The Mr And I Hiked Up The Bürgenstock After The Rain And It Was Beautiful. I Hope We Go Back One Day.

The Mr and I hiked up the Bürgenstock after the rain and it was beautiful. I hope we go back one day.

Do You Remember Mary Mount?

That’s the question I asked my younger sister as we worked together, peeling the skins off the apples we’d picked at a neighbor’s orchard. Here I am, 51, my sister three years younger. We still live not far from each other in the Fairfield County town we grew up in. My sister doesn’t remember. She was too young. But I can’t forget.

If you want to create a weird goth/true crime-loving child, my parents had the perfect formula, which was moving our family into an abandoned convent on the grounds of the former seminary for the Congregation of the Holy Spirit & the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Connecticut.

It was the summer of 1972 and I was 7. Our new home had two family graveyards on the property, an old greenhouse full of broken glass, and a well house with an infinitely deep hole in the floor. The house was in a heavily wooded area on the border of a town called New Canaan. During the summer, my mom would get a break from us by loading my sisters and me into the station wagon and driving us to Nature Day Camp. About a mile away from our house my mom would point to an area in the woods as we drove by and say, “that’s where little Mary Mount was murdered.”

Mary Mount was a 10-year old girl who police first thought had been kidnapped. That changed when her body was discovered by 2 boys looking for a fishing spot. She had been bludgeoned to death with a rock, and that’s all we knew. It remained an unsolved case; something that kept my sisters and I wondering at night after we were tucked into bed in our big creepy house. The area where poor Mary was discovered looked identical to the woods we played in (unsupervised) all summer long. The mystery of her death never left me. Also, what the hell was wrong with my mother for telling us that?

One night, as I sat at my computer with a glass of wine, I googled Mary Mount. In a few key strokes I saw her name appear. I learned that Six other girls had also gone missing over the course of several years in Connecticut, their bodies all found in the woods. Then 5-year old Jennifer Noon disappeared as she walked home from school (It was the 70s, remember? All kids were free-range). The discovery of her body brought the number of children who had been slain in Connecticut from 1969 - 1972 to seven.

It wasn’t until 23 years later that local police interviewed Harold Meade, a 52-year-old former tow truck driver and god-damned ice cream vendor who was serving a life term for three other murders. A month before Jennifer Noon's disappearance, Meade had killed three mentally disabled residents of group home who were out taking a walk. The skulls of all three were smashed with rocks, and their bodies left in wooded areas.

Harold confessed to the group home murders, but denied killing Mary Mount, Jennifer Noon, or any of the other children. In 1972, he was sentenced to life in prison. According to police and other sources, while he was incarcerated he repeatedly bragged that those three were not his only victims. In a letter written to the state's Board of Parole nearly 20 years after the murders, the Connecticut State's Attorney said that prosecutors at the time considered Meade a suspect in the girls' killings, but did not follow through because they assumed he'd be in prison for life anyway. He wrote, “As a result of this assumption, other serious crimes in which Mr. Mead was a suspect were not pursued to the point of arrest.”

Investigators have re-examined some of the cases over the years, but none of the investigations have resulted in arrests. In a phone interview, Meade said he was tired of the accusations. He told a reporter, “If they think I'm a killer, then come and get me.” Harold Meade passed away on December 9, 2007 in the MacDougall-Walker Prison in Suffield, Connecticut.

I think about Mary Mount a lot, as I live with my husband and son in a house about 2 miles away from my childhood home. My parents eventually managed to redo the dilapidated convent and sell it for a profit. My sisters and I always played in the woods, and despite the uncovered well and the shattered greenhouse, none of us died, although I did get bitten by a non-poisonous snake once. I look back at my bizarrely unsupervised childhood and worry that my son isn’t as tough as my sisters and I were at the same age. On the up side, he never worries that he’ll be hit over the head with a rock.