00:00:01 Speaker 1: It was the first snow of the season when Lujia Bilander disappeared into the woods of rural Maine. He'd gone out hunting, just like he had one hundred times before, but this time you didn't come home. His wife Linda thought maybe he'd gotten lost in the storm. But what game Wardens uncovered over the next few days would lead them through a maze of violence, drugs, and deceit that no one could have predicted. 00:00:24 Speaker 2: That's next on Blood Trails. 00:00:40 Speaker 1: Twenty five year old Luja Bolanger was what you might call a typical main whitetail hunter. He went out on November twenty fifth, nineteen seventy five, armed with his thirty thirty lever gun to track a deer through the snow in hopes of bringing home enough meat to feed his family. He wasn't chasing big antlers, and he didn't sit in a tree stand all day hoping a buck would walk past. He went out and found one, and even though we'll never know how big it was, I like to think it was a giant. Lujia, his wife Linda, and his brother John had all gone out that morning to look for deer, but the falling snow hid the previous night's activity, and the trio didn't have much luck as the gray dawn illuminated the winter landscape. 00:01:20 Speaker 3: Here's Linda and then about nine o'clock we just said, well, we're gonna go home, and I had to get ready for work, and John was going home, but Luji wanted to get off at the top of the hill and walk down through the field in the woods to the county road and then home. It was heavy snow that morning. We'd head heavy snow all night. 00:01:42 Speaker 1: Lujia had been dropped off about a mile from the home he shared in Washington, Maine, with Linda and their three young children. He only planned to hunt for about an hour before returning home and driving Linda to her waitressing gig, but he didn't show up, and after another hour had passed, Linda's annoyance turned to concern. 00:01:59 Speaker 3: Ere so I called next door and said luj home yet, So they went looking on smobiles following his name stuff. 00:02:09 Speaker 1: As nightfall approach and the search party still hadn't found any sign of the missing hunter, they called the game ardens. The state police wouldn't get involved until Ludra had been missing for seventy two hours, but Since the incident involved a hunter, the wardens were happy to help with the search. You might assume that Lujia had just found a deer track and lost track of time, but Linda wasn't buying it. She knew right away that something terrible had happened. 00:02:34 Speaker 3: I kind of got a little messed up emotionally, and they sent me to the hospital. 00:02:39 Speaker 1: In any movements, Linda's reaction to her husband's disappearance might sound extreme, but keep in mind that Linda was only twenty years old. She and Lujia already had three daughters between the ages of three and a half years and three months. The prospect of those girls losing their father was unbearable, and one of Linda's most vivid memories from those difficult days is of her middle daughter, Angel, happily playing around the feet of the game wardens and neighbors who were searching for her father. 00:03:06 Speaker 3: I remember getting up the next morning, is what I remember, and the house had game wardens and trackers and family all through it. They must have given me something that I just was out of it. But Angel was eating snow off from one of the game wardens boots. That's the memory that I have in my. 00:03:27 Speaker 1: Mind, the friends and family who filled that house knew that losing Lujia would be a blow not only to his wife and kids, but to the larger Washington community. 00:03:37 Speaker 3: No, he was a down to earth guy. He would have done anything for anybody, anything, He'd be there for. He loved life, he loved his family. We were building a house and making memories and making plans for the future, but that all got taken away. 00:03:58 Speaker 1: Luja Blanders disappeared, and which remains one of Maine's oldest unsolved cases. But this isn't your typical cold case, with scant clues, no suspects, and more questions than answers. The game wardens who investigated Lucra's case believed they knew what happened to him, but the trail got wilder and more unexpected with every twist and turn. It led them from Maine's big woods to drug fueled parties, to threatening suspects, to a house explosion. 00:04:24 Speaker 4: To insurance fraud to murder. 00:04:27 Speaker 1: It's a story of great detective work, even more devious suspects, and ultimately a family who never got to say goodbye to the father and husband they loved well. 00:04:38 Speaker 3: Had three children together. Now nineteen grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He wasn't here for the moments, the special times, the daily times. He just he was robbed of them. 00:04:51 Speaker 1: I'm Jordan Sillers and this is Blood Trails, a Big Woods Cold. 00:04:56 Speaker 4: Case, Part one Deer Tracks. 00:05:06 Speaker 5: Speak. 00:05:07 Speaker 1: When Linda called to report her husband missing, the main Warden Service sent out two officers to investigate, Lieutenant Warden John Marsh and District Warden Dick Hennessy. Though they were joined later by other wardens and Maine State Police officers, Marsh and Hennessy were the two primary investigators of Luger's disappearance. The problem from where we're standing in twenty twenty five is that Hennessy passed away in twenty twelve and Marsh followed him in twenty twenty three. Since this is still an open investigation, the Maine State Police can't release any case files, and they declined to sit down with us for an interview. We wouldn't know much more about this case than I've already told you if it wasn't for an author by the name of Darren Woocester. Darren published a book in twenty seventeen called Open Season, True Stories of the Main Warden Service, which is a great book that I highly recommend. Darren spoke with twelve game wardens about the two cases he covers in that book, one of which was Lugers. 00:06:04 Speaker 5: It happened to be that my father in law was a game warden and he would always tell me stories, and I got to thinking that this would be a great way to write a book. And he would give me some of his stories and we would slowly chip away at it, and he would always encourage me, Hey, I know a lot of people who were wardens, and they've got great stories too, Like, you shouldn't just have stories from me, We should get others involved. 00:06:29 Speaker 1: One of those wardens was John Marsh, who gave Darren an inside view into this investigation. This isn't information that was ever made public, but since Marsh was already retired, he apparently wasn't too concerned about explaining what happened. Now, normally I'd be skeptical about reporting secondhand information, but Darren did his homework. I sent his chapter to Detective Sergeant Josh Haines, who is currently in charge of Lujra's case with the Main State Police. Haines told me in an email quote. This information in the book is very accurate to the facts I know of the case. Names have been changed, and some of the other minor details are different, but the majority of the narrative and content is factual. Darren was kind enough to sit down with us and walk us through what he found, and let me tell you, you have no idea what's coming over the next hill. When Marsha Hennessy arrived at the Blanger home, they had some theories as to what might be happening, and they weren't overly concerned. The area Looser was hunting was basically his backyard. He knew it well, and there were no real dangers in those woods, no mountains, cliffs or rivers for him to get swept away in. 00:07:35 Speaker 5: When the wardens came in, they just didn't I don't want to say they didn't take it seriously, but they had done this a thousand times before. He was a young man. He was twenty five. They figured he probably just went out partying. The most plausible thing was that he wasn't. You know, he didn't report home because he was out doing something that he didn't want to tell his wife about. 00:07:55 Speaker 1: To their credit, the wardens didn't let their personal opinions keep them from doing their job. In fact, they spent the entire night of November twenty fifth and into the twenty sixth scouring the woods where Lujra had been hunting, but they couldn't find it. By the next morning, they began to be really concerned. If he was still in those woods, he was almost certainly hypothermic and might not last much longer. The first snowstorm of the year was in full swing, and the wet, slushy precipitation had turned light and fluffy as a cold front rolled through. The Warden service was stretched thin after the snowstorm and calling a full on search party would take time, maybe more time than Lujra had, so they kept at it, and before long they caught a break. As they were pacing the side of the road where Linda had left Lujra to go hunting, a neighbor approached them. 00:08:42 Speaker 6: They caught a lucky break, you know. 00:08:43 Speaker 5: They found a neighbor who when they knocked on his door the night before, nobody had answered, but he had come out and said, yeah, I saw where Luja went in I was about to go hunting myself. 00:08:53 Speaker 6: I can He's a good kid, I can take you right where I'm willing to bet he was. 00:08:58 Speaker 1: He was hunting this neighbor, A guy named Clayton Crosby said that he hunted and trapped that section of the forest all the time, and he knew a ridge along a stream that was a good place to look for deer tracks. If Lujira knew the woods as well as he did, that would be a place to start. The wardens accepted Clay's offer to accompany them, and when they reached the spot Clay led them to. 00:09:18 Speaker 4: They searched through the fresh. 00:09:19 Speaker 1: Powder for tracks Lujra had made in the slushy now frozen snow underneath. It didn't take them long to find Ludra's boot prints, and as they followed his trail a spent thirty thirty cartridge, they found blood spatters in the snow a short distance away, and as they continued to follow Lujra's footprints, a dark pool of frozen blood and guts. At that point it was easy to see what had happened. Lujira had shot a buck and had gutted it there in the woods. Then, instead of dragging it back towards his house, he had pulled it about a quarter mile through the woods to an old road. It was a shorter distance to drag the deer, and he figured he'd walk back home, get the car, and pick up the animal along the road. It was a good plan, but it hadn't worked. Lujia was still nowhere to be found, and neither was his deer. Rather than give them an answer for Linda about what had happened to her husband, but they found along that forest road raised even more questions and gave them the first suspicions that Lujia was in more trouble than they had ever imagined. Linda credits the game wardens for always treating her with kindness and keeping her in the loop on the latest developments in the case. But those days were still incredibly hard. 00:10:31 Speaker 3: The sick field, being alone with my kids, not having my husband around, I think and somebody heard him. I was twenty years old, very scary, very that wrote it was got wrenching. I There weren't a day go by that I didn't just sit and cry. 00:11:04 Speaker 1: Part two Clues in the Snow. To the trained eye of the game wardens, the snow along. 00:11:11 Speaker 4: The road told a clear story. 00:11:14 Speaker 1: The car had driven in at some point before the cold front. The driver and passenger had gotten out to take a leak, and from that the wardens knew both were mail. The driver was a smoker and had left two cigarette butts along the road, while the passenger appeared to be walking with a cane. The pair had gotten back into the car and driven about one hundred yards down the road, which is when they met Lujer. They had helped him load the deer into the trunk of the car, and then Lujer got into the back seat. There were no signs of a struggle anywhere along the road. It took me only a few seconds to explain what they found, but I want to highlight how difficult it was to decipher the criss crossing footprints and tire tracks along the road. Remember, all of these prints were covered in a layer of powder, and they had to figure out which prints belonged to which mail and construct a timeline of who did what and when. Their findings told them that Lujia hadn't spent the night in the woods. Maybe Lujia had met some guys he knew, and the trio had gone out to celebrate a successful hunt. A discarded Budweiser can indicated that the car's occupants had been drinking, but Linda had been insistent that her husband wasn't a drinker. 00:12:20 Speaker 3: No, that's not him. He wouldn't do that. No, he wouldn't even think to do it. He'd come home and celebrate with his brothers probably and his dad and the kids. But he wouldn't take off and go somewhere. He didn't have people like that. He wasn't a heavy conture anyway. He might have a beer on the weekend if my dad was around, but I don't think I ever saw him intoxicated. 00:12:47 Speaker 1: Ward and Marsh also noticed something that ignited his suspicions. As they'd been tracking Luja through the woods, they noticed that before he began dragging the deer, he walked a little ways ahead, leaned his gun against a tree, and came back to pull the deer with both hands free. He repeated this pattern until he got to the road where he'd left his thirty thirty. As he started to walk out, but Marsh noticed that after Lujira had gotten into the back seat of the car, the driver had gotten out, walked around the car to the other side of the road, and retrieved Ludra's gun from where it was leaning against a tree ward. Marsh was an avid hunter, angler, and outdoorsman. If you're a hunter as well, you know how weird it would be to let someone else get your gun for you if you're capable of doing it yourself. But what if, Marsh, wondered, Luder wasn't capable of doing it himself. That thought worried him more than any other. 00:13:40 Speaker 4: But he knew that. 00:13:41 Speaker 1: Finding the car and its driver was going to be a serious challenge. But that's when they caught their second big break in the case, this one also thanks to the neighbor hunter and trapper Clay Crosby. 00:13:54 Speaker 5: The receipt that was found was really a lucky break on their part in that it was actually found by the neighbor who had kind of shown him around and shown him to where Luja was probably hunting, and they had asked him to kind of stay out of the way to make sure he wasn't trampling any evidence. So as this person was stepping back to get out of the way, he felt something crunch under his shoe and looked down and it was the receipt to a local garage. And the receipt was found under four inches of powder but above like the thick, heavy wet snow that had come down early and then froze. So that really meant, you know, with the timeline of how everything went and when the snow came in, that the receipt was really at the same wayer of the snow as the tracks were right, so it clearly was tied to the vehicle. 00:14:45 Speaker 1: The receipt was dated for the previous day, the day Luja went missing. But this wasn't just any old receipt. I don't know if they made receipts differently in nineteen seventy five, but this thing was like an identity thief stream come true. 00:14:58 Speaker 5: Because the receipt had the suspects resonents on it, their phone number, everything was right there. It was sort of like a handwritten note of here's your suspect, here's where you go and find them. Like that just never happens, right, That in itself was a pretty lucky break. 00:15:12 Speaker 1: The snow along the road told them Luja was alive when he got into the car and that he might be in trouble, but it also showed them what to do. Next Part three, Sully's Marsha Hennessy knew the names of the guys they were looking for, but they wanted more information before confronting them, so they went to the auto garage listed on the receipt in the nearby town of Union. The owner, a guy named Sully, was more than happy to talk to them about the two men who had visited his shop the day before. 00:15:47 Speaker 5: The guy at the garage was all bent sideways over these guys coming in. He said that they were drunk, intoxicated on whatever drugs too. They had a radiator issue with the car, I think a crack and was leaking, and he just wasn't equipped at that garage to handle that. And he had told him that, and they yelled at him, they swore at him, and he just kind of did some quick fix to get him out of there, just to get him going and get him away from him. 00:16:13 Speaker 1: Selly thought he'd gotten rid of these two yahoos. But then later that same day they came back to the garage again after they had picked up Blue. 00:16:21 Speaker 5: Jerk, and he said when they came back in, the car was just white walled with steam. It was completely filled with steam. These guys were sitting in the car. They were even drunker more intoxicated than when they had been in that morning, and they just drove the car right in on the left. They didn't they didn't get out, they didn't park outside. They just drove it right into the garage, right on the lift, and were yelling out the window and demanding that he fixed it, that he was a crook, that he had cheated them before, even though he had told them, guys, there's nothing I can do here. 00:16:53 Speaker 6: You know, I can't fix this. 00:16:55 Speaker 1: Selly told the wardens that at this point he was actually kind of nervous. These guys were clearly intoxicated, clearly angry, and he also spied a shotgun in the front seat of the car and a box of shells on the dashboard, but he said he didn't see anyone in the back seat even after all the steam from the radiator had cleared, and he didn't try to open the trunk. He just wanted them out of a shop as quickly as possible, So once again he fixed them up the best he could and probably breathed a sigh of relief as. 00:17:23 Speaker 4: They drove away. 00:17:25 Speaker 1: Josh Haynes with the Main State Police confirmed to me that the car in question was a nineteen sixty five Uwick Special. Haynes told me that the two men driving the car have been identified, but their real names haven't been released. Since they've never been officially named as suspects. Darren used fake names in his book, and we're just going to call them Suspect A and Suspect B. Suspect A is the smoker, the driver of the car, and Suspect B is the passenger and the one who walks. 00:17:52 Speaker 6: With a cane. 00:17:54 Speaker 1: At this point, Martia and Hennessy knew a few things, and none of them spelled good news for lujer The men were not in their right mind. They were armed and had almost certainly picked up Lujra from the road in the woods. But Lujira wasn't in the back seat when they arrived at the garage the second time, and there were at least a few hours between when they'd picked up the Hunter and when they drove onto the lift at Sully's, plenty of time to do who knows what with Lucher Blanger Part four Suspect A. After confirming with Linda that Lujier didn't know either of the men in the car, the wardens made their way to Suspect A's house in Camden, about half an hour from Washington. They arrived around one in the afternoon, but based on the appearance of the man who answered the door, it could have been six in the morning or eleven at night. He was wearing pajama pants and his disheveled hair made it seem like he'd just woken up, but the beer can in his hand suggested that maybe he'd just never gone to sleep, and the bloodshot eyes peering out from the bushy, dark eye browse told the wardens that he'd much rather be left alone. He was also about six foot two, and the wardens later learned a US Marine who had served in Vietnam. He'd survived a grenade blast and, along with a silver star and purple heart, had earned a metal plate in his head. For his trouble, he'd been arrested several times for barroom boxing, along with two dui charges, and to complete the picture public urination point is, this wasn't some schlub they could push around. If he'd done what they thought he'd done, they had to be careful. 00:19:34 Speaker 5: He was home alone, and he stonewalled them at first, basically just said he hadn't been hunting that day, hadn't been to Washington, didn't know where Washington. 00:19:43 Speaker 1: Was, but Warden Marsh wasn't someone to be trifled with either, and he was in no mood to play games. 00:19:49 Speaker 5: The warnings at that point they had been they'd pulled an all nighter, you know, they'd been up for probably thirty six hours or something. At that point, his patience was wearing thin, and he just bottom lined. It was the guy that, look, we know your car was there. We found this receipt. We know you were there, so you better start telling us the truth. Because there's the two ways to do this. It's going to be the easy way of the hard way, and the way this is going it sounds like it's going to be the hard way. 00:20:14 Speaker 1: The way things turned out, the wardens should have gone right to the hard way, but they didn't know what was going to happen. So I'm sure they were relieved when suspect A let them into the house and they sat down with him at the kitchen table. After telling a BS story about selling the buick the night before, suspect A eventually admitted that yes he had visited Selly's garage, and yes he'd been hunting near Washington, but he claimed never to have met or even seen Lujer. He said they saw his tracks in the snow, but that a second car must have picked up the hunter before they got there. The wardens didn't believe this story either, because there had been only one set of tire tracks on that forest road, but Suspect A stuck to his story, So the wardens asked to see his hunting clothes and gun. They figured that if the suspects had done something to Luger, there would likely be evidence on their clothes or equipment. 00:21:03 Speaker 5: And he said it was down in the basement. So what they ended up doing is the warden split up. 00:21:08 Speaker 6: You know. 00:21:08 Speaker 5: One of them asked to use the restroom, so. 00:21:11 Speaker 6: He stayed upstairs. 00:21:12 Speaker 5: Well, the other warden went downstairs with the suspect. In hindsight, that kind of turned out to be probably something they regretted to not both being there. So the other warden goes downstairs. This would have been Warden Hennessy, and the guy shows them around and shows him the hunting gear that he was wearing. It had all been cleaned already, shows him his rifle already cleaned. 00:21:37 Speaker 6: They see there's a room down there with. 00:21:39 Speaker 5: The padlock on it, that's locked up, and the warden asks to see inside there, and Suspect Day tells them I can't get in there myself. I don't have the key to it or the combination, whichever one it was. You know, the guy bought the house from gave it to me. I lost it, like, I don't even know what's in there myself, he tells. 00:21:57 Speaker 6: Them, which and of itself. 00:22:00 Speaker 5: That's pretty sketchy and hard to believe, especially from a guy who had just lied to them for a few minutes before that. 00:22:08 Speaker 1: Meanwhile, upstairs, ward and Marsh was poking around. He noticed a box of federal shotgun shells on the table, which matched what Selly had said he saw on the dashboard of the buick. When he peeked inside, he saw that one of the shells was missing. He also noticed a knife on the table that had already been cleaned, which made him start to wonder. So he walked over to the refrigerator and opened the door to the freezer. 00:22:32 Speaker 5: Anyone who hunts will know what I mean when I say there were a bunch of packages of meat wrapped in white freezer paper. He went and tested one of the packages with his hands and it was still soft, so you know, they hadn't been. 00:22:47 Speaker 6: In the freezer for long. It wasn't frozen through. 00:22:50 Speaker 1: Clearly, according to Selly's Suspectey had made a point to complain about how there weren't any deer left in Maine and that they hadn't had any luck the previous morning. He also told the wardens that even though he'd been hunting in the Washington area, he hadn't killed anything, but the still warm packages of deer meat and his freezer proved he'd been lying about the deer, and Marsh wondered if that meat had come from the one Luger had killed. 00:23:13 Speaker 5: The suspect and Warden Hennessy came back up and basically he could tell for Mordon Hennessy's demeanor and the things that he was saying is let's get out of here, like we got to go tomic. 00:23:25 Speaker 6: So you know, they got out of there. 00:23:27 Speaker 1: The pair exchange information once they were back in their cruiser, which is when ward and Marsh pulled one of those packages of deer meat from his pocket. 00:23:34 Speaker 5: Warden Hennessy was a bit freaked out over that because obviously it would never be admissible in. 00:23:39 Speaker 6: Court and ward and marsh. 00:23:41 Speaker 5: Didn't care, you know, at that point he basically just said, look, this guy's dirty. 00:23:46 Speaker 6: We're gonna get a lot on him. But if this. 00:23:49 Speaker 5: Package of meat helps us identify that these are the guys and helps us find Lujah Blander or his remains, like, I don't care. 00:23:57 Speaker 6: Like we need to get this in the lab weed to figure this out. 00:24:06 Speaker 1: What Marsha and Hennessey discovered inside that house was only the beginning. The deeper they dug, the more perilous the trail became. Evidence destroyed, witnesses intimidated, a home burned to the ground, and a shocking confession that would take years to surface. That's after the break on Blood Trails. 00:24:33 Speaker 4: Part five. 00:24:35 Speaker 1: The party the evidence of the Wardens had collected thus far was either circumstantial or, in the case of the deer Meet, inadmissible. They knew they needed more, so they took the case to the main state police and applied for search warrants for the homes of Suspect A and Suspect B. The state police sent them officers to assist, and the local judge granted them the warrants they requested, but that process took time. Luja went missing the day after Thanksgiving, and I'm sure there were people in government offices taking long weekends. The wardens and state police continued to investigate. They drove the various routes the suspects may have taken to see if they could decipher where they had gone between picking up Lujer and Selly's garage, but they didn't find anything, and they weren't able to execute the search warrants on the suspects homes until the next Friday, a week after Lujer went missing. Destroying evidence of a murder or kidnapping is tough for even the smartest criminals, and investigators figured they'd be able to pull trace amounts of blood from hunting clothes or hares from hack saws. But when Marsha and Hennessy pulled up the suspect A's home along with two state police officers, they realized they should have tried to search the home sooner. 00:25:45 Speaker 5: When they showed up, they were cars all up and down the road. The guy was having a rip roaring party. The place was packed with people all throughout the house, and they're looking at it like, is this guy he's the lead suspect and potentially a murder case, and he's having this huge party, and you know, whether it was intentional or not, in some ways, potentially was a smart thing for him to have done, because it showed that, you know, he wasn't worried, he didn't think, you know, he was in trouble. But also if there was evidence, you know, blood splatter on the floor, things like that, he had forty fifty people tracking dirt all through the house and covering it up. 00:26:29 Speaker 4: To make matters worse. 00:26:30 Speaker 1: All the potential evidence the wardens had seen on their previous visit was gone. The hunting clothes, the deer meat, the knife, the gun, the gear, all of it nowhere to be seen. They hadn't seen the buick in the driveway on their previous visit, but it could have been somewhere else on the property, or they could have found information in the house that led them to it. But the car had also been disappeared without a trace. To add insult to injury, suspect A had taped a newspaper article on Lujer's disappearance to the door of the upstairs freezer. 00:27:04 Speaker 5: He was mocking them, and he was being quite obstinate and basically When they were confronting him, they asked him where all the hunting clothes were. He said he didn't know what they were talking about. 00:27:16 Speaker 6: There were no hunting clothes there. 00:27:18 Speaker 5: He had never had any, because he knew that Ward and marsh never came downstairs and never saw it, so it was just his word against Ward and Hennessy. 00:27:29 Speaker 1: There was no smoking gun, either literal or figurative. But no criminal is perfect, and suspect A was no different. They noticed that the padlock on the door in the basement, the one that the suspect claimed he'd never opened, had been turned around. 00:27:44 Speaker 5: So clearly Suspect A was going in and out of the room and he had carelessly switched the direction of the lock. 00:27:50 Speaker 1: They cut the lock off the door, hopeful that Suspect A had failed to clean up all traces of his crime. 00:27:56 Speaker 4: They were right, but not as right as they had hoped. 00:27:59 Speaker 5: The only thing they found in there is on a bench that you could see markings in the dust where looked like a gun had been laid there, and potentially a thirty thirty because it wasn't too long, and that was the gun that Lujiah Blanger had been hunting with and they found a broken piece of a v notch site that they got it tested and it was consistent with the type of site that was used on A thirty thirty at that time. 00:28:29 Speaker 1: They noticed the light bulb had been changed recently, but other than that, it didn't seem like Suspect A used the room very often. They didn't find any evidence that anyone had been locked in the room or a body had been kept there. They came up empty at Suspect Bee's house as well, which a different team had searched at the same time. Both men stuck to their story and without any additional evidence, the wardens were forced to drive away empty handed. Part six. To any investigator, the primary crime scene is of utmost importance, but in this case, that crime scene was mobile, and the fact that the suspects tried to hide the buick was reason enough to assume it held key evidence. That's why I'm sure Warden Marsh was excited to hear that just a few days after they searched the suspects homes, the Forest Green car was spotted on a residential road in the town of Northport, about twenty miles from Suspect A's home and the Vin number was registered to the same man Warden. Marsh rushed out to the scene to inspect the car himself, but what he saw made his stomach drop. The car's headliner, floor mats, and rear seat had all been removed. The trunk had been cleaned with heavy duty cleaner, and Marsh could still smell the pungent sterile aroma. The trunk, matt, spare tire, and carjack had also been removed from the wheel well. But when Marsh looked up as he inspected the trunk, he noticed something on the lid, a deer hair. It wasn't the evidence they were hoping for, but again, suspect A had claimed he never brought home a deer. That hair was enough to impound the car, so the state police forensic team could get a closer look. 00:30:10 Speaker 5: When they did find the car and they impounded it, one of the things that they also found was a bullet hidden way down in the wheel well or where the spare tire well, excuse me would be, and it had a beard hair attached to it. And Lujah Bolanger at that time had a semi goo tea. 00:30:31 Speaker 6: I guess you could call it. It was more chin than let. 00:30:34 Speaker 1: The bullet was actually a buckshot pellet of the same kind that would have been loaded in the twelve gage shells Marsh saw on Suspect A's table. How it came in contact with a beard hair, and how that beard hair and pellet came to be in the trunk of Suspect A's car is perhaps the most disturbing piece of evidence the wardens had uncovered thus far. Unfortunately, it was still inconclusive. Forensic DNA testing wasn't really an option nineteen seventy five, and when they sent the beard hair to the FBI lab in Washington, d C. Investigators weren't able to use its color or dimensions to match it with Luger or either of the suspects. It was close, but it still wasn't quite enough to make an arrest. Part seven Suspect B. Suspect A gets a lot of attention in this story, and he still has one more act to play, but Suspect B is also important. In fact, he's the reason we know much of anything about what happened to Luger on that road. He also may have been the one to pull the trigger. Suspect B was also a Vietnam veteran, who had been wounded in battle, which is likely the reason he walked with a cane. The pair shared experience of war apparently brought them together because they didn't have much else in common besides a love of alcohol. While Suspect A was large and imposing, Suspect B was short and slender. Suspect was married, but Suspect B lived alone, and while Suspect A is never known to have told anyone about what happened that day, Suspect B just couldn't keep the story to himself. A few months after Lujire's disappearance, a man came to the police with what he said was important information. He had been partying with Suspect B, and in a drunken stupor, Suspect B told him the entire story. According to this informant, Suspect A and B had seen Lujer on the road with his deer. Not having had any luck themselves, they decided to steal logers, so they pretended to want to help, got the deer in the trunk and invited Luger into the back seat, But when Suspect A told Lujer they were keeping the deer as a quote. Shipping and handling fee Lujer pushed back. He said he needed the deer to feed his family and asked to be let out of the car. That's when Suspect B turned around into seat, lowered the shotgun at Luger, and pulled the trigger. We can assume that the pair spent the next hours days hiding the body and cleaning the car, but the informant says he was afraid to ask where they had buried Lutra's remains. Linda has a similar, though slightly different theory about what happened to her husband. 00:33:12 Speaker 3: I believe that when he got into the car, they got the deer in the trunk. He got in the back seat of the car, and they got to the end of that road. They turned left instead of right to bring him home, and I think that's where he might have made a stink when he sat it, getting anxious that they were one wrong way, and then he realized they weren't taking him home. Ah. I don't know, but that's where I think they shout him in the back seat. Was there. 00:33:46 Speaker 1: Why Suspect B would admit to doing such a thing over something as trivial as a deer has baffled investigators not to mention Lucre's family. The pair of men were obviously intoxicated and not in their right minds, but there's a giant gap between being drunk or high and murdering a stranger over some venison. The details of Ludra's case were well known at the time, so it's possible the informant was fabricating a story for some ulterior motive. Maybe the gun went off by accident, there was a fight in the car, or a third party was involved. Marsh and his colleagues knew the informant's testimony would never hold up in court. They needed more details from a more reliable witness than one of suspect. 00:34:27 Speaker 4: Bee's drinking buddies. 00:34:29 Speaker 1: Ideally, they wanted him to confess in a less alcohol soaked setting, and a short time later they got their chance. Suspect Bee had been incarcerated for stealing in an effort to fund his drug habit. Law enforcement told Suspect Bee's cellmate that they'd let him go early if he could get Suspect Bee to tell him what happened, but the alleged murderer stuck to his original story. He didn't know anything about Lujier's disappearance, and that original informant died of a drug overdose a short time later. With Suspect B refusing to speak, investigators remained hopeful that Suspect A would one day crack. They sent undercover agents to the VFW where Suspect A hung out, and while these agents were successful in befriending him, they never got him to talk about the case. Suspect A was obviously smart. He hid or destroyed all the evidence that could have sent him to jail, and maintained his innocence even while dealing with severe drug and alcohol addictions. But you know that old saying about being too smart for your own good, Suspect A may have been too smart for his own good. 00:35:35 Speaker 4: In July of. 00:35:36 Speaker 1: Nineteen seventy six, about seven months after Lujer went missing, Warden Marsh got a call Suspect A had blown up his own house in what was probably an attempt at insurance fraud and, according to Darren, possibly an attempt to kill his wife. Suspect A had filled a bunch of washtubs with gasoline and lit a candle as a fuse. He'd purchased a plane ticket to Orlando, and his plan was to be out of the state when his house went up in flames, so the insurance company couldn't accuse him of starting the blaze himself. But there was a flaw in his plan. 00:36:11 Speaker 5: It is believed that his refrigerator, with all the fumes in the air, triggered the explosion prematurely before he. 00:36:17 Speaker 6: Got out of the house. 00:36:18 Speaker 5: He did have an air ticket that day to take him to Orlando, Florida, so he was trying to make it look like he wasn't at home at the time of the explosion, But the explosion went off when he was in the house. It blasted him clear through the picture window and outside into the yard. 00:36:37 Speaker 1: Suspect A suffered severe burns and was taken to a military hospital in San Antonio. Doctors didn't expect him to last long, so the state police rushed down to Texas. They wanted to see if Suspect A would confess on his deathbed and maybe tell them what he'd done with Lujer, but they were too late. 00:36:54 Speaker 4: Suspect A died before. 00:36:55 Speaker 1: They could get there, taking what he knew about the young Hunter's disappearance to his career. Suspect B, however, is still alive. Tracy Luja and Linda's youngest daughter told me he's not in good health, but he's remained in the area since nineteen seventy five. 00:37:12 Speaker 7: He went on, he had children, and he continued with his life. 00:37:16 Speaker 1: Tracy and Linda believe there are people who might know where Ludra's body was buried, but they're too afraid to come. 00:37:22 Speaker 7: Forward because there's definitely people all did that. 00:37:25 Speaker 3: No, but it's as scared of the family too, their sons, even the kids. For a cry of interest. People are scared of him, as scared of them. Intimidation, I suppose, yeah. I mean they're very threatening. They would come on to our page and be very nasty, you know, threatening. So we had to block a few of them. And I can't blame him for sticking out for the dad. But they don't know. 00:38:02 Speaker 4: Part eight. The search continues. 00:38:06 Speaker 1: It's tempting to think of this case as solved, or that justice, at least in the case of suspect A was somehow served, but the family is far from feeling closure. They never got the chance to face in court the person who killed their husband and father, and they've never been able to put him to rest in the way he deserves. 00:38:24 Speaker 3: Above all, we just want to lay him to rest our way, not throw him like a bag of trash somewhere. We want to lay him to rest with what love and dignity, you know, because that's what he deserved. He didn't deserve what he got, No one does. 00:38:41 Speaker 1: You might expect Linda and her children to want an explanation for why their husband and father was murdered, but Linda and Tracy say answering that question isn't important to them at this point. They don't buy the excuse that the suspects were drunk or high or suffering from PTSD, and given Suspect a's attempt to kill his wife, they don't leave it was an accident. 00:39:01 Speaker 7: You're not going to get a why that you go, oh, that makes sense, because you'd have to be psychotic to agree with that. So a why is never going to be good. It's never going to be okay, it's never gonna be right. That's never going to ring closure or feel like an answer. 00:39:15 Speaker 1: They also aren't motivated by a desire to see suspect be behind bars. 00:39:19 Speaker 7: The only remaining suspect is not well and probably not long for this world. And so as far as like getting justice that's not going to happen. 00:39:26 Speaker 1: All they really want is to find Lugers remains, not only for themselves, but for the grandchildren and great grandchildren who never got the chance to know him. 00:39:35 Speaker 7: The family goes on, and I don't want it to always be like, oh, this story that's in the fam and never been solved. They've never been a saying. So they still hear about, you know what going on, and they know that that's their grandfather, and the little ones eventually will know that that's their great grandfather. And so I just feel like it's just an important to have an end. 00:39:57 Speaker 1: The mission to find Loudiers remains has been top of mind forever investigator assigned to this case. That's just as true today as it was back in the seventies. 00:40:05 Speaker 5: In the years that followed, they did anything and everything. The next spring they had a huge search at the scale that the Warden Service had never done before. 00:40:15 Speaker 6: They literally brought in all wardens. 00:40:17 Speaker 5: My father in law recalls being a part of this too, and it wasn't in his district. 00:40:22 Speaker 6: They brought him volunteers. 00:40:23 Speaker 5: They filled up a couple hotels, you know, they had aircraft flying around looking for Crow circles things like that that would suggest that animals are gravitating towards remains in certain areas. They drained one farmer's pond because there was a tip that the body was in there. And this is an area down eastern Main where there's a lot of quarries, So they sent divers into a whole bunch of quarries and different bodies of water. Suspect A himself lived on a pond. They dragged the pond, they sent divers in the pond, They looked everywhere, and unfortunately all that came up handed. 00:41:01 Speaker 1: Warden's Marsha and Hennessy won't be able to see it, but bringing this case to a close would mean more to them than most other investigators. 00:41:09 Speaker 5: One thing that really struck me, you know, with jarn and with a lot of these wardens in particular, is that they all seem to have experiences and stories that sort of haunts them and they can't put away with. This was the case that for Jarh and I could tell he really had some misgimmings about and really just have that personal drive. I know he's stayed in contact with a family for years after the case was over because he just He really personally just wanted to help bring closure for them, so he was really motivated. 00:41:41 Speaker 1: The State police have continued to search as additional tips have come in. In fact, according to a June email from Detective Haynes, ground and water searchers have been conducted in recent weeks and additional searches have been planned. They're especially interested in the back seat from the buick. There's a reason that suspects got rid of it, but it may still be around somewhere, sitting in an old barn. 00:42:02 Speaker 4: Or garage collecting dust. 00:42:04 Speaker 1: Modern forensic techniques can do things detectives in the nineteen seventies could only dream of, and that seat may hold the clues to finally solving this case. If you know or know someone who might know anything about a back seat from a green nineteen sixty five Buick, special, get in touch with the Maine State Police at two O seven six two four seven zero seven six and ask for the Major Crimes Unit Unsolved Division. Detective Haines would ask the same of anyone who might know anything about lujires disappearance, no matter how minor. Again, that number is two O seven six two four seven zero seven six part of The reason Detective Haines has resources to investigate lujres disappearance is thanks to Linda's advocacy. Linda worked with a group called the Main Cold Case Alliance to lobby the state legislature to provide funding to solve cold cases. Many states have a dedicated cold case division, but until twenty fifteen, Maine didn't. 00:43:03 Speaker 3: It was a group of us. We were at Statehouse and we were pushing. It was a law we just wanted. We wanted a cold case unit. It was really great to watch all those lights light up green. Nobody was against it, you know, all the Senate, it all lit up in our favor, and it was really a great feeling to get it approved. 00:43:23 Speaker 1: Linda is hoping that fifty years after her husband's disappearance and ten years after she helped fund a cold case unit, someone will have the courage to come forward and give the Belander family the closure they've been searching for. 00:43:37 Speaker 3: Fifty years is a long time. It's been a never ending nightmare. Some days are okay, some days aren't. But to find his remains, no matter what it is, and we want to land to rest the right way. I can't explain the feeling It's something that we've always wanted and never gone and something that we've always wanted to do for him, and he got dealt a radio and UH just want to bring him home. 00:44:04 Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. If you'd like to see images from this case, head over to the meeater dot com slash blood Trails and click on the case file for this episode. A big thanks to Darren Wooster, Linda, and Tracy for their time and willingness to speak with me. I also appreciate Detective Josh Haynes for verifying the details of Looser's disappearance. If you have a tip about this case or another case you think we should cover, send us an email at blood Trails at the meeater dot com. 00:44:32 Speaker 4: That's b l O O D. 00:44:34 Speaker 1: T R A I L S at the meeater dot com. 00:44:38 Speaker 6: See you next time. 00:44:40 Speaker 4: Stay safe out there.