Back in 1911, the Lewiston Evening Journal mentioned a man who had once filled its news pages with riveting copy named James M. “Jim” Lowell, who “had the peculiar fate to be the central figure in one of the most singular, dramatic and sensational cases ever known in the annals of law.”
The news story described the Rangeley native, who had moved to Lewiston after serving in a Maine regiment during the Civil War, as “the mildest-mannered man that ever killed a woman.”
That was nowhere near the most accurate summation in the annals of the newspaper.
But it was true that Lowell wound up as the key player in a long-running saga that captured the attention of a nation and spurred debate for decades among a populace that could never quite make up its mind about him — and what he did.
After the facts had been sorted out legally, for better or worse, the Journal insisted that the tale it had followed so closely in its pages “read like the fictions of the most sensational imagination.”
The story of that man and that murder, arguably the biggest ongoing news story that ever occurred in Lewiston, will be told in full this year as part of the newspaper’s 175th anniversary.
Much of the information for the tale comes from the newspaper’s own coverage, but it is supplemented by substantial archival research, books, magazines and what appeared in other papers.
It’s such a long, long story that to do it justice, the paper plans to run it in weekly installments beginning Sunday and continuing into the winter, akin to the novels the Journal once routinely serialized in its pages.
Only this time, the story is true.
And it happened in Lewiston.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
