convinced of his innocence over a period of years. If I had been on the jury that heard his
case in Portland Superior Court over six stormy weeks in 1947-48, I would have voted to
convict, too.
It was one hell of a case, all right; one of those juicy ones with all the right elements.
There was a beautiful girl with society connections (dead), a local sports figure (also
dead), and a prominent young businessman in the dock. There was this, plus all the
scandal the newspapers could hint at. The prosecution had an open-and-shut case. The
trial only lasted as long as it did because the DA was planning to run for the US House of
Representatives and he wanted John Q Public to get a good long look at his phiz. It was a
crackerjack legal circus, with spectators getting in line at four in the morning, despite the
subzero temperatures, to assure themselves of a seat.
The facts of the prosecution’s case that Andy never contested were these: That he had a
wife, Linda Collins Dufresne; that in June of 1947 she had expressed an interest in
learning the game of golf at the Falmouth Hills Country Club; that she did indeed take
lessons for four months; that her instructor was the Falmouth Hills golf pro, Glenn
Quentin; that in late August of 1947 Andy learned that Quentin and his wife had become
lovers; that Andy and Linda Dufresne argued bitterly on the afternoon of 10 September
1947; that the subject of their argument was her infidelity.
He testified that Linda professed to be glad he knew; the sneaking around, she said, was
distressing. She told Andy that she planned to obtain a Reno divorce. Andy told her he
would see her in hell before he would see her in Reno. She went off to spend the night with Quentin in Quentin’s rented bungalow not far from the golf course. The next
morning his cleaning woman found both of them dead in bed. Each had been shot four
times.
It was that last fact that mitigated more against Andy than any of the others. The DA
with the political aspirations made a great deal of it in his opening statement and his
closing summation. Andrew Dufresne, he said, was not a wronged husband seeking a hot-
blooded revenge against his cheating wife; that, the DA said, could be understood, if not
condoned. But this revenge had been of a much colder type. Consider! the DA thundered
at the jury. Four and four! Not six shots, but eight! He had fired the gun empty … and
then stopped to reload so he could shoot each of them again! FOUR FOR HIM AND
FOUR FOR HER, the Portland Sun blared. The Boston Register dubbed him The Even-Steven Killer.
A clerk from the Wise Pawnshop in Lewiston testified that he had sold a six-shot .38
Police Special to Andrew Dufresne just two days before the double murder. A bartender
from the country club bar testified that Andy had come in around seven o’clock on the
evening of 10 September, had tossed off three straight whiskeys in a twenty-minute
period – when he got up from the bar-stool he told the bartender that he was going up to
Glenn Quentin’s house and he, the bartender, could ‘read about the rest of it in the papers’.
Another clerk, this one from the Handy-Pik store a mile or so from Quentin’s house, told
the court that Dufresne had come in around quarter to nine on the same night. He
purchased cigarettes, three quarts of beer, and some dish-towels. The county medical
examiner testified that Quentin and the Dufresne woman had been killed between eleven
p.m. and two a.m. on the night of 10-11 September. The detective from the Attorney
General’s office who had been in charge of the case testified that there was a turnout less
than seventy yards from the bungalow, and that on the afternoon of 11 September, three
pieces of evidence had been removed from that turnout: first item, two empty quart
bottles of Narragansett Beer (with the defendant’s fingerprints on them); the second item,
twelve cigarette ends (all Kools, the defendant’s brand); third item, a plaster moulage of a
set of tyre tracks (exactly matching the tread-and-wear pattern of the tyres on the
defendant’s 1947 Plymouth).
In the living room of Quentin’s bungalow, four dishtowels had been found lying on the
sofa. There were bullet-holes through them and powder-burns on them. The detective
theorized (over the agonized objections of Andy’s lawyer) that the murderer had wrapped
the towels around the muzzle of the murder-weapon to muffle the sound of the gunshots.
Andy Dufresne took the stand in his own defence and told his story calmly, coolly, and
dispassionately. He said he had begun to hear distressing rumours about his wife and
Glenn Quentin as early as the last week in July. In August he had become distressed
enough to investigate a bit. On an evening when Linda was supposed to have gone
shopping in Portland after her tennis lesson, Andy had followed her and Quentin to
Quentin’s one-storey rented house (inevitably dubbed ‘the love-nest’ by the papers). He
had parked in the turnout until Quentin drove her back to the country club where her car
was parked, about three hours later.
‘Do you mean to tell this court that your wife did not recognize your brand-new
Plymouth sedan behind Quentin’s car?’ the DA asked him on cross-examination.
‘I swapped cars for the evening with a friend,’ Andy said, and this cool admission of
how well-planned his investigation had been did him no good at all in the eyes of the jury.
After returning the friend’s car and picking up his own, he had gone home. Linda had
been in bed, reading a book. He asked her how her trip to Portland had been. She replied
that it had been fun, but she hadn’t seen anything she liked well enough to buy. That’s
when I knew for sure,’ Andy told the breathless spectators. He spoke in the same calm,
remote voice in which he delivered almost all of his testimony.
‘What was your frame of mind in the seventeen days between then and the night your
wife was murdered?’ Andy’s lawyer asked him.
‘I was in great distress,’ Andy said calmly, coldly. Like a man reciting a shopping list he
said that he had considered suicide, and had even gone so far as to purchase a gun in
Lewiston on 8 September.
His lawyer then invited him to tell the jury what had happened after his wife left to meet Glenn Quentin on the night of the murders. Andy told them … and the impression he
made was the worst possible.
I knew him for close to thirty years, and I can tell you he was the most self-possessed
man I’ve ever known. What was right with him he’d only give you a little at a time. What
was wrong with him he kept bottled up inside. If he ever had a dark night of the soul, as
some writer or other has called it, you would never know. He was the type of man who, if
he had decided to commit suicide, would do it without leaving a note but not until his
affairs had been put neatly in order. If he had cried on the witness stand, or if his voice
had thickened and grown hesitant, even if he had gotten yelling at that Washington-bound
District Attorney, I don’t believe he would have gotten the life sentence he wound up
with. Even if he had’ve he would have been out on parole by 1954. But he told his story
like a recording machine, seeming to say to the jury: this is it. Take it or leave it. They left
it.
He said he was drunk that night, that he’d been more or less drunk since 24 August, and
that he was a man who didn’t handle his liquor very well. Of course that by itself would
have been hard for any jury to swallow. They just couldn’t see this coldly self-possessed
young man in the neat double-breasted three-piece woollen suit ever getting falling-down
drunk over his wife’s sleazy little affair with some small-town golf pro. I believed it
because I had a chance to watch Andy that those six men and six women didn’t have.
Andy Dufresne took just four drinks a year all the time I knew him. He would meet me
in the exercise yard every year about a week before his birthday and then again about two
weeks before Christmas. On each occasion he would arrange for a bottle of Jack Daniels.
He bought it the way most cons arrange to buy their stuff—the slave’s wages they pay in
here, plus a little of his own. Up until 1965 what you got for your time was a dime an
hour. In ’65 they raised it all the way up to a quarter. My commission on liquor was and is