The Murder of James Cassidy, Part 2 (Maine)

[MUSIC] 50 years after James Cassidy's death, there is still no simple explanation for his brutal murder. The evidence left behind in the main woods raised questions investigators have never fully answered. And the deeper the investigation went, the more complicated the picture became. A respected bank executive had vanished. Federal authorities were preparing to arrest him. And a burned cart was found far from home on a deserted logging road. But the paper trail and the witness accounts pointed in several different directions at once, toward financial crimes, toward organized crime figures operating in New England, and toward the surprisingly valuable world of rare stamps. Somewhere along those threads may lie the explanation for what really happened, all those years ago, in April of 1976. I'm Kylie Lo and Miss is the case of James Cassidy, part two, Undark Down East. [MUSIC] On April 7, 1976, investigators in Eastern Maine received a call about a burned-out station wagon, hidden off a remote logging road near Debeck Pond. When they finally located the scene, they found the badly burned body of 43-year-old James Jim Cassidy, of Brookline, Massachusetts, a bank vice president and father of three. The fire had been extremely intense, destroying much of the evidence and making it difficult to determine exactly what had happened. The autopsy ultimately concluded that Jim died from burning. Today, Jim's death is considered an unsolved homicide by Maine State Police. By the time the car was discovered, Jim had already been missing for several days. Federal authorities had also obtained a warrant for his arrest on embezzlement charges connected to his job at Brookline Trust Company. Allegations his sister-in-law, Evelyn Cassidy, still has a hard time believing. We couldn't imagine Jim being involved in anything like that voluntarily, but see that where voluntarily was in there, we don't know. Investigators were left trying to reconcile the violent way Jim died with the life he had been living. What was Jim wrapped up in before his death? Was his death the result of risky dealings at the bank? Or was it motivated by something much smaller, like stamps? According to reporting by Richard J. Connelly for the Boston Globe, Jim was believed to have been carrying approximately $350,000 worth of rare stamps when he left Massachusetts, and those stamps were unaccounted for at the scene. Rare stamps carry significant value even today, and the market for those collectibles has occasionally intersected with criminal activity. Because individual items can be worth large sums of money and are relatively easy to transport or resell, they became targets for theft or trafficking during Jim's era. In 1971, for example, members of Boston's Winter Hill gang stole a stamp collection worth about $500,000 from a Boston stamp business and later moved the stolen collectibles through other stamp dealers. Joseph McDonald was indicted in 1975 for his alleged part in the theft, but failed to appear for trial, so a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wounded List in April of 1976 and was classified as armed and extremely dangerous. This guy, with a passion for high-value stamp theft, was on the lamb at the same month Jim was killed. And he wasn't the only one. That history raised another possibility in Jim's case. If he had encountered people operating in dark arenas, maybe stamps were the common denominator. Jim's philatellic passion, the formal term for stamp collecting in the study of stamps, began in his childhood. "I always thought it was really cool because he started this when he was really young. And I remember one time at the house, I lived in a house now in Canada where he grew up. I found a thing in the attic and it was like maybe a three-by-three piece of wood. Anyway, I had little slots in it, and I remember my husband telling me that Davis said Jim had made that for stamps, so it would hold stamps so he could see them all." Jim's son Ken Cassidy remembers his father's stamp business fondly. He even got to participate. "He was heavily into stamps. One of the things that I enjoyed the most was the fact that he would come home with envelopes from other people and countries and stuff. My job, and he painted that on a lot of so much per stamp like that, is to soak them in water and then take the stamp of the stamp and the stamp fell off the envelope, just take them and put them on newspaper, put them on the side to dry, and then obviously give them back to them later." The self-named business James A. Cassidy Inc. had started modestly as a mail-order stamp and rare coin company. Jim first ran it out of his home in Brooklyn, Massachusetts, but by 1973 he expanded into a Boylston Street office in Newton. The move suggested Grove, reporting by Jeff Strout for the Bangor Daily News indicated Jim had even purchased a mini-computer for the operation and employed several people to help run the business. Jim never talked about having valuable stamps or anything like that. He said how he enjoyed getting them from different places and how some were rare and how they'd been worth more money, but he never mentioned anything about the value of them. Yet, they were extremely valuable. A single rare stamp could fetch thousands of dollars or more. According to reporting by David Wright and Jeff Strout for the Bangor Daily News, after Jim died, a friend of Jim's made a payment of more than ten grand to Jim's stamp and coin business. That friend was reportedly the same man who told investigators he had seen and spoken with Jim at the Portland Jet Port on April 5th. Reporting in the Rumford Falls Times from December 1976 described someone named John Head as an internationally known stamp collector. According to an obituary I found for John B. Head from Bethel Main, after he returned from military service in Japan, John started a business dealing in the fallotly and postal history of the Far East, specializing in Japan and the Ryukus. I wanted to learn more about John Head and just how well known he was in the stamp world, and I struggled to find any information about him and even the most obscure and super niche sources. I even spoke to the president of the Maine Fallotlick Society as part of my reporting for this episode, and he remembers the name John Head, but wasn't sure if they ever met. But Evelyn believes she met John and his wife at least once, and the tone of that meeting has always struck her as odd. She recalled that she attended a dinner meeting with Jim sometime in the early 70s, maybe four or five years before his death, when she was staying with his family in Brooklyn one summer. At the time we spoke, she couldn't recall the names of the man and the woman at the table, but based on what she does remember, and after speaking with her nephew Ken, she now is fairly certain the meeting was with John Head. In time, the summer, in the early 70s, my visited Jim, he had to go to a meeting with someone at a restaurant and wanted me to come with him, he ate first, and then very strange, uncharacteristic of Jim. He said, Evelyn, you should be excuse us, and we need to talk for a bit. So there was a lady with the other gentleman, and she was Japanese. So her and I left the table, and that was not like Jim at all. Ken Head's wife, Fumiko, was from Japan. They were married in 1960 at the embassy in Tokyo. It's this detail in particular that leads us to believe that the meeting was with John and his wife. But that was just very unlike him, wouldn't you? I'm like to myself, I never asked him, but I'm like, what could you be talking about? Stamps said, I couldn't hear what I care. It could have been nothing at all, just a slightly out of character moment for Jim asking his sister-in-law for a little space to hold a private conversation with a business contact. But she hasn't forgotten it more than 50 years later, and it keeps surfacing in her mind like it means something more to Jim's case than she can decipher without the full picture. John Head has never been identified as a suspect or person of interest in Jim Cacity's case. He is believed to be one of the last known individuals to see him alive, and so, no doubt he was a valuable witness and he may have known much more about Jim's stamp dealings than has ever been publicly shared. John died in 2008, and Fumiko passed away in 2025, so I can't talk to either of them for clarity on any of this. For now, we'll leave John Head where he stands. But another thread keeps drawing me back, one that leads further into the peculiar, obsessive world of stamps. The deeper it goes, the more it suggests that Jim's case may intersect with something much larger and far more dangerous. Around the same time investigators were looking into the stamp business, they were also still trying to identify two men who had been seen in the Bangor area around the time of Jim's death. Though it's not explicitly stated in any of the source material I have access to for this case, it is reasonable to assume that the two men were the same individuals detailed in composite sketches shared with rental car companies during the initial investigation. While no identifying characteristics were shared in 1976, reporting by Richard Connolly for the Boston Globe in 1978 shed some light on who these people might have been. One of the men was identified in general terms as a former inmate of Walpole State Prison in Massachusetts. I'll refer to him by the fake name Adam to make this easier to follow, but I haven't been able to confirm his real name. According to reporting, Adam and the other man were stopped by an Elseworth main police officer during a routine highway check on the night of Jim Cassidy's disappearance. When asked what they were doing, the men reportedly said they were visiting a friend in Elseworth, but they could not remember the friend's name. The men were also reportedly suspects in an unrelated arson case involving a cottage in Maine owned by a man from Revere Massachusetts. Now I asked, but Elseworth PD doesn't have any traffic stop records from 1976 anymore, and I've tried to get more details on this arson case in an attempt to get my hands on records and names of the suspects, but to my intense frustration, I have come up empty handed. Retention schedules for records will never cease to bother me. I can only hope the originals are retained in the main state police file for Jim's murder. Anyway, Richard J. Connolly for the Boston Globe reports that the guy we're calling Adam and the other man were both friends of a guy named Ralph Delayow. At the time, Delayow was identified as a bank robber who had escaped from prison in Massachusetts and who had known ties to organized crime in Boston. Delayow was eventually recaptured in 1978 while attempting to rob another bank in Columbus, Ohio. In an effort to gain favor with authorities, he provided information about a murder case in Columbus, even leading investigators to the murder weapon. Delayow was also trying to avoid being returned to Massachusetts where he had escaped from, and during those negotiations while in custody, he was questioned about the Cassidy case by Massachusetts investigators due to his reported connections to the two men seen in the area at the time of Jim's death. Like I said, I've been unable to conclusively identify the two men that police were questioning Delayow about, but I do know who Ralph Delayow was pallying around with after Jim was killed. Ralph Delayow was arrested on April 12, 1976, within days of Jim's murder, along with two other men, 32-year-old Franklin M. Goldman, and 36-year-old Anthony J. Kiyote. The trio had robbed a woman at gunpoint and attempted to kidnap her before being apprehended by Revere Police. All three were sentenced for their part in that crime. Now, here's where stamps come back into the timeline. According to reporting, the former Walpole inmate, who we're calling Adam, the man believed to have been in the Bangor area around the time of Jim Cassidy's death and connected to Ralph Delayow, he was known to be a stamp collector while incarcerated at Walpole State Prison. Yeah, so stamp collecting was reportedly common among inmates at Walpole. There was a club at the maximum security prison called the 906 stamp collectors, dating back to 1956. For more than a decade during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, stamp collectors at the prison also organized an event known as the Inmate Philodolic Exhibition. The event invited collectors from outside the prison to loan valuable stamp collections, which were displayed in locked cases inside the facility. Members of the public were even allowed to visit the prison to view the exhibits. But the prison stamp world became the target of a major theft. According to the last good heist by Tim White, Randall Richard, and Wayne Luster, when the 1971 exhibition opened, attendees, including several of the collectors who had sent their items in advance for display, noticed that things were missing from the cases. About $20,000 worth of stamps and collectibles valued at over $160,000 today if adjusted for inflation. A prolific criminal named Robert DeSalt, who was later linked to the 1975 bonded vault heist in Providence, Rhode Island, one of the largest heist in New England history, he was an inmate at Walpole at the time. After weaseling his way into the stamp club, he coordinated the heist of those stamps, secretly packing them into the crates of prison made license plates that were shipped out of the facility and later intercepted by an associate of his. They were never recovered. When you step back and look at all of this together, with a red string from stamps to organized crime to Jim and banking and beyond, the connections start to look strange. Jim Cassidy may have been carrying $350,000 worth of rare stamps when he left Massachusetts. He ran a stamp and coin business. One of the last people known to see him alive was an internationally known stamp collector. At the same time, investigators were looking for two men, who they later determined were likely associates of a Boston organized crime figure, one of whom had been a stamp collector inside Walpole State Prison. And inside that same prison, stamps themselves had become valuable enough at one time to steal in a coordinated heist involving someone later connected to organized crime. Anthony Kiyote served time at Walpole in the 70s. Is he, Adam, the stamp collector friend of Delayos who was possibly seen in the Bangor area at the time of Jim's death, who was arrested with Ralph Delayo within days of Jim's death for an unrelated robbery and attempted kidnapping? I can't say for sure. Anthony Kiyote and Franklin Goldman have never been identified as suspects or persons of interest in Jim's case and they have not been charged with any crimes relating to his death. None of this proves that Jim Cassidy's death had anything to do with stamps or organized crime, but it does show something important. The world Jim was operating in was a lot more complicated than it might appear at first glance. And if Jim really was carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in stamps the night he disappeared, who knew he had them and where are they now? The details of Jim Cassidy's life don't seem to line up with the way he died. Family, friends and colleagues described him as a steady community-minded person. He was involved with his church, volunteered as a "boys' council" leader and by most accounts lived what people who knew him described as a "perfectly normal life". Nothing in his background seemed to clearly explain the two things investigators were now trying to reconcile. The violent way he died and the federal embezzlement charges filed against him shortly before his body was discovered. Plus, he had like a good standing in Brookline, running for town council. If I had a plan to rob a bank or embezzle money, I wouldn't be running for town council and everybody know me, I'd be keeping a low profile. As the months and years passed, the investigation into his murder appeared to lose momentum. Attention on Jim's case largely disappeared after the 1978 reporting about the questioning of Ralph Delayo. There were no major updates, no arrests and no clear answers about who killed him or why. The case went cold and the Cassidy family was left behind missing the man they loved. The empty space he left was filled with endless wondering what the truth could be among all the theories. Nothing made sense. It just did not make sense. So, say he was the mafia did approach him and all that. That's the last place he would have tried to escape to would be us. I mean, he would have went the opposite direction away from his family, not towards him. When Ken spoke with now retired main state police detective Jay Pellateer in 2020, he walked away thinking the investigation was primarily focused on the organized crime angle. listening to the officer rambling off about nine different Italian names, I believe this might have been that he was forced to do what he did. But why? Why jam? Why was he subjected to such a horrendous death? Could it have been a calling card of sorts? They also say, too, like when the mafia is involved, they always like leave a statement, right? Who did you believe in a statement to? What was a statement? Confusion. It was all confusion. That doesn't make any sense to me. None of it made sense. April of 2026 marks the 50-year anniversary of Jim's death. Half a century has passed without answers, but some of the people whose names surfaced around the investigation are still alive today. One of them is Ralph Delayo. Over the years, he has become a major figure in organized crime. Federal authorities later described him as a street boss of the Colombo Crime Family, one of the five mafia families that historically controlled organized crime in New York. But Delayo largely operated out of New England, including Massachusetts. His criminal history stretches back decades. Notably, in 2012, he pleaded guilty to racketeering and firearms charges, tied to a criminal enterprise that prosecutor said was involved in crimes like extortion, loan-sharking, and drug trafficking. After serving about 15 years in federal prison, Delayo was released in 2024, but in May of 2025, federal agents arrested him again. According to Aaron Kuttersky's reporting for ABC News, prosecutors alleged that Delayo had been plotting revenge against the federal agents involved in his earlier conviction. Investigators say he was gathering personal information about them and their families, compiling files on their home addresses, and had even assembled a burglary kit and notes referencing disguises. So, Delayo is alive and back in custody. If there were questions left unanswered back when investigators spoke with him about his friends and the death of Jim Cassidy back in 1978, this might be their last chance to ask him. Over the years, small details have lingered. These strange moments and unexplained discoveries that were never fully resolved. On their own, any one of them might seem insignificant. Together, they form a collection of loose threats. One of those moments came the night of Jim's funeral. After the service, Evelyn and the rest of the family gathered at Jim's house to comfort his wife, Alice, and their three sons. Later that evening, Evelyn and her husband returned to Jim's brother Arthur's house where they had been staying. When they pulled into the driveway, something immediately caught their attention. We looked and we could see all the light on our house, but I said, "Well, Dave and I must have hit some switches by accident or something, you know?" So, we sat in the car and talked for a bit, you know what we thought would happen, right? As they talked about Jim and the circumstances of his death, they eventually stepped out of the car and headed towards the house. I mean, did go in the house and the door was open, but it was the back door that was open and we came in the front door. The house had definitely been broken into and it looked like they just left when we came. Probably when our car came in. Arthur took stock of the place. It was clear someone had been inside looking for something. I remember like papers were strewn around, so they had looked through the files. Arthur had brought some of Jim's paperwork home with him. Those documents were among the items that had been disturbed. And when in the dining room, they went to Arthur's attach a case and papers gone through there, you could tell. And they even went into her Jerry's bedroom, you know, and you could tell, and they'd just gotten maybe half the house done. And you could tell, "Well, you know, what up this dresser's over here and then stopped right here, but they didn't finish the job." Evelyn remembers Arthur calling police to report the break-in, but she can't recall whether an officer came to the house or if anything was officially documented. I requested records from the police department that would have responded to the call, but those records no longer exist due to retention schedules. Arthur has since passed away, so there's no way to ask him what may have been taken or what he believed someone might have been looking for. Although the specifics have been lost to time, Evelyn remembers exactly how it felt. I tell you, we were all scared to death. Was the break-in connected to Jim's death? Who was there rifling through his brother's home? And what were they looking for? Those to the pile of questions that have stacked up over the last five decades. And the confusion doesn't end there. Some of the items reportedly found near the burned car in Maine still puzzle Jim's family to this day. Investigators recovered a metal arch at the scene, similar to one Jim owned. The device was meant to correct a slight difference in leg length caused by a childhood case of polio, but according to Evelyn, Jim never used it. How did that metal arch end up at the crime scene if Jim never wore it? A watch was also found at the scene, believed to be Jim's watch as far as Evelyn was told. But that same watch was found at home by his wife sometime later, untouched by fire. If Jim's watch was still in the house, then whose watch had been found along that remote logging road. The location of Jim's car itself deserves a little more discussion here, too, because the remoteness matters. The burned station wagon wasn't sitting along the shoulder of Route 9 where a passing driver might easily notice it. According to reporting at the time, the vehicle was located about 600 feet off a discontinued section of Route 9 near Debeck Pond. It was hidden far enough from the road that it couldn't be seen by anyone simply driving by. When the anonymous caller first reported the burning car on the morning of April 7, deputies began searching the area almost immediately. They spent the better part of the day combing Route 9 and nearby roads looking for smoke or wreckage, but they didn't find anything. It wasn't until the caller phoned back the next day and gave more precise directions that investigators were able to locate the car. In other words, the person who called knew exactly where the vehicle was. The caller told dispatchers he had been heading out to go fishing beyond Pond when he came across the scene. That very well may be true, but I wonder how did a passerby notice a car hidden hundreds of feet down a discontinued road when trained deputies searching the area couldn't find it after hours of intense searching? The identity of that caller has never been publicly confirmed. At the time, dispatchers reportedly described the man as sounding calm and possibly elderly, though later comments from a Penobscot County lieutenant suggested the caller may have been a man in his 40s. Whether he simply was a witness who happened upon a terrible discovery and didn't want to get any more involved or he was someone who knew more about what happened on that remote stretch of road remains another unanswered piece of Jim Cassidy's story. Jim probably didn't drive himself to that location. He was seen in the Bangor Brewer area roughly 20 miles away sometime on April 5th and investigators were trying to identify two men who had been in that same area around the same time. Evelyn recalls hearing that Jim was actually seen in a vehicle with two men that day. If that sighting is accurate that he was in a car with the guys, she wants to know why he wasn't fighting them. Did he know that people he was with? If Jim was really seen at a gas station in Brewer that day as both reporting and family recollections suggest maybe in the company of two men, is it possible Jim ran out of gas on his road trip to Canada and these men presented themselves as helpful strangers only to reveal their true intentions later. It's a stretch given everything we know about the circumstances of this case this doesn't feel like a crime committed by strangers on a whim and besides Jim was always prepared. Don't run out of gas. Even one of them. Each of these details sits somewhere between coincidence and clue. Individually, they might be red herrings, or they might be pieces of a larger puzzle that investigators are still assembling. Without the full picture, it's impossible to know which is which. That uncertainty is exactly what has kept Jim Cassidy's story unresolved for half a century. Jim had a natural curiosity and a knack for figuring things out. He was a man of many talents. He's just one of those guys. It doesn't even have to pick up a book. He could just figure things out and whatnot. He's just very good at what he did, whether it be mechanical things or wooden things and whatnot. Well, Jim, he used to play the guitar, and he had a little rack or something where he could play the motor, we're going the same time. And he would go all around the country playing for dances. And he used his money so he could go to teachers college. The people closest to him say Jim never carried himself like he was above anybody else. He was a calm, steady, presence, content to be in the background. But who could also bring a group together? He had a great characteristic about him that everybody was equal. They'd come to Canada. He'd bring his boys, his three boys. And his wife and family in a town nearby, so sometimes he'd drop her off. But the boys, you know, sons always came to the farm. And nobody was the big shot with Jim, right? I was just as important to my daughter as his father. Like everybody just, he could do that somehow. After Jim died, life for his family changed in ways that can't really be measured. Because we had a mom that did the best she can do to raise three boys on her own and raise a household. And you keep a roof over our head and keep food in our stomachs and whatnot. Ken went to live in Canada for some time after his dad's death, being there gave him the gift of connecting with his father through the legacy of their family farm. To actually sit there and do the work that my father and my uncles did with me were younger, washing the cows down, putting their milkers on them. And then within an hour, so I'd have to go back in the house, get cleaned up, and then go outside with the school bus to go to Hampton. So I have the experience and some of the knowledge that was actually passed on from living the life that my father did when he was younger. He plans to retire there on a plot of land overlooking the interval land his father once worked. And my family tells me your home is here. I've left it up to you so much that I bought it. I bought a piece of property back in 2019. And it's a five acre lot. It's only two miles from the farm. But I can actually oversee the farm for my mad. The questions about what happened to his father have never really gone away. There are quiet moments when Ken's mind drifts back to the mystery that has followed his family for decades. I've got my own tractor, and I've got my own field, and I cut my field, and I look around in wonder. It's just your mind wanders at time, and I'm an over-the-road truck driver, too. So when I'm on the road, I have a lot of time to think. And just early in the morning is when you wake up, and that starts to roam in your head, different things. And like many families connected to unsolved cases, what they want most isn't necessarily punishment. It's answers. You wonder, if it would make a difference tonight? Maybe it would. And that could be proud of knowing that man. And I thought I had really nothing to do with this, and he was forced to do it. So I would probably feel better knowing that somebody else forced him to do it than he did this on his own. Mostly I'd like to know what happened. I'm able to say, and maybe publicly even, you know? This is what happened. Jim didn't do it. I knew he didn't do it then, and now I can prove it, right? That would be amazing. Justice is another thing that doesn't bring much joy, right? The joy remains in their memories of when their family was whole. I stay down in Boston one summer. The Jim and Arthur back forth. And Jim at night, he did work a lot. But like in the day, he let me have his car. I'd go all around Brooklyn, and you know, a little country pumpkin driving around Brooklyn. And always in Sunday, we'd go for a drive. And then we'd go for ice cream at night. You know, I thought he was great. We had a great wife together. I remember the time at night, time, I couldn't wait to kiss my father, and she just made her night to go to bed. All three of us did, which is one of us. We love their father enough. If you have information about this case, no matter how small it may seem, please contact the main state police major crimes unit north at 207-973-3750, or use their toll-free line at 1-800-432-7381. You can also submit information anonymously by using the form linked in the description of this episode. Crime Junkie fan club members got to hear both parts of James Cassidy's story, Add Free in the App. And starting next week, you can get all the episodes of Dark Down East in the Crime Junkie fan club app, Add Free, the very same day they go live everywhere else. Find it in the App Store, and in the show description for this episode. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdown East.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Dark Down East. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones, and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East. Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Adia Chuck. I think Chuck would approve.