The Dennis Dechaine case is a Maine murder prosecution that has run for more than three decades: Dechaine, a Bowdoinham farmer, was convicted in 1989 of kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and murdering 12-year-old Sarah Cherry, and he has maintained his innocence ever since. He has sought a new trial four times and been denied each time, most recently on January 31, 2025. He is serving a life sentence at Maine State Prison and, as of February 27, 2025, has an appeal pending before the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
The 1988 Murder and the Case Against Him
Sarah Cherry was babysitting at the Henkel home in Bowdoin, Maine, on July 6, 1988. Her employer spoke with her around noon and returned at about 3:20 p.m. to find her gone. Searchers found her body two days later in the woods nearby. She had been sexually tortured, bound with yellow rope, gagged with a bandana, and strangled.
Dechaine was arrested the same day Sarah disappeared. He had no criminal record. The case against him was built on circumstantial evidence and on his own shifting statements to police. He first told a couple in the woods he had been fishing, then later testified he had injected himself with drugs and become lost while driving and walking. He admitted lying to hide the drug use. After telling officers his truck keys were in his vehicle, he was found with the keys in his pocket and hid them under a police cruiser seat.
The physical links were these. A car repair receipt and a notebook bearing Dechaine’s name were found at the Henkel house. Yellow rope similar to the cord binding Sarah’s hands was in his truck. A witness heard a vehicle slow near the house around 1:00 p.m. and saw a red truck consistent with his driving north. Sarah’s body was found roughly 400 feet from where his truck had been parked when police picked him up. A Knox County Superior Court jury convicted him in 1989 on kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder charges, and he was sentenced to life.
What the Defense Has Argued
Dechaine’s account is that while he was in the woods using drugs, the real killer stole items from his truck and planted them at the crime scene. His lawyers point to a photograph taken at his arrest that they say shows no fingernail marks on his body, which they argue is inconsistent with the state’s theory that Sarah scratched her attacker while being strangled.
A separate dispute involves the time of death. Later forensic analysis, never admitted at trial, suggested rigor mortis and decomposition markers put Sarah’s death hours after Dechaine was already in custody. The prosecution has responded that a body buried in cool earth during a heatwave could have been dead for two days. Courts have repeatedly refused to let the defense reopen the time-of-death question in post-conviction proceedings, ruling it fell outside the scope of the DNA-based new-trial motions before them.
The defense has also pointed to alternative suspects. Douglas Senecal, a retired drywall mason in Phippsburg whose stepdaughters had lived in the same household as Sarah in 1983, was under indictment in 1988 for alleged sexual abuse of one of those stepdaughters. Dechaine’s original trial lawyer, Tom Connolly, theorized Senecal feared Sarah might testify against him. At least three judges found no credible evidence linking Senecal to the crime, describing the theory as “nothing but speculation,” and state and federal judges denied requests to compel him to provide a DNA sample. The defense has also examined Richard Marc Evonitz, a serial killer who murdered three girls in Virginia in the 1990s and killed himself in 2002. Evonitz was stationed in Portland, Maine, from May 1988 to May 1989 as a radar technician aboard the USS Koelsch, which was undergoing maintenance at Bath Iron Works. The defense obtained his DNA profile through Deirdre Enright of the University of Virginia Law School’s Innocence Project for comparison with crime-scene evidence; the available record does not confirm a definitive result.
What the DNA Testing Has Shown
DNA has been the central battleground for more than thirty years. At the 1989 trial, the court denied a defense request to test fingernail clippings taken from Sarah, calling DNA testing a “radical and new technique.” In 1993 and 1994, defense attorney Thomas Connolly independently submitted the clippings to CBR Laboratories. The results showed two or more DNA donors on one fingernail and excluded Dechaine as a contributor. Prosecutors and later courts raised chain-of-custody and contamination concerns about how the clippings had been handled after trial.
Dechaine filed a new-trial motion under Maine’s DNA analysis statute in 2003, and further court-ordered testing followed in 2008 under an amended version of the law. The resulting hearing was strictly limited to the new DNA evidence, with the court barring testimony on time of death and other issues.
In July 2022, Knox County Superior Court Justice Bruce Mallonee granted a motion for fresh testing using M-Vac technology, a newer collection method. The Serological Research Institute performed the work, funded by the advocacy group Trial and Error. Six items were tested. On the bra, Dechaine was definitively excluded. On one of two sticks used in the sexual assault, he was excluded; the second was inconclusive. On the bandana used as a gag, he was excluded. On the scarf used for strangulation, the result was inconclusive: the lab summary said Dechaine “could be included as a contributor,” but experts noted the statement was meaningless without statistical likelihood data. On a blood-stained T-shirt, results were inconclusive due to insufficient data. Partial male DNA profiles were identified on at least four of the six items.
The defense argues these results are devastating: a perpetrator of such a violent, prolonged assault should have left DNA on the instruments used in the crime. The prosecution counters that the results are ambiguous, and that the evidence-recovery teams in 1988 worked without masks or gloves, opening the door to contamination.
Four Denied Motions for a New Trial
Dechaine has sought a new trial in proceedings spanning 2006, 2013, 2015, and 2024. Each was denied. The 2015 ruling reached the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, which affirmed. That court held Dechaine had not shown by “clear and convincing evidence” that the DNA results, weighed with all other evidence, would make a different verdict probable. The justices also upheld limiting the hearing to DNA-related evidence and denied a motion to recuse the presiding judge.
The most recent hearing ran in April 2024 before Justice Mallonee. The defense presented two DNA experts and two crime-scene experts. Defense expert Rod Englert testified that blood under Sarah’s fingernails likely came from scratching her attacker, a scenario the defense said was inconsistent with Dechaine’s unblemished appearance at arrest. John Nale, who represents Dechaine pro bono from Waterville, put the defense’s position this way: “My only question is this: Is Mr. Dechaine’s DNA on any of the evidence used in the commission of the crime?” Assistant Attorney General Donald Macomber argued for the state that failing to detect Dechaine’s DNA on degraded, decades-old items did not exonerate him, and that the circumstantial case remained strong.
On January 31, 2025, Justice Mallonee issued a 23-page ruling denying the motion. He described the new DNA evidence as “weak, vague and without practical meaning.” He cited three factors: 36 years of physical degradation that could render DNA undetectable; small sample sizes and contamination risk from the original recovery; and the continuing strength of the circumstantial evidence and Dechaine’s own incriminating statements. A new trial, he concluded, would produce the same outcome. “This case is exhausted,” he wrote.
The Pending Appeal
Dechaine filed a notice of appeal from Justice Mallonee’s ruling to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court on February 27, 2025. According to Nale, this appeal focuses on alleged “misconduct on the part of prosecutors.” Dechaine remains incarcerated at Maine State Prison while the appeal is pending.
The Advocacy Around the Case
Trial and Error, founded by Carol Waltman and made up largely of Dechaine’s family and friends, has spent more than $200,000 on his defense, funded private investigators, produced DVDs, and lobbied for changes to Maine law. That lobbying contributed to a 2001 state law, revised in 2006, that allows prisoners to seek new trials based on DNA evidence. Jim Moore, a former ATF special agent who was resident agent in charge for Maine and New Hampshire, wrote two books about the case, Human Sacrifice: On the Altar of Injustice and State Secrets: What the Jury Never Heard, directing all proceeds to Trial and Error; Moore died in 2022.
Legal observers have taken a middle view of the DNA record. Daniel Medwed, a Northeastern University law professor and founding member of the New England Innocence Project, has said a direct DNA match to another person is the “Holy Grail” for overturning a conviction, and that exclusion evidence combined with unknown profiles on the crime-scene items suggests the state’s case is “much, much weaker than it was thought to be.” For prosecutors and the Maine courts, the answer so far has been that degraded, partial results from decades-old items cannot dislodge the circumstantial case a jury accepted in 1989. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court will now decide whether that answer holds.