Maine State Police arrested and charged a 65-year-old Bangor man with murder on Thursday in the 1984 killing of a teenager in Washington County, officials said.

Linda Maxwell was last seen alive leaving Calais after a late-August evening with friends, according to the state’s cold case archive. Three days later, the 18-year-old’s body was found near a boat launch on the bank of the St. Croix River in Robbinston, a Washington County town along the eastern Canadian border, according to the state’s cold case archive.

Linda Maxwell photographed sometime before her death in 1984. Courtesy Department of Public Safety

“Despite an extensive investigation at the time, the case remained unsolved,” Department of Public Safety spokesperson Shannon Moss said in a prepared statement.

But on Thursday, more than 40 years since Maxwell’s death, police arrested Raymond Brown, a Bangor resident who used to live in Pembroke, about 20 miles south of Calais. Brown, who was indicted by a Washington County Grand Jury, is charged with murder, Moss said.

Police arrested Brown shortly after 4 p.m., following a traffic stop, she said. He will be held at the Washington County Jail without bail, Moss said.

Details of the decades-long investigation’s findings, including a potential motive, were not immediately clear.

A report issued weeks after Maxwell’s death indicated that the primary cause of her death was being drowned in saltwater, “but the circumstances surrounding the way she was found caused suspicion,” the Calais Advertiser reported in 2019. The river where her body was found feeds into Passamaquoddy Bay.

On Aug. 23, 1984, the night she was last seen, Maxwell had been hanging out with friends and others at a parking lot frequented by area teenagers, the local newspaper reported.

Maxwell was born to Cleveland and Nancy Maxwell, and had two brothers and one sister, according to her obituary, published in the Bangor Daily News less than a week after her body was found.

Brown has a criminal history predating Maxwell’s death, according to a background check through the Maine Bureau of Identification.

He was imprisoned for one year on a burglary conviction in the late 1970s, and in 1982, he was sentenced another 90 days plus one year of probation on charges of criminal threatening, assault and possession of a firearm by a felon. A year later, he was sentenced to six months plus one day for another assault charge.

The Bureau of Identification did not report any crimes or incidents after 1983, a year before Maxwell was killed.

Anyone with further details in Maxwell’s or other cold cases is urged to call the Maine State Police.