May 5, 2006

Physicist's body found
covered in bite marks

'Generation's Einstein' dies in Maine woods. FBI joins probe.

Royston Mulready

The Daily

    PRESQUE ISLE, Maine – Physicist Theodore Currie was covered with bite marks when his body was discovered inside his home last year, local police have confirmed.

The death of the man once compared to Albert Einstein has not been declared a homicide, but the FBI has joined an investigation that already involves a half dozen agencies.

A cloud of secrecy has surrounded the death of Currie since his body was discovered in June. State and local investigators have said nothing about the cause of death. In spite of a media frenzy that surrounded the bizarre end to a brilliant career, few details emerged about the killing until last week.

In Mulberry, where Currie lived alone in a house that was completed just months before his death, local police have responded to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by several journalists. The town constable revealed that numerous bite marks were discovered on Currie’s body and that the bites appeared to have been inflicted by a human mouth.

Already a strange case, the circumstances around Currie’s death have blossomed into something stranger still.

“From what I understand, the bite marks likely came from a child,” said Mulberry Constable Reginald Lyons. “Can I confirm that? No. I have not seen the medical examiners report. But I examined the body myself as did two local doctors who have 60 years of medical experience between them. They believe Currie was bitten by a child and so do I.”

Currie had just turned 42 when he was found dead. He had moved into the house in April and from all accounts, spent his entire time there alone.

“I know everybody in this town,” Lyons said. “And nobody ever saw anyone visited Mr. Currie. No children, no adults. It’s all very mysterious.”

A year before Currie severed all ties with the scientific community and moved to Mulberry, his 6-year-old daughter Angel died in a house fire at their home in Tarrytown, NY. The night of the fire, Currie was in Princeton, NJ accepting an award for his contributions to physics, a field in which he was considered the most significant contributor since Einstein.

Friends and colleagues later told journalists that Currie began acting strangely in the weeks and months following the death of his daughter. Once regarded as the physicist most likely to formulate the long sought Theory of Everything, Currie left his job as a professor and researcher at Princeton and began planning the construction of a Second Empire home in Mulberry, Maine.

“I met him twice and he never explained why he wanted to live here,” said Fred Descoteaux, who has lived and worked in Mulberry for forty plus years. “He was a very nice man, but very private. I assumed he wanted a secluded place to work, and it doesn’t get more secluded than Olive Hill.”

Before Currie came to Mulberry, Olive Hill was entirely uninhabited, a heavily wooded section that was enjoyed as a view from Cross Lake and other areas around this Aroostook County landscape.

Currie bought a 30 acre section of land near the top of the hill last year and construction on the Second Empire house began immediately.  It was said that the Second Empire was fashioned after Angel Currie's favorite dollhouse, which burned in the fire that killed her.

To the locals, the final product seemed incongruous on Olive Hill and in Mulberry in general. The ornate house was topped by a turret which can be just barely made out from a few choice locations around the region.

“It was a beauty and it still is,” Lyons said. “But what will become of it is anybody’s guess.”

The fate of the house is in question in large part because news of Currie’s mysterious death was known to local residents long before Lyons spoke with reporters about it. Most know that Currie appeared to have been bitten numerous times by a child, in a house where no child had ever visited. The story, at least locally, has taken on a certain Halloween ambiance.

“It’s one of those situations,” Lyons said, “where the spook stories going around town appear to be true. I have no explanation for it. As far as I know, neither do the state police or the FBI.”

Lyons said that the house would be tough to sell, given its history. Even if a buyer with a healthy disregard for lore and superstition should come along, the house will not be inhabited any time soon – the house remains the property of Currie’s mother, Olivia Currie, who lives in Marblehead, Mass. She has expressed no interest in selling it. She only asked that authorities in Mulberry protect her son’s home from vandals.

“I don’t think she has much to worry about,” Lyons said. “Even the bravest of kids wouldn’t go up there on a dare.”

Still, Lyons and Descoteaux agree that few residents worry that a killer might be at large in Mulberry. It is, with a population of just over 7,500 souls, a place where everybody knows everybody. The death of Theodore Currie was personal business, they reason. And nobody in Mulberry had personal business with the great scientist.

Like the teams of investigators, residents in this farming town tend to keep quiet about the killing. It's a silence that appears it will persist, in spite of Lyon's two page report and the few words he shared with the press last week.

Maine State Police would not comment Monday on the cause of death or any aspect of the investigation. An FBI spokesman in Portland refused to speak with a reporter at all. In Mulberry, where life has almost returned to normal after the media tsunami that followed Currie’s death, Lyons insists he has no personal feelings about Currie or the manner of is death. He only knows what he saw when he was summoned last June to the house on Olive Hill.

“They looked like human bite marks to me,” Lyons said. “Two physicians agreed with that and a game warden ruled the bites out as those of an animal. I don’t say that to be lurid, it’s simply what I know firsthand about the death of Theodore Currie.”

In spite of that, there are elements to the investigation that Lyons will not reveal. The matter of the bite marks was covered in the constable’s two page report before State Police took over the investigation. That report was turned over in response to the FIA request. All other details – like the contents of the house the day the body was found – remains off limits. Lyons will also not reveal in what part of the house the body was found.

“My job here is mostly to break up bar fights and settle domestic squabbles,” said Lyons, constable in Mulberry for more than 20 years. “It’s a job I’d like to keep.”

Theodore Currie is buried in Tarrytown, between the bodies of his daughter and of his wife, who passed away giving birth to the child in 1999. Olivia Currie has refused all requests for interviews.

In October of 2005, state police and the FBI obtained a court order to exhume the body of Angel Currie. It was not revealed what prompted the exhumation or what, if anything, was discovered.

Staff writer Stephen Boone contributed to this report.

Photos and more from the Currie case