Twelve years ago — after jurors convicted him of gruesomely murdering his girlfriend — Ted Jaime told them, “I am not responsible for this murder. We will proceed with an appeal or whatever.”
“Whatever” came this week when the now-frail Presque Isle monster died at Maine State Prison.
Jurors in 2014 decided that the pawn shop owner stabbed and beat his live-in girlfriend to death in a drunken rage.
Starlette Vining, a young mother and supermarket bagger, was 38 when she was last seen alive in October 1998.
Jaime walked the streets of Aroostook County free for the next 14 years after Vining went missing.
Cops finally put the case together and arrested Jamie in 2012 on murder charges.
The killer’s son, Ted Jaime, Jr., and his friend, James Campbell, both testified during the trial that Jaime told them he stabbed Vining to death, dismembered her body and incinerated it in a commercial furnace in the basement of the pawn shop and apartment complex he owned on Main Street in Presque Isle.
The younger Jaime also testified he saw Vining’s corpse in his father’s apartment, and both he and Campbell said they helped clean up the murder scene.
The killer’s ex-wife, Parise Voisine, also said on the witness stand that her former husband told her about cleaning up the murder scene and the dismemberment.
Jaime, 75 years old when convicted, was sentenced to 40 years, ensuring he would leave prison in a wooden box.
He died Thursday at Maine State Prison in Warren.
