The next meeting will be Nov. 18.

HEBRON — Retired Trooper Percy Turner recently recounted the details of a 77-year-old murder mystery at a special presentation before the Hebron Historical Society. 

The double-homicides of Dr. James Littlefield and his wife, Lydia, in the nearby town of Paris made national news in 1937 when Lydia’s body was discovered in the doctor’s car in New Jersey, having been driven there by local 17-year-old Paul Dwyer.

Dwyer would give authorities several different versions how the murders came to pass, but his initial admission of guilt along, with the physical evidence of blood in the couple’s bathroom on Paris Hill, built a conviction that landed him in the Maine State Prison.

According to Dwyer, Mrs. Littlefield was lured into the car with a contrived story to meet her husband in Boston, where he supposedly went by train after hitting two people and leaving them by the roadside.

Dwyer told police that he eventually strangled her while stopped by a road in New Gloucester.

Soon after starting his sentence, Dwyer changed his story, claiming that his girlfriend’s father, Deputy Sheriff Francis Carroll, was the murderer.

The scenario for this claim was that Carroll had been rumored to be (and substantiated in letters from his daughter) guilty of an incestuous relationship with her. Fearing that Dr. Littlefield was about to make this information public, Dwyer said Carroll committed the murders.

After that, according to Dwyer, Carroll and Dwyer supposedly went on a road trip, with Dwyer ending up in New Jersey.

Carroll was arrested on the incest charge, during which time a murder case was built against him.

A jury believed the revised story of Carroll’s involvement, so he and Dwyer were both convicted of the same crime and both served years in prison at the same time.

In 1950 a Superior Court justice heard Carroll’s petition for a new trial and, based on “inadmissible evidence and hearsay,” the court ordered Carroll released. Dwyer was released in 1959 when eligible for parole.

The next society meeting will feature Cindy Creps of Hebron’s Meadow Ridge Perennial Farm speaking on growing cut flowers. That presentation will begin at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 18, at the Town Office, 351 Paris Road. The public is invited.