WALDOBORO — Several days after a woman was found dead in her home in a suspected homicide, the street where she had lived for the last three years was quiet.
“It’s a good neighborhood — quiet,” resident Mary Rolerson said Wednesday. She said she had been sitting on her porch the night before police arrived on her street Saturday.
“And there was nothing happening down there,” Rolerson said.
Police have shared few updates about what may have happened to Levern Kelley, 53, whose body was found in her home on Genthner Road in Waldoboro on Saturday morning, two days after her family says anyone last heard from her.
Maine State Police said Sunday that they’re treating Kelley’s death as a homicide, but since then, they’ve shared no other details — including Kelley’s cause of death or whether police have identified any suspects.
State police spokesperson Lt. Aaron Turcotte said Wednesday that he had no updates to share about the case. A spokesperson for the Office of the Maine Attorney General, which prosecutes murders, said Thursday that they couldn’t comment on the case or whether any prosecutors have been assigned.
Rumors have circulated online about a suspect, but Turcotte would not confirm whether investigators are looking at anyone specific. Police have said there is no known danger to the public.
Kelley’s daughter, on a GoFundMe page set up to raise money for her mother’s “final wishes,” wrote that someone had called 911 after her mom didn’t show up to work.
“There was foul play involved, my mom had been murdered, I’m still in disbelief,” Amanda Gustafson wrote. “We all are.”
The Press Herald could not reach the family this week.
The GoFundMe had raised $3,800 as of Thursday morning. Another person who knew Kelley asked a reporter to leave the family alone.
Gustafson wrote that Kelley raised her and her younger sister in Union, where Kelley lived for 20 years before moving to Waldoboro. Kelley had worked for Pen Bay Hospital in Rockport for more than a decade, her daughter said, and close friends and family knew her as “Bernie.”
“All of us at MaineHealth, and especially those of us at MaineHealth Pen Bay Hospital who had the chance to know and work with her, are saddened to learn of the tragic passing of Levern Kelley,” the hospital said in a statement. “Our hearts go out to her family during this difficult time.”
Kelley’s daughter described her as a devoted mother and grandmother, “the type of person who would’ve gave the shirt off her back, she was kind and loving to everyone she knew.”
Kelley bought the home at 506 Genthner Road in 2022, according to Waldoboro property records.
She lived there with a man whom she divorced in 2023, according to Lincoln County court records. The house is shielded from the main road by trees and a long driveway, where a sign with an image of a revolver discourages trespassers.
Neighbors who spoke with a reporter Wednesday said Kelley and the man she lived with kept to themselves in an otherwise quiet community. Rolerson said she could sometimes hear the man riding his motorcycle in the summer.
Other neighbors who asked not to be named said they felt the incident was contained and aren’t afraid, although some expressed sorrow about Kelley’s death, even though they did not know her well.
