convinced of his innocence over a period of years. If I had been on the jury that heard his
case in Portland Superior Court over six stormy weeks in 1947-48, I would have voted to
convict, too.
It was one hell of a case, all right; one of those juicy ones with all the right elements.
There was a beautiful girl with society connections (dead), a local sports figure (also
dead), and a prominent young businessman in the dock. There was this, plus all the
scandal the newspapers could hint at. The prosecution had an open-and-shut case. The
trial only lasted as long as it did because the DA was planning to run for the US House of
Representatives and he wanted John Q Public to get a good long look at his phiz. It was a
crackerjack legal circus, with spectators getting in line at four in the morning, despite the
subzero temperatures, to assure themselves of a seat.
The facts of the prosecution‘s case that Andy never contested were these: That he had a
wife, Linda Collins Dufresne; that in June of 1947 she had expressed an interest in
learning the game of golf at the Falmouth Hills Country Club; that she did indeed take
lessons for four months; that her instructor was the Falmouth Hills golf pro, Glenn
Quentin; that in late August of 1947 Andy learned that Quentin and his wife had become
lovers; that Andy and Linda Dufresne argued bitterly on the afternoon of 10 September
1947; that the subject of their argument was her infidelity.
He testified that Linda professed to be glad he knew; the sneaking around, she said, was
distressing. She told Andy that she planned to obtain a Reno divorce. Andy told her he
would see her in hell before he would see her in Reno. She went off to spend the night
with Quentin in Quentin‘s rented bungalow not far from the golf course. The next
morning his cleaning woman found both of them dead in bed. Each had been shot four
times.
It was that last fact that mitigated more against Andy than any of the others. The DA with
the political aspirations made a great deal of it in his opening statement and his closing
summation. Andrew Dufresne, he said, was not a wronged husband seeking a hotblooded
revenge against his cheating wife; that, the DA said, could be understood, if not
condoned. But this revenge had been of a much colder type. Consider! the DA thundered
at the jury. Four and four! Not six shots, but eight! He had fired the gun empty ... and
then stopped to reload so he could shoot each of them again! FOUR FOR HIM AND
FOUR FOR HER, the Portland Sun blared. The Boston Register dubbed him The Even-
Steven Killer.
A clerk from the Wise Pawnshop in Lewiston testified that he had sold a six-shot .38
Police Special to Andrew Dufresne just two days before the double murder. A bartender
from the country club bar testified that Andy had come in around seven o‘clock on the
evening of 10 September, had tossed off three straight whiskeys in a twenty-minute
period - when he got up from the bar-stool he told the bartender that he was going up to
Glenn Quentin‘s house and he, the bartender, could ‘read about the rest of it in the papers‘.
Another clerk, this one from the Handy-Pik store a mile or so from Quentin‘s house, told
the court that Dufresne had come in around quarter to nine on the same night. He
purchased cigarettes, three quarts of beer, and some dish-towels. The county medical
examiner testified that Quentin and the Dufresne woman had been killed between eleven
p.m. and two a.m. on the night of 10-11 September. The detective from the Attorney
General‘s office who had been in charge of the case testified that there was a turnout less
than seventy yards from the bungalow, and that on the afternoon of 11 September, three
pieces of evidence had been removed from that turnout: first item, two empty quart
bottles of Narragansett Beer (with the defendant‘s fingerprints on th

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