It was December, maybe 10 years ago. Neither David Brooks nor Dan Michel could remember the exact date.

While a distraught young man’s brother pleaded with him not to do it, the young man raised a rifle, said “I love you” and shot himself in front of the two officers.

“We couldn’t stop him; we couldn’t stop him,” said Lisbon Chief Brooks. He paused.

“Thinking back on all this is difficult.”

“I can still hear his brother, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,'” said Lisbon Lt. Michel. “Then boom! with a rifle. I can still see that. I think it was ’95 for some reason. Dates get a little fuzzy. Pictures don’t.”

Over long careers responding to thousands of calls for help and investigating too many crimes to count, certain cases – horrifying or sad, unsolved, funny or rewarding – stand out.

Brooks and Michel were among eight police officers, some of the longest-serving in western Maine, to recently talk with the Sun Journal about the early days of their careers and the cases that have stayed with them.

Androscoggin County Sheriff Guy Desjardins caught a pair of bank robbers on Christmas eve in the late 1970s, the first and only time he ever pulled his weapon on someone.

Richard Pickett was a state trooper newly assigned to the criminal division of the Oxford County District Attorney’s Office when allegations of sexual abuse in a house where a woman lived with her two daughters led to one of the largest indictments the county had ever seen.

Among the 11 charged: The mother of the 12- and 14-year-old girls and the string of strange men she had over.

“She would do sexual favors for them for firewood, I mean all kinds of bizarre things,” said Pickett, now chief in Dixfield. “As their interest went from her to the girls, she didn’t do anything to protect them.”

Not everyone was convicted, but Pickett got the daughters out of the house.

“I’ve always hoped in my mind that maybe they’ve made out OK,” he said.

Carrabassett Valley Chief Ron Moody remembers looking for Kurt Newton. The 4-year-old went missing from a campground near the Canadian border in September 1975.

“We’d flown all kinds of special planes up there, infrared planes that had come from Vietnam. It’s all wilderness and woods and mountains, tough terrain. We had thousands of people searching up there, probably the biggest search that’s ever been done in the state of Maine,” Moody said.

Kurt was never found. Some suspected foul play; others thought he was snatched by a bear. Officers still work the case.

Pickett put off retirement from the state police for two years hoping detectives could solve the murder of Crystal Perry in Bridgton and the disappearance of Kim Moreau in Jay.

He was the primary officer the night of the Perry homicide. In 1994, the 30-year-old was brutally attacked and killed while her daughter was in the next room. Her murder was solved with a DNA match this year. Pickett was assigned to the Moreau case three months after the 17-year-old went missing in 1986. It’s still open.

“It just really irritates me to know that somebody in that area, probably more than one (person), knows exactly what happened, but they’re scared to death to say anything because of who’s involved,” Pickett said.

For Farmington Chief Richard Caton III and Franklin County Sheriff Dennis Pike, the unsolved murder of a Farmington girl killed in 1971 nags at them. Judith Hand disappeared after school only to be found 13 days later in a sawdust pile, her body badly decomposed.

Caton read the file as a detective and followed up on tips. The case passed to a state police detective he still talks to.

Pike said he thinks about it a lot. He was working the Friday night her family reported her missing.

“I had great hopes we would have (the slayings of Hand and of Butch Weed, who was killed in his Wilton home Dec. 23, 2003) resolved before my career was over or before I moved on. I still have hopes, but certainly the Hand case is so ancient now that unless someone probably confessed on their death bed – if they’re even still alive – tragically (it) will go unresolved,” Pike said.

Lurking in the middle of the night

Some cases stand out for the sheer absurdity, like the Lisbon bank robber who asked a teller for an extra $25 to cover the bail fee. Or the thief in Lewiston who broke into a bunch of cars on Westminster Street to steal radios, then left his wallet under the dash.

“There’s a lot of dumb criminal stories, that’s probably why we’re in business. Some are not the smartest in the world,” said Lewiston Chief William Welch.

He had a tough one in the mid-1980s when kids tore up the Mount Hope Cemetery on Halloween night, tipping stones and scrawling graffiti, some of it satanic.

“To go up there the day after and watch wives and mothers look at the gravestones that were overturned and see the devastation and the hurt that they were feeling just was a driving force,” Welch said.

The investigation went on for months. A resource officer in the high school at the time, he talked to several classes, describing the damage and heartbreak. After one talk, two girls came forward. It had been their boyfriends.

“They just couldn’t live with themselves anymore,” he said.

One Christmastime, Moody, the Carrabassett Valley chief, got a complaint of people moving around inside a ski shop at 2 a.m. The building was under construction and not secure. Not finding anyone, he went downstairs and started opening ski lockers. Just as he opened one, two teenagers burst out.

“They were scared, I was scared, we were all scared,” Moody said. The teens got trotted back to their parents.