BANGOR — The man accused of using Facebook to lure 15-year-old Nichole Cable to her death nearly two years ago wrote out a detailed confession while awaiting trial at the Maine State Prison and shared it with another inmate, according to testimony Thursday at Kyle Dube’s trial.
The handwritten document, penned over five to seven days in 2014, included a diagram of the area near Cable’s home that showed Dube waiting in the trees at the end of her road. It also showed where police said the mask Dube wore when he attacked her and Cable’s shoes were found.
Maine State Prison inmate Scott Ford, 45, testified that he thought Dube was “trying to hone his story for the jury” by writing out different versions of what happened May 12, 2013, the night Cable died. Ford also said that Dube changed his description of what happened.
A copy of the confession was displayed page by page for jurors to read.
“I made a Facebook account to pranck my friend Nichole,” the second page of the document, which had some words misspelled, stated. “I had her meet me at the end of her driveway and then I jumped out and scared the [expletive] out of her.
“She passed out and then I freaked,” it continued. “I put duck tap[e] on her to keep her from running off. I put her in the truck and then when for a drive thinking she would wake up … After 15-20 min she didn’t get up. I checked her [pulse] and she was dead. I did CPR but didn’t work. I panicked. I was already coming to jail so didn’t want to get charged for murder so I put her body in the woods and took her clothes off and scraped her nails from my DNA, covered her up and then left. Threw her clothes out into the wood, latter down the road but cops found them.”
On page four, Dube changed details of the night’s events, according to testimony Thursday. He again said that he created the fake Facebook page and arranged to meet Cable at the end of her road but confessed that he choked her, according to testimony.
“I jump out wearing a ski mask,” the document stated. “I grabbed her around the chest and stomach, so I thought, and then realized I had her in a choke[hold] with my right arm over her neck area. She [passed] out and I freaked.”
Dube also wrote that Cable ripped off the ski mask and scratched his face with both hands, according to testimony.
He again described taping Cable’s hands and feet with duct tape and putting her in the truck, according to testimony, and Dube wrote that she was breathing as he drove away from her home.
“So, she was breathing and still passed out,” the document stated. “Then, she started gasping for air. I quickly got out and cut the tape and sat her up. She went still and I started doing CPR and [she] didn’t start breathing.”
Dube, whose palm print was matched to one found on the document by a fingerprint analyst at the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory, said in the document that he didn’t intend to kill Cable, according to testimony.
“The truth [is] I never meant for her to die,” he said in the document, according to testimony. “She passed out after jumping her from behind and then died in the truck I didn’t hit her or [drowned] her or [choke] her or shoot her. [She] just sto[p]ped breathing. I should have called 911 and got help. But was so scared. That’s why I’m here. Because I was [expletive] scared and didn’t call for help.”
Dube, 21, of Orono is accused of using Facebook to lure Cable out of her mother’s home in Glenburn nearly two years ago by using the identity of Bryan Butterfield, a boy his girlfriend had dated, then killing Cable in an abduction gone wrong.
He has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping and murder in the May 12, 2013, death of the Old Town High School student. He allegedly planned to kidnap the girl, hide her, then find her and play the hero.
In two recorded interviews with Maine State Police detectives played for the jury last week and Wednesday, Dube repeatedly denied having anything to do with Cable’s disappearance. He described those denials in the document shown to jurors Thursday.
After refusing to testify Feb. 13 at a pretrial hearing, the man who was in prison with Dube told the jury Thursday that he and Dube communicated by surreptitiously passing papers back and forth between their cells at the Maine State Prison. Ford said that although Dube asked him “to flush” the papers, he kept them. He gave them to a prison investigator in July 2013 when he was moved to the Maine Correctional Facility in Windham.
The inmate said that he does not know what happened to the pages he sent Dube. Ford said he assumed Dube flushed them down the toilet in his cell.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Stephen Smith of Augusta, Ford said that he has spent much of his adult life incarcerated. Ford denied receiving a shortened sentence or any favors in exchange for his testimony. He said because he must be kept in a secure section of the prison, he no longer can earn good time off his sentence.
Other witnesses Thursday included Dube’s younger brother. Dustin Dube, 19, of Orono denied telling detectives that he heard “straight from Kyle” that his brother killed the Glenburn girl. The younger Dube told the jury of eight men and seven women, including alternates, that he heard his brother was responsible for Cable’s death from Sarah Mersinger, Kyle Dube’s girlfriend at the time.
Mersinger, 18, of Glenburn testified Monday that Dube confessed to her after he was interviewed by police on May 16, 2013. She later told police what she had learned, which led to the discovery of Cable’s body in the woods near Gilman Falls in Old Town.
Sean Kasprzak, Dustin Dube’s co-worker in May 2013, testified Thursday that Dube told him that his brother, Kyle Dube, had confessed to him. Dustin Dube testified that he did not remember that conversation.
Maine State Police Detective Jay Pelletier testified previously that Dube told him that he heard “straight from Kyle” the details of how he killed Cable and where he hid her body.
The defense called one witness, Tammy Dube, the defendant’s mother, who testified about how her son was a high school athlete and was the primary caregiver for his daughter, Savannah, now 6. The defense before resting entered a stipulation about a statement Mersinger made about Cable to a caseworker from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services.
“‘The [expletive] got what she deserved,’” Smith read into the record just before Superior Court Justice Ann Murray dismissed jurors for the night.
The jury is to hear closing arguments and instructions Friday morning before beginning its deliberations.
If Dube is convicted of murder, he faces between 25 years and life in prison. He is being held without bail.
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