The request was a simple one. A nice author lady from down Portland way asked if she could look at the file I kept on a cold murder case out of Lewiston. 

Why, sure, I told the nice author lady. Just give me a minute to track down that old file and by golly, it’s yours.

Six weeks later, I’m still sending her apologetic notes. 

“Haven’t found it yet,” I’ll write. “I thought it would be in that old box behind the water heater, but nope. That box was full of Halloween decorations.” 

In my defense, let me tell you a couple things about the hundreds and hundreds of file folders I have on crime and other matters of local interest dating back to the early ’90s. 

For one thing, those files are presently scattered all over the place. A few years ago, some cruel-hearted soul decided to sell the old Sun Journal building on Park Street and so everything I had accumulated in and around my desk for near 30 years went first into boxes and then into the back of my truck. 

All that stuff lived in the back of my truck for an entire summer, as I recall, and for part of the autumn. Then they were moved in haste into an empty room inside a house we don’t currently live in. 

In search of a single file, I had to go digging through a whole lot of boxes and a whole lot of memories came flapping out like deranged moths to greet me.

In the first box, I found a giant, latex bat that used to hang from a shelf above my desk on Park Street. Next to that was an alien in a jar, a roll of faux barbed wire, a foam sign that says “Morgue” on it, a duck head that quacks when you squeeze its bill, a yellow fuzzy thing that makes a “boing, boing” sound when you bounce it up and down, some more rats, a roll of crime scene tape and various oddities, including a little windup ice cream truck that still gives me nightmares. 

So, my search for that file folder was delayed in the first place because I found so much stuff that I wanted to play with. That happened with the second box and the third one, too, but eventually, I found some boxes with files inside them and so play time was over.

What was I looking for again?

Oh, right. The author in question was looking for my file on a murder victim from the 1970s whose name starts with M, so that’s where I began my search.

Under M, I found all kinds of files. One was “Murder-for-Hire Plot,” because, yes, we actually had one of those in 1997. It didn’t go well for the planners. 

There’s a folder called “Mad Dog,” containing correspondence with a street source I’ve since lost track of. Where you at, Mad Dog?

There’s a folder labeled “Murphy, Lucas” that holds a lot of sad information about a teenager who jumped into the icy Androscoggin River and died in November of 1996. 

I found a folder labeled “Massachusetts to Maine Cocaine Pipeline,” another called “Mill Fires” and a really fat folder titled “Massage,” containing a lot of really fun information — you younglings may not remember it, but in 1997 and 1998, Lewiston police were always raiding massage parlors and making sweeping prostitution arrests. There was talk, at the time, that investigators had uncovered a massive list of prominent locals who had frequented these illicit massage parlors.

I never saw the list so you can exhale now.

Here’s another M folder, this one fattened to the point of bursting. The title: “Maine Mutant!” with an exclamation point to inform you just how exciting this one is going to be. 

As I sat there squatting on the dusty floor in search of one specific folder, I found myself instead drifting back in time and recalling the now faded glory of some of these old stories. Even you whippersnappers may remember the mysterious beast that was found dead at the side of a Turner road in the summer of 1996.

The Maine Mutant, also known in some circles as The Turner Beast, was a good friend to me on a beat that isn’t always exciting. That story got so big, I was doing interviews every day with media from around the world. The History Channel sent up a crew and dragged me out into the woods to film their special about the beast for their series, “Monsterquest.” 

Good times. And just never you mind the fact that the creature turned out to be a plain old dog.  

But it wasn’t the Maine Mutant file I was after.

The folder I sought wasn’t under M where it was supposed to be, so I kept digging. And as I dug, I got a glimpse of a much younger me who had approached his new career with great zeal and optimism. 

Brothers, I had a file for everything! If I wrote a single story about something, that younger me insisted that something have its own file. To get to the fun stuff in my files, I had to paw through folders with prosaic titles like “911 Committee,” “Joint Police Efforts,” “U.S. Attorney Press Releases” and (yawn) “City Council Meetings.” 

Stay awake long enough to move past those, though, and you’ll find plenty of excitement. Take a thumb through my “Exotic Dancing” folder and you may find yourself sweating and blushing a little bit. Have a look at “Raves” and recall a time, right around the year 2000, when Lewiston found itself, weirdly, a mecca for massive youth parties associated mainly with glow sticks, techo music and Ecstasy.  

I also have an “Ecstasy” folder in case you want to read further on this topic.

Here’s a folder titled “Crime Wave, 1995!” which catalogs a whole bunch of home invasions, drive-by shootings, gang initiations, general beat downs and vicious knife attacks that occurred during that bloody year. 

Inside the crumbling boxes are folders with action-adventure titles such as “Crack Crime,” “Auburn Mall Stabbing,” “Hammer Beating,” “Hammer Beating II,” “Cabbie Slashing,” and “April Robberies 96,” because in April of 1996, there were so many youth home invasions and such, I had to dedicate an entire folder to that one month alone. 

At one point during my search, I decided to count how many folders there were for local murder cases over the years, but when the count started reaching double digits, I quit. I get the feeling that the fresh-faced younger me didn’t expect to cover so many killings in this small community when he took the job. In fact, there is a folder in there titled simply “Murder,” as though one folder was all I would need to cover local killings.

I have a folder called “Secrets” that I don’t recall creating. I couldn’t wait to dig into that one and see what secrets I’d unveiled when I was a hard-charging newcomer on the job. Unfortunately, the folder is empty, which seems kind of profound if you think about it enough. 

Instead of spending minutes finding the folder that was requested, I spent hours reminiscing over old cases that I’d completely forgotten about. I sat on that cold floor ruminating over handwritten notes I’d taken on bar napkins, restaurant menus, parking tickets and, in one case, a McDonald’s burger wrapper. So many names, phone numbers and potential clues to ancient crimes. 

All in all, my files are spread across maybe five boxes in three or four different locations. There are some in an upper room used for storage in one house, a musty corner of a dark basement in another. I keep finding more boxes in old trunks, closets and crawl spaces. 

And what am I to do with these relics from a different time? Newspaper archives, the World Wide Web and programs like Evernote have pretty much rendered the contents of those file folders obsolete. I don’t go scrounging through my old paper files when I need a scrap of information these days, I go to the internet. 

Chances are good that before long, all of those boxes with all of those notes and all of those memories are going to be loaded into the truck, driven to the dump and discarded once and for all. They’ll be burned or buried or whatever it is they do to trash at the landfill these days and that will be that. Three decades of meticulous and sometimes drunken note keeping will be gone forever. 

I’ve already lost the old Sun Journal press machine, my desk with all its ghoulish decor and that big, beautiful building on Park Street. Why not toss the rest and make it a clean sweep? 

In the meantime, the search goes on. I haven’t found that folder for the nice author lady in Portland, but I’m still looking.

I recently spotted a half-rotted box in the basement behind the snow blower. 

I feel pretty good about that box. Surely, THIS is where that file is at.