Starlette “Star” Vining was a 39-year-old woman from Presque Isle, Maine, when she disappeared in October 1998. She was White, had brown hair, and was described in missing-person listings as between about 5 feet 3 inches and 5 feet 6 inches tall, with her weight reported in varying ranges because medication she was taking could cause it to fluctuate. She worked at Smythe’s IGA in Presque Isle, and investigators later determined that she last appeared for work there in October 1998.
When she stopped showing up, she left behind a life that included her children, her job, and people who knew her in the community. Her absence was not immediately reported to police, in part because she had previously moved or gone periods without regular contact with family, but this silence stretched far beyond anything familiar.
At the time she vanished, Starlette was in a relationship with George Jaime Sr., a Presque Isle businessman who owned a Main Street building that contained a pawnshop, a wine shop, and apartments. Court records later stated that in the late summer or early autumn of 1998, Vining and Jaime were living together in a ground-floor apartment in that building. According to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s later summary of the evidence, one night in October 1998 Jaime went to his adult son Ted’s home while intoxicated and distraught, with scratches and blood on him, and said that something bad had happened. Ted took him back to Jaime’s apartment, where Ted said he saw Vining’s body on the floor. The official appellate account framed the case as a cold-case murder prosecution built many years after Vining disappeared.
For years, Starlette remained missing, and her loved ones were left without the comfort of clear answers or the dignity of recovering her remains. Authorities were not formally alerted that she might be missing until 2006, about eight years after she had last been seen alive. The later investigation focused heavily on witness testimony. At trial, witnesses including Jaime’s son Ted and James Campbell testified that Jaime had admitted killing Vining, dismembering her body, and burning it in a commercial furnace in the basement of the building he owned. Testimony also described the cleanup of the scene and the disposal of ashes from a bridge over a stream in Westfield. Despite these accounts, Starlette’s remains were never recovered.
In July 2012, after the case had been cold for many years, George Jaime Sr. was charged with Starlette Vining’s murder. In November 2013, after a four-day jury trial in Aroostook County Superior Court in Houlton, he was convicted of intentional or knowing murder. The following month, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison. News reports and court summaries noted the unusual and painful nature of the case: it moved forward without the recovery of Starlette’s body, relying on testimony and circumstantial evidence to establish what had happened to her after she disappeared from Presque Isle. Jaime maintained his innocence, but the jury found him guilty.
Jaime appealed, arguing in part that the trial court had wrongly limited evidence he wanted to use to suggest an alternative suspect. On March 10, 2015, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the conviction, concluding that even if there had been an error in how the alternative-suspect issue was handled, it was harmless in light of the record. The ruling left intact the jury’s finding that Jaime murdered Starlette. Later reporting stated that Jaime died in Maine State Prison in 2025, while serving the sentence imposed for her killing.
Starlette Vining’s case began as the unexplained disappearance of a woman who stopped appearing for work and stopped communicating with her family in October 1998. It became a long-delayed homicide prosecution after investigators connected her disappearance to the man she had been living with, George Jaime Sr. Though Starlette’s remains have never been found, a jury convicted Jaime of her murder in 2013, and Maine’s highest court upheld that conviction in 2015. The case stands as a deeply sorrowful example of a missing-person investigation in which the absence of remains did not prevent accountability, while still leaving Starlette’s family and community without the full measure of closure that comes from bringing a loved one home.Last Seen: Oct 1, 1998
