Mary Dickerson Cadreau, a 94-year-old woman, died on June 6, 2011, in Portsmouth, Virginia, in a case police described as an apparent murder-suicide that unfolded behind the quiet routines of an ordinary morning. The first hint that something was wrong came not from a frantic call or a neighbor’s shout, but from a message deliberately placed for a mail carrier to find—an invitation to look closer, and to understand that whatever waited inside the home had already been decided.
According to reporting that quoted Portsmouth police, a note left for the mailman led officers to a house on Sarazen Drive, where they arrived around late morning. Investigators said there were two notes—one in the mailbox directing the mailman to check further, and another in the garage that included an entry code—details that suggested planning rather than panic. Inside, the bodies of a man and a woman were found in a back bedroom, and police characterized the scene as consistent with a murder-suicide while the investigation continued.
In the days that followed, the names attached to the tragedy became clearer in public records and notices: Mary and her husband, Alfred Edgar “Eddie” Cadreau, were memorialized together. Their obituary traced a long partnership that began in uniform—both serving in the U.S. Air Force at Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas—and continued through decades of work and family life. They married in 1954, raised a son, and built careers that brought them to Portsmouth, where Mary worked as a registered nurse at Portsmouth General Hospital while Eddie worked as an engine mechanic at the Naval Air Reworks Facility.
That same notice painted the later years as a chapter of motion and companionship—retirement marked by travel and RV trips, friendships collected mile by mile—before ending with the stark finality of June 6. When it came to accountability in the legal sense, there was no arrest to announce and no courtroom to prepare, because the suspected perpetrator in an apparent murder-suicide is not taken into custody. Instead, investigators’ work centered on documenting what happened, preserving what the notes and the scene could explain, and closing the gap between a private decision and its irreversible public aftermath.
