WAITRESS MISSING IN SEAL COVE
The story was sensational, but what caught my attention was the accompanying photograph. It showed an achingly beautiful brunette, a few years older than I was, smiling at the camera. I knew from the moment I saw her that Nikki Donnatelli was dead. My heart didn’t care. I was smitten by a ghost.
That summer, I was working as sternman on a lobsterboat out of Pine Point. The previous year, I had gone to work in a remote sporting camp in the North Woods, where my estranged father lived, to wash dishes and scrub floors. Mostly, I had gone to be with my dad. The experiment had proved a disaster. So the next year, I decided to try my luck at sea. The sternman acts as the lobsterman’s assistant, which means you do all the shitwork-emptying the rancid bait bags and throwing the decaying remains to the gulls, rebaiting the mesh sacks with “fresh” herring, coiling the algae-slick lines, stacking the brick-weighted traps. You don’t actually get to haul traps or pilot the boat, or at least I didn’t. And while my employer earned a small fortune, he paid me only a flat wage. Still, I preferred lobstering to selling sneakers at the mall.
Most lobstermen listen to country-and-western music while they work, but my boss preferred talk radio. All the news that summer was about the beautiful Nikki Donnatelli and her despicable killer, Erland Jefferts. As a result, I found myself following each development in the case as the story shifted daily.
Nikki Donnatelli was twenty years old. Her family resided most of the year in White Plains, New York, but they had a summer cottage in Seal Cove. I have a vague memory that her father was an investment banker at one of those too-big-to-fail firms. Whatever he did, the Donnatellis had plenty of money.
The Harpoon Bar was a dive bar of a certain type you find in coastal towns. The decor tended toward lobster buoys and fishnets slung along plank walls. As the only saloon for miles, it attracted a diverse clientele. I always figured that the suntanned summer people got a thrill from drinking gin and tonics next to windburned guys who reeked of fish, sweat, and desperation. Fights broke out at the bar on weekend nights, but no one ever got shot or stabbed, so there was only a mild aura of danger to go with your fried clams. The appeal of dining and drinking at the ’Poon was that it made you feel like a local, even if you spent only a month in town each summer.
Nikki Donnatelli had just finished her junior year at Brown, where she was majoring in art history and planning a course of postgraduate study in Italy. She was described by various sources as intelligent, playful, and feisty: a young woman who had traveled alone across Europe and could take care of herself. The Harpoon’s owner, Mark Folsom, said Nikki enjoyed the attention she received from the younger lobstermen, but he claimed she confidently resisted their crude advances. She had a boyfriend in Florence, to whom she remained faithful, Folsom later testified.
Erland Jefferts was twenty-three that summer and a local kid. His mother’s family-the Bateses-had lived in Seal Cove since the town’s founding, and there were a number of landmarks in the neighborhood bearing their name. Little was known about Jefferts’s deadbeat dad. He had been a merchant mariner who had departed for seas unknown when young Erland was in diapers. The boy had largely been raised by his mother’s sizable clan. And when he later went on trial for murder, it was the Bates family who packed the courtroom.
From a young age, Erland had been called sensitive and intelligent. He’d started college at the Maine College of Art but dropped out after a year to follow the rock group Phish on its transcontinental wanderings. Eventually, he drifted back on the tide to Seal Cove. Before Nikki Donnatelli was murdered, he was working as sternman on a local vessel, the Glory B, owned by one Arthur Banks, and renting a room over the general store.
Jefferts had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Even the worst photos of him showed an impossibly handsome young guy with a sculpted jaw, piercing eyes, and wavy blond hair. Prior to the murder, his claim to fame was that a photographer from GQ had used him in a photo shoot. The magazine dudded up a few rugged lobstermen in expensive sweaters and designer peacoats for a fashion feature. Erland’s reputation as a small-town Casanova would later become a central point in the case against him, as well as an argument in his own defense.
The night of Nikki’s disappearance was a balmy Friday evening in mid-July. An approaching high-pressure front from the southwest had pushed a mass of subtropical air into Maine, making Seal Cove feel as hot and steamy as the Caribbean. As a result, the deck outside the Harpoon Bar was packed with merrymakers. The owner, Mark Folsom, later testified that everyone in town seemed to drop by that night for a cold drink.
In Erland Jefferts’s case, it was more than one drink. His liquor of choice was Jagermeister, and his capacity was legend. Even so, there was a line where his charm began to curdle, and he crossed the sloppy meridian around nine o’clock, according to witnesses. He’d been flirting with Nikki Donnatelli for weeks, and the pattern continued right up until the moment he grabbed her ass. Nikki complained to her employer, a former Marine who served as his own bouncer. Folsom applied a headlock to Jefferts and dragged him through the door. Outside, the bartender flung him bodily to the pavement. A small crowd watched Erland burn rubber as he fled the parking lot.
Why didn’t Folsom phone the police? That question took prominence at the trial. The barman’s confession was that he was worried about losing his liquor license, since Maine law prohibits serving drinks to anyone who is visibly intoxicated, and it was no secret that Jefferts had consumed the better part of a bottle since sundown.
After Jefferts left, the fiesta started up again. There were no more fights. Last call was at twelve-thirty, and then at one o’clock, Folsom locked the doors, and he and his staff went home.
With one exception.
Nikki Donnatelli lived less than a quarter of a mile from the Harpoon Bar. A notoriously poor driver who had just wrecked her car, she typically walked home or caught a ride from Folsom or one of the waitresses. But with the night being warm and the moon shining in the harbor, she made a fateful decision to take the shore path that stopped by Compass Rock. She was never seen alive again.
Several hours later, her mother, Angela, awoke from a nightmare. Because the walls of the summer house were cardboard-thin, she always heard Nikki washing her face and brushing her teeth, she told authorities. Angela roused her husband, Nick, and they agreed to telephone the police. The dispatcher informed them that Nikki couldn’t properly be termed missing. People her age frequently spent entire nights out without informing their parents, despite the Donnatellis’ assurances that their daughter would never do such a thing. The dispatcher eventually agreed to write down a physical description of Nikki, promising to alert sheriff’s deputies and state troopers on patrol in the area. “If anyone sees her,” the dispatcher said, “we’ll let you know.”
Shortly before dawn, a first-year sheriff’s deputy with the odd name of Dane Guffey was patrolling a stretch of isolated road about five miles from the Harpoon Bar when he decided to check out a forested ATV trail popular with teenagers looking for privacy. He had received word about Nikki Donnatelli, and he had a hunch that she might have sneaked into the woods with some Romeo. At the very least, he hoped he might surprise some amorous teens. Interrupting a couple having sex is one of the beat cop’s prurient pleasures.
The dirt road was heavily rutted but passable to four-wheel-drive vehicles, and Guffey had been assigned one of the county’s new SUVs. About half a mile into the forest, he was surprised to find a rusted blue Ford Ranger parked with its tailgate down and driver-side door ajar. He recognized the truck as belonging to Jefferts.
Guffey hit his spotlight, bathing the scene in brilliant whiteness, and announced his presence as a police officer over the radio loudspeaker. There was no movement, no response. He took his flashlight and, resting his right hand on the grip of his pistol, carefully approached the vehicle.
In his report, he wrote that the first thing he noticed was a pile of greenish vomit near the passenger door. His testimony evolved over time. At the trial, he testified that his eyes went first to a roll of marine rigging tape resting oddly on the tailgate, as if someone had just set it there.
Inside the vehicle, Guffey found Erland Jefferts passed out across the passenger seat. He was curled into something resembling a fetal position and would not awaken when the deputy called his name. Guffey said he had to shake Jefferts’s leg hard repeatedly before the intoxicated man awoke with a groan.
The deputy asked Jefferts if he had been drinking and received a firm no. Guffey then pointed to the pile of vomit outside and indicated the strong odor of alcohol filling the cab. At this point, Jefferts relented. Yes, he said, he had been drinking-but just a shot and two beers.
Why was he parked here in the woods? the deputy asked.
Jefferts’s confused explanation was that he had been returning to his apartment from a house party, where he had eaten some clam dip that disagreed with him. He felt that he needed to throw up, and so he drove down the ATV trail, looking for privacy. After he had puked, it occurred to him that having an empty stomach might boost his blood-alcohol level, and since he was fearful about being arrested for operating under the influence, he decided to take a nap until he was safe to drive again. That, he said, was when the deputy had found him.
Jefferts seemed excessively agitated, Guffey later testified. His eyes were wide and jumpy, and his upper lip
