50 years after James Cassidy's death, there is still no simple explanation for his brutal murder.

The evidence left behind in the main woods raised questions investigators have never fully answered.

And the deeper the investigation went, the more complicated the picture

became. A respected bank executive had vanished. Federal authorities were preparing to arrest

him, and a burned car was found far from home on a deserted logging road. But the paper trail

and the witness accounts pointed in several different directions at

once, toward financial crimes, toward organized crime figures operating in New England,

and toward the surprisingly valuable world of rare stamps.

Somewhere along those threads may lie the explanation for what really happened all those years ago in April of 1976.

I'm Kylie Lowe and this is the case of James Cassidy Part 2 on Darkdown East.

On April 7, 1976, investigators in eastern Maine received a call about a burned-out station wagon hidden off

a remote logging road near De Beck Pond.

When they finally located the scene, they found the badly burned body of 43-year-old James

Jim Cassidy of Brookline, Massachusetts, a bank vice president and father of three.

The fire had been extremely intense, destroying much of the evidence and making it

difficult to determine exactly what had happened. The autopsy ultimately concluded that Jim

died from burning. Today, Jim's death is considered an unsolved homicide by Maine State Police.

By the time the car was discovered, Jim had already been

missing for several days. Federal authorities had also obtained a warrant for his arrest

on embezzlement charges connected to his job at Brookline Trust Company. Allegations his sister-in-law

Evelyn Cassidy still has a hard time believing.

We couldn't imagine Jim be involved in anything like that voluntarily.

...