Pauline Rourke was a young mother from Fairfield, Maine, who disappeared in December 1976. Records differ on the exact last-contact date — NamUs lists December 12, while Maine State Police and The Charley Project note December 15 — but all agree she vanished from Fairfield. At the time she lived in a mobile home with her twelve-year-old daughter Honey and a distant relative, Albert P. Cochran.

Honey said she last saw her mother lying in bed the morning she left for school and later found Pauline gone; she and police believed Pauline may already have been dead. Pauline had been expected to be interviewed as a possible witness in the November 1976 murder of nurse Janet Baxter. Cochran later denied involvement in Pauline’s disappearance; he was convicted in 1998 of Baxter’s murder and before 1976 had served time in Illinois for the 1964 death of his first wife. He told authorities he knew Pauline’s body was in a well, and multiple wells were searched, including in 2017, but no remains have been found and Pauline’s whereabouts remain unknown.

Does anyone have information about Pauline’s life in Fairfield or possible well locations in the Oakland, Fairfield, Smithfield, or Mercer areas?