HOULTON, Maine — A man who escaped from the Aroostook County Jail more than 30 years ago was sentenced in Houlton District Court March 25, 2015 to one year in prison.
Albert C. Marcheterre, 56, of Eden, Vt. escaped from the ACJ on April 21, 1981, when he scaled the fence of the outdoor inmate pen area and squeezed between an opening at the top of the fence that did not contain enough barbed wire, Aroostook County Sheriff Darrell Crandall said. Marcheterre had originally been in jail on a burglary charge from the Ashland area.
Assistant District Attorney Kurt Kafferlin said Marceterre pled guilty to the charge of escape during his court appearance last Wednesday and was sentenced to a year in prison at the Maine Department of Corrections.
Crandall said Marcheterre was the last person to have escaped from the Aroostook County Jail and had been a mystery for the jail staff until his arrest. Crandall’s father, Darrell Sr., was sheriff at the time of the escape. Crandall said there was a sense of redemption in being the sheriff who brought Marcheterre to justice.
After his escape in 1981, a spelling mistake on his arrest warrant allowed Marcheterre to spend the next 30 years on the run. He was living under the assumed name “Albert Michael Dumais” in Vermont. While under the name Dumais, he was arrested several times between 1992 and 2002.
“He actually had several run-ins with the law, including a federal conviction under his assumed name,” Crandall said. “There were apparently no fingerprints on file, so the dots were never connected.”
Once those dots were connected, Marcheterre was arrested Nov. 2 by Vermont State Police and extradited to Maine.
His true identity may have been uncovered in 2004, when he was sentenced to five years in federal prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm. It was undetermined when the FBI realized Marcheterre was wanted on the 1981 warrant for escape.
“It (the escape) was a stupid move by a grown-up kid and many years later he is now paying the consequences,” Crandall said. “The one year he was sentenced to is certainly a lot longer than the burglary charge he would have been sentenced to had he just stayed put.”
Editor’s note: Bangor Daily News reporter Judy Harrison contributed information to this article.
