A Bangor transient was charged Friday with two counts of murder in the deaths of a man and a woman whose bodies were found Wednesday night in a burning panel truck, according to Bangor police.
John De St. Croix, 25, was arrested Friday after being interviewed by detectives, Bangor police spokesman Sgt. Wade Betters said in a news release.
De St. Croix was taken to the Penobscot County Jail where he will be held without bail.
He is expected to make his first court appearance Monday at the Penobscot Judicial Center.
Michael Bridges, 43, and Desiree York, 36, both of Bangor, were found Wednesday night in the back of a box truck parked on Washington Street.
Police believe De St. Croix and the victims “were acquainted” through Bangor’s homeless community. Betters did not say how well or for how long the three had known each other.
De St. Croix has no criminal history in Maine, according to the Maine Bureau of Identification in Augusta.
His Facebook page includes numerous posts of the game Criminal Case. It is a game created for Facebook that allows the player to act as a detective and gather clues at murder scenes. De St. Croix apparently last posted to his page on March 24, 2017.
Bangor firefighters dispatched about 10 p.m. Wednesday to the scene for the report of a burning unmarked delivery truck under the Penobscot Bridge, which is on the north end of the Penobscot Plaza strip mall on Washington Street.
The medical examiner determined Thursday that their deaths were homicides. Information about how they died was not released Friday.
At a Friday afternoon news conference, Betters said that he expected De St. Croix would face additional charges once his case is presented by prosecutors from the Maine attorney general’s office to the Penobscot County grand jury next month. He declined to say what those charges might be.
In response to a reporter’s question, Betters said the case could not really be compared to a 2012 case in which three people who had been shot to death were found in a burning rental car Aug. 13, 2012, at 22 Target Industrial Circle in Bangor.
“We suspected from the start of that case that it was drug related,” Betters said. “We have not made that connection in this case.”
In the 2012 case, the charred bodies of Nicolle Lugdon, 24, of Eddington, Daniel Borders, 26, of Hermon and Lucas Tuscano, 28, of Bradford were found once firefighters extinguished the blaze.
Nicholas Sexton, 37, of Warwick, Rhode Island, and Randall Daluz, 40, of Brockton, Massachusetts, who were in Bangor selling drugs the summer of 2012, are serving life sentences for murder and arson in connection with those deaths, described by police as a drug deal gone bad.
Bridges and York are the seventh and eighth homicide victims of 2018 in Maine, according to Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety, the agency that gathers crime statistics.
For Bangor, the slayings are the second and third homicides of 2018, after Israel Lewis, 51, was shot twice in a Second Street boarding house in January. F “Frank” Daly, 29, was indicted in February in Lewis’ death on one count of intentional or knowing murder.