By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

It’s the worst job for a reporter, interviewing the family of someone who’s died.

“I hate it,” said Christine Young, a longtime Maine journalist who has worked for WMTW-TV and the Sun Journal. “It’s the worst.”

However, death and survivors are at the core of her first book, a retelling and analysis of the 2003 church poisoning in New Sweden.

It’s titled “A Bitter Brew: Faith, Power and Poison in a Small New England Town.”

“It was the most painful thing I have ever done in my life,” Young said of the work, trying to crack the insular community of just over 600 people outside Caribou.

During her yearlong effort, Young was shunned, accepted by a few and shunned again.

“I still don’t know what happened,” she said of several sources who gave interviews, then abruptly cut off contact.

However, their interviews became the centerpiece of the book.

The 252-page “A Bitter Brew” begins with the events of April 27, 2003.

Young re-creates the Sunday morning, detailing the movements of middle-aged and elderly churchgoers as they gather, pray and meet after the service. As a group, they munch on tuna sandwiches and, unknowingly, drink coffee laced with arsenic.

Then slowly, 16 people fall dangerously ill.

At first, they become nauseated. However, their illnesses quickly worsen until, one by one, they begin to overwhelm Caribou’s tiny hospital.

Step by step, Young takes readers through the next days as one of the sick people, Reid Morrill, dies and health officials discover the poison.

Then, she follows the apparent suicide of a church member, Daniel Bondeson, whom many came to believe was part of a murderous conspiracy.

The rest of the book tries to understand why it happened and who did it.

Maine police have yet to close the case.

“We do not believe Bondeson acted alone,” Steve McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety, said Wednesday.

It’s Young’s contention that Bondeson did it by himself.

She believes Bondeson was mentally ill. And she thinks his sister, Norma Bondeson, was unfairly targeted by the close-knit congregation – and the police followed.

As she quotes one of the victims, Lester Beaupre, “The detectives cried wolf, and now they can’t find the wolf.”

In part, Young illustrates the investigators with composite characters. In imaginary conversations, they chat about an affair with a female newspaper reporter and mull over the evidence.

There was never any evidence that Bondeson was part of a conspiracy, Young said Wednesday, only his letter, which she managed to read during her research for the book.

She does not reproduce the letter in her book. Instead, she describes police reaction to a passage.

According to Young, the letter began by repeating, “I acted alone.”

His letter was so forceful that the police didn’t believe it, she said.

Attention was turned to Norma, who angered many people within the congregation.

A New Sweden native who left, had an Air Force career and returned home in her 50s, she was suspect by many when she returned.

They turned against her, Young said.

“It happened to me, too,” said the author.

One of the many reporters, both local and national, to cover the case, Young returned periodically after the poisoning. Eventually, she spent a month there.

Young never managed to get all of the interviews she wanted.

She became marked as another reporter, another person who wanted to know more about their community than they were willing to share, she said.

“Everybody is related to everybody, really,” said Young. At almost every house she went to, she was turned away.

The story – of arsenic and a church congregation – kept her going.

“It’s just straight out of Agatha Christie,” said Young, echoing her book’s dust jacket. “I knew that I would get it done.”