Mark LaFlamme: Not all bogeymen wear horns

Christopher Michael Good isn’t much to look at.

A redhead, his hair is receding to the middle of his scalp and his beard has gone mostly white. His eyes are evenly spaced, his nose doesn’t stand out in any way and his overall appearance is one of a man who is getting on in years, and maybe some of those years were hard ones.

He stands 5 feet, 11 inches tall and weighs in around 160 pounds, so he’s about as average as you can get, sizewise. A fairly inconspicuous fellow, is 57-year-old Christopher M. Good. You might glance at him if you passed him on the street, but you probably wouldn’t give him a second look. Why would you? Here is just an average man with average looks doing not much at all to capture your attention.

Except maybe you SHOULD pay closer attention. Last week, Good was accused of rampaging his way down Main Street in Lewiston, exposing himself to anyone in sight before trying to force his way into a woman’s car, still exposed and with extreme aggression.

If not for the quick actions of the woman, and for the intervention of police and others on the crowded downtown street, things might have gone very badly. Christopher Good, after all, does have a history of taking things to the extreme.

In 2021, Good turned on a woman, a mental health worker, who had been giving him a ride to his Augusta home. According to court accounts, Good punched the lady. Groped her. Told her he was going to rape her and make her bleed.

Good then grabbed the steering wheel and tried to crash the car, presumably so he could make good on those threats. The woman fought him the best she could, but her efforts might have been in vain had it not been for a group of construction workers who rushed to her aid.

The woman was lucky. I suspect she knows it.

Good was hauled off, thrown in jail and in the spring of 2022 and sentenced to five years in prison for the attack — with all but two of those years suspended.

He didn’t serve the full two years, clearly, because in recent weeks, he had been freely roaming around Lewiston where he was at least once reported to be harassing people on the street. After receiving one such report, police arrested Good and charged him with violating conditions of the probation that was set when he was freed from prison over the summer.

Back to jail Good went, but not for very long, obviously, because last week he was out and about and once again raising his personal brand of hell on Main Street in Lewiston.

Someone should ask why Good was released so quickly from jail given his violent history — and believe me, this cat’s criminal record is among the longest I’ve seen — but that’s not the point I’m trying to make at the moment.

The point is this: Much has been said about all the random shootings in Lewiston over the summer as hardcore drug runners, many from out of state, run amok and fling brass all over the downtown.

It’s a troubling matter, those shootings, no doubt about it. But the fact is, if someone you love isn’t hanging out in drug circles here in the downtown, they’re probably not going to have a problem. The dangers down there are rather easy to spot.

But a man like Christopher Good doesn’t look like much trouble at all. You might see him strolling down the sidewalk when you’re stopped at a traffic light in the middle of an afternoon. He might approach your car as you’re sitting at an intersection and you’d be apt to think: “Why, this guy doesn’t look like any threat to me. No reason I shouldn’t roll down my window and see what he needs.”

People like Christopher Good don’t walk around sporting horns, fangs and a long pointy tail to announce their wicked thoughts. They don’t foam at the mouth and shuffle along hunched over like proper horror movie villains. And it’s for this reason that I worry about people like Good more than most when my wife is out running her errands or when my daughter is on a drive to Lewiston.

People like Good, so inconspicuous that they’re practically invisible, don’t cause inner alarms to sound. Their sad faces or wan smiles might be just enough to prompt the average person to let their guard down, and there aren’t always cops or construction workers around to rush to the rescue.

I can’t even guess how many of the crimes I’ve covered — rapes, mainly, but vicious murders, too — involved culprits who looked so ordinary that it was no trick for them at all to gain trust from their unwary victims.

Patrick J. Maher didn’t look like a guy you had to worry about much, but in the wee hours of the morning in February 2021, he sneaked through a window of a family home in Turner and stabbed a husband and wife to death.

My suggestion isn’t that you go about mistrusting plain looking people but that you maintain situational awareness in ALL circumstances and never assume the good intentions of a stranger.

As for Good, what went down on Main Street last week was as predictable as a tide. This is a man who has spent as much time in prison as he has spent out.

His adult criminal career started in the 1980s when he began getting arrested regularly for crimes such as theft and criminal trespass. But before the decade was out, his crimes had escalated to robbery and terrorizing and then, in the early 1990s, he was pinched for the first time on charge of unlawful sexual contact — a charge that would reappear in later decades.

There have been numerous counts of terrorizing, indecent conduct, criminal threatening with dangerous weapons. Arrests for assault have piled up high and Good was charged with sex crimes again in 2015 and 2021.

Most of Good’s bad deeds have been adjudicated in the courts without much fanfare. Others were heinous enough, or bizarre enough to garner media attention.

In 2010, Good was arrested for threatening a clerk with a knife after she had caught him shoplifting at the “exotic supercenter” in Bangor. He did 18 months for that one, but then was free again to pick up where he left off.

The list of Good’s crimes just goes on and on but if you were to spot him out for a walk on Pine Street one afternoon, it’s doubtful you would suspect such a thing. You wouldn’t make much of him at all, really. He’s just so ordinary looking and easy to dismiss.

By the time Good savagely attacked the mental health worker in Augusta in 2021, he was by all definitions a seasoned criminal who had done time in Warren and Windham state prisons, and at least two county jails.

It’s an impressive criminal record, all right, and yet after Lewiston police picked up Good for resuming his old behavior on Lisbon Street just weeks ago, he was nonetheless freed by the courts a short time later, this nondescript fellow you wouldn’t give a second look if you happened upon him on the street.

Dangerous people like this don’t sport devil horns and pointy tails, it’s true.

But some of them sure work hard enough to deserve them.