Jo’s secret investigation period (1993–1994)

Jo’s secret investigation period (1993–1994) was a sustained, concealed inquiry into the history of the township around Sara Laughs. What began as research for an article led Jo to the TR repeatedly, where she collected local testimony and historical material about Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops. She hid her findings rather than sharing them with Mike, leaving him to piece together her movements and the significance of her archive after her death.

An inquiry that began as an article

Jo initially undertook the research as a lark, playing detective while gathering material for an article. According to Frank Arlen, she read books but relied especially on talking with people, listening to accounts of the old days, and persuading them to look for letters and diaries. He considered her particularly skilled at drawing out stories. She did not tell Mike what she was doing; Frank thought that at first she meant to keep it as a surprise. He later suspected that she had stumbled on something while investigating, rather than setting out to uncover a particular crime.

The surviving account places the research across 1993 and 1994, but its chronology is reconstructed after Jo’s death from several incomplete sources. Her calendars appeared to document board meetings, while recollections, local histories, and the archive she concealed supplied different pieces of the story. Mike’s gradual reconstruction makes the investigation itself an inquiry into evidence: the records Jo left were useful precisely because they exposed contradictions in records and recollections that had seemed ordinary.

Calendars and concealed trips

Mike’s first useful lead came when Ward Hankins checked Jo’s appointment calendar for November 1993. An entry for Tuesday, November 16, read “S-Ks of Maine, Freep, 11 A.M.” Mike identified S-Ks as Soup Kitchens of Maine, whose board Jo had served on from 1992 until her death, and Freep as Freeport. He initially inferred that she had attended a board meeting and then driven roughly seventy miles to the TR to collect two plastic owls. The appointment entry looked like a routine record, but it pointed toward a trip whose purpose remained unexplained.

A call to Bonnie Amudson and ten faxed calendar sheets, covering November 1993 through August 1994, substantially changed that reading. Bonnie said Jo had finished her terms with Woman Shelters and Teen Shelters at the end of 1993 and had resigned from Soup Kitchens of Maine and Friends of Maine Libraries in October or November. Yet meetings of all these boards continued to appear on the calendars. Mike concluded that the entries were cover for Jo’s repeated visits to the TR: on the supposed meeting days, she had been there. The calendars thus worked as both a record of her movements and a misleading account of their purpose.

Frank later placed the beginning of the inquiry around February 1994, possibly March, recalling the period when Patrick had an appendectomy. Mike’s reconstruction also puts Jo’s day trips to the TR within the months before her death. Her questions could make local people uncomfortable, according to Bill Dean, but she continued asking them. The evidence does not resolve every date or explain exactly what Jo learned on each visit; instead, the recurring trips, disguised as appointments, establish the persistence and secrecy of her work.

From local stories to a hidden archive

Jo’s research extended beyond calendars and conversations. An account by Edward Osteen, a former summer resident who later lived in the area full-time, provided some historical background. His privately published book, Dark Score Days, included stories about the township and an old photograph believed to show Sara and the Red-Tops at the Fryeburg Fair in 1900. Osteen’s book was imperfect and little circulated, but it preserved material that helped connect Jo’s local investigation to the group’s earlier presence in the county.

The most consequential part of Jo’s work survived in a tin box hidden inside a plastic owl. When Mike found it at Sara Laughs, it held folded papers, two wirebound steno books, and a photographic negative of Jo at the swimming float. The collection had been concealed in July 1994: Mike inferred that Jo had returned to Sara Laughs, removed the owls from the deck, placed the box inside one, wrapped the objects, and hid them. Frank had been with her during that visit. The papers and notebooks were not a finished explanation; their arrangement and concealment show that Jo had preserved material she did not leave in the open, while the negative tied the cache directly to her presence at the house.

The loose papers included photocopied clippings from the Castle Rock Call and the earlier Weekly News, dated in Jo’s handwriting. The oldest located clipping, from 1865, concerned Jared Devore. Other clippings about Sara and the Red-Tops recorded how local newspapers described them in openly racist terms, yet did not explain the circumstances of their departure. By comparing these materials with Jo’s notes and accounts gathered from residents, Mike could see both what the public record contained and what it omitted.

Recovering a suppressed history

Jo’s notes identified the crying boy as Reg Tidwell Jr. and showed where her inquiry had begun: Royce Merrill knew the story of the boy and his family. The notes recounted that, by September 1901, nearly everyone on the TR knew that Sara and her son had been murdered, and many residents had an idea who was responsible. Reg spent much of August pressing the county sheriff first to search for his family alive, then to find their bodies, and finally to find their killers. The town histories did not whisper this account, according to Mike’s later explanation of the notes.

The archive also traced how the Red-Tops’ position in the community changed. Although they had been treated well during their time at the TR, that welcome did not protect them once the crisis over Sara and her son began. Jo’s notes described the group’s community starting to break up by the time the Red-Tops played at the Castle County Fair. By Labor Day, active harassment had begun. Son Tidwell did not want to leave before learning what had happened to his sister and nephew, and the family remained at Tidwell’s Meadow after others had gone elsewhere. The difference between earlier hospitality and subsequent hostility exposed how conditional the community’s acceptance had been.

The notes further connected Reg’s routine to the landscape around the meadow. A clearing about a mile east of Tidwell’s Meadow, marked by a large birch cross, had served as a place of worship after local churches closed their doors to the Black community. Reg often went there to pray or sit quietly. Someone who knew his habits placed a concealed leghold trap on the path he used. Jo’s documentation preserved details that made the attack legible as an act directed at a known routine, not an unexplained accident.

What her investigation leaves behind

Jo’s investigation survives in fragments: an appointment notation, calendars that disguise rather than disclose her travel, Frank’s recollections, copied newspaper clippings, steno books, and a photograph hidden with the papers. None alone provides a complete account. Together, they allow Mike to distinguish Jo’s real movements from the board meetings entered as cover, and the community’s remembered history from the version preserved in town histories and contemporary press coverage.

The concealed archive also explains why Mike’s reconstruction proceeds through material traces rather than a conversation with Jo. He discovers the cache only after her death, and it gives him evidence of both her research and her effort to protect or preserve it. Her findings expose not only past violence but the social processes that kept it from public history: euphemistic newspaper coverage, missing explanations, and collective silence when the community turned against Sara’s family. The inquiry ends without resolving every motive or revealing everything Jo knew, but it changes the meaning of her repeated trips to the TR. They were not unexplained errands; they were the hidden work of assembling a history that the town had left untold.