The Lewiston father shot dead by his son. The massacre in Newry. The unsolved disappearance of a Jay woman. Detective Mark Lopez has been involved in some of the area’s most notorious cases. He says it’s time for a change.

They’re plain old houses to everyone else.

To Mark Lopez, the places he passes, even on a simple bus trip to coach a JV basketball game, remind him of infamous crime scenes. He says it’s how he marks the miles.

Homicide. Baby death. Homicide.

There’s no suggestion that it bothers him, just that it’s time for a change.

After 14 years as a State Police detective investigating homicides from Kingfield to Kittery, Lopez has taken the unusual step of asking to be reassigned to traffic duty. Come summer, he’s going to be writing up overweight trucks.

Lopez has handled some of the biggest, most notorious cases in western and central Maine.

Lead investigator on the recent Scott Poirier case, one of the founders of the state’s Evidence Response Team, he doesn’t want to say he’s burned out. But he’s had enough of murder.

Tickets for log book violations and lapsed inspections usually aren’t drawn-out affairs. The work’s quick and, if you’re able to educate drivers, proactive, Lopez said.

He worked the Poirier homicide, a Lewiston man found guilty of killing his father at a birthday party, from November 2006 to last month.

“There was a year and a half I held a case. You’re dealing with this family that was so devastated by a crime,” Lopez said. They’re mad, sad, not entirely sure what they want.

In no small sense, he lives with his work.

He adopted Julie Bullard’s cat, one of the few things to survive the massacre in Newry when Christian Nielsen murdered innkeeper Bullard and three others in 2006.

Lopez saw the friendly, black-and-white pet hanging around the crime scene for two days before bringing it home. The vet told police its name: Killer. Lopez’s kids changed it to Kiki.

‘Bitten by police work’

Lopez, 43, originally from Thomaston, said his mother dated a police officer when he was young, “I was just bitten by police work.” After four years in the Air Force, he joined the State Police as a trooper in 1988, assigned to Franklin County.

Six years in, a sergeant called about a detective opening. Flattering, he thought, but no thanks.

“I pictured myself being a road trooper for 25 years,” Lopez said. After a second sergeant called to prod him, he applied, with some reservations.

“These are the cases that end up on the front page. You make a mistake, you really can’t hide,” he said.

His first homicide was a man killed in Auburn. There have been dozens and dozens of cases since: murders, suicides, accidental deaths, drug overdoses.

Lopez is reluctant to talk about many of them, concerned it brings up bad memories for the families involved. He worked one where a teenage girl set fire to a trailer and killed her roommate. Another, he interviewed the stepfather who murdered and raped his 11-year-old stepdaughter.

Last year, in one unusual streak, he dealt with seven dead bodies in a two-week period.

He also adopted another crime scene cat, that time from a woman who fell down stairs and broke her neck.

The Scott Croteau case helped inspire the creation of the statewide Evidence Response Team, Lopez said. While police searched for days in 1995 for the Lewiston High School football standout, officers seized reams of potential evidence. A random hat, a bed sheet under a bridge, not all of it meticulously catalogued.

“Most of the stuff they collected had absolutely nothing to do with the Croteau case, but what we saw was a chance for evidence to get lost,” Lopez said.

Croteau was eventually found, hanging from a tree in Lewiston, his death ruled a suicide.

ERT members today have classes on how to collect evidence, read wounds, dig up bodies.

“It’s just worked out so much better,” he said.

In his new role as a trooper in Commercial Vehicle Enforcement, Lopez will stay involved with the response team, but maybe not called on as often. Crime scene work has been his favorite part.

In getting ready to leave, Lopez said he felt bad telling the Moreau family that he was coming off the case.

Kim Moreau disappeared 22 years ago in Jay. Lopez told her father, Dick, that he’ll still be a trooper for five years. He can reach out anytime.

“The fortitude of that family is unbelievable,” Lopez said. “You don’t see anger anymore, you just see fate. ‘One of these days, I’m going to find out what happened to Kim.'”

He’ll miss the camaraderie with the other homicide detectives. He won’t miss the cases.

Murder scenes, ‘chalk fairies’

Public Safety spokesman Steve McCausland said detectives typically leave homicide through retirement or promotion to another division.

“His decision that he wanted a voluntary demotion, that is probably fairly unique,” McCausland said.

For the record, Lopez doesn’t consider it a demotion.

The move does come at the same time as another local homicide detective, Jeffrey Linscott, is opting to step down to York County patrolman. They’d gone to the academy together.

“It was a big decision. When he took the plunge, I said, ‘Yeah, I am (too),'” Lopez said. “Jeff said, ‘We started our career on the road, let’s end on the road.'”

Farmington Police Chief Richard Caton III said the news didn’t come as a shock.

“Being on call, especially when they do homicides, going home to get a few hours sleep, has to be hard on the family,” Caton said. Lopez is “a very good people person. He was good at conversing and getting to their level. I’m sure that had to be nothing but an asset as a detective.”

Tuesday night, in front of Woody Hanstein’s “Criminal Law & Criminology” class at the University of Maine at Farmington, Lopez told students he’s never been able to play the yelling, over-the-top cop.

“I can’t sell it. People just start laughing. I have to go the Father Murphy approach,” Lopez said. Saying things like, “Talk to me, what’s this about?” and “Let me help you.”

He told students “chalk fairies,” or tape outlines of dead bodies, are only for police on TV. That sometimes making a seemingly impossible ID is as easy as looking in a back pocket for a wallet. That it’s important not to sully the crime scene: “A victim is only going to get killed once; you can murder a crime scene 100 times.”

He also told students how he got started.

“I thought at the time, it was going to be a mistake, but it’s been a rewarding 14 years,” Lopez said.