time of death, some shucking and jiving by one of the investigating detectives on the witness stand—there were holes in the prosecutor’s case, but not enough to persuade the jury of Jefferts’s innocence. When the judge sentenced the handsome and articulate lobsterman to life imprisonment in the Maine State Prison without the possibility of parole, a group of his supporters began organizing to prove his innocence and secure his release. They called themselves “the J-Team.”
For seven years, they’d worked with a pro bono legal team to hire private investigators, write letters to newspapers, and file friend-of-the-court briefs to secure a new trial. But it was all for nothing. Erland Jefferts was still rotting away in his cell. And no more beautiful girls had gone missing in Knox County in all the years since.
That was before Ashley Kim took a wrong turn on a fog-darkened road on Parker Point.
I still remember the morning I first read the story. It was the summer following my graduation from high school, a rainy July day. My stepfather, Neil, was at his law office and my mother was having lunch with one of her tennis friends when I shuffled into the kitchen. The
Portland Press Herald
was spread out on the breakfast table. The headline read
WAITRESS MISSING IN SEAL COVE
The story was sensational, but what caught my attention was the accompanying photograph. It showed an achingly beautiful brunette, a few years older than I was, smiling at the camera. I knew from the moment I saw her that Nikki Donnatelli was dead. My heart didn’t care. I was smitten by a ghost.
That summer, I was working as sternman on a lobsterboat out of Pine Point. The previous year, I had gone to work in a remote sporting camp in the North Woods, where my estranged father lived, to wash dishes and scrub floors. Mostly, I had gone to be with my dad. The experiment had proved a disaster. So the next year, I decided to try my luck at sea. The sternman acts as the lobsterman’s assistant, which means you do all the shitwork—emptying the rancid bait bags and throwing the decaying remains to the gulls, rebaiting the mesh sacks with “fresh” herring, coiling the algae-slick lines, stacking the brick-weighted traps. You don’t actually get to haul traps or pilot the boat, or at least I didn’t. And while my employer earned a small fortune, he paid me only a flat wage. Still, I preferred lobstering to selling sneakers at the mall.
Most lobstermen listen to country-and-western music while they work, but my boss preferred talk radio. All the news that summer was about the beautiful Nikki Donnatelli and her despicable killer, Erland Jefferts. As a result, I found myself following each development in the case as the story shifted daily.
Nikki Donnatelli was twenty years old. Her family resided most of the year in White Plains, New York, but they had a summer cottage in Seal Cove. I have a vague memory that her father was an investment banker at one of those too-big-to-fail firms. Whatever he did, the Donnatellis had plenty of money.
The Harpoon Bar was a dive bar of a certain type you find in coastal towns. The decor tended toward lobster buoys and fishnets slung along plank walls. As the only saloon for miles, it attracted a diverse clientele. I always figured that the suntanned summer people got a thrill from drinking gin and tonics next to windburned guys who reeked of fish, sweat, and desperation. Fights broke out at the bar on weekend nights, but no one ever got shot or stabbed, so there was only a mild aura of danger to go with your fried clams. The appeal of dining and drinking at the ’Poon was that it made you feel like a local, even if you spent only a month in town each summer.
Nikki Donnatelli had just finished her junior year at Brown, where she was majoring in art history and planning a course of postgraduate study in Italy. She was described by various sources as intelligent, playful, and feisty: a young woman who had traveled
For seven years, they’d worked with a pro bono legal team to hire private investigators, write letters to newspapers, and file friend-of-the-court briefs to secure a new trial. But it was all for nothing. Erland Jefferts was still rotting away in his cell. And no more beautiful girls had gone missing in Knox County in all the years since.
That was before Ashley Kim took a wrong turn on a fog-darkened road on Parker Point.
I still remember the morning I first read the story. It was the summer following my graduation from high school, a rainy July day. My stepfather, Neil, was at his law office and my mother was having lunch with one of her tennis friends when I shuffled into the kitchen. The
Portland Press Herald
was spread out on the breakfast table. The headline read
WAITRESS MISSING IN SEAL COVE
The story was sensational, but what caught my attention was the accompanying photograph. It showed an achingly beautiful brunette, a few years older than I was, smiling at the camera. I knew from the moment I saw her that Nikki Donnatelli was dead. My heart didn’t care. I was smitten by a ghost.
That summer, I was working as sternman on a lobsterboat out of Pine Point. The previous year, I had gone to work in a remote sporting camp in the North Woods, where my estranged father lived, to wash dishes and scrub floors. Mostly, I had gone to be with my dad. The experiment had proved a disaster. So the next year, I decided to try my luck at sea. The sternman acts as the lobsterman’s assistant, which means you do all the shitwork—emptying the rancid bait bags and throwing the decaying remains to the gulls, rebaiting the mesh sacks with “fresh” herring, coiling the algae-slick lines, stacking the brick-weighted traps. You don’t actually get to haul traps or pilot the boat, or at least I didn’t. And while my employer earned a small fortune, he paid me only a flat wage. Still, I preferred lobstering to selling sneakers at the mall.
Most lobstermen listen to country-and-western music while they work, but my boss preferred talk radio. All the news that summer was about the beautiful Nikki Donnatelli and her despicable killer, Erland Jefferts. As a result, I found myself following each development in the case as the story shifted daily.
Nikki Donnatelli was twenty years old. Her family resided most of the year in White Plains, New York, but they had a summer cottage in Seal Cove. I have a vague memory that her father was an investment banker at one of those too-big-to-fail firms. Whatever he did, the Donnatellis had plenty of money.
The Harpoon Bar was a dive bar of a certain type you find in coastal towns. The decor tended toward lobster buoys and fishnets slung along plank walls. As the only saloon for miles, it attracted a diverse clientele. I always figured that the suntanned summer people got a thrill from drinking gin and tonics next to windburned guys who reeked of fish, sweat, and desperation. Fights broke out at the bar on weekend nights, but no one ever got shot or stabbed, so there was only a mild aura of danger to go with your fried clams. The appeal of dining and drinking at the ’Poon was that it made you feel like a local, even if you spent only a month in town each summer.
Nikki Donnatelli had just finished her junior year at Brown, where she was majoring in art history and planning a course of postgraduate study in Italy. She was described by various sources as intelligent, playful, and feisty: a young woman who had traveled
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