Lloyd Franklin Millet was the boogeyman.
He was the reason you kept your daughter home at night. His was the face that inspired you to go shopping with your wife rather than send her out on her own. Frank Millett was the name in your head each night when you went through the house a second time to make sure each window was bolted.
Those big, farm-boy hands. The scratched and soulless face. Frank Millett — all 6 feet, 4 inches of him — was the very poster boy for things that could go wrong if you let your loved ones wander.
And yet, look at you now, scratching your head and trying to remember. Frank Millett. Which one was he again?
For a few weeks in 1995, Frank was all we could talk about in Androscoggin County. The ghoul had snatched one woman right out of a hotel bar out by the highway. He silenced her, raped her, killed her. He left her dead in a field while her colleagues partied on inside.
Another victim he lured back to his ratty trailer in Turner. He raped her, killed her, stuffed her in the back of a closet like so many old clothes.
Frank Millett was the stranger about which we warned our loved ones. His was the face we conjured when deciding whether we needed a gun in the house or an alarm system. Remember Lloyd Franklin Millett, our inner voice trembled as we tucked our children in bed. Remember and always be vigilant.
Yet, somehow, most of you forgot about the big, bad killer by the time that early November became the Christmas season. Frank who? Was he the one who ran that pyramid scheme over in Lewiston?
Frank Millett went to jail, went to court, went to prison. In his official rap sheet, he is credited with killing two women: one a Pizza Hut manager from Gorham, N.H., the other a 39-year-old mother of two. Enough to make him the boogeyman for a few weeks.
But in some police circles, Millett was so much more. Talk to a cop who really got close to the case and he’ll tell you the big farmhand and one-time carnival worker was a serial killer. There were a good half-dozen unsolved murders to which Millett could have been connected. He spent most of his life, after all, as a wandering sociopath.
Frank Millett could have been the big time, a face for Court TV or for the crime shows that come on after midnight. But in the end, they could prove none of it. And so Frank Millett went down as a two-time killer, just horrifying enough to earn him the title of boogeyman in this corner of the county.
As a newbie reporter, I thought I’d caught one hell of a break. An archetypal Bad Guy had stomped right across my beat and now, in accordance with the weird rules that govern relationships between reporters and criminals, he was mine. Frank Millett would forever be remembered as the Boogeyman of the Greater Lewiston-Auburn Area. I would forever be remembered as the journalist who covered him, the fly on the stink.
But here’s what was weird about that. Terror, apparently, has a shelf life. The role of boogeyman is a one-term deal. As soon as we had a Brad Chesnel, a Leroy Tomah or a Brandon Thongsavanh, the people of the Androscoggin valley moved on.
No, really. Frank who?
Lewiston went on to other things. College kids got knifed in street fights. Millionaires were murdered in shabby hotels. There was crack and war, the bird flu and terrorism. Plenty to worry about beyond hulking farm boys out to grab our women.
When the word came down last week that someone had beaten Lloyd Franklin Millett to death in prison, it should have been bigger news. The boogeyman himself was dead.
But almost nobody matched the name to the terror. They remembered being afraid way back in 1995, but they didn’t recall exactly why.
Which maybe is a good thing. People have a way of recovering from fear the way they recover from physical wounds. Good for you and your resilience.
Me, I still remember Frank Millett plenty. He’s on my mind every time my wife says she’ll be late coming home. If a friend tells me she’s going to walk home after a night in the clubs, it’s Frank’s face I’ll see before I drive downtown to get her.
The boogeyman is a terrible thing to have among us, all right. But he serves a purpose.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Email him at [email protected] for a ride home after a night out on the town.
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