Brooks, ME: Brooks man charged with wife's murder

BY ABIGAIL CURTIS

BROOKS -- A local man was charged with murder over the weekend after his wife was found shot to death in their home Friday evening.

Deborah Littlefield, 49, was already dead when emergency crews arrived at the family's Veteran's Highway residence at 7 p.m. in response to a 911 call made by a relative, according to Sgt. Anna Love of the Maine State Police said.

Love said Saturday that following a search, police located Michael Littlefield, 48, who was reportedly speaking with a friend inside his truck at a nearby residence on the Back Brooks Road. Police also recovered a rifle they believe was used in the shooting, according to a press release sent by the Maine Department of Public Safety.

Littlefield, who Love said has been cooperative with investigators, was being held in Waldo County Jail on Sunday. He will be arraigned today or Tuesday in Belfast District Court.

"It's early stages," Love said Saturday outside the couple's home, the white evidence response team truck parked in the driveway. "We've got to get to the bottom of things."

There is no indication that drugs are involved, she said, adding that police are treating the case as a domestic violence homicide.

"They had no history that we're aware of," Love said.

Deborah Littlefield worked at the Residence in Tall Pines, a retirement home in Belfast, where she helped care for elderly residents. News of her death has been "devastating" to the community there, said Cindy McIntire, the resident services director and Littlefield's supervisor.

"She is the most wonderful person I have ever known in my entire life," McIntire said Sunday of Littlefield. "For all the residents that she cared for, and for everyone's life that she touched, she made their life better. She made it special. She was a jewel, a gem, a diamond."

Littlefield's family meant everything to her, McIntire said.

"She loved her children, she loved her grandchildren, she loved her husband very much," she said. "It's a horrible tragedy for everyone involved."

Crews from the Maine State Police criminal investigation division spent much of Friday night and Saturday working at the blue-and-white home where the slaying happened. Troopers kept the press and others away from the home, a well-kept property screened from the road with a line of trees.

A for sale sign on the road said the single-family house was listed for-sale for $199,000. Photographs on the website of real estate agency Jaret & Cohn show a spacious, immaculate home that the agency describes as "exceptionally nice."

After the couple's children moved out, they wanted to make a change, and that's why the home was for sale, McIntire said.

Outside, laundry hung on a clothesline Saturday morning and a newer-looking Wilderness RV trailer was parked in the driveway, close to a sporty-looking black car. A child's toy truck could be spotted on a stone wall. According to Love, the couple's grandchildren visited them occasionally, but police believe no one else was home when Deborah Littlefield was shot.

Maine State Police spokesman Steve McCausland said Sunday afternoon that there is no new information about Littlefield's death.

"Anything new will come out in the form of court documents," he said.

Outside J.P. Wentworth's General Store in Brooks, the news of yet another murder in rural Maine -- just two days after two men and a 10-year-old boy were stabbed to death in Amity -- provoked shock and worry from several people who were chatting in the parking lot.

"I don't know what the hell is happening in this state," Rob Roberts of Swanville said Saturday morning. "I've never seen so many murders. It's ridiculous."