By Carolyn Thompson, ASSOCIATED PRESS
MACHIAS, N.Y. -- For nearly 30 years, June Marie Gordon’s girlhood treasures were consigned to a brown cardboard box on a police station shelf, in a mournful limbo between her too-short life and violent death.
A ragged stuffed Snoopy dog, saved birthday cards and a pastel pink comb rested among yellowing police files that documented the fruitless search for Gordon’s killer.
Last year, state police investigator John Wolf dusted off the box for another look into the 18-year-old mother’s death. Within months, he was sitting across a table from Charles Sullivan, Gordon’s long-ago suitor, taking his confession.
On Monday, Sullivan, now 49, will be sentenced to 8 1/3 to 25 years in prison for manslaughter.
Gordon’s mother, Elsie Card, always knew Sullivan was guilty. She never doubted that the persistent 19-year-old who had badgered her daughter with unwelcome advances was the one who knocked her unconscious in her home in 1974.
She never doubted that it was Sullivan who, leaving Gordon’s 4-month-old daughter alone in the house, took the woman to a gravel pit, fired a shotgun into her head and covered her body with twigs and leaves, where it would remain for 19 agonizing months.
Card had sat next to her daughter when she told Sullivan she didn’t want his ring. Gordon had just left a marriage that began when she was 16 and had produced baby Rhonda Ann. She wasn’t ready for a new relationship. Sullivan wouldn’t hear it. Card had to throw him out of their house one night when he refused to leave.
Investigators had a feeling about Sullivan, too, and had questioned him more than once. He acknowledged he’d been one of the last people to see Gordon on Oct. 5, 1974, but insisted he had nothing to do with the killing. With no witnesses and little evidence from a body long exposed to the elements, police had nothing to act on.
DNA technology, the modern-day smoking gun, was years off.
“There was nothing to link him to the crime other than his link to the victim,” said retired investigator Tom Stofer, who was one of the first officers on the case.
“They pounded until every lead was gone,” said Senior Investigator John Ensell.
Last year, Wolf began to work his way through a list of people mentioned in the police files, mostly old friends and acquaintances of Gordon. He found that Sullivan, third on the list, moved in with his girlfriend a few years earlier -- just across the street from where the victim had lived.
Time had taken its toll on Sullivan, who at 5-foot-7 weighed 300 pounds and was diabetic and unemployed. He was awaiting sentencing on a charge of sexually abusing a young girl, the same charge he pleaded guilty to in another case in 1993.
At first, Sullivan told Wolf he didn’t recall Gordon or the murder that had shaken tiny Machias, a town of 2,000 about 50 miles south of Buffalo.
“Oh yeah, I do remember something about that,” he would eventually acknowledge.
Wolf told Sullivan about a new polygraph test. Sullivan could clear his name once and for all if he would take it, the investigator said.
Sullivan agreed.
“He has basically beaten the system for 28 years,” Ensell said, explaining Sullivan’s cooperation. “He’s gone through several interviews, didn’t suffer any consequences from it, and this is going to be no different from the other ones.”
On Sept. 17, Sullivan drove himself to the state police barracks in Machias.
Investigators sensed he was no longer the impenetrable teenager he had been. He had experienced health problems, the death of his mother.
“What we had going for us after 28 years is that Charles Sullivan became vulnerable,” Ensell said.
“Our intent was to bring out his emotions from 1974. We basically brought out ... that someday he will meet his maker, that he’s got issues in his life that he’s got to come forward on,” Ensell said.
After nearly a full day at the station, a weeping Sullivan admitted attacking Gordon after she had spurned him for the last time. Initially charged with second-degree murder, Sullivan pleaded guilty to manslaughter under a plea deal.
“Those defenses that he’s had up for the last 28 years just fell apart,” Ensell said.
Word of the confession elated Card, who is now 69.
“I could have danced a jig,” she said.
Not a day goes by when Card doesn’t think about Gordon, “this little girl, my sweetheart.” She remembers playing cards and doing crafts with her daughter, and proudly watching her dote on Rhonda Ann, who was raised by her father and now lives in Maryland.
Messages left for Rhonda Ann by The Associated Press were not returned.
Card said she won’t be in the courthouse Monday when Sullivan is sentenced.
“I would lose it,” she said from her home in Hanover, Pa.
“Death is too good for him,” she said. “I am so angry with him and I just hate him so much. You’re supposed to forgive people but right now I’m not in a forgiving mood.”
Looking back, Wolf believes Sullivan may have been ready to unburden himself of the secret he had carried for so long when he showed up at the barracks that September day.
“His whole demeanor changed (after confessing). He was more relaxed,” Wolf said.
“Maybe he just wore out,” offered Stofer. “Who knows?”