Authorities Doubt Fiery ‘Suicide’ Was End of Double Murderer

A bitter wind was howling through Mt. Washington Valley on the night innkeepers Malcolm and Elizabeth Jennings were murdered in their cottage at the Dana Place Inn.

They were bound and gagged, their throats were slashed and they were stabbed repeatedly. A passing truck driver saw the snowbound cottage in flames and called firefighters, who found the bodies in separate bedrooms.

“It was stark . . . stark,” said attorney William D. Paine, a close friend of the Jenningses. “I really remember having a feeling of it being black and gray and white,” he said of the scene that dawn last January.

Villagers in nearby Jackson feared that a vicious intruder had come to this peaceful community in the White Mountains, which caters to cross-country skiers and hikers. But soon emerged a tale of a family in torment, of a troubled young daughter and the middle-age lover she met in Alaska.

‘May Remain Whodunit’

Fresh grass now covers the place where the Jennings cottage stood, and the only sign of the fire is a scorched tree trunk.

The couple’s son has sold the inn, a century-old farmhouse, to the builders of a resort across the highway. The developers say they will preserve its country charm.

“It happened, and you can’t hide it,” new owner E. C. Low said of the murders and fire. Guests still ask about it, and to the townspeople the story is as perplexing today as it was on that frigid winter morning.

“It’s a definite whodunit more than anything--and might very well, forever and ever amen, remain a whodunit,” said Spencer Mann of the sheriff’s office in Alachua County, Fla., where the second stage of this murder mystery unfolded.

Twelve days after the Dana Place deaths, the charred remains of a young woman and a middle-aged man were found in a burned-down shack on the edge of a cornfield in High Springs, Fla., north of Gainesville.

A seven-page, murder-suicide letter, mentioning the Jennings killings up north, was found in a blue Fiat not far from the shack. It was written and signed by Glyde Earl Meek, 49, a drifter who had caused a deep rift between Mal and Betty Jennings and their 21-year-old daughter, Page.

More than 10,000 bone fragments recovered from the cornfield still lie in metal trays in a Florida laboratory, where Dr. William Maples, a forensic anthropologist, is trying to put the pieces together.

Killer Feared at Large

Meanwhile, it is uncertain whether Meek is dead, whether he killed Page and whether she died with him or is, perhaps, alive somewhere. The only certainty is that nobody knows.

Florida investigators, relying on the letter’s contents and other evidence they say has not been made public, insist that both Page and Meek died at High Springs.

But New Hampshire authorities, who have issued a warrant for Meek’s arrest in connection with the Dana Place murders, theorize that Meek murdered the Jenningses, killed Page, faked the suicide scene and fled, probably to the Northwest.

That leaves Christopher Jennings, 25, wondering what became of his sister and of Meek, wondering “if they’re still out there,” said Betsy Paine, 21, Chris’ friend since childhood.

Page Jennings was a tall, handsome young woman with auburn hair. She was a champion javelin thrower and a high-school honor student who dropped out of Simmons College in Boston and headed for Alaska.

Couple Met in Alaska

She met Meek at a lodge near Anchorage, where she worked in the kitchen--a job she had known as an innkeeper’s daughter. Meek was working there as a handyman.

“She went up there to find herself, and she was very, very vulnerable,” Betsy Paine said. “This guy gave her something she couldn’t get from anybody else.”

Page apparently had no idea that the balding, muscular man had used at least eight aliases and had served three prison terms for burglary and car theft.

He had been the star football player on the Walla Walla State Penitentiary team in Washington, and has been described as physically strong and roguishly charming.

Chris Jennings described Meek as “quiet and low-key.” Mal and Betty Jennings were horrified over the relationship between him and their daughter.

“They hated him,” said Bill Paine, the Jenningses’ lawyer.

In the fall of 1984, after a year’s on-and-off romance between Page and Meek in Texas and Alaska, Betsy Paine says the Jenningses told Page, “It’s him or us.”

Daughter Sought Therapy

Page said that Meek beat her but, Betsy Paine recalled, “She begged me to understand her and not to judge her.

“She had no more sense of her own persona. There was no Page left. It was what Betty and Mal wanted. It was what (Meek) wanted,” Betsy Paine said.

Page saw a therapist, bought herself a puppy and went to live with her brother in Gainesville, where he worked in a newspaper advertising office. Meek, whom Page had left in Seattle, showed up in December and moved in with them.

According to a summary filed in probate court here, Betty Jennings learned in mid-December that Meek was still in the apartment and told her daughter on the telephone, “That’s it--don’t come home for Christmas.”

On Jan. 11, four days before the Dana Place murders, Chris Jennings, backed by his parents and friends, told Page and Meek to get out. He told Page, whom he has always described as his best friend, that she could come back any time--without Meek. It was the last time that Chris Jennings saw his sister.

“My big beef with the guy was: ‘What the hell do you do with your life? I don’t understand. Where is your goal? Don’t you have a goal?’ ” Jennings said of Meek in a recent television interview.

Hindsight on Call

According to the case summary, written by attorney Paine, Meek telephoned Chris Jennings on Jan. 13 and told him that he and Page were honeymooning in Miami. If his sister had been alive, Chris has said since, she also would have talked with him then.

Meek pawned some of Page’s jewelry in Portland, Me., on Jan. 14 or 15, according to court records. Law enforcement sources have said they have evidence that Meek traveled alone up the Eastern seaboard.

New Hampshire Atty. Gen. Stephen Merrill believes that Meek returned to Page Jennings after he murdered her parents:

“He goes back and tells her (about the murders) and thinks she will be pleased that he has removed the tension between her parents and him, and in fact, she is extremely distraught,” Merrill said in an interview. He further theorized that Meek, fearful that Page would turn him in, then killed her.

According to Betsy Paine, the murder-suicide note found in the Fiat said that Page was aware of Meek’s plan to kill her parents, but “the possibility of her condoning it is outrageous to those who knew her,” Betsy Paine said.

Much of the speculation over the identities of the bodies at High Springs centers on two teeth that were found at the shack. One has been identified as Page’s and that other as a gold inlay of Meek’s. Those clues have made some investigators more doubtful, however.

Teeth Are Suspect

“The gold tooth is the most characteristic tooth in Glyde Earl Meek’s mouth. The tooth found next to the female body is the most characteristic tooth of Page Jennings,” said Merrill. “I suggest to you that is salting the scene.”

Law-enforcement sources have said that another tooth of Meek’s was found, three weeks after the Dana Place murders, under the back seat of a stolen car recovered in Arizona.

Meanwhile, forensic specialist Maples cannot prove that Page died in the cornfield, and he has said that the bone fragments found there are inconsistent with Page’s physical history.

Some New Hampshire officials speculate that Meek may have used the bodies of two vagrants to set up the murder-suicide scene after he had killed Page somewhere else.

At state police headquarters in Concord, N.H., Lt. Martin Heon, who is in charge of the case here, said the Jennings file will remain open until officials here know “in our own hearts and minds that ‘Hey, that is Glyde Earl Meek and Page Jennings down there.’ ”

A small flagstone patio overlooking the gurgling Ellis River is the only reminder of the Jennings cottage that stood in the apple orchard at Dana Place. On the refrigerator door, Betty Jennings used to keep a clipping of the newspaper column that Chris wrote about the day his sister took off for Alaska:

“I know she’ll be back, and she’ll be a better person for going, but that awful empty feeling crept into my stomach as I watched her leave--my little sister all grown up,” Jennings wrote.

“And it was all right for me to cry, because I’ll miss her.”