On the first day of June 1975, twenty-three-year-old teacher Ellen Choate left her home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and set out for Bangor, Maine, where she was supposed to start a new job on June 2nd. At some point along her journey, she vanished without a trace.
It would be more than two years before she was found. On June 26th, 1977, a set of skeletal remains was discovered in a shallow grave off Old County Road not far from Newport, Maine. Upon examination, these remains were found to belong to Ellen Choate, who had vanished on her way to a teaching job in Bangor on June 1st, 1975. A post-mortem examination established that Ellen had been killed by a single gunshot to the head.
Though leads were practically non-existent in 1977, a promising new avenue of inquiry opened up in 2000 with the arrest of James Rodney Hicks, who confessed to killing three women in Maine—Lynn Willette, Jennie Hicks, and Jerilyn Towers—at around the same time period as Ellen Choate’s disappearance.
Based upon this confession, police reexamined the Ellen Choate case in the hopes that some link to Hicks could be found, though they stated from the outset that they did not have any solid evidence that Hicks had killed any more women than the three he had confessed to.
In 2014, a new plea was issued in the Ellen Choate homicide investigation, though authorities did not specify why interest in the case had been renewed. Since that time, however, there have been no further developments.
Crime Immemorial 