Up to 1984, Maine hadn’t seen a crime or a trial like it.

John Lane claimed Angela Palmer was a demon. Cynthia Palmer, Angela’s mother, claimed she didn’t help Lane kill her little girl.

Listening to the Auburn couple on trial, accused of burning her daughter to death in an oven after propping a chair against the door to trap the 4-year-old inside, defense attorney Elliott Epstein decided to write a book.

To put aside the horror and understand the why.

Epstein copied court transcripts, medical records, a jail log, anything that had been made public. He interviewed teachers, firefighters, jail guards, judges and even Palmer. The result is a true-crime manuscript, “Lucifer’s Child.”

He thinks he has an understanding of what happened that day, what led up to it and – perhaps shockingly – some sympathy for the defendants.
Angela was murdered 25 years ago on Oct. 27 in an apartment at 317 Main St. The trial was held in Bangor a year later.

“At the time, it was perhaps the most horrible crime anyone could remember,” Epstein said.

People from all over the country sent letters to the judge, the jail, lawyers and the local newspaper, he said. They wrote things like, “I hope they hurry up and burn you on the gallows” and “We hear of it, and tears come to our eyes, and our whole being sags with the weight of the atrocity.”

There was “anger and confusion at the system that would give these people the rights all people are entitled to: trial by jury, presumed innocence,” Epstein said.
His own small role in the trial had been to represent a mental health agency that counseled Lane years earlier and didn’t want to turn its records over.

Superior Court Judge Bruce Chandler found Lane guilty of murder and gave him a life sentence. Palmer was acquitted on a manslaughter charge.
Afterward, in interviews, police and firefighters told Epstein how traumatic it was to find Angela’s body. From her teachers, he heard that the little girl was “sweet, but kind of clingy and needy.”

Judge Chandler told Epstein that when an acquaintance congratulated the judge on having “the guts to impose a punishment like that,” Chandler had replied: “You don’t understand at all. It would have taken greater guts to find him not guilty.”

“He told me, in the end, he concluded Cynthia Palmer was guilty of nothing except falling in love with John Lane,” Epstein said.
Palmer was pretty candid when he talked to her.

“There wasn’t much question in my mind she had suffered bad abuse from any number of men,” Epstein said.
She and Lane had been together less than two months, after meeting at a lower Lisbon Street club in Lewiston.

“John didn’t just go off the deep end suddenly,” Epstein said. “For about a week beforehand he had been acting more and more irrationally and angrily as he kind of unraveled mentally. So she not only moved in with him when she hardly knew him, but she didn’t act to get out of there when he began to act in a bizarre and scary fashion. Again, that’s very typical of an abused woman. They cling to that relationship, regardless of how a man’s acting.”

Part of Palmer’s defense was that Lane had forced medication down her throat, sedating her and leaving her unable to rescue Angela, and that when faced with abuse, she would disassociate, Epstein said, “into some mental retreat. I think she often thought of it as being next to a lake or behind a brick wall.”

Alan Stone, a local lawyer who represented Palmer, told Epstein he hadn’t wanted to take the case. He became the court-appointed counsel anyway.

“He was worried about his reputation; he was afraid his wife wouldn’t talk to him,” Epstein said. “He ended up throwing himself into it, body and soul.”

Epstein, a newspaper reporter early in his career, said he has written several drafts of the manuscript over the years and hopes to find an agent, the first step toward publishing. He acknowledged that the subject matter might upset some people in the community who would rather forget.

“A lot of what’s interwoven in this book are the kinds of changes that were going on in the world while this was happening,” Epstein said.

Changes such as security. Court officials, still shaken after a California state judge was kidnapped from his courtroom and killed, were offered armed escorts. People attending the trial had to walk through metal detectors, which wasn’t routine back then.

The insanity defense – used by Lane and President Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassin John Hinckley Jr. – was more controversial than it is today. So was treatment of the mentally ill.

Epstein’s test readers have had one of two reactions to the manuscript.

“One is, ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ The other is, ‘I couldn’t pick it up,'” said Epstein, half of the law firm Pickus & Epstein.

As to understanding the why of the crime, he said he feels like he got close.

“These were two people that were so emotionally damaged from an early age,” Epstein said. “They were handicapped from making sound and rational decisions.”
It was hard to come to grips with feeling “a certain amount of sympathy by the end,” he said.

Cynthia ultimately lost custody of her older daughter, Sarrah, 5, at the time of Angela’s murder. Epstein presumes she was placed for adoption. The mother has since dropped out of sight, he said.

Not long ago, he called the Maine State Prison to check on Lane. He’s still there, serving out the life sentence.

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