A local witness in the Mary Olenchuk murder case breaks a half century of silence.

BY KYLIE LOW

The only sign of her was a bicycle found leaning inside an archway at the Lookout Hotel. She was almost home, just two hundred yards away from her family’s summer cottage on Israel Head Road in Ogunquit, but she never made it back.

SUMMER, CHILLED
The investigation into the August 9, 1970, disappearance of thirteen-year-old Mary Catherine Olenchuk began quietly, so as not to frighten the tourists in their saltwater-soaked bliss. This is Vacationland. Bad things don’t happen here.

Growing up in Maine, I believed my home state was somehow exempt from the violent crimes that punctuated the top stories of big cities across the country; that our remote location and rural, small-town existence “the way life should be” sheltered us.
I now know seventy-five cold-case homicides await solution in The Pine Tree State. Mary Catherine’s is one of them.
SOME NERVE
When she disappeared during a solo bike ride into town for a pack of gum, her family wondered if they’d been too cavalier in the face of threats from activist groups protesting the involvement of her father, Major General Peter George Olenchuk, in Operation CHASE. “Cut Holes and Sink ‘Em” was a secret Department of Defense program for the disposal of some 40,000 tons of surplus munitions and chemical weapons at sea in the 1960s and 70s. Thousands of rockets filled with Tabun, Sarin, and VX nerve agents or mustard gas were encased in coffin-like cement vaults, then transported from storage facilities to the coast by train and truck, putting each community along the route at risk. Finally, decommissioned Liberty ships carrying these deadly gases in their concrete caskets were scuttled off the coast of Florida by opening the seacocks. Mary Olenchuk disappeared the day before the first train transports of CHASE 10 began, long delayed by petitions, protests, and lawsuits filed in response to widespread media coverage of a 1969 Pentagon leak.
For those first crucial forty-eight hours, Mary’s parents kept quiet on the advice of law enforcement and waited by the phone for a ransom call. After two days with no ransom call, the first news reports circulated Mary’s description: five foot, three inches tall; 80 pounds; red hair and freckles. A thousand fliers with her photo were distributed as the FBI and the military arrived in town to take up the search. One witness had reported a young girl with shining red hair speaking to a man in a maroon car, but the trail stopped there. Headlines noted each day that the search failed to return any clues, and blamed summer crowds for impeding these efforts.

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