I'm Kristen Seavy. This is Murder She Told. Farmington Police Chief Raymond Orr was in over his head, and he knew it.

He stood on Lincoln Street with his back to the late morning sun, staring at a mountain of

decomposing sawdust. The pile loomed 25 feet high and sat on a large patch of

marshy earth, about 60 feet long and 40 feet across. His officers had cordoned off the street and were now carefully stepping around the

weeds and brambles that had sprung up around the pile. The Zoddust had sat abandoned for 20 years,

refuse from the old Corson mill that had been long out of business.

This morning, following the discovery of the body, it was receiving more attention

than it had in decades.

The chief thought back on his 42 years in the area, and he couldn't recall anything like this

ever happening in his small town.

This was Farmington, a rural college town of 5,500 people.

He had grown up as a child in nearby Jay Main and then went to high school in Wilton,

less than 10 miles away.

After graduating, he spent four years in far-flung places in the Air Force,

but then returned to the area, working in the region's construction industry for two years, long enough for him to figure

out that he didn't want to spend a lifetime working outdoors in the harsh New England elements.

So he enrolled in the University of Maine in Orano and earned his

undergraduate degree. In 1958, at the age of 29, he applied for a job as a

constable with the Farmington Village Corporation, a quasi- government business whose main responsibility was to keep the town in clean drinking water.

At the time, it was the closest thing that Farmington had to a police department.

I was given a badge and a gun and told to enforce the law, he told the morning Sentinel.

It would be five years before he received any formal training.

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