BAR HARBOR (AP) – A former state human services caseworker charged with the January bludgeon murder of an 83-year-old retired professor in Southwest Harbor is no stranger to turmoil.

Michelle Mills, 37, had a difficult childhood, her adoptive father was convicted last month of murder and her decade-long marriage ended three months ago after her husband got into trouble with the law, the Bangor Daily News reported.

A dropout from Mount Desert Island Regional High School, Mills earned her general equivalency diploma in the 1987, the year she would have graduated, and earned a degree a decade later from the University of Maine, where she majored in social work.

She was employed for a year and a half as a caseworker with the Department of Human Services in Bangor.

Mills has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Jacqueline Evans, who apparently was beaten with a ceramic gargoyle in her home and left to die. Mills was being held without bail at the Hancock County Jail in Ellsworth.

Mills’ mother, Jean Young, and her adoptive father, David Grant, married as teenagers, according to Young’s family friend and attorney Steven Juskewitch, who said the marriage was rocky.

“It was a terrible time for Jean,” he said, pointing to Grant’s record of violence stretching from assault and rape convictions in the 1980s to his recent conviction for the 2004 murder of his 74-year-old mother-in-law, Janet Hagerthy, in Farmingdale.

“David Grant is a person who has earned the fear that he’s generated in other people,” Juskewitch said. “(Michelle) did not get along with her (adoptive father).”

Despite the turmoil at home, friends and teachers had fond memories of Mills during her early childhood.

“I’ve known her pretty much since she was a little girl. She was the sweetest thing you ever saw,” Peter Alley, a family friend and former neighbor, said this week. “I find it hard to believe she’s capable of that.”

When Mills was 12, her mother and Grant were divorced. She unofficially changed her last name, calling herself “MacLeod” after her biological father, Robin MacLeod, about the time she entered high school, Juskewitch said.

In 1995 Mills married Peter Mills, who was more than a decade her senior, and the couple – who have no children together – moved to Sarasota, Fla. They moved back to Maine in 2004 and separated shortly thereafter, according to Juskewitch, and divorced in March.

In February, not long after Evans’ slaying, Peter Mills was indicted on 22 counts that included charges of gross sexual assault for incidents that allegedly occurred last summer. The indictment alleged that Mills drugged and raped the female victims. He has a co-defendant, Stephanie Stark, 44, of Bar Harbor.

Bar Harbor Police Chief Nate Young said the investigation of these incidents is continuing and he would neither confirm nor deny whether Michelle Mills was part of that investigation.

Juskewitch suggested that the murder case against Mills lacks a motive.

According to a police affidavit, Evans and Mills had a phone argument Jan. 11 in which Mills claimed that Evans owed her money. Evans had hired Mills to care for a sick friend, Dari Burke, and had paid Mills $11,000 to work from Thanksgiving through the end of the year, investigators said.

Juskewitch quoted Mills as saying that the $11,000 was used for paying off bills, fixing her car and being “very generous with friends and family at Christmastime.”

The attorney said it would make no sense for Mills to kill her employer’s benefactor.

“This is a lot like killing the goose that laid the golden egg,” he said. “There are more questions than answers at this point.”