Murder in Woodstock

Circumstances

Detectives Marty Graham and David Lamoureux never told Scott Deojay what they wanted to talk to him about after he finally pulled himself out from underneath the house. They asked him, however, if he was willing to go down to the Plainfield Police Department, just down the road, to answer some questions.

Plainfield Police Department logo

Deojay, teary-eyed and shaken from the pepper spray, said he would do that—but never asked why or what they wanted.

Again, Graham and Lamoureux had to be careful. Deojay wasn't under arrest. He could leave anytime he wanted to.

"We did the usual: timelines, history, trying to reason with Deojay," Graham told me. "We were thinking that Judy Nilan was still alive and we needed to find her before she dies."

"I had no involvement with the missing woman," Deojay said immediately after the detectives asked him about Judy Nilan.

Then Marty Graham asked him about the bloody receipt. His name was on it. How would blood get on a receipt he had signed?

He said he frequently purchased items for the Spinney estate. He had no idea how the receipt ended up on that road, or how blood got on it.

"Where is she, Scott?"

"I don't know."

The interview went on for about three hours. They got nowhere. "Obviously, our angle was, 'Where is she?'" Graham told me later. "We had nothing to hold him or arrest him on. We believed she might be alive. The interview went on and on and on, ...and we eventually got to the point where we let him go."

What else could they do?