Shirley Mae Murray Coolen was just 24 years old when her lifeless body was discovered in a tulip bed on Park Row in Brunswick. Sketch published in the New York Daily News, May 13, 1956

It was late in the evening on Saturday, May 26, 1951, and Shirley Mae Coolen had just left her job at the Bowdoin Hotel restaurant at 115 Maine St., Brunswick. The popular waitress then walked up Maine Street toward Park Row, expecting to meet her ex-husband in front of the Pastime movie theater. It was the last time Shirley would be seen alive.

On Tuesday evening, three days after Shirley was last seen, Lillian Chase stepped out of the Senter Family home at 163 Park Row where she worked as a housekeeper. Chase noticed something odd in the tulip bed of the front yard, near the row of hedges. Stunned by what she had seen, Chase ran into the house and called police.

When officers arrived, they discovered a bright red scarf had been tied tightly around Shirley’s neck. It was clear Shirley had been murdered. Police wasted no time gathering clues from the scene and from Shirley’s home at 27 South St. Suspicions quickly focused on Shirley’s ex-husband, Guy Coolen of Boston.

Police found correspondence between the divorced couple indicating Shirley expected to meet Guy on Park Row that Saturday night. However, police interrogated Guy in Boston, where he passed a lie-detector test and revealed that he had an alibi. Guy, as it turns out, didn’t see Shirley at all.

Police now gathered the usual local offenders for interrogation but found no clear suspects. Investigators also interviewed two expelled Bowdoin College students. Both men had recently dated Shirley and were now staying at the Portland YMCA under assumed names. But even these two were cleared.

Bath police then joined the investigation as detectives, investigating a series of recent attacks on women, now believed the attacks were connected to the red scarf murder.

Shirley was laid to rest near her infant son in the family plot at the Riverside Cemetery in Yarmouth. Lori-Suzanne Dell photo

Many women in the Bath and Brunswick were refusing to leave home without an escort. And a week after Shirley’s funeral at the Riverside Cemetery in Yarmouth, there was still no one charged with her death.

Police worked overtime to find the murderer. Investigators even looked into closed cases in Sanford, Portland, Lewiston and Waterville. Then, in Winslow, police discovered a prime suspect.

Charles Terry, a 21-year-old repeat offender, was already in police custody. The former U.S. Marine, who had been dishonorably discharged, had just been arrested and arraigned for assaulting two women — one in Augusta and the other in Chelsea.

Both Brunswick Police Chief Joseph Lebel and Bath Police Chief Frank Moriarty interviewed Terry for over three hours, but Terry provided a believable alibi and offered to take a polygraph to demonstrate his innocence.

When the lengthy interrogations by both chiefs and state and county investigators were over, all were “satisfied” with Terry’s answers to their questions. Investigators saw no reason to submit Terry to a costly lie-detector test. As a result, Terry was eliminated as a suspect in Coolen’s murder. Police were now back to square one.

Terry was soon convicted of raping one of the women and assaulting the other and was sentenced to serve nine years in the Maine State Prison. He was released in 1961.

Winslow native Charles Terry, once a cleared suspect in the Coolen case, was convicted of the scarf murder of a New York City Woman in 1963. Maine State Prison files

While newspapers declared a lack of progress in one murder, headlines exalted progress in another. On Thursday, Jan. 18, 1951, Lancelot Cooper, a 56-year-old Bath Iron Works welder, was hacked to death in his Bowdoin Courts apartment on Maine Street. Cooper’s wife Evangelyn was arrested and charged with his murder.

In the Cooper case, police employed polygraph testing and it had paid off. Investigators had used the polygraph with nearly two dozen of the Coolen suspects but did not test Charles Terry. By mid-June, Cooper was found guilty of manslaughter. Meanwhile, Coolen case detectives still had little to go on.

Then, on Nov. 9, 1951, state investigators — unable to determine further clues or suspects — officially closed Brunswick’s red scarf murder case. The homicide of Shirley Mae Coolen would never be solved.

Twelve years later, Charles Terry was back in the headlines — only this time in New York City. On June 6, 1963, Terry was arrested for the scarf strangulation of 63-year-old Zenovia Clegg. When interrogated by NYPD investigators, Terry confessed to Clegg’s murder. And detectives believed it wasn’t Terry’s first homicide.

In fact, Boston Police long suspected Terry had committed many of the strangulation deaths later claimed in the confessions of the infamous “Boston Strangler,” Albert DeSalvo.

Charles Terry was tried, convicted and imprisoned for Clegg’s murder, and he was set to be executed for his crime when he died of lung cancer in 1981 while on death row.

Today, the case of Shirley Mae Coolen’s homicide may be closed, but Brunswick’s red scarf murder still remains one of the more infamous of our “unsolved” Stories from Maine.

Historian Lori-Suzanne Dell has authored five books on Maine history and administers the popular “Stories from Maine” page on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.