The NH Attorney-General’s Office has closed the books on a cold-case homicide that is believed to be solved, but the murderer died before charges could be brought against him.
The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence in this case is that Albert Moore killed Arlene Clevesy after he drove her away from the Eagles Club on June 4, 1972, and left her body in Hume Brook. … Here, the person the evidence proves to be the murderer, Albert Moore, has died. Therefore, the case will now be administratively closed with this closure report instead of prosecution.
— ATTORNEY GENERAL OFFICE’S REPORT REGARDING THE 1972 MURDER OF ARLENE CLEVESY
According to the report, Stephen Bennett was on his way to fish in Hume Brook in Newton on June 4, 1972, when he discovered the body of Arlene Clevesy of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Her nude body was lying face-down in the water. The investigation showed that Albert Moore was the last person to have seen her, offering her a ride home from an Eagles Club. He told police that he dropped her off beside the road following an argument.
On August 14, 1972, 27-year-old Donald Rimer was killed at his home in Salem, Massachusetts, and Moore became a suspect. Moore subsequently was convicted of theft and, in August 1974, he was sentenced to prison at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. Subsequent information implicated him in Rimer’s murder. During interviews with a number of people who had been in contact with Moore, he was said to have referred to the death of “a woman in New Hampshire” — likely referring to Arlene Clevesy.
In April 1977, a Rockingham County Superior Court Grand Jury indicted Moore on one count of second-degree murder in the Clevesy’s death but, by then, Moore had been convicted of the Donald Rimer murder in Massachusetts and was serving a life sentence in that state. On November 30, 1979, the New Hampshire Attorney-General’s Office nolle prossed the murder charge in Clevesy’s death.
New Hampshire established its Cold Case Unit in 2009 and, on January 20, 2015, Arlene Clevesy’s grand-niece, Aimee Wallace, contacted the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office to inquire about the status of the Clevesy murder case. That initiated a reopening of the case and, between March 19 and June 10, 2015, CCU investigators interviewed Moore three times. Moore continued to deny any involvement in the murders of both Clevesy and Rimer.
The Attorney-General’s Office asked Detective James Soucy of the CCU to look into Moore’s location and status in March 2021, and, on April 14, Soucy obtained a death certificate confirming Moore’s death due to metastatic prostate cancer on November 11, 2019.
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