Cold case homicide detectives with the Maine State Police are revisiting a wooded area where the skeletal remains of a 23-year-old woman were found in a shallow grave nearly 40 years ago.
Ellen Choate disappeared in 1975. She was last seen getting off a Greyhound bus in the town of Newport outside Bangor. Her remains were found near a lake in 1977. She had been shot in the head.
On Friday detectives returned to the crime scene without saying what prompted their renewed interest in the case. The lake is now shallower than it was four decades ago.
“We have six investigators looking in that same area today for any additional evidence,” Stephen McDonald, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety, told the Bangor Daily News Friday. He told the paper the detectives would be out at the sight through the afternoon.
As part of the search investigators were using metal detectors and shovels. They were also marking areas with colored ribbons, WABI-TV in Bangor reported Friday.
“It’s not uncommon for items to be dropped during the commission of a crime and it’s not uncommon for items to be discarded after the commission of a crime,” Police Lt. Troy Gardner told the station.
When she disappeared Choate was moving from Philadelphia to Bangor to take a teaching job at a nursery school. Police said at the time that she knew Newport because she had friends who lived there at a commune.
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