1958, Lewiston, Maine. 14-year-old Sandra Knowlton kills an officer

Ten Lewiston police officers stood in the woods just off a back road in Sabattus, Maine, hiding behind trees in defense positions. They’d been engaged in an armed standoff, and for the past 30 minutes they’d been trying to coax the shooter to drop their weapon and come out from behind the bush they were hiding in. The ground and trunks around the officers were peppered with about 50 bullets that had greeted them when they closed in on the shooter, who aimlessly shot in their direction.

But police were at a stand-still; the shooter wasn’t budging, despite multiple attempts to talk them into surrendering.

32-year-old Lewiston patrolman Paul J. Simard took the lead, attempting to de-escalate the situation. “Don’t be gun-happy, just come out and nobody will get hurt,” he said, cautiously stepping forward.

A voice from the bushes shouted at the officers to go away, and when they didn’t follow instructions, the voice warned once again “Get that other flatfoot out of the way or he’ll get shot.” (flatfoot is an old slang term for policeman)

But the officers didn’t back down, and in response, a shot rang out, piercing the air.

Officer Ralph Fraser counted his blessings as a .22 caliber round whizzed just passed his ear, barely missing him. The bullet lodged itself into a nearby tree. In an instant, a second shot was fired, and Paul Simard fell to the ground, hit with a bullet between the eyes.

The officers didn’t return fire.

Officer Fraser told the shooter he had them in his gun sight, and if they didn’t surrender immediately, he would shoot. Tension hung in the air as the standoff came to a head. Fraser fired a warning shot into the ground, and once again ordered them to drop the weapon. And the shooter did... out from behind the deadly bush in a pair of blue jeans and a red shirt, stepped Sandra Knowlton, a 14-year-old girl, who had just shot and killed a Lewiston Police Officer.

Sandra ran from her home to escape her father

Sandra had fled her home on foot, just east of Lewiston, Maine, in rural country, near the present-day town of Sabbatus. She had wearied of her parents’ fighting and her father’s temper and had decided to remove herself from the situation.

That morning she had gone upstairs to her bedroom under the pretense of getting some clothes and at 8:30AM she escaped through her bedroom window with $3.00 she had been saving for a camera. From a nearby cabin that the family owned, she retrieved a .22 caliber rifle and a box of ammo.

It was the afternoon of Monday, July 7th, 1958, and it was a pleasant 70-degree overcast day.

Her mother was distraught by her disappearance and called the Lewiston police department to report her missing.

Some neighbors found her, and she threatened them with the gun. They left and alerted the police.

It wasn’t long thereafter that the police got some calls from the community about someone taking pot shots at passing automobiles. They responded to the calls to investigate.

Police confrontation

Police located Sandra, hidden in a clump of bushes off of a road just a mile or two from her home. They called for backup, and all together about 10 officers faced off against her.

Over the course of the next 30 minutes they tried to reason with the armed teen – to deescalate the situation – but she was resolute, firing about 50 rounds in the direction of the police.

It wasn’t until after she shot and killed 5-year veteran Paul Simard that her mother was summoned and was finally was able to convince her to give up her weapon and come out. After listening a few minutes to her mother's pleas, Sandra stalked from her hiding place and dropped her rifle. Four sheriff’s deputies then seized her.

Sandra arrested and charged with murder

Police immediately arrested Sandra and took her back to the station where she signed a statement admitting that she had fired the shots. They then took her to Androscoggin County Jail where she spent the night.

The next day, Tuesday, July 8th, she was brought to court to appear before a judge.

Sandra was an unlikely murder suspect. She was just 14 years old, tall, thin, and pale-skinned, and had just-past-shoulder-length dark reddish-brown hair. She wore blue jeans and a red shirt, and in a photo from that day, her lips, centered on her square jaw, were pressed together in defiance.

Her mother, Rosella Knowlton, wept and repeated, “I’ll stand by you baby, it wasn’t your fault.”

Her father, Everett Knowlton, sat separate from her mother, and watched quietly.

Due to her financial need, she had been provided a defense attorney, AF Martin, and as he had advised, she pled not guilty. Sandra was later indicted on a murder charge and held without bail until the September term.

Sandra’s sanity assessed

Shortly after her initial appearance, her lawyer filed a motion to allow her to be voluntarily committed to a hospital in Augusta for a 30-day psychiatric evaluation. It was approved, and under the supervision of Dr. Francis H. Sleeper, she lived 24/7 at the hospital where he formed his medical opinion about her sanity. On Tuesday, September 9th, two months after the incident, she was returned to jail along with Dr. Sleeper’s opinion. His diagnosis: she was sane and knew exactly what she was doing.

Sandra’s murder trial

Just one week later, on September 17th, her trial began. 14 jurors were empaneled, nine women and five men, and the first thing that they did was take all of the jurors to the site of the shooting.

Once again Sandra’s mother and father attended the proceedings, but they sat separately. Her mother was in the front row, just a few feet from her daughter, but her father sat on the opposite side of the courtroom.

Sandra took the stand in her own defense: “I fired in the direction of some rustling bushes hoping to scare them (police) away,” she said. “I ran into the woods because I couldn’t stand the constant bickering and fighting of my parents.” She said she brought the rifle to "defend myself against anyone who was going to bring me back to my father so I wouldn’t get beaten up again.”

Sandra’s mother also testified and said Everett’s temper was very bad – that “he used to swear at us and hit Sandra on numerous occasions.” She corroborated Sandra’s account of family fighting the day of the shooting.

Everette, himself, was part of the search party looking for Sandra that day and was hesitant to approach her for fear of his own safety. She warned him, “I will not go back to have you beat me up again.”

Sandra only put down her weapon when her mother promised her “they would move to an apartment near Lewiston and live apart from” her father.

Her defense attorney described her situation: "a scared little girl with a desperate and violent hatred for her father who was in the woods defending herself against an ogre, a monster—that was the tragedy.” He said that she had run away because her father had brutally beaten her and had tried to force her into unnatural sexual acts. He said “Sandra looked upon every policeman as an emissary of her father.”

Sandra told her mother, “I’d rather die than live with my father.”

The judge gave detailed instructions to the jury. He told them their verdict might be innocent, guilty of murder, or guilty of manslaughter. Murder, he said, involved killing “with malice aforethought,” while manslaughter involved killing “in the heat of passion, or upon sudden provocation.”

Jury delivers verdict, sentencing

On Fri, September 19th, after a brief 3-day trial, the jury deliberated for 3 hours and 58 minutes and delivered their verdict. They found Sandra Knowlton guilty of manslaughter (but not murder). Sandra was relieved.

The judge adjourned the trial and said he would have a sentencing hearing in a few days after a pre-sentencing report was prepared.

The presentencing report is a very important step in the legal process that is designed to summarize a person’s situation in life for a judge to consider in determining sentence. In Sandra’s case, the report was prepared by a probation and parole officer, who interviewed both her mother and father, visited her home, and looked into other details in her life.

On Monday of the following week, in just one business day, probation officer Raymond Nichols had completed the report and presented it to the judge, and on Tuesday, September 24th, Judge Archibald held a hearing to announce his decision. He said, "I want no one under any conditions, to see that report,” implying that the details of the report were very private and very unfortunate. He told Sandra, “Fundamentally, there are other people to blame for the situation you are in.” He went on to tell her, "You've got a cross to bear the rest of your life unless you overcome it yourself.”

He sentenced her to 5-10 years in prison, and let her know that she would be eligible for parole in 4 years, when she was 18 years old. He told her that she would be given special tutors who would provide her with her high school education (she would have started Lewiston HS the month of her trial). She smiled and said, “thank you.”

Ultimately, she served her sentence at the Skowhegan Women’s Reformatory because of lack of facilities for lodging female prisoners at the State Prison.

What happened to Sandra Knowlton?

The newspapers stopped reporting on Sandra right after the trial happened, and many questions remained. What happened to Sandra Knowlton?

Sandra Knowlton has lived an entire lifetime since July 7th, 1958. She is still alive (now 77), and she has a family of her own, and when we spoke to her on the phone, Sandra said she didn’t remember a lot from this time of her life – perhaps she has buried these painful memories.

She said that she lived at the reformatory for four years, 24/7, and while she was there a woman took her under her wing and taught her how to be a nurse’s aide. When she was released, she got a job working for the woman’s aunt. She also earned her high school diploma in prison through the help of a tutor as the judge had promised.

Sandra doubts she shot Simard…

Sandra also gave me a conflicting account of what happened that day. She said that she wasn’t shooting at cars, despite the papers saying that one’s of the reasons the police arrived in the first place.

She also said she didn’t think she shot Paul Simard. She said that her brother thought the same; that the bullet came from another officer and was an accident. She remembered the Waterville Sentinel reporting that Paul was killed by a shotgun round which didn’t match her small caliber rifle. The rifle was her mother’s and she took it from the house that day. The Waterville Sentinel currently doesn’t have digital access to their microfilm archives, so I can’t verify what they printed historically, but I can confirm all the sources I used including the Bangor Daily News and the Boston Globe said it was bullet from a rifle that killed Paul Simard.

Did Sandra reunite with her family?

We asked her about her relationship with her family in the wake of this tragedy. She said that after she was released from the reformatory, she wrote her mother Rosella, never got a reply, and that was the last contact she had with either her mother or her father. She lost her mother through this tragedy, too. Her father passed away in 2000 and her mother in 2005 at 92 years old, and it appears that her parents stayed together for the rest of their lives.

Who was Paul Simard?

The MVP of this story is a woman who was referred to in all the historic newspaper coverage as Mrs. Paul Simard. Her name is Anita, she’s 92 years old and she’s sharp as a tack. We were lucky to connect with Anita, who speaks both English and French, and she shared her memories from 63 years ago.

Anita met Paul in 1946 when he had just gotten out the service (WW2). She was 18 and he was about 22. Anita said she was working at the local pharmacy, which was also where the teenagers in town would hang out. He came in one day and he asked her if she’d like to go to the football game with him the following evening. They were married a year later in 1947.

“He was a very nice young guy and we were just teenagers in love. He was very much a gentleman and he was very devoted,” she said.

They had two daughters: Claudette in 1948 and then Pauline five years later. Anita said her parents owned an apartment building in Lewiston on Bates Street, and that her sister and her parents lived in apartments on the first floor and she and Paul lived on the third floor with the girls. She worked as a secretary at a local church, and around 1952 Paul started working as a cop for Lewiston PD. Anita still attends that same church today.

Paul and Anita were building a camp on the Tacoma Lakes with her parents, and in his free time he’d be out there working on it. Whenever he wasn’t working on it, they’d take the girls to the beach or do something fun together as a family.

Paul had only been working for the Lewiston PD for about 5 or 6 years when he was killed. I asked her about the moment she found out and she said “I’ll always remember. Somebody knocked at the door and they said “have you heard?” I said “what are you talking about?” and he said “You haven’t heard about your husband?” I repeated, ‘what are you talking about?’... it was a reporter.

The police were already talking to my parents, and were getting ready to come upstairs to tell me and when the reporter heard that the police were downstairs he ran off and left. I ran downstairs after him and that’s when I saw the chief of police and my parents and sister... that’s how I found out.”

She also remembered being at the trial and said, “I went to the trial. Can you believe that? I wanted to go. And my sister came with me. And I stayed. I cried through the whole trial. And when they found her guilty I walked out, crying my heart out.”

After Paul’s death, things were hard for the young family. Anita was a widow at just 29 with daughters who were 5 and 10 years old. I asked her how it was for her and she said, “Very, very hard. I cried a hell of a lot. It was hard on all of us. We learned to do what we could and I know it would have been different if he were alive, but we did what we could. I don’t know what I would have done without my parents, sister and good friends. They really helped me get through it.”

Paul Simard’s sacrifice is honored

The Maine Law Enforcement Officers Association immediately began raising money for Paul’s family after his death – Paul was the first Lewiston policeman that had ever been killed while on duty. After five months of fundraising, the association presented Anita with $700 just before Christmas which would be about $6,600 in today’s dollars.

Much later, in 2007, the city of Lewiston renamed a park in his name to remember his service and his sacrifice. “Railroad Park” was renamed “Simard-Payne Law Enforcement Memorial Park” to honor Paul Simard and another Lewiston officer killed in the line of duty named David Payne. They also have installed a monument to Paul there.

In 2015, the Lewiston Police Department installed a memorial cross at the approximate location where Paul’s life was taken in Sabattus, just east of Lewiston.

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Sources For This Episode

Newspaper Articles

Various articles, from the Bangor Daily News, Biddeford Daily Journal, Boston Globe, Daily News, Intelligencer Journal, Latrobe Bulletin, Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph, Press and Sun Bulletin, Scrantonian Tribune, Shamokin News Dispatch, The Berkshire Eagle, The Brattleboro Reformer, The Burlington Daily News, The Burlington Free Press, The Daily News, The Evening Times, The Morning Call, The Newport Daily Express, The North Adams Transcript, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Pittsburgh Press, The Portsmouth Herald, and The Times Tribune.

Articles written by various wire services.

Full listing here.

Interviews

Sandra Knowlton and Anita Simard

Photo Sources

All family photos courtesy of the Simard family. Other photos from various newspaper sources.

Credits

Created, researched, written, told, and edited by Kristen Seavey

Research, writing, photo editing support by Byron Willis