The Murders of Gloria Gough & Evelyn “Penny” Deans (Maine and South Carolina)

In August of 1972, 44-year-old Gloria Gough left her home in Gardiner, Maine after a late-night phone call and vanished. Two days later, more than a thousand miles away in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 52-year-old Evelyn “Penny” Deans was shot to death inside her home.

Then police looked in Penny’s driveway. Sitting there was Gloria’s car. Inside were blood-soaked towels, clothing, and a map pointing toward yet another state.

What followed was a multistate investigation, a murder case built largely on circumstantial evidence, and a second murder case that never reached trial – not because investigators walked away, but because the family asked for something different from the justice system.

Murder of Evelyn “Penny” Deans

Mount Pleasant, South Carolina sits low along the coast, where tidal creeks cut through broad stretches of marsh grass and warm salt air hangs heavy in late summer. It is more than a thousand miles south of New England’s northernmost state, where the landscape is quite different with its pine forests, rocky ground and small towns built along cold rivers.

On August 20th, 1972, there was no obvious reason that a quiet house in Mount Pleasant should have anything to do with an unexplained disappearance in Gardiner, Maine. But that was about to change.

Just before midnight that Sunday, William “Bill” Deans and a friend had driven past the home of Bill's mother, who lived in the same neighborhood, and noticed the lights were on and there was a strange car in the driveway. According to the book A Courageous Fool by Todd C. Peppers and Margaret A. Anderson, Bill’s mother 52-year-old Evelyn “Penny” Deans and her young daughter weren’t expected back from vacation for a few days, so everything about the house and the car didn’t make sense.

Bill pulled in to take a closer look. Penny and her daughter must’ve returned from vacation earlier than expected, because Bill heard voices as he approached the house and figured she had a friend over or something. He turned to leave but just as his back was to the house, he heard gunshots. Bill rushed to the front door, pounding on it, trying to get inside, while his friend rounded the back of the house just in time to see an unknown man running from the garage.

Bill found his mother lying on the floor of her home. She had been shot. Penny’s young daughter was inside, physically unharmed.

Police descended on the house and the surrounding area and they didn’t have to look far for a major piece of evidence. In Penny’s driveway was the strange car Bill had noticed: a Volkswagen car that wasn’t hers. It had Maine license plates.

The out-of-state plates were strange enough. What investigators found inside made the Volkswagen impossible to dismiss.

Inside were a woman’s purse and a rain hat, along with men’s pants and a jacket, a radio and a flashlight. There were also two towels soaked with what appeared to be blood. A map inside the car had Fayetteville, North Carolina circled. And tucked into the men's pants was a piece of paper containing a list of names.

At the top was the name Gloria Gough.

Police ran the Volkswagen’s registration and found that it belonged to Gloria, a 44-year-old woman from Gardiner, Maine. A missing woman from Maine.

Two nights earlier, on Friday, August 18th, Gloria’s sister was visiting from Boston when the telephone rang sometime around 9:50 or 10 o’clock that night. Gloria answered, and her sister would later say that Gloria told the person on the other end that she would come pick them up. About ten minutes later, Gloria put on her rain gear, climbed into her new Volkswagen and drove away.

She never came home. By Saturday, Gloria had been reported missing. Now Gloria’s Volkswagen was sitting in the driveway of a woman who had just been murdered, but Gloria wasn’t there.

Police in South Carolina were trying to determine who shot Penny Deans. Police in Maine were trying to determine what had happened to Gloria Gough. Almost instantly, they would realize these weren’t two separate investigations.

The Escape

According to reporting in the Morning Sentinel, on Saturday morning, August 19th, a cook’s helper at the Kennebec County Jail went looking for one of the inmates who worked in the kitchen. His cell was empty. Jail officials found a window between the officers’ mess hall and the sheriff’s apartment, which was adjacent to the jail, pushed open – the likely escape route.

The missing man was 38-year-old Lloyd Wayne Northup Jr., who went by his middle name, Wayne. Wayne had been at the county jail much longer than was typical. He was in the middle of appealing earlier convictions, and while those cases moved through the appellate process, he remained in county custody rather than being transferred to Maine State Prison to begin his given sentence.

Jeff Seideman reports for the Kennebec Journal that for 14 months, Wayne had worked as the jailhouse cook and was considered a “trusty,” an inmate given certain responsibilities and privileges because jail officials believed he could be trusted.

That status gave Wayne considerably more freedom than most of the people held there. He slept in an unlocked cell adjacent to the kitchen, and his job allowed him access to areas of the jail other inmates generally wouldn’t have.

Nothing the night before had apparently caused anyone to think Wayne was planning to leave. On Friday night, August 18th, he told the dispatcher who would be coming on duty the following morning that he should tiptoe into the office because Wayne would be sleeping and didn’t want to be disturbed.

The dispatcher last remembered seeing him at about 9 o’clock that night. Sometime after that, Wayne disappeared.

Sheriff Stanley Jordan was reportedly away on vacation when Wayne escaped, but his son had been in the sheriff’s apartment that night from about midnight until 3 in the morning and said no one came in or out during that time.

So, investigators believed Wayne may have escaped much earlier, sometime around 9:15 p.m., while a movie was being shown for the inmates.

The theory was that he simply made his way through the window to an unlocked door and left the jail. Under normal circumstances, the dispatcher’s office door was open, giving whoever was on duty a clear view of the jail’s front entrance. But the investigation found that on the night Wayne disappeared, that office door had been closed for a period of about five minutes. Investigators believed Wayne may have used that brief window to leave without being seen.

For hours after, no one noticed. By the time the empty cell was discovered Saturday morning, Wayne had a significant head start.

That same Friday night, less than an hour after he was last seen at the jail, Gloria Gough had received a phone call at her home in Gardiner. She told her sister she was going to pick someone up, put on her rain gear and drove away in her Volkswagen.

Now both Gloria and Wayne were missing.

The stories of Gloria Gough and Evelyn “Penny” Deans continue on Dark Downeast. Press play to hear the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.