BELFAST, Maine — A man indicted in a decades-old cold case death in Waldo County pleaded guilty Friday to a manslaughter charge.
Police arrested Kirt Damon Sr., of Stockton Springs, in 2020 and charged him with murder stemming from the death of 63-year-old Dorothea Burke. He was 20 when she was last seen alive the night of June 23, 1984 at a Bucksport bar. Construction workers found her body on the side of a dirt road in Stockton Springs five days later.
Damon, now 58, pleaded not guilty to the murder charge, but did plead guilty to the lesser charge on Friday during a hearing at the Waldo Judicial Center in Belfast.
“Are you pleading guilty to this charge because you are, in fact, guilty of this charge?” Superior Court Justice Robert Murray asked Damon.
After a pause, he answered.
“I am, your honor,” he said quietly.
For his sentence, Murray ultimately agreed with the recommendation that was jointly presented by state prosecutors and Damon’s defense team — that Damon would spend 20 years in prison with all but 12 years suspended, followed by four years of probation. According to the terms of his probation, he will be barred from having contact with 20 or so people, including some who would have served as witnesses if the trial had gone forward.
The conviction was a long time coming. Police had interviewed Damon several times over the years as part of the murder investigation, beginning the day her body was discovered. But he steadfastly denied his involvement in her death.
Over the years, though, advancements in forensic science — and more witnesses, including Damon’s ex-wife, coming forward to tell police about things Damon had told them — allowed the state to finally prosecute the case. Among the things that Damon said was that another man had been involved in Burke’s death. That man died at sea in the early 1990s, prosecutors said.
Assistant Attorney General Leane Zainea said after the hearing that it’s hard to reconstitute a motive so many years later. But, she said, it is likely that it was simple.
“They took her purse and she had money in her purse,” Zainea said.
Lara Nomani, an assistant attorney general, spent about half an hour going over the evidence that would have been presented if the case had gone to trial.
The prosecutor told the court that on the evening of June 23, Burke was celebrating her birthday and going to a wedding reception in Prospect. She got ready at her daughter Ruth Shute’s house, and made sure she had plenty of her preferred cigarettes — Bright 100s — at hand. The two women, who planned to see each other the following day at a birthday party Shute was throwing for her mother, said goodbye.
At the wedding reception, some of Burke’s family members showered her with confetti and sang “Happy Birthday” to her.
“That confetti would later be important,” Nomani said.
Witnesses who would have testified also saw Damon at the reception, talking to Burke, who decided to leave to go dancing elsewhere at 9:15 p.m. Both Damon and Burke eventually went to the two Bucksport bars. One witness would have testified about seeing Burke arrive at Captain Jack’s in a compact red car in the company of a young man who looked like Damon, Nomani said.
The next day, after Burke didn’t come home and didn’t go to her own birthday party, her family reported her missing and began to search for her.
When her body was finally found, it appeared to police that her body had been dragged away from the road. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn to the wedding — black pants, a maroon blouse and a pink sweater — and investigators found pieces of confetti in her hair. She had obvious wounds to her face, including lacerations and multiple fractures.
During the investigation, police searched Damon’s mother’s car, a red Chevette. They collected confetti from the passenger’s seat and cigarette butts from Bright 100s, Nomani said.
Over the years, she said, Damon made various statements to his friends and family, including that he and his friend backed the car over Burke, moved her body and then took her money. He also said that Burke’s death was an accident.
But Burke’s injuries were not consistent with being run over, prosecutors said. They showed that she died by blunt force trauma to the head, likely caused by a baseball bat or a two-by-four.
Her family “had to live with the thought that Dot was discarded on a desolate road like she was a beer can or cigarette butt,” Zainea said.
The decades of questions about who had done this to her were very hard, family members wrote in letters that were read to the court by a victim witness advocate. The murder shattered feelings of safety and peace in Stockton Springs, a small town where people thought they knew their neighbors,
“It was a day that our hearts were broken forever. Our lives changed forever,” Kimberly Burke, the daughter-in-law of Dorothea Burke, said. “For more than 37 years, Kirt went on with his life like nothing ever happened. I hope he spends the rest of his life in prison.”
Damon chose to not address the court.
There are challenges inherent in prosecuting a case that’s as old as this one, Zainea said. It relies in part upon “fading memories,” but also new information from witnesses who previously were nervous about testifying against Damon.
“This was a good resolution for the family,” she said after the hearing. “It gave them some closure after nearly 40 years. I think there was some relief for the family.”