Why Are Maine Parents Killing Their Kids?

Why Are Maine Parents Killing Their Kids?

We’ve recently been discussing a rash of high-profile mass killings of women and children in Indiana. And while these deaths are tragic and extremely shocking, it would be hypocritical for us not to be transparent about the rash of child deaths that have been occurring in our very own backyard this month. Many folks have asked for a content warning. So, as I’ve stated, we’re talking about child deaths. So, if that’s something that you are sensitive to, this might not be the episode for you.

When 35-year-old Jessica Williams of Stockton Springs, Maine, brought her son, Maddox Williams, to Waldo County General Hospital on the afternoon of Sunday, June 20th, she told staff members that he had been knocked down by a dog leash and kicked by his 8-year-old sister. But Maddox wasn’t breathing when he got there, and hospital employees sadly weren’t able to resuscitate him. So, this beautiful three-year-old boy died at the hospital.

The cause of his death was determined by the Maine Medical Examiner’s Office to be multiple blunt force trauma that was inflicted non-accidentally. An autopsy revealed that Maddox had suffered from a fractured spine, bruises on his arms, legs, belly, and head, bleeding in his brain, and a ruptured bowel, among other injuries.

Police pieced together what happened to poor Maddox prior to his death through interviews with people including his grandmother Sherry Johnson, his father Andrew Williams, and Jason Trefethen, who lives in a camper on Cross Lane in Stockton Springs. Trefethen is the father of three of Jessica Williams’ children. Altogether, she has five children. Jessica also lives at the Cross Lane address, though not in the camper itself. So, detectives weren’t able to speak with Jessica Williams herself for several days because they couldn’t find her until Wednesday, June 23rd, the same day that she was arrested and charged with murder.

At the time, Williams told police that she had no idea how her son received such severe injuries. She said that Maddox did have a lot of bruises because he bruised very easily and her kids play “wild and crazy.” Before they found her, however, they interviewed Trefethen, 43, who said that Maddox had been playing with the other children around 10:00 a.m. on Sunday. At about 10:30 a.m., Jessica Williams came to Trefethen to ask him to watch the kids so she could take Maddox to the hospital. According to Trefethen’s bail conditions for a prior matter, he is not allowed to enter Jessica Williams’ home or have contact with her except to facilitate child care. So, Jason said when Jessica and Maddox left for the hospital, Maddox appeared lethargic. Jason said if Maddox was conscious and he said to him, “Bye, Maddox,” Maddox did not respond. When asked if Jessica Williams was abusive towards her son, he replied, quote, “You’ll have to ask her,” end quote.

Meanwhile, Maddox’s 8-year-old sister told a detective that they had been playing together earlier that day. She said she and Maddox were running and holding hands and that Maddox fell and hit his head on a rock. The sister said after Maddox hit his head, he went inside to get a drink. Maddox’s four-year-old brother told a caseworker that Maddox was, quote, “faking a seizure.” That makes me very confused. How would a four-year-old, one, even know what seizures are? And two, how would he know that he was faking? This seems like these children were coached on what to be saying. That’s what I was going to say. In my opinion, this looks like coaching. Yeah, definitely.

So, the next day, two detectives spoke to Andrew Williams. He’s 30 years old, who is currently an inmate at the Knox County Jail in Rockland. He told them that his relationship with Jessica Williams was volatile and ended when she was pregnant with Maddox. Andrew Williams told police that he had last seen his son on the weekend of April 10th, at which time he noticed multiple bruises on Maddox’s back and a cut over one of his eyes. The father said he took photographs of the injuries to document them “so he wouldn’t get blamed,” end quote. When he asked Williams about the injuries, she told him that her four-year-old son had thrown a toy at his little brother causing the cut. Williams is in jail right now ’cause he went and did a burglary and brought Maddox with him. Oh, like robbed somebody else’s house with his son? Yeah. Wow. Was that in the Stockton Springs area? It was in that general area. Yeah, this is quite a rural area for those not aware of this. It’s Midcoast Maine, so it’s kind of like northeast, but it follows the coast and it’s getting up towards like the Bangor area if you’re familiar. Probably about an hour and a half from us, I’d say. Yep.

When police spoke with Maddox’s grandmother, Sherry Johnson, they found that her story had changed over the course of a couple days. Initially, she told them that after Maddox was declared dead at the hospital, Jessica wanted to leave immediately and then wanted to be alone. Johnson claimed that she had dropped her daughter off at the pier located on Steamboat Avenue in Searsport and then went back to Williams’ house in Stockton Springs. She eventually admitted that she did not drop Jessica off at the pier and confirmed that she had lied to detectives the previous night. Instead, Jessica Williams went back to Johnson’s home and was picked up there the next day by an Andrew Moulton of Swanville, who told police later that he had dropped her off at an apartment.

The two had communicated via text. On Sunday, Jessica sent him a message saying, and I quote, “You awake? I need your help.” And then, “My son passed away.” These are both quotes. She wrote to him that the State Police and DHHS were at her house. “I’m not going to go home to deal with that on top of this,” end quote. She wrote, as well as writing, “Keep this between us, please,” end quote. When Moulton asked her what happened, she wrote to him that she didn’t know, then said, quote, “No, I didn’t kill my son,” end quote. People were looking for her for a while last week. So, I was first alerted to this when friends of friends were sharing posts from her friends trying to track her down. This was all over social media. Yes. On Wednesday, police went to Johnson’s house again, and this time, Jessica Williams was inside.

Williams told police that her daughter told her that Maddox had been knocked down by the puppy. He came inside and told her that his tummy hurt. She called her mother to come down to the house and they took him to the hospital. Jessica Williams told police that her son had also fallen from a trampoline recently and that she tried to run and catch him, but did not make it in time. She stated he landed on the grass and was not bleeding anywhere and seemed fine. However, when detectives spoke with the Medical Examiner’s Office, they were adamant that all of the boy’s injuries could not have been caused by any of those incidents. Maddox also had three partially healed abrasions on his face and forehead that were covered with temporary stick-on tattoos, deep tissue bruising on his butt, and he was missing three teeth from what appeared to be at least two different events. They stated that Maddox’s injuries were too severe to be caused by kids playing, falling off of a trampoline, or being knocked down by a puppy.

The three-year-old’s death marks the second highest-profile killing of a child in Stockton Springs since 2018. In February of 2018, 10-year-old Marissa Kennedy was beaten to death by her mother, Sharon Kennedy, and stepfather, Julio Carrillo, in the family’s Stockton Springs condo. And I do remember when that was all over the news. It was major. The 10-year-old’s beating death focused intense scrutiny on Maine’s child welfare systems. The state had received 25 reports about Marissa Kennedy and her family in the 16 months leading up to her murder when the family lived both in Bangor and then in Stockton Springs. The reports often alleged Carrillo’s violent, controlling behavior toward Marissa and Sharon Kennedy, but no one managed to confirm he was abusing the girl—a finding that would have prompted the state to remove her from her mother and stepfather’s custody. Carrillo is now serving a 55-year sentence for murder. Sharon Kennedy is serving a 48-year sentence.

Last year, 11 children died after the state’s child welfare system had received reports concerning their safety. Though none of those deaths were ruled a homicide, according to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, most of the deaths were ruled as accidents. Sadly, this doesn’t end here. Maddox Williams’ death marks the third highest-profile killing of a young child in the Bangor region in less than a month. So, 36-year-old Ronald Harding of Brewer, Maine, which is just across the river from Bangor… Yeah, it’s very close… was handed what they quote as a “happy and cooing baby.” And 15 minutes later, the 6-week-old boy was unresponsive and his parents were calling 911. The baby died from being shaken violently. Harding called 911 on Memorial Day to report that his infant was unresponsive and not breathing. The boy was taken to Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center in critical condition and sadly was pronounced dead. The Maine State Police arrested Harding 2 days later, charging him with manslaughter and setting a $3,000 cash bail.

Less than a week later on June 6th, 28-year-old Hillary Goding was charged with manslaughter in the death of her three-year-old daughter, Haley Anne Goding, in Old Town. And Old Town is another small mill town in the area. It’s kind of like a twin city to Orono where the University of Maine is. So, Goding called 911 after saying her daughter was unresponsive and not breathing. And again, the three-year-old was taken to Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center where she died. An autopsy was performed on the young girl, but findings are not being released at this time. There was a prior instance where Goding exposed the young girl to drugs and she needed medical attention. If convicted, Goding faces up to 30 years in prison and a fine up to $50,000 on the manslaughter charge.

So again, I ask, what is going on this year that is causing parents to harm their young children? Is this a drug-related thing? Is this a poverty-related thing? Does this stem from stress caused by the pandemic, joblessness? Please let us know what your thoughts are in the comments section below. Since this is all in like the greater Bangor area, the thing people like to say is like, “Oh, it’s the drugs up there. It’s all drugs. It’s all about drugs.” And I’m not here to say that that’s what it is, but that’s the reputation that it has and that’s how people write off the Bangor area. I don’t think that it is the sole cause for all of this. I mean, there’s definitely a lot of drugs in Bangor. There’s drugs all over the place, really. There’s drugs all over Maine. But personally, in my own personal experience, this was the first time I had any sort of indication that we had a meth and heroin problem was when I lived up in Bangor. And that’s saying a lot because this was over 15 years ago and we didn’t really have a drug epidemic in Maine, or most people didn’t consider it a drug epidemic, until we started getting like… I didn’t think heroin existed in Maine until I was 18 at a party and I saw somebody shoot up. And again, people didn’t even think it was a problem until we got fentanyl in the state and then it was in Portland and we were getting on Congress Street one overdose a week at least. So, Bangor has certainly had a drug problem for a lot longer than Maine has been considered to be a state with a drug problem. Because they had, or I don’t know if it’s still there or not, but one of the biggest substance abuse hospitals was right there on Broadway. Yes, that’s also true. Stillwater, excuse me.

It should also be mentioned because I mean, I don’t know of the drug habits of these people, but what we can talk about regarding this, and maybe we went into too much detail about the drug history of our state when it has no bearing on this… When I was about to say that what does have a bearing on this is the failure of our social services in Maine. And it is very common knowledge that you have to move heaven and earth for DHHS to take your kids away. You really have to do something terrible. There’s a lot of people around here that know people, have had stories of people who straight up abused their kids. CPS comes in and nothing happens. Right. And I don’t really put this as a fault to the individual caseworkers or social service workers themselves. It’s more the program. I know many, many caseworkers who are extremely hardworking women who are just completely… and men. Well, the ones I know are women, but they’re exhausted from this job. Yeah, they’re trying. They’re overloaded. No, they’re absolutely overloaded. I’m not putting the blame on them. You know, I’ve known people as well, and yes, they are overloaded. They’re absolutely overloaded. And I am not familiar with every single rule and code they must abide to, but I know that it is strict and there’s a lot of things that must be done. A lot of things have changed over the years.

So, back when Governor Paul LePage was still our governor—say what you will about him, a lot of people don’t agree with a lot of things he did—but he was very, very invested in family services. He grew up in an abusive home. He was very much a child advocate. So, he was a child advocate. He actually put in some legislation hoping that the CPS system would shift away from family reunification because currently they’re very, very much into reuniting families and keeping kids out of foster care. But he wanted to shift this to the best interests of the child. So, a lot of this stems back to the 2001 death of Logan Marr, who was a little girl who was placed in the foster care system with a woman named Sally Schofield. And Logan was killed. She died of suffocation after Sally Schofield duct-taped her face and left her in the basement. That happened again, 2001. Sally’s already out of jail. Do you know how many years she got? I don’t know off the top of my head, but I don’t believe it was a full sentence. I believe she was sentenced to 25 years, but she didn’t do all of it. I don’t have a ton of examples, but it just seems like in recent memory when I hear of mothers killing their own children or committing heinous child abuse, that they don’t end up serving full sentences, they don’t get life, they don’t even do 10 years, right? They seem to get released early.

And I don’t want to really get too much on the Sally Schofield case because I think it would be a good story to cover in full in the future. Absolutely. But from there, they started to want to not put so many kids in foster care and rather place kids with other family members that could keep them, or at least somebody that they were familiar with, which I guess is a really great idea. However, it causes problems later. So, I don’t know if Jubie wants to speak to this or I could speak to this, but back around the time when Marissa Kennedy was murdered by her parents, there was also the same year a little girl named Kendall Chick, who was four years old, who died in Wiscasset after she was taken away from her parents and placed in the custody of her grandfather and his grandfather’s fiancee. Kendall Chick was born drug-dependent and developmentally delayed. Was taken away from her mother and was given full custody to her paternal grandfather. His name was Stephen Hood. And Hood’s fiancee was Shawna Gatto. From my understanding, it was mostly Gatto taking care of Kendall Chick. And she was also taking care of two of her own biological grandchildren, and they were four years old and an infant. I’m not sure of the infant’s age, but the primary focus of the abuse here was Kendall Chick. I believe for a bit they were wondering if Stephen Hood was responsible. I believe he was cleared of all wrongdoing. He was away at work, I believe, while Gatto was home.

And Gatto basically squeezed her to death, ruptured her internal organs. Yeah. Her pancreas was completely lacerated. And the medical examiners that handled the autopsy found that this wasn’t crushing or anything like that. It was like literally she had been squeezed to death. So apparently this recent trauma to her abdomen that lacerated her pancreas occurred somewhere between 1 hour to 12 hours before she died. It was closer to the shorter end of that in the medical examiner’s opinion. She was also found with bruises all over her body. Her defense was that, “Oh, since she’s developmentally delayed, she falls a lot. She hits herself. All these bruises are from falls, and so the fall must have killed her.” But the medical examiner said this is definitely consistent with squeezing, crushing, not a blow or a fall that would just happen spontaneously. There was one instance where she had texted Hood basically claiming that she had run into the coffee table. Yeah. And then was angry because… yeah. She basically went to the bathroom on the floor. After the trial took a little while, there were two medical examiners’ statements that were conflicting with each other, but finally, Gatto was convicted. She’s currently down in, I believe, Windham doing her time at the women’s prison, and she’s doing 50 years.

She was convicted of depraved indifference murder. Yes, that’s one I had not heard before. Very specific, but yeah. So, I think it really should be like Murder 2 where you’re not intending, but what you did specifically… You would think that would fall into Murder 2, right? Right. Because you’d think depraved indifference would be, “Oh, I just didn’t give you proper care. Yeah, I didn’t feed you or something like that. Feed you or wash you.” But you assaulted a child, right? You’re crushing her. You may not have done it with the intent to kill, but people get into fights and end up with Murder 1 all the time, even when they weren’t assaulting someone to kill them. You would just think in this case, like even if she did get Murder 1, I would be like, okay, that’s fine. Yep. It’s because women get off like way easier, especially when it comes to murdering children for whatever reason.

So right now, there’s been some drama in the Maine State Legislature. They have been trying to push, since Logan Marr, a bill that would allow them to separate the Department of Child and Family Services away from the Department of Health. Really what this will do is allow a budget of I believe $1.7 million to be allocated specifically to this new department, but it got vetoed. Yeah. So, Senator Bill Diamond, he’s a Democrat from Windham, a city in Maine, town, whichever terminology you want to use. We use them both here. I think it qualifies more as a town. It’s a smaller city or a bigger town. I don’t know. Some people would call Lewiston a smaller city, but it’s a bigger city when it comes to the perspective of Maine. Anyway, regardless, Bill Diamond’s thought process with this is that if you make this its own department, we can get its own funding and it doesn’t have to be spread among the full breadth of social services. So that way these kids can get the funding, the care that they need, because we don’t have enough social workers right now. We don’t have enough hands on deck. We don’t have enough manpower or enough resources. So, a lot of kids are falling through the cracks. So, this bill made a lot of sense on paper. However, Janet Mills, who isn’t a lot of people’s favorite governor, did veto this. Her administration did not feel this was necessary. She felt it was conflicting with current legislation they were trying to put through, which involved hiring more social workers, but I don’t know why you would need legislation for that necessarily.

So, right now, due to the deaths that we already spoke about, they are bringing in an outside agency to investigate any possible wrongdoings by CPS. And I believe they’re going to be also investigating the case of a child in Temple, Maine, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound recently, as well as a young autistic boy in Windham, the town we just spoke about, who died after wandering off. Although they haven’t stated whether or not they think there’s any wrongdoing. It could have been he just wandered. Yeah, they’ve been quiet about that. That child was also born developmentally delayed. It’s hard to say, but they’re investigating it. Now, do you know if this when you say outside agency, is this basically meaning outside from the private sector or outside the state of Maine? So, I believe it is indeed the private sector and they are also an outside-of-the-state agency. Okay. They’re not in Maine.

I know a lot of people might be wondering why shine a light on this, that this is happening everywhere, that they have stories of their own, especially if you’re listening from another state. But having this been something I’ve grown up kind of seeing, hearing about all my life, this was important to shine a light on. And I feel like in this day and age, things should have gotten better by now. And I really think since the time I’ve been alive to now, it really hasn’t gotten that much better. Maybe in some small ways, but still seeing things like this… it’s disgusting. It needs to be talked about, and I don’t think we’re talking about it enough. And if you’re seeing this in your own home state, I encourage you to bring it up as well. We would love to talk about it as well. You know, these are the cases that we want to shine more of a light on, the things that nobody talks about. So that’s why we felt it was important to do this. I mean, that and we had been going kind of hard on Indiana a little bit. We started with our Delphi episodes and then from there people started sharing similar stories that were happening in Indiana that were similar to this, and I felt it really important, where there’s so many cases in Maine right now where this is occurring, that it would be hypocritical not to bring it up. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s very important to bring up because it’s our home state. Yeah. 100%.

So, if you are concerned about a child being neglected or abused and you are in the state of Maine, feel free to call the 24-hour hotline at 1-800-452-1999 or dial 711 to speak to a CPS specialist. They can be made anonymously. And for more information, visit the maine.gov DHHS reporting link, which we’ll have in the description.