The Murder of Shirley Coolen (Maine)

On May 20, 1951, 24-year old Shirley Coolen retrieved a sheet of her favorite stationary, the paper with a red rose embossed in the left corner, and began to write what she hoped would be the message that would bring her childhood sweetheart, her ex-husband, back into her life. 

The note contained a request. “I want you to come down this weekend,” she wrote. Saturday night around 10:30. Saturday night would be May 26, 1951. She couldn’t have known when she penned the letter, that Saturday night would become the last night anyone saw her alive.

The letter she wrote and mailed to her ex-husband was a key piece of evidence in the earliest days of the investigation, but before you jump to conclusions… This isn’t a simple case of, “The husband did it.” In fact, none of these cases are simple.

When Zenovia Clegg’s killer confessed to his crime, he also revealed small scraps of the secrets he’d been keeping throughout the decades. Is Charles E. Terry the serial killer responsible for the murders of two women whose cases are still unsolved decades later? And what really happened to Patricia Wing in the back of that Cadillac?

These are the complex, dark, and interwoven stories of Shirley Coolen, Donna Kimmey, Zenovia Clegg, and Patricia Wing. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts and with the player above.