The man who pleaded guilty in 2014 to the 1976 killing of Blanche M. Kimball of Augusta died Wednesday at PenBay Medical Center in Rockport, according to a news release from the Maine Department of Corrections.
Gary S. Raub, 67, had served about two years of a 20-year sentence for criminal homicide in the second degree at the time of his death.
Raub was charged in October 2012 with criminal homicide in the first degree, the equivalent to today’s murder charge. At the time, he was homeless and living on the streets in the university district of Seattle, Washington.
The charge followed an undercover sting in which Seattle detectives got Raub’s DNA by paying him $5 to participate in what they told him was a chewing gum survey.
He was later extradited to Maine to face the criminal homicide charge.
The charge against Raub originally said he “knowingly inflicted great physical suffering” while intending to kill Kimball, a 70-year-old retired dental technician and practical nurse who took in boarders.
In 1976, Raub, under the name Gary Wilson, lived in Kimball’s 352 State St. home for a short time. He was questioned by police after Kimball’s body was discovered in early June 1976, but denied any involvement.
In a 2014 jailhouse interview with the Kennebec Journal, Raub said he had no memory of the incident, but he “pled guilty because it must have happened.”
He also indicated in the interview that he had medical problems, including trouble with his equilibrium.
At the time of his arrest in 2012, Maine State Police said it was the oldest unsolved homicide case to result in charges in state history.
The state police and the medical examiner are reviewing the death, as is protocol when a prisoner dies while in the custody of the corrections department.
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