A Maine man has been charged with murder nearly 40 years after his girlfriend was found dead in their Westbrook apartment.

Alice Hawkes, 23, was killed in October 1987; her death was quickly ruled a homicide, but the case went cold for decades.

Maine State Police announced Friday that Hawkes’ boyfriend at the time of her death, Stephen Bouchard, now 63 and living in Winslow, has been taken into custody in connection with her killing. He was arrested at about 2:15 p.m., said Shannon Moss, spokesperson for the Maine Department of Public Safety.

Officials began a fresh investigation into Hawkes’ killing in 2025, Moss said, and a Cumberland County grand jury indicted Bouchard on a murder charge on Thursday.

Bouchard was taken to the Cumberland County Jail in Portland and will be arraigned “in the near future,” Moss said.

He is being held without bail, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office said. A Maine criminal background check for Bouchard came back Friday evening with no offenses on record.

According to an obituary published in the Oct. 7, 1987, edition of the Portland Press Herald, Hawkes was born and raised in Bangor, attended the University of Southern Maine in Portland, and worked for Maine Savings Bank in South Portland.

Family described Hawkes as “a very unselfish and upbeat person” in later Press Herald reports, while co-workers at the bank said she was friendly and dedicated, noting she had earned several promotions during her time there.

Her body was found on the morning of Oct. 4, 1987, inside the Spring Street apartment that she and Bouchard shared, according to a Press Herald article published two days later.

The owner of 8 Spring St., Robert Margiloff, said at the time that he had to let Bouchard into the apartment because it was locked from the inside by a dead bolt. After helping Bouchard get into the residence and discovering Hawkes’ body, Margiloff called police.

An autopsy determined Hawkes had bled to death, and her death certificate indicated that her throat had been slit. Maine State Police promptly launched a homicide investigation in cooperation with Westbrook police, according to a Press Herald article from a few days after her death.

Police interviewed Bouchard immediately after Hawkes’ death, according to the article, but Deputy Attorney General Fernand LaRochelle said at the time that he was not a suspect.

In addition to Bouchard, investigators interviewed the landlord, family members and a neighbor “with whom Hawkes had argued over the use of hot water,” according to a Dec. 4, 1989, report by the Press Herald.

According to that article, Hawkes told family members in March 1986 that she’d be moving into the Spring Street apartment in Westbrook with her boyfriend. The couple met five years earlier at a summer camp in Orono.

The morning before her body was discovered, Hawkes and her mother talked on the phone for about 40 minutes, according to the article.

Hawkes said she had just come back from doing laundry and was thinking about going to a craft show at the Fryeburg Fair in the afternoon, while she said Bouchard was going to play golf.

The 1989 report notes police remained “tight-lipped” even two years into the investigation. A state police captain said the murder was still being investigated at that time.

After the case went cold, Hawkes’ family kept pressing for answers.

Two of Hawkes’ siblings expressed frustration with the lack of a resolution, even though they said investigators seemed to have a suspect, they told the American Journal in 2019.

The newspaper reported that state police Lt. Brian McDonough told WGME in 2016 that “we have a pretty good idea of what happened and who is responsible for it,” but the family said no suspect was publicly identified at that time.

One of the siblings noted that their mother, prior to her death in 2009, never gave up hope of finding an answer.

In the late 2000s, Westbrook resident and independent researcher Mark Swett created a website in the hopes of drawing renewed attention to Hawkes’ case.

“Everyone is pleased that Alice’s story is being told,” one of Hawkes’ sisters said at the time.

Swett said that, according to his research, Bouchard stopped cooperating with investigators in the days after his girlfriend was killed and broke off contact with Hawkes’ family.

This is a developing story.