. The first snowstorm of the year was
in full swing, and the wet, slushy precipitation had turned
light and fluffy as a cold front rolled through. The
Warden service was stretched thin after the snowstorm and calling
a full on search party would take time, maybe more
time than Lujra had, so they kept at it, and
before long they caught a break. As they were pacing
(08:37):
the side of the road where Linda had left Lujra
to go hunting, a neighbor approached them.
Speaker 6 (08:42):
They caught a lucky break, you know.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
They found a neighbor who when they knocked on his
door the night before, nobody had answered, but he had
come out and said, yeah, I saw where Luja went
in I was about to go hunting myself.
Speaker 6 (08:53):
I can He's a good kid, I can take you
right where I'm willing to bet he was.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
He was hunting this neighbor, A guy named Clayton Crosby
said that he hunted and trapped that section of the
forest all the time, and he knew a ridge along
a stream that was a good place to look for
deer tracks. If Lujira knew the woods as well as
he did, that would be a place to start. The
wardens accepted Clay's offer to accompany them, and when they
reached the spot Clay led them to.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
They searched through the fresh.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Powder for tracks Lujra had made in the slushy now
frozen snow underneath. It didn't take them long to find
Ludra's boot prints, and as they followed his trail a
spent thirty thirty cartridge, they found blood spatters in the
snow a short distance away, and as they continued to
follow Lujra's footprints, a dark pool of frozen blood and guts.
(09:41):
At that point it was easy to see what had happened.
Lujira had shot a buck and had gutted it there
in the woods. Then, instead of dragging it back towards
his house, he had pulled it about a quarter mile
through the woods to an old road. It was a
shorter distance to drag the deer, and he figured he'd
walk back home, get the car, and pick up the
animal along the road. It was a good plan, but
(10:02):
it hadn't worked. Lujia was still nowhere to be found,
and neither was his deer. Rather than give them an
answer for Linda about what had happened to her husband,
but they found along that forest road raised even more
questions and gave them the first suspicions that Lujia was
in more trouble than they had ever imagined. Linda credits
the game wardens for always treating her with kindness and
(10:24):
keeping her in the loop on the latest developments in
the case. But those days were still incredibly hard.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
The sick field, being alone with my kids, not having
my husband around, I think and somebody heard him. I
was twenty years old, very scary, very that wrote it
was got wrenching. I There weren't a day go by
(10:56):
that I didn't just sit and cry.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Part two Clues in the Snow. To the trained eye
of the game wardens, the snow along.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
The road told a clear story.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
The car had driven in at some point before the
cold front. The driver and passenger had gotten out to
take a leak, and from that the wardens knew both
were mail. The driver was a smoker and had left
two cigarette butts along the road, while the passenger appeared
to be walking with a cane. The pair had gotten
back into the car and driven about one hundred yards
down the road, which is when they met Lujer. They
(11:36):
had helped him load the deer into the trunk of
the car, and then Lujer got into the back seat.
There were no signs of a struggle anywhere along the road.
It took me only a few seconds to explain what
they found, but I want to highlight how difficult it
was to decipher the criss crossing footprints and tire tracks
along the road. Remember, all of these prints were covered
in a layer of powder, and they had to figure
(11:58):
out which prints belonged to which mail and construct a
timeline of who did what and when. Their findings told
them that Lujia hadn't spent the night in the woods.
Maybe Lujia had met some guys he knew, and the
trio had gone out to celebrate a successful hunt. A
discarded Budweiser can indicated that the car's occupants had been drinking,
but Linda had been insistent that her husband wasn't a drinker.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
No, that's not him. He wouldn't do that. No, he
wouldn't even think to do it. He'd come home and
celebrate with his brothers probably and his dad and the kids.
But he wouldn't take off and go somewhere. He didn't
have people like that. He wasn't a heavy conture anyway.
He might have a beer on the weekend if my
(12:41):
dad was around, but I don't think I ever saw
him intoxicated.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Ward and Marsh also noticed something that ignited his suspicions.
As they'd been tracking Luja through the woods, they noticed
that before he began dragging the deer, he walked a
little ways ahead, leaned his gun against a tree, and
came back to pull the deer with both hands free.
He repeated this pattern until he got to the road
where he'd left his thirty thirty. As he started to
walk out, but Marsh noticed that after Lujira had gotten
(13:11):
into the back seat of the car, the driver had
gotten out, walked around the car to the other side
of the road, and retrieved Ludra's gun from where it
was leaning against a tree ward. Marsh was an avid hunter, angler,
and outdoorsman. If you're a hunter as well, you know
how weird it would be to let someone else get
your gun for you if you're capable of doing it yourself.
(13:33):
But what if, Marsh, wondered, Luder wasn't capable of doing
it himself. That thought worried him more than any other.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
But he knew that.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Finding the car and its driver was going to be
a serious challenge. But that's when they caught their second
big break in the case, this one also thanks to
the neighbor hunter and trapper Clay Crosby.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
The receipt that was found was really a lucky break
on their part in that it was actually found by
the neighbor who had kind of shown him around and
shown him to where Luja was probably hunting, and they
had asked him to kind of stay out of the
way to make sure he wasn't trampling any evidence. So
as this person was stepping back to get out of
(14:15):
the way, he felt something crunch under his shoe and
looked down and it was the receipt to a local garage.
And the receipt was found under four inches of powder
but above like the thick, heavy wet snow that had
come down early and then froze. So that really meant,
you know, with the timeline of how everything went and
(14:35):
when the snow came in, that the receipt was really
at the same wayer of the snow as the tracks
were right, so it clearly was tied to the vehicle.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
The receipt was dated for the previous day, the day
Luja went missing. But this wasn't just any old receipt.
I don't know if they made receipts differently in nineteen
seventy five, but this thing was like an identity thief
stream come true.
Speaker 5 (14:58):
Because the receipt had the suspects resonents on it, their
phone number, everything was right there. It was sort of
like a handwritten note of here's your suspect, here's where
you go and find them. Like that just never happens, right,
That in itself was a pretty lucky break.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
The snow along the road told them Luja was alive
when he got into the car and that he might
be in trouble, but it also showed them what to do.
Next Part three, Sully's Marsha Hennessy knew the names of
the guys they were looking for, but they wanted more
(15:33):
information before confronting them, so they went to the auto
garage listed on the receipt in the nearby town of Union.
The owner, a guy named Sully, was more than happy
to talk to them about the two men who had
visited his shop the day before.
Speaker 5 (15:47):
The guy at the garage was all bent sideways over
these guys coming in. He said that they were drunk,
intoxicated on whatever drugs too. They had a radiator issue
with the car, I think a crack and was leaking,
and he just wasn't equipped at that garage to handle that.
And he had told him that, and they yelled at him,
they swore at him, and he just kind of did
(16:08):
some quick fix to get him out of there, just
to get him going and get him away from him.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Selly thought he'd gotten rid of these two yahoos. But
then later that same day they came back to the
garage again after they had picked up Blue.
Speaker 5 (16:21):
Jerk, and he said when they came back in, the
car was just white walled with steam. It was completely
filled with steam. These guys were sitting in the car.
They were even drunker more intoxicated than when they had
been in that morning, and they just drove the car
right in on the left. They didn't they didn't get out,
they didn't park outside. They just drove it right into
(16:43):
the garage, right on the lift, and were yelling out
the window and demanding that he fixed it, that he
was a crook, that he had cheated them before, even
though he had told them, guys, there's nothing I can
do here.
Speaker 6 (16:53):
You know, I can't fix this.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Selly told the wardens that at this point he was
actually kind of nervous. These guys were clearly intoxicated, clearly angry,
and he also spied a shotgun in the front seat
of the car and a box of shells on the dashboard,
but he said he didn't see anyone in the back
seat even after all the steam from the radiator had cleared,
and he didn't try to open the trunk. He just
(17:15):
wanted them out of a shop as quickly as possible,
So once again he fixed them up the best he
could and probably breathed a sigh of relief as.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
They drove away.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Josh Haynes with the Main State Police confirmed to me
that the car in question was a nineteen sixty five
Uwick Special. Haynes told me that the two men driving
the car have been identified, but their real names haven't
been released. Since they've never been officially named as suspects.
Darren used fake names in his book, and we're just
going to call them Suspect A and Suspect B. Suspect
(17:47):
A is the smoker, the driver of the car, and
Suspect B is the passenger and the one who walks.
Speaker 6 (17:52):
With a cane.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
At this point, Martia and Hennessy knew a few things,
and none of them spelled good news for lujer The
men were not in their right mind. They were armed
and had almost certainly picked up Lujra from the road
in the woods. But Lujira wasn't in the back seat
when they arrived at the garage the second time, and
there were at least a few hours between when they'd
picked up the Hunter and when they drove onto the
(18:16):
lift at Sully's, plenty of time to do who knows
what with Lucher Blanger Part four Suspect A. After confirming
with Linda that Lujier didn't know either of the men
in the car, the wardens made their way to Suspect
(18:36):
A's house in Camden, about half an hour from Washington.
They arrived around one in the afternoon, but based on
the appearance of the man who answered the door, it
could have been six in the morning or eleven at night.
He was wearing pajama pants and his disheveled hair made
it seem like he'd just woken up, but the beer
can in his hand suggested that maybe he'd just never
gone to sleep, and the bloodshot eyes peering out from
(18:59):
the bushy, dark eye browse told the wardens that he'd
much rather be left alone. He was also about six
foot two, and the wardens later learned a US Marine
who had served in Vietnam. He'd survived a grenade blast and,
along with a silver star and purple heart, had earned
a metal plate in his head. For his trouble, he'd
been arrested several times for barroom boxing, along with two
(19:21):
dui charges, and to complete the picture public urination point is,
this wasn't some schlub they could push around. If he'd
done what they thought he'd done, they had to be careful.
Speaker 5 (19:34):
He was home alone, and he stonewalled them at first,
basically just said he hadn't been hunting that day, hadn't
been to Washington, didn't know where Washington.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Was, but Warden Marsh wasn't someone to be trifled with either,
and he was in no mood to play games.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
The warnings at that point they had been they'd pulled
an all nighter, you know, they'd been up for probably
thirty six hours or something. At that point, his patience
was wearing thin, and he just bottom lined. It was
the guy that, look, we know your car was there.
We found this receipt. We know you were there, so
you better start telling us the truth. Because there's the
two ways to do this. It's going to be the
(20:10):
easy way of the hard way, and the way this
is going it sounds like it's going to be the
hard way.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
The way things turned out, the wardens should have gone
right to the hard way, but they didn't know what
was going to happen. So I'm sure they were relieved
when suspect A let them into the house and they
sat down with him at the kitchen table. After telling
a BS story about selling the buick the night before,
suspect A eventually admitted that yes he had visited Selly's garage,
and yes he'd been hunting near Washington, but he claimed
(20:37):
never to have met or even seen Lujer. He said
they saw his tracks in the snow, but that a
second car must have picked up the hunter before they
got there. The wardens didn't believe this story either, because
there had been only one set of tire tracks on
that forest road, but Suspect A stuck to his story,
So the wardens asked to see his hunting clothes and gun.
They figured that if the suspects had done something to Luger,
(21:00):
there would likely be evidence on their clothes or equipment.
Speaker 5 (21:03):
And he said it was down in the basement. So
what they ended up doing is the warden split up.
Speaker 6 (21:08):
You know.
Speaker 5 (21:08):
One of them asked to use the restroom, so.
Speaker 6 (21:11):
He stayed upstairs.
Speaker 5 (21:12):
Well, the other warden went downstairs with the suspect. In hindsight,
that kind of turned out to be probably something they
regretted to not both being there. So the other warden
goes downstairs. This would have been Warden Hennessy, and the
guy shows them around and shows him the hunting gear
that he was wearing. It had all been cleaned already,
(21:34):
shows him his rifle already cleaned.
Speaker 6 (21:37):
They see there's a room down there with.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
The padlock on it, that's locked up, and the warden
asks to see inside there, and Suspect Day tells them
I can't get in there myself. I don't have the
key to it or the combination, whichever one it was.
You know, the guy bought the house from gave it
to me. I lost it, like, I don't even know
what's in there myself, he tells.
Speaker 6 (21:57):
Them, which and of itself.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
That's pretty sketchy and hard to believe, especially from a
guy who had just lied to them for a few
minutes before that.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Meanwhile, upstairs, ward and Marsh was poking around. He noticed
a box of federal shotgun shells on the table, which
matched what Selly had said he saw on the dashboard
of the buick. When he peeked inside, he saw that
one of the shells was missing. He also noticed a
knife on the table that had already been cleaned, which
made him start to wonder. So he walked over to
(22:29):
the refrigerator and opened the door to the freezer.
Speaker 5 (22:32):
Anyone who hunts will know what I mean when I
say there were a bunch of packages of meat wrapped
in white freezer paper. He went and tested one of
the packages with his hands and it was still soft,
so you know, they hadn't been.
Speaker 6 (22:47):
In the freezer for long. It wasn't frozen through.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Clearly, according to Selly's Suspectey had made a point to
complain about how there weren't any deer left in Maine
and that they hadn't had any luck the previous morning.
He also told the wardens that even though he'd been
hunting in the Washington area, he hadn't killed anything, but
the still warm packages of deer meat and his freezer
proved he'd been lying about the deer, and Marsh wondered
(23:10):
if that meat had come from the one Luger had killed.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
The suspect and Warden Hennessy came back up and basically
he could tell for Mordon Hennessy's demeanor and the things
that he was saying is let's get out of here,
like we got to go tomic.
Speaker 6 (23:25):
So you know, they got out of there.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
The pair exchange information once they were back in their cruiser,
which is when ward and Marsh pulled one of those
packages of deer meat from his pocket.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Warden Hennessy was a bit freaked out over that because
obviously it would never be admissible in.
Speaker 6 (23:39):
Court and ward and marsh.
Speaker 5 (23:41):
Didn't care, you know, at that point he basically just said, look,
this guy's dirty.
Speaker 6 (23:46):
We're gonna get a lot on him. But if this.
Speaker 5 (23:49):
Package of meat helps us identify that these are the
guys and helps us find Lujah Blander or his remains, like,
I don't care.
Speaker 6 (23:57):
Like we need to get this in the lab weed
to figure this out.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
What Marsha and Hennessey discovered inside that house was only
the beginning. The deeper they dug, the more perilous the
trail became. Evidence destroyed, witnesses intimidated, a home burned to
the ground, and a shocking confession that would take years
to surface. That's after the break on Blood Trails.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
Part five.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
The party the evidence of the Wardens had collected thus
far was either circumstantial or, in the case of the
deer Meet, inadmissible. They knew they needed more, so they
took the case to the main state police and applied
for search warrants for the homes of Suspect A and
Suspect B. The state police sent them officers to assist,
and the local judge granted them the warrants they requested,
(24:58):
but that process took time. Luja went missing the day
after Thanksgiving, and I'm sure there were people in government
offices taking long weekends. The wardens and state police continued
to investigate. They drove the various routes the suspects may
have taken to see if they could decipher where they
had gone between picking up Lujer and Selly's garage, but
they didn't find anything, and they weren't able to execute
(25:20):
the search warrants on the suspects homes until the next Friday,
a week after Lujer went missing. Destroying evidence of a
murder or kidnapping is tough for even the smartest criminals,
and investigators figured they'd be able to pull trace amounts
of blood from hunting clothes or hares from hack saws.
But when Marsha and Hennessy pulled up the suspect A's
home along with two state police officers, they realized they
(25:43):
should have tried to search the home sooner.
Speaker 5 (25:45):
When they showed up, they were cars all up and
down the road. The guy was having a rip roaring party.
The place was packed with people all throughout the house,
and they're looking at it like, is this guy he's
the lead suspect and potentially a murder case, and he's
having this huge party, and you know, whether it was
(26:08):
intentional or not, in some ways, potentially was a smart
thing for him to have done, because it showed that,
you know, he wasn't worried, he didn't think, you know,
he was in trouble. But also if there was evidence,
you know, blood splatter on the floor, things like that,
he had forty fifty people tracking dirt all through the
house and covering it up.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
To make matters worse.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
All the potential evidence the wardens had seen on their
previous visit was gone. The hunting clothes, the deer meat,
the knife, the gun, the gear, all of it nowhere
to be seen. They hadn't seen the buick in the
driveway on their previous visit, but it could have been
somewhere else on the property, or they could have found
information in the house that led them to it. But
(26:51):
the car had also been disappeared without a trace. To
add insult to injury, suspect A had taped a newspaper
article on Lujer's disappearance to the door of the upstairs freezer.
Speaker 5 (27:04):
He was mocking them, and he was being quite obstinate
and basically When they were confronting him, they asked him
where all the hunting clothes were. He said he didn't
know what they were talking about.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
There were no hunting clothes there.
Speaker 5 (27:18):
He had never had any, because he knew that Ward
and marsh never came downstairs and never saw it, so
it was just his word against Ward and Hennessy.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
There was no smoking gun, either literal or figurative. But
no criminal is perfect, and suspect A was no different.
They noticed that the padlock on the door in the basement,
the one that the suspect claimed he'd never opened, had
been turned around.
Speaker 5 (27:44):
So clearly Suspect A was going in and out of
the room and he had carelessly switched the direction of
the lock.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
They cut the lock off the door, hopeful that Suspect
A had failed to clean up all traces of his crime.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
They were right, but not as right as they had hoped.
Speaker 5 (27:59):
The only thing they found in there is on a
bench that you could see markings in the dust where
looked like a gun had been laid there, and potentially
a thirty thirty because it wasn't too long, and that
was the gun that Lujiah Blanger had been hunting with
and they found a broken piece of a v notch
site that they got it tested and it was consistent
(28:23):
with the type of site that was used on A
thirty thirty at that time.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
They noticed the light bulb had been changed recently, but
other than that, it didn't seem like Suspect A used
the room very often. They didn't find any evidence that
anyone had been locked in the room or a body
had been kept there. They came up empty at Suspect
Bee's house as well, which a different team had searched
at the same time. Both men stuck to their story
and without any additional evidence, the wardens were forced to
(28:51):
drive away empty handed. Part six. To any investigator, the
primary crime scene is of utmost importance, but in this case,
that crime scene was mobile, and the fact that the
suspects tried to hide the buick was reason enough to
(29:11):
assume it held key evidence. That's why I'm sure Warden
Marsh was excited to hear that just a few days
after they searched the suspects homes, the Forest Green car
was spotted on a residential road in the town of Northport,
about twenty miles from Suspect A's home and the Vin
number was registered to the same man Warden. Marsh rushed
out to the scene to inspect the car himself, but
(29:34):
what he saw made his stomach drop. The car's headliner,
floor mats, and rear seat had all been removed. The
trunk had been cleaned with heavy duty cleaner, and Marsh
could still smell the pungent sterile aroma. The trunk, matt,
spare tire, and carjack had also been removed from the
wheel well. But when Marsh looked up as he inspected
(29:55):
the trunk, he noticed something on the lid, a deer hair.
It wasn't the evidence they were hoping for, but again,
suspect A had claimed he never brought home a deer.
That hair was enough to impound the car, so the
state police forensic team could get a closer look.
Speaker 5 (30:10):
When they did find the car and they impounded it,
one of the things that they also found was a
bullet hidden way down in the wheel well or where
the spare tire well, excuse me would be, and it
had a beard hair attached to it. And Lujah Bolanger
at that time had a semi goo tea.
Speaker 6 (30:31):
I guess you could call it. It was more chin
than let.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
The bullet was actually a buckshot pellet of the same
kind that would have been loaded in the twelve gage
shells Marsh saw on Suspect A's table. How it came
in contact with a beard hair, and how that beard
hair and pellet came to be in the trunk of
Suspect A's car is perhaps the most disturbing piece of
evidence the wardens had uncovered thus far. Unfortunately, it was
(30:56):
still inconclusive. Forensic DNA testing wasn't really an option nineteen
seventy five, and when they sent the beard hair to
the FBI lab in Washington, d C. Investigators weren't able
to use its color or dimensions to match it with
Luger or either of the suspects. It was close, but
it still wasn't quite enough to make an arrest. Part
(31:21):
seven Suspect B. Suspect A gets a lot of attention
in this story, and he still has one more act
to play, but Suspect B is also important. In fact,
he's the reason we know much of anything about what
happened to Luger on that road. He also may have
been the one to pull the trigger. Suspect B was
(31:41):
also a Vietnam veteran, who had been wounded in battle,
which is likely the reason he walked with a cane.
The pair shared experience of war apparently brought them together
because they didn't have much else in common besides a
love of alcohol. While Suspect A was large and imposing,
Suspect B was short and slender. Suspect was married, but
Suspect B lived alone, and while Suspect A is never
(32:04):
known to have told anyone about what happened that day,
Suspect B just couldn't keep the story to himself. A
few months after Lujire's disappearance, a man came to the
police with what he said was important information. He had
been partying with Suspect B, and in a drunken stupor,
Suspect B told him the entire story. According to this informant,
(32:25):
Suspect A and B had seen Lujer on the road
with his deer. Not having had any luck themselves, they
decided to steal logers, so they pretended to want to help,
got the deer in the trunk and invited Luger into
the back seat, But when Suspect A told Lujer they
were keeping the deer as a quote. Shipping and handling
fee Lujer pushed back. He said he needed the deer
(32:47):
to feed his family and asked to be let out
of the car. That's when Suspect B turned around into seat,
lowered the shotgun at Luger, and pulled the trigger. We
can assume that the pair spent the next hours days
hiding the body and cleaning the car, but the informant
says he was afraid to ask where they had buried
Lutra's remains. Linda has a similar, though slightly different theory
(33:10):
about what happened to her husband.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
I believe that when he got into the car, they
got the deer in the trunk. He got in the
back seat of the car, and they got to the
end of that road. They turned left instead of right
to bring him home, and I think that's where he
might have made a stink when he sat it, getting
(33:33):
anxious that they were one wrong way, and then he
realized they weren't taking him home. Ah. I don't know,
but that's where I think they shout him in the
back seat. Was there.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Why Suspect B would admit to doing such a thing
over something as trivial as a deer has baffled investigators
not to mention Lucre's family. The pair of men were
obviously intoxicated and not in their right minds, but there's
a giant gap between being drunk or high and murdering
a stranger over some venison. The details of Ludra's case
were well known at the time, so it's possible the
(34:08):
informant was fabricating a story for some ulterior motive. Maybe
the gun went off by accident, there was a fight
in the car, or a third party was involved. Marsh
and his colleagues knew the informant's testimony would never hold
up in court. They needed more details from a more
reliable witness than one of suspect.
Speaker 4 (34:27):
Bee's drinking buddies.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Ideally, they wanted him to confess in a less alcohol
soaked setting, and a short time later they got their chance.
Suspect Bee had been incarcerated for stealing in an effort
to fund his drug habit. Law enforcement told Suspect Bee's
cellmate that they'd let him go early if he could
get Suspect Bee to tell him what happened, but the
alleged murderer stuck to his original story. He didn't know
(34:52):
anything about Lujier's disappearance, and that original informant died of
a drug overdose a short time later. With Suspect B
refusing to speak, investigators remained hopeful that Suspect A would
one day crack. They sent undercover agents to the VFW
where Suspect A hung out, and while these agents were
successful in befriending him, they never got him to talk
(35:14):
about the case. Suspect A was obviously smart. He hid
or destroyed all the evidence that could have sent him
to jail, and maintained his innocence even while dealing with
severe drug and alcohol addictions. But you know that old
saying about being too smart for your own good, Suspect
A may have been too smart for his own good.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
In July of.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Nineteen seventy six, about seven months after Lujer went missing,
Warden Marsh got a call Suspect A had blown up
his own house in what was probably an attempt at
insurance fraud and, according to Darren, possibly an attempt to
kill his wife. Suspect A had filled a bunch of
washtubs with gasoline and lit a candle as a fuse.
(35:58):
He'd purchased a plane ticket to Orlando, and his plan
was to be out of the state when his house
went up in flames, so the insurance company couldn't accuse
him of starting the blaze himself. But there was a
flaw in his plan.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
It is believed that his refrigerator, with all the fumes
in the air, triggered the explosion prematurely before he.
Speaker 6 (36:17):
Got out of the house.
Speaker 5 (36:18):
He did have an air ticket that day to take
him to Orlando, Florida, so he was trying to make
it look like he wasn't at home at the time
of the explosion, But the explosion went off when he
was in the house. It blasted him clear through the
picture window and outside into the yard.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Suspect A suffered severe burns and was taken to a
military hospital in San Antonio. Doctors didn't expect him to
last long, so the state police rushed down to Texas.
They wanted to see if Suspect A would confess on
his deathbed and maybe tell them what he'd done with Lujer,
but they were too late.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
Suspect A died before.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
They could get there, taking what he knew about the
young Hunter's disappearance to his career. Suspect B, however, is
still alive. Tracy Luja and Linda's youngest daughter told me
he's not in good health, but he's remained in the
area since nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 7 (37:12):
He went on, he had children, and he continued with
his life.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Tracy and Linda believe there are people who might know
where Ludra's body was buried, but they're too afraid to come.
Speaker 7 (37:22):
Forward because there's definitely people all did that.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
No, but it's as scared of the family too, their sons,
even the kids. For a cry of interest. People are
scared of him, as scared of them. Intimidation, I suppose, yeah.
I mean they're very threatening. They would come on to
our page and be very nasty, you know, threatening. So
(37:48):
we had to block a few of them. And I
can't blame him for sticking out for the dad. But
they don't know.
Speaker 4 (38:02):
Part eight. The search continues.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
It's tempting to think of this case as solved, or
that justice, at least in the case of suspect A
was somehow served, but the family is far from feeling closure.
They never got the chance to face in court the
person who killed their husband and father, and they've never
been able to put him to rest in the way
he deserves.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
Above all, we just want to lay him to rest
our way, not throw him like a bag of trash somewhere.
We want to lay him to rest with what love
and dignity, you know, because that's what he deserved. He
didn't deserve what he got, No one does.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
You might expect Linda and her children to want an
explanation for why their husband and father was murdered, but
Linda and Tracy say answering that question isn't important to
them at this point. They don't buy the excuse that
the suspects were drunk or high or suffering from PTSD,
and given Suspect a's attempt to kill his wife, they
don't leave it was an accident.
Speaker 7 (39:01):
You're not going to get a why that you go, oh,
that makes sense, because you'd have to be psychotic to
agree with that. So a why is never going to
be good. It's never going to be okay, it's never
gonna be right. That's never going to ring closure or
feel like an answer.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
They also aren't motivated by a desire to see suspect
be behind bars.
Speaker 7 (39:19):
The only remaining suspect is not well and probably not
long for this world. And so as far as like
getting justice that's not going to happen.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
All they really want is to find Lugers remains, not
only for themselves, but for the grandchildren and great grandchildren
who never got the chance to know him.
Speaker 7 (39:35):
The family goes on, and I don't want it to
always be like, oh, this story that's in the fam
and never been solved. They've never been a saying. So
they still hear about, you know what going on, and
they know that that's their grandfather, and the little ones
eventually will know that that's their great grandfather. And so
I just feel like it's just an important to have
(39:55):
an end.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
The mission to find Loudiers remains has been top of
mind forever investigator assigned to this case. That's just as
true today as it was back in the seventies.
Speaker 5 (40:05):
In the years that followed, they did anything and everything.
The next spring they had a huge search at the
scale that the Warden Service had never done before.
Speaker 6 (40:15):
They literally brought in all wardens.
Speaker 5 (40:17):
My father in law recalls being a part of this too,
and it wasn't in his district.
Speaker 6 (40:22):
They brought him volunteers.
Speaker 5 (40:23):
They filled up a couple hotels, you know, they had
aircraft flying around looking for Crow circles things like that
that would suggest that animals are gravitating towards remains in
certain areas. They drained one farmer's pond because there was
a tip that the body was in there. And this
is an area down eastern Main where there's a lot
of quarries, So they sent divers into a whole bunch
(40:46):
of quarries and different bodies of water. Suspect A himself
lived on a pond. They dragged the pond, they sent
divers in the pond, They looked everywhere, and unfortunately all
that came up handed.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Warden's Marsha and Hennessy won't be able to see it,
but bringing this case to a close would mean more
to them than most other investigators.
Speaker 5 (41:09):
One thing that really struck me, you know, with jarn
and with a lot of these wardens in particular, is
that they all seem to have experiences and stories that
sort of haunts them and they can't put away with.
This was the case that for Jarh and I could
tell he really had some misgimmings about and really just
have that personal drive. I know he's stayed in contact
(41:31):
with a family for years after the case was over
because he just He really personally just wanted to help
bring closure for them, so he was really motivated.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
The State police have continued to search as additional tips
have come in. In fact, according to a June email from
Detective Haynes, ground and water searchers have been conducted in
recent weeks and additional searches have been planned. They're especially
interested in the back seat from the buick. There's a
reason that suspects got rid of it, but it may
still be around somewhere, sitting in an old barn.
Speaker 4 (42:02):
Or garage collecting dust.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Modern forensic techniques can do things detectives in the nineteen
seventies could only dream of, and that seat may hold
the clues to finally solving this case. If you know
or know someone who might know anything about a back
seat from a green nineteen sixty five Buick, special, get
in touch with the Maine State Police at two O
seven six two four seven zero seven six and ask
(42:27):
for the Major Crimes Unit Unsolved Division. Detective Haines would
ask the same of anyone who might know anything about
lujires disappearance, no matter how minor. Again, that number is
two O seven six two four seven zero seven six
part of The reason Detective Haines has resources to investigate
lujres disappearance is thanks to Linda's advocacy. Linda worked with
(42:50):
a group called the Main Cold Case Alliance to lobby
the state legislature to provide funding to solve cold cases.
Many states have a dedicated cold case division, but until
twenty fifteen, Maine didn't.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
It was a group of us. We were at Statehouse
and we were pushing. It was a law we just wanted.
We wanted a cold case unit. It was really great
to watch all those lights light up green. Nobody was
against it, you know, all the Senate, it all lit
up in our favor, and it was really a great
feeling to get it approved.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Linda is hoping that fifty years after her husband's disappearance
and ten years after she helped fund a cold case unit,
someone will have the courage to come forward and give
the Belander family the closure they've been searching for.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
Fifty years is a long time. It's been a never
ending nightmare. Some days are okay, some days aren't. But
to find his remains, no matter what it is, and
we want to land to rest the right way. I
can't explain the feeling It's something that we've always wanted
and never gone and something that we've always wanted to
(43:57):
do for him, and he got dealt a radio and
UH just want to bring him home.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. If
you'd like to see images from this case, head over
to the meeater dot com slash blood Trails and click
on the case file for this episode. A big thanks
to Darren Wooster, Linda, and Tracy for their time and
willingness to speak with me. I also appreciate Detective Josh
Haynes for verifying the details of Looser's disappearance. If you
(44:25):
have a tip about this case or another case you
think we should cover, send us an email at blood
Trails at the meeater dot com.
Speaker 4 (44:32):
That's b l O O D.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
T R A I L S at the meeater dot com.
Speaker 6 (44:38):
See you next time.
Speaker 4 (44:40):
Stay safe out there.
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