A Phone Call on Pine Street: The Unanswered Killing of Scott Sampson

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A Man on the Sidewalk on Pine Street

In the early morning hours of November 13, 1990, Portland police were called to 64 Pine Street in the city's West End for a report of a person lying on the ground. People nearby had assumed the man was simply drunk. When first responders reached him, they found no pulse. The man was Scott Sampson, a 26-year-old father of two who had come to Portland to visit a friend and had planned to get a ride home that night. His death was ruled a homicide. Thirty-five years later, no one has been arrested, and the Portland Police Department continues to describe the case as open.

A Young Father From Springvale

Scott Sampson was 26 years old and the father of two young sons. At the time of his death, he was living with his mother in Springvale, Maine, a town in York County. His son Shawn was five years old when his father was killed. His sister, Sandra Hill, has spent decades speaking publicly about her brother and the hole his death left in their family. To them, Scott was not a case number but a son, brother and father whose life was taken on an ordinary November night for reasons no one has ever explained.

A Visit to Portland's West End

According to his family, Scott had been staying at a woman's apartment in Portland's West End on the night of November 12, 1990. At some point he decided he wanted to go home. Around midnight, he walked to a convenience store on Pine Street with the intention of calling his mother in Springvale and asking her to come pick him up. That phone call was meant to be the start of an ordinary trip home. Instead, it set in motion the last hour or so of his life, a period that investigators and his family have been trying to reconstruct ever since.

The Conversation Outside the Store

Inside the store, Scott ate and chatted with the clerk. The clerk later told Scott's family that when Scott stepped back outside, he appeared to be talking with someone he recognized. That detail has become one of the most important threads in the case. If Scott knew the person he was speaking with in the minutes before his death, then his killer may not have been a stranger at all. Police have never publicly identified the person seen with Scott outside the store or said what role, if any, that person played. His sister has said that police that night recognized Scott but did not recognize the person who was with him.

How Scott Sampson Died

The Portland Police Department has never publicly released Scott Sampson's cause of death. Investigators have said they withhold certain facts to protect the integrity of the investigation, a common practice in cold cases that allows detectives to test the credibility of anyone who claims to have knowledge of the crime. Scott's family, however, has kept copies of the homicide and medical examiner's reports. Portions they have shared indicate that he suffered a stab wound. The man people walked past, assuming he had simply had too much to drink, had been fatally wounded on a city sidewalk.

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