PORTLAND, Maine — A former federal criminal profiler is claiming a brutal 1989 murder on the Maine State Pier may have been the work of the so-called Connecticut River Valley Killer, according to a report Wednesday by the Portland Press Herald.

That serial killer, who has never been apprehended, is believed by authorities to be responsible for at least seven knife murders across New England between 1978 and 1987.





The 1989 murder of 16-year-old Jessica Briggs has returned to headlines this year as the man convicted of the crime, Anthony Sanborn, Jr., is claiming he’s been wrongly imprisoned and is seeking to overturn his 25-year-old conviction.

Sanborn’s legal team hopes the serial killer theory helps convince the court Sanborn himself was not guilty.

Sanborn scored a key victory in April when the court released him on bail. Central to Sanborn’s case is the fact that a key witness from the 1992 trial has recanted her testimony, saying she was not near the Maine State Pier at the time of the crime and was partially blind then, anyway.

Former FBI criminal profiler Gregg O. McCrary and fellow profiler John Philpin agreed in recent reports filed in Portland Unified Criminal Court that the Briggs murder bore uncanny resemblance to those attributed to the Connecticut River Valley Killer, the Press Herald reported.

The two profilers are expected to testify in court in July at the request of Sanborn’s lawyer, the newspaper reported.

McCrary wrote in his report that Briggs’ injuries were similar to those sustained by another supposed Connecticut River Valley Killer victim and “reflect an unusually severe underlying psychopathology typically evidenced by serially violent offenders,” according to the Press Herald. He also reportedly wrote that the unsolved 1990 murder of Angela Thomas in Brunswick should be reviewed for similarities to the aforementioned serial killer’s cases.