Delaware 1974 Cold Case SOLVED — Arrest Shocks the Quiet Chesapeake Bay Township 

The crab traps were still in the water. That was the first thing Deputy Earl Mast noticed when he pulled his cruiser to the edge of Fenwick Cove on the morning of September 14th, 1974. The aluminum skiff belonging to Raymond Hollis bobbed at the end of its tether, engine cold, bow nudging the dock pilings with each slow sway of the tide.

The traps were still set. Raymond would no more leave his traps overnight than he would leave his front door unlocked. In 31 years of working the bay, he never had. What happened to Raymond Hollis in the hours before that morning would haunt the Township of Mill Haven, Delaware for the next 50 years. But to understand what was lost, you first have to understand who Raymond was.

 Mill Haven sat at the southwestern edge of the Delaware shore. One of those small communities the state highway signs announced, but the Interstate Highway System never bothered to reach. Population 912. One diner. One volunteer fire company. A post office that doubled as a notary on Thursdays. The kind of place where the Methodist church kept a spare key above the door, and everyone in town knew it.

In 1974, it was the kind of place where people still left windows cracked in August and sent their children to the corner store alone without a second thought. Raymond Hollis was 53 years old that September. He had worked the Chesapeake-Delaware Estuary corridor since he was 19. First as a mate on his father’s boat, then as an independent Waterman with his own two vessels and his own leased trapping grounds in the shallows north of the cove.

His hands had been calloused since his 30s. His back had gone stiff the winter before. Something his wife Margaret had been after him to see a doctor about. Something Raymond had put off in the way that men of his generation put things off. He was a deacon at Millhaven Methodist. He coached Little League for 11 seasons.

He had three daughters. Carol, Lynn, and the youngest, Deborah, who was eight that fall, and who liked to sit at the bow of the skiff on summer mornings while her father checked the pots, trailing her fingers in the water while he worked. Raymond’s routine was known to everyone in Millhaven. He rose at 4:30. He was on the water by 5:15.

 He pulled traps until 10:00, offloaded at the Millhaven Co-op dock, went home for a midday meal Margaret kept warm on the stove, and was back at the dock by 2:00 for maintenance and trap repair. He had not varied this routine in years. Margaret Hollis could have told you where her husband was at any given hour, the way other wives consulted clocks.

 On the evening of September 13th, Raymond drove into town after dinner to return a socket set he had borrowed from his neighbor, Gerald Purvis. Gerald was on his front porch when Raymond pulled in. They talked for perhaps 20 minutes about the autumn crab run, about whether the Co-op was going to raise its commission rate before the season ended, about nothing in particular.

 Raymond said goodnight at 8:45. Gerald watched the tail lights of the pickup disappear around the bend in Cove Road. That was the last time anyone outside the Hollis family saw Raymond alive. Margaret said later that he’d come home, changed into his work clothes for the following morning, a habit, laying them out the night before, and gone to bed at 9:30.

 She fell asleep beside him. When she woke at 6:00 and reached across the bed, she found his side empty and cool. The truck was gone. She assumed he had risen early and gone to the water ahead of schedule. By 8:00, she had started calling. There was no answer at the co-op. There was no answer from anyone who might have seen him.

By 10:00, she called the sheriff’s office. At 10:40, Deputy Earl Mass drove to Fenwick Cove. He found the skiff still tied to the dock. The engine was cold. The traps were in the water, untouched. Raymond’s tackle box sat open on the dock beside a coil of rope, as if he had set it down mid-task and stepped away for a moment.

The engine key was missing. Raymond Hollis was gone. There was no note. There was no blood. There was no sign of struggle on the dock or in the boat. There was only the skiff, the water, and the traps he had never pulled. Sheriff Delbert Crane assembled a search the following morning. Volunteer fire crews, neighbors, a team from the state police barracks in Dover, they walked the marsh edges north and south of the cove, pushed through the fragmites and cordgrass, dragged a portion of the channel.

Three days into the search, a waterman named Herb Tillman spotted a section of rope and Raymond’s missing engine key tangled in a crab pot he pulled from the bottom of the north channel, 40 yards from where the skiff had been docked. The key was Raymond’s. He had carved his initials into the float with a jackknife years before.

The rope appeared to have been used as a weight. State police detective Arthur Pellegrino arrived from Dover on the fourth day. He was 41 years old, compact, methodical, and known in the barracks for outlasting cases that younger detectives gave up on. His case notes from Millhaven would later run to 11 volumes.

Pellegrino’s early canvas of the township turned up two points of interest. The first was a passing reference from a neighbor who had seen an unfamiliar vehicle, a dark-colored pickup, possibly green, possibly navy, idling at the entrance to Cove Road sometime in the late evening of the 13th. She could not say with certainty what time.

She had not thought to note the plates. The second was more specific. A 19-year-old seasonal worker at the Millhaven Co-op named Dennis Farro had been dismissed from his position 2 weeks earlier following a dispute with Raymond over a short-weighted delivery that Raymond had reported to the Co-op manager. Farro had been seen by two co-workers making a threat in the parking lot of the Co-op the day he was let go.

He had said specifically that Raymond Hollis would regret opening his mouth. Pellegrino brought Farro in within the week. The young man had no solid alibi for the evening of the 13th. He was nervous in the interview in the way that many 19-year-olds are nervous in rooms with detectives, but there was no physical evidence tying him to the dock, no witnesses who could put him at Fenwick Cove that night.

No vehicle matching the dark pickup registered to him or his family. After 4 days of interviews and a failed polygraph Farrow passed at the margins. Pellegrino was forced to release him and move on. Raymond Hollis’s body was recovered 6 weeks later, in late October, from a marsh channel 11 miles from Millhaven, snagged in the root structure of a stand of Phragmites at low tide.

The medical examiner determined he had died from a single blunt force injury to the back of the skull, delivered before he entered the water. He had been restrained at the wrists. Someone had killed Raymond Hollis on or near that dock, put him in the water, and walked away. The state police investigation continued through the following spring.

The dark pickup was never identified. Dennis Farrow moved to Pennsylvania in the fall of 1975, got married, and built a quiet life. Pellegrino kept the file open. He worked it alongside everything else, a rotation of other cases, other families, other missing people. He drove back to Millhaven three times over the next several years, conducted fresh interviews when he had new leads, and found nothing that held.

Margaret Hollis waited. She kept the house on Cove Road. She raised her three daughters. She went to church on Sundays and came home and made Sunday dinner, and sat at the table where Raymond used to sit. Deborah, the youngest, grew up and moved to Wilmington and became a nurse. Carol stayed in Millhaven and took over the house when Margaret’s health declined.

Lynn moved to Maryland, but came back for every anniversary and every holiday. By the mid-1980s, the Hollis case was what investigators call administratively cold, still technically open, but no longer actively worked. Pellegrino retired from the State Police in 1989. He kept his own copy of the case file in a box in his spare bedroom.

He told his wife he would not throw it out until someone answered for Raymond Hollis. He lived long enough to see it happen. By 1994, 20 years had passed. The Cove Road had been widened. The Co-op dock where Raymond had worked his whole adult life burned down in a fire and was rebuilt as a recreational marina.

The skiff sat under a tarp in Carol’s backyard, the same aluminum hull, the same slow corrosion at the waterline. Nobody in Millhaven had forgotten Raymond. But the township had learned to hold the memory quietly, the way communities learn to carry things they cannot put down and cannot resolve. Margaret Hollis died in 2001 at the age of 78, having never received an answer.

Her obituary in the Millhaven Courier noted that she was survived by her three daughters and that her husband Raymond had passed in 1974 under circumstances that remained under investigation by the Delaware State Police. It was a kindness the paper paid her, technically true, though the practical reality was that no detective had touched the physical file in nearly a decade.

 Deborah Hollis Reader, working from Wilmington, had spent the preceding years quietly researching investigative genealogy, a method she had read about in a nursing journal article on forensic identification. She contacted the Delaware State Police Cold Case Unit in 2019 and formally requested that the biological evidence from her father’s case be submitted for genetic genealogy analysis.

 The evidence in question was a partial blood sample, not Raymond’s blood type, recovered from the dock pilings in October 1974. It had sat in the state’s evidence archive for 45 years. Every case on this channel represents weeks of research, verifying records, and reconstructing lives that deserved better. If you want us to keep bringing these stories to light, take a second to like this video and subscribe.

 Drop a comment and tell us where in the world you’re watching from. We’re grateful for every one of you. Now, let’s get back to Raymond. The genetic genealogy process works by uploading crime scene DNA to public ancestry databases, the same platforms where ordinary people trace their family trees, and working backward through distant relatives until a single unknown contributor can be identified.

In May of 2022, a forensic genealogist contracted by the Delaware State Police Cold Case Unit completed that work on the dock blood sample. The contributor matched, and the name that emerged from the database had not been on anyone’s list in 1974. Investigator Sandra Kowalchik of the Cold Case Unit, a 12-year veteran who had been assigned the Hollis file in 2020, was reviewing the genealogy report at her desk in Dover on a Tuesday afternoon when she stopped and read the primary match a second time.

Then, a third. She pulled the 1974 interview logs. She ran the name through the motor vehicle registry for New Castle County. Then, she picked up the phone. The name was not Dennis Ferro. It was Martin Gault. In September of 1974, Martin Gault had been 26 years old and employed as a delivery driver for a farm supply company based in Seaford.

His route included the Millhaven Co-op. His personal records showed a 1974 Ford pickup registered in dark green and a residence 7 miles from Millhaven. He was not mentioned in any of Pellegrino’s 11 volumes of case notes. No one had ever spoken to him. He had cut himself on something. Investigators believe a piece of dock hardware during the assault, bled onto a piling, and left with Raymond Hollis and taken away everything else.

He had moved to Sussex County in 1976. He had married. He had worked for 30 years in agricultural equipment sales and retired to a house on a cul-de-sac outside Georgetown, Delaware. He had four grandchildren. He attended the same church he had attended for 40 years. His neighbors described him as quiet, generous, the kind of man who salted your walk in winter without being asked.

On the morning of October 18th, 2022, Investigator Kowalczyk and two detectives from the Sussex County Sheriff’s Office drove to the house on the cul-de-sac at 6:40 a.m. Martin Gault answered the door in his bathrobe. He was 74 years old. He looked at the badges and the warrant, and he did not say anything for a long moment.

He asked if he could put on his shoes. They told him yes. He sat on the front steps and laced them and stood up and held out his wrists. His wife watched from the doorway. Gault was charged with murder in the first degree. He was extradited to Kent County and held without bail. In his first jailhouse call to his daughter, recorded and later entered into evidence, he said only, “I thought that was done.

” He did not elaborate. He did not explain. He pleaded no contest in March of 2023 and was sentenced to 22 years, the maximum available to the court given his age and the evidentiary constraints of a case that old. He will not leave prison. Deborah Hollis Reeter drove back to Millhaven on the day of the arrest.

She went to her sister Carol’s house. She sat at the kitchen table where their mother had once made Sunday dinners and the two sisters held each other for a long time without speaking. Carol told a reporter from the Wilmington News Journal that their mother had always known it wasn’t an accident, that she had said it until the end.

That Margaret Hollis had gone to her grave with Raymond’s name in her mouth and the truth still buried. The truth would not stay buried forever. Millhaven has changed in 50 years. The marina where the co-op once stood hosts pleasure boats now, kayakers in summer, fishermen in fall. The Methodist church Raymond Hollis served as a deacon was renovated in 1998 and a new wing added in 2014.

The Cove Road runs smooth where it used to break up every spring. The house where the Hollis family lived has had three other families in it since Carol sold it in 2009. But in the Millhaven Methodist Fellowship Hall, there is a framed photograph above the coffee station. Raymond in a white shirt squinting into the sun standing at the bow of his skiff grinning the way a man grins when he is exactly where he wants to be.

Carol put it there in 2023. Nobody in the congregation has asked for it to come down. Raymond Hollis was 53 years old. He had calloused hands and a bad back he never saw a doctor about. And a youngest daughter who liked to drag her fingers in the water while he worked. He had a wife who believed in him until her last day.

He had a whole township of people who knew his name and grieved when he was gone. He had a morning routine that everybody knew. A routine that someone used against him. And a life that was cut short on a dock in the dark for reasons that were small and mean and not worth the cost. 50 years is a long time to wait.

It is also, it turns out, not too long. What do you think justice looks like in a case like this? When the guilty party spent half a century living freely raising a family becoming someone his neighbors trusted. Does a sentence at age 74 carry the same weight as one at 26? And how many other cases from this era have biological evidence sitting preserved in a state archive waiting for someone to ask for it to be tested? Justice came for Raymond Hollis after 50 years.

Stories like his are why this channel exists. Because truth, however late, does not expire. If you believe that, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case. And if you want more solved cold cases, every link is waiting for you in the description. Thank you for being here.