I then began to read it, "Over a period of four days, and in Maine's worse homicide case in more than a decade, a 31-year old cook with a spotty past and aimless future allegedly killed four people, cut three of them into pieces and set fire to the other. In between, he calmly reported to work at a nearby inn." The four-day rampage began at the start of the long Labor Day weekend and had the makings of a "macabre" movie rather than that of a frenzied spree. But the alleged violence didn't stop there. While in the holding tank, he attacked another inmate hitting him in the back of the head with a mop stick in an unprovoked attack that could have been serious had he not been restrained. And to add to the senseless rampage, the suspect, Christian Nielsen also killed three pet dogs. State Police Chief Col. Craig Poulin called it "a crime of horrific proportions."

Nielsen, who had been living at the Black Bear Bed & Breakfast for a couple of months, told police his first victim on Friday was Jimmy Whitehurst, 50, of Batesville, Ark., whose remains were burned, dismembered and discarded in the nearby town of Upton. Inn owner Julie Bullard, 65, was killed Sunday. The following day, her daughter, Selby, and friend Cynthia Beatson, 43, were also killed when they arrived at the inn unexpectedly. Police say Selby, concerned for her asthmatic mother, came to Newry to check on her, leaving her two children at a friend’s house. Accompanied by Beatson, the pair apparently arrived as Nielsen was covering his tracks from the second murder. Police say he then shot them both and began trying to dismember and hide their bodies. Another terrible case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. All three women were horribly dismembered and initial, but unconfirmed, reports indicated the women’s bodies were chopped up with a Chainsaw.

Whitehurst had split from his common law wife, a Maine resident, and returned south in May, leaving two of his four children behind, said his sister, Diana Whitehurst-Taylor, 52. But after a change of heart, he returned to Newry, his sister said. “He was just trying to get his two little ones and leave that place,” she said. He was described as a handyman who was helping out Julie Bullard and had been while he was in the area.

In a chilling call, State police were alerted to the carnage Monday evening by Nielsen's father and stepmother who arrived at the inn, the Black Bear Bed and Breakfast (a remodeled seven-bedroom farmhouse in the rolling hills of western Maine), to find a woman's body and blood outside. Nielsen's father told troopers he thought his son had committed the killing. Nielsen then admitted killing all four people.