November 16, 1993

November 16, 1993 is the date later reconstructed as a turning point in Jo’s secret investigation: after a likely Soup Kitchens of Maine board meeting in Freeport, she drove to the TR to collect two plastic owls, an errand that Bill Dean remembered but that her widower had not known about. The surviving calendar entry and the eventual discovery of papers hidden inside an owl establish parts of her movements and research, but do not fully explain why she made the trip or what she intended her husband to understand.

The itinerary reconstructed

Jo’s calendar contained a single entry for the second week of November 1993: “S-Ks of Maine, Freep, 11 A.M.” Ward Hankins identified “S-Ks of Maine” as Soup Kitchens of Maine and “Freep” as Freeport; the appointment fell on Tuesday, November 16. Since Jo had served on the organization’s board of directors from 1992 until her death, her husband understood the entry as a likely board meeting, perhaps concerning plans to feed people experiencing homelessness over Thanksgiving. The calendar placed her in Freeport that morning, but did not record the later drive north.

Bill Dean supplied that missing part of the day from memory. He recalled Jo arriving while he was putting up storm doors, then speaking with him as a UPS truck delivered a carton. He carried the box into the entry and had coffee while Jo removed the plastic owls and showed them to him. She left less than ten minutes later. Bill could not explain why anyone would drive from Derry to receive a pair of plastic owls, and the shortness and apparent purposefulness of the stop made the visit seem like a special errand.

Asked when the delivery occurred, Bill promptly placed it in the second week of November. He also recalled that he and his wife later went to Lewiston to visit her sister for her birthday, then stopped at the Castle Rock Agway on their way back so she could buy a Thanksgiving turkey. These ordinary details anchored his recollection in the day’s movements, while his surprise that Jo’s husband knew nothing about the owls underscored that the errand had been kept from him.

The meaning of a concealed visit

The two accounts did not initially fit neatly together. The calendar pointed to a charitable meeting in Freeport; Bill’s memory placed Jo at the TR to collect the owls. The implied drive of roughly seventy miles after the meeting made the delivery seem more than an incidental stop, but neither account established what Jo had told others or why she had arranged to receive the package there. Her husband recognized that the date helped clarify her movements without resolving the questions her death had left behind.

When he later called Jo’s friend Bonnie Amudson, he described Jo as having been curious about the township where their summerhouse stood and suggested she might have been writing about it. Bonnie was surprised by the idea that Jo had shown her any writing. She remembered Jo sharing photographs and herb samples, but not a draft. Bonnie’s recollection therefore offered no confirmation that Jo had explained her inquiry to a close friend; the calendared meeting and the unexplained owl delivery remained the firmer clues to her activity.

The archive hidden in the owl

The delivery acquired a clearer, though still incomplete, significance when Jo’s husband found a small tin box concealed inside a plastic owl. The box held folded papers, two wirebound steno books, and a photographic negative of Jo standing on the swimming float in a gray two-piece bathing suit. He understood the materials as the reason she had come to Sara Laughs in July 1994: to gather them and hide them. He inferred that she had removed the owls from the deck, hidden the box inside one, wrapped the owls in plastic, and taken them away to conceal them.

That later discovery reframed the 1993 delivery. Bill had remembered Jo receiving the owls, while the hidden archive showed that an owl eventually served as a container for her papers and notebooks. The surviving evidence connects the objects, her later return to Sara Laughs, and her investigation, but it does not establish precisely when she hid the box or whether every item in it was already present on the November trip. Her husband could only infer that Jo believed he would eventually find his way to the hiding place; he could not know all her reasons or her state of mind.

A date that opens onto older history

The archive included clippings about Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops, whose contemporary reviews described the performers in openly racist terms. Among the clippings was a July 19, 1933, article about a wildfire near Halo Bay and Fred Dean’s inability to save his daughter, Carla. The newspaper described the fire’s sudden spread after the wind changed and the resulting panic and blocked escape route. These materials widened Jo’s investigation beyond the unexplained delivery: her hidden papers linked her interest in the TR to local history and to events that had not been adequately explained by the surviving public record.

Jo’s notes also concerned the disappearance and murder of Sara Tidwell and her son. They identified the crying boy as Reg Tidwell Jr. By September 1901, the account says, many people around the TR knew Sara and her son had been murdered and suspected who was responsible. Reg spent much of August pressing the county sheriff first to search for them alive, then to find their bodies, and finally to identify their killers. This older history is not an event of November 16, 1993, but it clarifies the historical subject matter that Jo’s concealed research pursued.

Significance and limits of the record

The date matters because it joins an otherwise ordinary appointment to a private, unexplained delivery. The calendar provides a precise time and place for Jo’s likely charitable meeting; Bill’s memory supplies the owls and the brief stop; the later discovery of the hidden archive connects those objects to her research. Read together, these fragments make the trip legible as part of an investigation, but they do not turn inference into certainty. The record preserves Jo’s movements and some of the evidence she concealed, while leaving her immediate purpose on November 16 and the full reasons for her secrecy unanswered.