Gardiner

It is more than 1,000 miles south of New England's northernmost state, where the landscape is quite different, with its pine forests, rocky ground, and small towns built along cold rivers.

On August 20th, 1972, there was no obvious reason that a quiet house in Mount Pleasant should have anything to do with an unexplained disappearance in Gardiner, Maine, but that was about to change.

Just before midnight that Sunday, William Bill Deans and a friend had driven by Bill's mother's home, who lived in the same neighborhood as him, and noticed the lights were on, and there was a strange car in the driveway.

According to the book A Courageous Fool, by Todd C. Peppers and Margaret A. Anderson, Bill's mother, 52-year-old Evelyn Penny Deans, and her young daughter weren't expected back from vacation for a few days.

And tucked into the men's pair of pants was a piece of paper containing a list of names.

At the top was the name Gloria Goff.

Police ran the Volkswagen's registration and found that it belonged to Gloria, a 44-year-old woman from Gardiner, Maine.

A missing woman from Maine.

Though not an Englishman, he had been educated in England, had imbibed the autocratic ideas of the mill owners of the mother country, and many stories were told of his tyranny or his peculiarities long after he ceased to be a resident.

Of his connection with the early history of Lowell, it is stated that before the water power was discovered there, he went as an agent of the purchasers to Gardiner, Maine, and tried to buy of R.H. Gardiner, Esquire, the great water privilege belonging to his estate.

Mr. Gardiner would not sell but was willing to lease it.

Kirk Boott would not agree to this, or Lowell might now have been on the Kennebec in Maine.

Then he came to Chelmsford and saw the great Merrimack River and its possibilities and set himself shrewdly to work to buy land on its banks, including the water power.