Jeremy Theodore Alex: A free spirit

On April 8, 1976, in the coastal town of Portsmouth, NH, Paula Caswell and Ted Alex welcomed their son into the world. They named their little boy Jeremy Theodore Alex. Four years later, in January of 1980, Paula gave birth to a girl they named Nikohl. Unfortunately, Ted and Paula’s marriage didn’t last and, not long after Nikohl’s birth, they divorced.

Jeremy was about 8 years old when they settled into their life in Belfast, Maine. Though Jeremy and Nikohl were primarily with their mother in Belfast, they would spend time with their father at his second home in Boothbay and in the summers, they would often stay with him in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Jeremy loved Belfast. He would later go on to travel extensively, but he always felt that Belfast was home.

Jeremy was often in nature. He was an active child—learning to sail, snowboard, and skateboard. He was an adventurer—perhaps channeling some of his love for Star Wars into finding new worlds in his small town. But he also pursued intellectual hobbies as well—in particular, Jeremy enjoyed playing chess. He learned to play in elementary school and continued to play for the rest of his short life.

Jeremy was away from home constantly, hanging with his friends. His sister, Nikohl remembers them:

Nikohl: “He had a solid group of friends. They just kinda ran the streets. They were awesome. As a little sister, I looked up to that whole crowd. They skateboarded downtown and anywhere they could really. Anywhere they weren’t supposed to. They were in trouble all the time. I think the Belfast Police Department kept an eye on them always. They were that group of guys that just kinda hung out. They weren’t doing anything to get in trouble… they just always had eyes on them. Excellent skateboarders though!”

When Jeremy wasn’t skateboarding with his group of friends, he was a sponge filling his head with knowledge through his love of reading research books. But Jeremy’s high school career was brief—he dropped out around his junior year.

Nikohl: “I don’t think he was all that interested in school to be honest. I think he felt he could learn more outside of school than in school. He often challenged the teachers and it became and issue… as well as just going through a rebellious stage in his adolescence. He really did leave home at a younger age—that being about 16. He just kinda stopped coming home at night. [He would] be with friends. He had been on his own. And that was when a lot of the traveling started… and hitchhiking… and getting to festivals… doing that type of thing. He gained an independence very early on in his life.”

Reflecting on his son’s childhood, Ted would later recall Jeremy was “kind of a free spirit,” — even from an early age. Ted watched as his son morphed from a sandy-haired, dimple-cheeked toddler into a wiry teenager with a curly brown ponytail and a penchant for wearing Grateful Dead t-shirts.

Jeremy loved the Grateful Dead along with Bob Dylan, Phish and Dave Matthews Band, and he dreamed of crisscrossing the country, following them on tour. So, at 18 around 1994, he bought a van, packed light, and began driving west with a group of friends. The Dead played venues up and down the West Coast, and Jeremy followed the band, living out of his van, and supporting himself by selling grilled cheese sandwiches that he made in the back of the vehicle. He was right at home living among the other Deadheads—the community of Grateful Dead followers who emerged in the 1970s and bonded around a shared connection with the band’s music and message. Deadheads were considered counterculture, rejecting mainstream values, materialism, and conformity. Instead, they put an emphasis on communal living, spiritualism, and cooperation.

Despite the distance, Jeremy made it a point to stay in touch with his family.

Nikohl: “He would use collect call and reach out and let us know, ‘Hey, I’m okay.’ He also wrote my mom letters quite frequently that she would get in the mail—just to let my mom know I went to this concert and different types of adventures he was on. She keeps those letters. She’s got them. He did a good job keeping in touch and letting us know that he was okay and loving the life that he was living.”

Jeremy felt at home with this extended family of wanderers. He loved playing his guitar in venue parking lots with near-strangers, discussing philosophical issues, and bartering goods to get by. Each show was a unique improvisational experience they could share together.

Another experience that members of the Dead community also shared, however, was heavy drug use. Deadheads were widely recognized for their consumption of mind-altering drugs, particularly marijuana and psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. There was also ample access to harder drugs like cocaine and heroin, which frontman Jerry Garcia himself struggled with.

Jeremy returns to Maine

On the hot, sticky evening of July 9, 1995, the Grateful Dead played the final concert of their summer tour at Chicago’s Soldier Field. It was not their finest performance—Jerry Garcia reportedly seemed disoriented and struggled with equipment throughout the show. The following month, Garcia passed away in his sleep from cardiac arrest at an addiction treatment center in Forest Knolls, California.

With no more tours to follow, Jeremy spent some time in the West and even did a stint working for Greenpeace, the global environmental nonprofit. The organization’s use of peaceful protest, non-violent actions, and grassroots campaigning appealed to Jeremy. He wanted to contribute to a building a better, more sustainable world.

It was during this time out West that he met Suzanne, who went by Suzie. They were introduced through a mutual friend and began dating around 2000. Sometime later, they moved to Maine. According to Suzie, this was around the time that Jeremy began periodically using drugs with friends. She and Jeremy’s father, Ted, would later describe him as a binge user, going a bit wild every six months or so.

Ted Alex would later tell the media that he was aware that Jeremy did drugs, but not the extent to which he was using. He noted that his son was “always able to get himself [off drugs].” Even in the fall of 2003, when Jeremy was charged in Searsmont, ME, with possession of marijuana—charges that were later dropped—he seemed to have a handle on his use.

Disappearance

On April 8, 2004, Jeremy turned 28 years old. Suzie and he were living in Lincolnville, ME, another coastal town just south of Belfast, and they were preparing to move into a single-family house in Northport at the end of the month.

He went on a day trip to Sugarloaf Mountain with Suzie and some friends on Thursday, April 22. After his return, he seemed eager to part ways with Suzie, saying that he wanted to keep moving things into their new place alone. There was tension between them about his drug use, and she suspected that Jeremy just wanted to be able to party without her disapproval.

It’s unclear where he slept on Thursday night, but sources say that this was the first night of a multi-day drug bender.

An unidentified friend of Jeremy’s would later confirm that she was with him on the next evening, Friday, April 24, and that he had used both cocaine and heroin. She would later state that she knew that his drug consumption was out of control and needed to stop. That same night, home alone in their new rental house, Jeremy saw something outside that scared him. Through the first-floor window, he saw what he believed was Suzie and two of their mutual friends wearing black ski masks. They stood outside, staring menacingly at him.

The next morning, Saturday, April 24th, he drove back to the Lincolnville apartment and confronted Suzie about the incident around 11:00AM. She later said that he was “freaking out,” claiming that there were people out to get him. And he believed that she was in on the conspiracy.

Understandably, Suzie was upset. She stormed upstairs and shut herself in the bedroom, crying. She didn’t approve of her partner’s drug use under the best circumstances, but now he seemed paranoid, angry, and possibly dangerous. After a little while, Jeremy came in, apologetic and consoling. But minutes later, he was back to being agitated. At last, he packed some of their furniture into his van and took off, noting that he had an appointment in the afternoon to see about buying a moped. The couple parted ways on less-than-happy terms. It was the last time that Suzie ever saw Jeremy.

The final sighting of Jeremy Alex

Sunlight was fading and shadows were growing long in Northport, Maine, on the evening of Saturday, April 24th, 2004. It was a little before 6:00PM and Sergeant James Porter navigated down Pound Hill Road. Behind him, a Belfast ambulance and a cruiser from Northport followed silently, without their lights on.

Less than half an hour before, dispatch had called the sergeant over the radio to inform him that a resident on Bay Ridge Road in Northport had placed an emergency 9-1-1 call. Cynthia Munkelt been in her yard, enjoying the end of a pleasant spring afternoon, when a young man emerged from the woods behind her home. He appeared panicked and unkempt, dressed in blue jeans, an olive-green sweatshirt, and black sneakers. A red backpack was slung over his shoulders and a wad of money was clutched tightly in his hand. It took a moment—because it had been some time—but Cynthia recognized the man as Jeremy Alex. She had taught English to Jeremy at Belfast Area High School a decade or so before.

According to Cynthia, Jeremy was paranoid and acting erratically, claiming that “bad guys” were trying to hurt him. One moment, he seemed to recognize her, and then just as quickly that recognition would be gone. She thought he might be hallucinating. He begged Cynthia not to call the cops. Cynthia’s husband, James, came out and attempted to talk Jeremy down. He got him to have a seat in the backyard and tell him about his troubles. When Cynthia went inside to call for an ambulance, Jeremy got up and tried to run, but was tackled by James.

Jeremy pleaded with James to let him go, offering him the money that he had on him to try to buy his freedom. As the cry of sirens approached the house, Jeremy broke free and took off running back into the woods.

At the northern end of Pound Hill Road, Sergeant Porter found a van parked in a small gravel lot owned by the Waldo County Humane Society. He suspected the vehicle might belong to Jeremy. He got out of his cruiser and peeked into the car. The keys were still inside, as were some personal belongings. The other first responders joined him in a search of the immediate area, but found no sign of Jeremy.

Searching for Jeremy

Sgt. Porter returned early the following morning, Sunday, April 25. He found that Jeremy’s van was still parked in the same spot on Pound Hill Road. Searching the van, he found Jeremy’s cell phone and began calling his contacts. Nobody had heard from Jeremy nor seen him since Saturday afternoon.

On Monday morning, Jeremy’s father, Ted Alex, received a call from police around 7:00AM notifying him of Jeremy’s bizarre behavior and disappearance. Initially, he and his wife, Susan, were worried, but they thought that there might be a reasonable explanation for the event. But when they called Suzie, it became clear that this was part of a larger, more distressing pattern of behavior. Jeremy’s mom and sister, Nikohl, were also notified that he was missing, and made plans to travel to Maine.

Suzie went to check out their new rental home in Northport and found it open and unlocked with the keys in the lock. She found drugs in the home, so she flushed them, fearing that it would bring more trouble upon Jeremy.

Bright and early Tuesday morning, the big search began. Ground zero was Jeremy’s van, sitting in a sleepy gravel parking lot off of Pound Hill Road. The Maine Warden Service arrived and was joined by eight K-9 units and local law enforcement. The investigation was led by Detective Jason Trundy with the Waldo County Sheriff’s Department. Numerous friends and family of Jeremy were also present. They searched the roadways and hilly woods surrounding Jeremy’s van—Bluff Road, Neally Road, Pound Hill Road, Bay Ridge Road… They searched vacant camps. A mile to the east of his van, the forest sloped steeply to the salty waters of Penobscot Bay, and the wardens used ultralight aircraft to search the coastline by air.

It had been three nights with low temperatures right around freezing and everyone was concerned for Jeremy’s wellbeing.

After eight hours, sadly, they called it a day, empty-handed. By late afternoon the chief of the Waldo County Sheriff’s Department, Bob Keating, asked the public for help—looking for anyone who had seen Jeremy after Saturday afternoon at 5:00PM.

Nikohl: “I thought [to myself], ‘He’s a traveler. He does all of these things. He’s gotta be somewhere. He went to Canada… or he went to Bar Harbor… Why are we so concerned about this?’ And then the more I found out, the more concerned we grew about his disappearance… I just thought he would show up. How does someone just disappear? I mean, there was no trace of him whatsoever.”

On Sunday, May 2, five game wardens, 17 members of area search and rescue teams, six canine teams, and several civilians combed over a three-square-mile stretch of land. The search lasted for four days and covered wooded areas previously scoured along both sides of Route 1 in Northport, as well as some terrain beyond. Finally, on May 6, Chief Keating called off the search. He was “reasonably certain” that Jeremy was not in the area.

When September came, dozens of volunteers, law enforcement, and dog teams searched a massive seven-square-mile area, came up empty. Ted was informed that this would be the third and final search for his son.

The family’s hope rested on avid hunters in Maine to come across evidence. “It’s up to them to get into the woods… maybe notice a piece of clothing… and find him,” Ted said. In the meantime, he hung up posters all over town spreading the word about Jeremy.

The Jeremy Alex Fund, Ted’s efforts

Ted wanted to do something positive in the wake of his son’s death. He organized a celebration of life ceremony a year after Jeremy’s disappearance. He found it unlikely that Jeremy could still be alive.

The Portsmouth, NH, community rallied around Ted. Jackie Valley, the director of the city’s community diversion program, was moved by the family’s loss and Jeremy’s story. She helped to organize the first annual Healthy Kids Expo at nearby Odiorne Point State Park in Rye, NH. On a sunny summer day in 2006, a crowd of hundreds of children and parents gathered to play lawn games, enjoy the live music, and participate in health-focused sessions like yoga and nutrition classes.

Building on the community’s enthusiasm for the Expo, the Portsmouth Rotary Club contributed $3,000 to the Jeremy Alex Fund, an endowment that Ted created in his son’s memory. The fund would be used to help children at risk. Ted believed that Jeremy’s life had become derailed when he began abusing narcotics, and he wanted to help prevent a similar fate from befalling other young people.

By 2007, the fund had received more than $200,000 in contributions from area businesses and supporters. The following year, 2008, the Jeremy Alex Fund underwrote the purchase of 200 chess sets, which were distributed to fourth-grade students in Portsmouth. The committee responsible for making grants from the endowment thought that an introduction to the game would promote critical thinking.

Ted told the Bangor Daily News, “I don’t think we’ll ever see the true results of the Jeremy Alex Fund. All it takes is a kid to have a chess set, meet up with a friend; they get playing chess and it keeps them out of trouble. And maybe it sends them in a different direction.”

Shore Road discovery

A month after Jeremy disappeared, in May 2004, Tim and Debbie Dugal walked along the strip of pebble beach that lay at the foot of their new coastal home in Northport, Maine.

Glancing down, one of them noticed a small pale rectangle. They plucked it from the ground and turned it over, examining the face of a young man with dark hair, round cheeks, and a strong chin—Jeremy Theodore Alex, brown eyes, 5’7”, 155 pounds, 28 years old.

The couple chuckled. Wherever Mr. Alex was, he was missing his driver's license. Had he lost it during a day at the beach, or after taking an impromptu swim in the bay, or from hitting some chop while on a boat and launching it overboard?

The ocean brought them so many interesting things—feathers, sea glass, knobs of wood smoothed by the currents. Just two weeks before, about $30 dollars had washed ashore in the same place. Later, they would put it in the glass vase that sat on their coffee table, where they kept all the bits of detritus that the sea presented to them. And, for four years, that’s where it stayed.

In August of 2008, Debbie invited a family friend, Jim Baker, to come and visit. She told him about how the tides deposited little bits and bobs that she and Tim loved to collect. Why, it had even brought them money once, and a young man’s driver’s license.

Jim was a retired California patrol officer who had spent time in the area previously. Something in his memory prickled and he asked Debbie if he could see the ID. She showed him the glass vase on the coffee table, filled with everything they had found during their walks along the shore. In amongst the sea glass and pebbles was Jeremy Alex’s driver’s license. Jim turned it over in his hands, asking Debbie if they had ever reported the lost ID to the police, and she replied that they had not.

Jim recognized the face on the license. He had seen the missing persons posters in café windows and on light poles throughout this stretch of Maine. This was indeed the same young man peering back from the ID card. At this point, he knew that the right thing to do was to notify the Maine State Police, who, by this time, were in charge of the case. But Jim didn’t stop there. His career had left him all too familiar with the pain that families felt when their loved ones could not be found. He contacted Ted Alex.

Ted would later recall, “He ended up e-mailing me about it, saying ‘I have $30 of Jeremy’s money and his license,’ which was obviously really bizarre.”

Following the discovery, Ted began driving to Maine every weekend to search the area near the Shore Road house. Perhaps there were more items that belonged to his son dotting the coastline. By then, the Alex family had accepted the possibility that Jeremy was no longer alive. Even if he had been living rough and avoiding attention, surely by now he would have reached out.

Ted made it no secret that he believed that there was foul play involved in his son’s disappearance. In 2007, he told the Bangor Daily News that he believed Jeremy’s involvement with drugs and drug dealers led to his murder. But now, four years later, here was a new clue. Had somebody killed Jeremy and thrown his belongings into the sea? Or had the young man wandered into the water himself, panicked with delusions and trying to escape some imagined attackers?

Jeremy would have turned 48 years old on April 8th, 2024, and April 24th will mark the 20th anniversary of his disappearance. The Alex family has endured a lot of pain in those twenty years.

Nikohl: “It’s changed my life… a lot… I feel like it was really hard to be a parent and not helicopter the shit out of my kids… I really want my parents to have some kind of closure. I think that’s the biggest thing… I just really need for them to have some closure… And that’s probably the thing that keeps me up at night.”

What happened to Jeremy Alex?

Everyone has an opinion about what happened to Jeremy on that spring day in 2004… he died from hypothermia in the woods… he swam into the cold waters of Penobscot Bay while fleeing imaginary attackers… he was murdered by drug dealers who were looking for money.

There are rumors that Jeremy was killed. There are rumors that the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office and the Belfast Police covered it up. If you look around online deeply enough, you’ll find specific names. You’ll find family relationships that weave the cops and some nefarious characters in the Belfast community together. You’ll find references to a map of dead bodies buried in someone’s backyard.

There’s even a guy who goes onto a YouTube video and says that his son did it—he also says that it happened in 1986 at a 4th of July Party… Jeremy disappeared in April of 2004… 18 year later.

It’s unclear what to make of these accounts.

Over the years, commenters on forums like WebSleuths and Reddit have championed variations of the theory that Jeremy was killed. One user claimed that there had been other sightings of three people in black ski masks scaring people around Belfast. A Redditor claiming to be from the region posted that one of the alleged killers got drunk and admitted what they had done to a friend once.

Nikohl: “I know that people know what happened to him that day. Shame on them for continuing to go on with their life while the rest of us hurt every single day... and I have a message for those people that call themselves ‘friends’… I would call on them to do the right thing and to come forward. I know that at one time in their life, they cared about Jeremy… and they’ve been holding onto this secret for twenty years... and it's just time, it’s time to come forward and let our family have some kind of closure so that we can move forward. Turn yourself in. Hell, turn in whoever needs to be turned in. Just do the right thing. It’s been twenty years—twenty years too long.

But regardless of how Jeremy died, this is how Nikohl wants him to be remembered—remembered as he was in life, not death.

Nikohl: “I want everyone to know how loved my brother was. He was loved by his family, by his siblings, by his friends, by his community. He wasn’t just somebody with a drug problem, or some junkie that got high and went on a binger and didn’t mean anything to anyone… He meant a lot to a lot of people around him. And many people in our community who suffer from substance-use disorder or trauma—childhood trauma—and just because they have an addiction doesn’t mean they’re worthless. And it doesn’t mean that they don’t play a vital part in people’s lives. This world is not the same without him.”

If you have ay information on the disappearance of Jeremy Alex, please call the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit Central at (207) 624-7076 x9 or leave a tip online.

If you or somebody you love are struggling with substance use disorder, helps is available 24/7. Please call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services hotline (SAMHSA) at 1-800-662-HELP (4357). Your life matters.

This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, The Disappearance of Jeremy Alex. To hear Jeremy’s full story and Nikohl’s interview, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform or the episode on your favorite podcast player.

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Sources For This Episode

Newspaper articles

Various articles from Bangor Daily News, Camden Herald, Foster's Daily Democrat, Herald Gazette, Kennebec Journal, Republican Journal, Waldo Independent, here.

Written by various authors including Abigail Curtis, Daniel Dunkle, Dave Piszcz, Irene Yadao, Maureen Milliken, Tom Groening, Toni Mailloux, and Walter Griffin.

Interviews

Many thanks to Nikohl for speaking with us.

Photos

Photos from the Alex family, Discovery ID’s Disappeared, Jeremyalex.com

Online written sources

'Portsmouth Rotary President's Son Missing' (Seacoastonline), 4/29/2004, by Nancy Cicco

'Search Continues for Portsmouth Man's Son' (Seacoastonline), 4/30/2004, by Joe Adler

'Son of Portsmouth Rotary President is Missing in Maine' (Foster's Sunday Citizen), 5/2/2004, by AP

'Widened Search Fails to Find Missing Man' (Seacoastonline), 5/4/2004, by Joe Adler

'A father's anguish-Alex thanks community as Maine wardens end search for son' (Seacoastonline), 10/3/2004, by Nancy Cicco

'Jeremy Ted Alex' (Charley Project), 10/12/2004

'Jeremy Alex' (MySpace), 3/5/2007

'Chess Keeps Memory Alive' (Seacoastonline), 12/24/2007, by Adam Leech

'N.H. man killed in tree cutting accident' (Seacoastonline), 4/23/2008, by AP

'Timothy Dugal' (Legacy), 4/26/2008

'ME - Jeremy Alex, 28, Northport, 24 April 2004' (Websleuths),

'Help Find Jeremy Alex' (Jeremy Alex), 2/1/2009

'Six Years Later, A Father's Search Continues' (The Courier Gazette), 4/21/2010

'Jeremy Alex's 2004 disappearance on Investigation Discovery network Feb. 7' (The Courier Gazette), 2/1/2011

'The Jeremy Alex Fund' (Portsmouth Rotary), 6/30/2015

'Jeremy Alex Fund' (Facebook), 2/5/2016

'Me and the Pedophile Piper of Phish' (Archive.org), 7/2/2016, by Bradley Williams

'Missing Person / NamUs #MP98' (NamUs), 5/21/2018

'How Belfast, Maine Police Killed Jeremy Alex and a Bit on Their Child Porn Thing' (Archive.org), 5/26/2018, by Bradley Williams

'Eyewitnesses Appear!' (Archive.org), 2/16/2020, by Bradley Williams

'Deadheads' Marked for Murder!' (PressReader), http://pressreader.com 1/18/2021

'Missing Person / NamUs #MP98' (NamUs), 4/12/2021

'State Police Call Attention to Missing Persons Cold Case' (News Center Maine), 4/24/2021, by Luke Saccone

'Maine State Police ask for public's help in solving an 18-year-old case of a missing Northport man' (News Center Maine), 4/24/2022, by Elle Ousfar

'Maine Police Looking for Man Who Vanished 18 Years Ago' (Telegraph-Journal), 5/20/2022

Online video sources

'Into the Woods' (IMDb), 1/7/2011

'Jeremy Alex's Last Day, Testimony of a Perpetrator's Dad' (YouTube, u/The Grateful Brad), 6/21/2016

'COP GRAVEYARD IN MAINE!' (YouTube, u/The Grateful Brad), 3/18/2018

'State Police Call Attention to Missing Persons Cold Case' (News Center Maine), 4/24/2021

Credits

Vocal performance, research, and audio editing by Kristen Seavey

Research, photo editing, and writing support by Byron Willis

Additional research by Bridget Rowley and Kimberly Clark.

Writing by Morgan Hamilton

Murder, She Told is created by Kristen Seavey.