In April of 1976, an anonymous called to a sheriff's department in Maine alerted investigators to something almost impossible to imagine.

A burning station wagon hidden off a remote road and what looked like a body inside.

What they found would open a case filled with contradictions. The victim was James Cassidy,

a Massachusetts Bank vice president, father of three, churchgoing family man, and by all accounts

someone living a quiet, ordinary life. But in the days before his death, Jim had vanished

across state lines.

Federal authorities were preparing to arrest him on embezzlement charges,

and whispers of missing money, valuable stamps, and possible organized crime connections began to surface.

Nearly 50 years later, his death remains unsolved.

I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of James Cassidy, Part 1, on Dark Down East.

In the early spring of 1976, the woods of eastern Maine were still quiet from winter.

Snow had mostly melted, but the ground was soft, the trees bare, and the long stretches of road that cut through the forests between Bangor and the coast were often empty for miles at a time.

According to reporting by the Bangor Daily News, on the morning of April 7th, that quiet was broken by a phone ringing at the Penobscot County Sheriff's Department.

At 9.01 a.m., an unidentified man on the other end of the line told the dispatcher that he was heading

out to go fishing out behind Park's pond when he came across a disturbing sight along the side of the road.

There was a gutted out station wagon on fire, and it looked like there was a human body in the

back of the vehicle, he said. The dispatcher tried to confirm what the caller had

seen, where exactly it was located, and who he was, but before the conversation could go much

further, the line went dead. The man hung up without identifying himself. Even with so little information

and the anonymous nature, the call didn't feel like a prank. It was

specific and concerning enough that the sheriff's department acted on it. Deputies began

searching the area described in the call, focusing on Route 9 and Route 18 on either side of

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