Murder in Woodstock

Hide N' Seek

Detective Marty Graham and his partner waited patiently at the door for Scott Deojay. They needed to speak to him regarding a receipt they had found with his name on it—a receipt that, in fact, had also been stained with what appeared to be fresh blood droplets. It was too early for the lab to come back with a match, so there was no definitive answer as to whose blood it was on the receipt, or in the snow where the receipt had been located. Still, maybe Scott Deojay could clear the matter up and point the state police's investigation in a different direction.

The key was to talk to him.

Deojay's girlfriend returned to the door and let Graham and Lamoureux in. "Where is he? We want to talk to him," Graham said confidently.

"In the bedroom," the blonde said. ("She was very helpful," Graham recalled later. "Ready and willing to help us.")

But Deojay had run from the bedroom into a garage attached to the house. He was gone.

"When we got into the bedroom," Graham explained to me later, "we were all surprised because Deojay was no longer in bed, where his girlfriend said he was."

"This is odd," the girlfriend said to Graham and his partner. "We were just sleeping. He asked me casually who was at the door."

After leaving the bedroom, realizing Deojay had bolted, Graham walked into the garage and began looking around while Lamoureux called for backup. Deojay was AWOL. With snow on the ground outside, Graham quickly determined that he could not have taken off, or they would have seen fresh footprints in the snow. They had to be careful. They were there without a warrant. All they wanted to do was talk, ask Deojay a few questions and, with the right answers, be on their way. They weren't accusing him of anything; they were simply trying to locate a missing person and the evidence had led them directly to Scott Deojay.

As they entered the garage a second time, Graham and Lamoureux heard some movement near one of the walls. It appeared Deojay was hiding underneath the house in what Graham described later as a "three foot high crawl space."

Sure enough, Deojay had shimmied himself underneath the house and was hiding, like a child.