RAYMOND GRAEBE, right, poses for an undated photo with his mother and granddaughter. Graebe’s body was found on Dec. 22, 2011, in Brunswick, and it took police weeks to identify him.
That’s all she has to remind her of her husband of 25 years, Raymond Graebe, whose body was found hanging from a tree in Brunswick late last year.
Police searched for two weeks to identify Graebe after his body was discovered
Dec. 22 along railroad tracks off Bath Road, but no one seemed to know who he was, and no one in the area reported him missing.
In mid-January, though, detectives identified the 79-year-old man, who they said had died after hanging himself from a tree.
Today his family struggles to make sense of Ray’s decision, and grieves for the man they remember — not the man they say died in the woods.
“This plastic bag was a person,” Reardon said earlier this month. “It’s very hard to even look at.”
Ray’s son, Mark, mailed The Times Record a photo of his father from years ago, showing him standing proudly with his own mother and his granddaughter.
The photograph shows “the happiness he possessed at the time,” Mark Graebe, of New York, said recently. “This is truly the man that he was, and the man he should be remembered as.”
Three days before Christmas, Brunswick police responded to railroad tracks off Bath Road where a man reported finding a body hanging from a tree. Detectives found no clues to the man’s identity, and after the holiday they released details and asked the public for help identifying him.
The man was found near a makeshift tent, they said, and was wearing a catheter, so he likely had been treated at an area hospital.
Days passed and detectives fielded “ tons of calls,” but still no one could positively identify the mystery man.
Finally, on Jan. 4, police said DNA evidence indicated the man was likely 79-year-old Raymond Graebe.
Residents of the Woodlawn Terrace housing complex on Water Street told detectives that Graebe, a former neighbor, had given away his belongings in October and moved out, and DNA from the items confirmed that.
“He was a great guy — very intelligent and good,” his former wife, Joan Reardon, said this month from Florida, where she lives with her husband.
She and Ray had three sons together. They divorced after 25 years, although she said they stayed in touch through weekly phone calls every Monday morning.
“The only reason we got a divorce was we were just so different. He just loved me so much. He could have been a movie star, he was so handsome," Joan recalled, and then paused. “It’s not going to matter now, he’s dead. But they would stop him on the beach and want to make movies of him. He didn’t want anything to do with them.”
Based on family accounts, Ray “didn’t want anything to do” with most people. He was an intensely private, self-sufficient man who retreated into himself to cope with stress or conflict, according to Joan and Mark.
Joan said her former husband had difficult relationships with many family members, including his sons.
Describing Ray as a “loner,” she said he worked for many years as a truck driver. Mark remembers his father leaving the house early in the morning and returning days later “to go to Omaha or wherever the route was taking him. But he really enjoyed it because he was seeing America.”
On one of those trips, Ray visited Maine, and “ fell in love with it.”
He moved to Portland — his family isn’t quite sure when — and then to Brunswick.
While living in Portland, he became an avid kayaker, and did volunteer work for Rippleffect, a Portland-based program that works with youth in crisis — and that incorporates kayaking into its program.
Anna Klein-Christie, executive director of Rippleffect, said Ray was among a group of volunteers who “ transformed” Cow island in Casco Bay into “ a really magical place where kids are connecting with nature in a way they never have before. He was part of something that was essential to, frankly, the kids in the greater Portland area.”
Joan said Ray sent her pictures of his “beautiful work” on the island.
“Who else was he going to send them to?” she asked, sadly.
In 2006, Mark traveled to Maine to see his father. The two visited Portland Head Light (“The seagulls are voracious!”) and Popham Beach.
More recently, Joan came to Maine to see Ray, though she’s not sure when that visit took place. But she remembers that he was sick, and that he wouldn’t go to a doctor because he couldn’t afford it.
Then last year, during their regular Monday morning phone calls, he told her he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
She tried to comfort him, saying, “That’s OK, they can treat it. Go to a hospital … I told him, ‘You can get some more life out of you.’”
But Joan said he had no medical insurance and was too proud to accept financial assistance.
“He couldn’t handle the fact that he had prostate cancer,” she said she realizes now.
Then Joan went on vacation to North Carolina, and when she came back, “There was a change. He called and told me he was moving. He said, ‘Uh, this apartment is too big.’ I just believed it.”
Shortly thereafter, Ray’s phone calls stopped.
Joan thinks he stopped calling her because “ he didn’t want my (BS), as he called it. He didn’t want me to say, ‘Please don’t do this, there’s a different way to do this.’ But he just slipped out of my hands … he kept lying to me that he moved, but in reality he had it planned all the time.”
Apparently, Graebe lived by himself in wooded areas of Brunswick until the time of his death.
Joan said she struggles to understand “ how anybody could get themselves to that point. I cannot get over it. He didn’t have to do that. He was such a good man. What the heck happened to him? Did he go crazy?”
But Mark thinks he understands — and accepts —the “ very personal choice” his father made.
With the help of Brunswick detectives, Mark got in touch with Jeffrey Dolloff, a friend of his father’s from Woodlawn Terrace.
Mark discovered that before he moved out, Ray told his neighbors he was moving back to Portland to be treated for cancer.
In the days before Ray disappeared, his cancer progressed dramatically and it had become painful for him to walk.
So Ray and Jeffrey Dolloff went fishing and to the beach. Then, he told Mark, he never saw Ray again.
“My father loved the Indians, all the old tribes,” Mark said. “What they used to do was, when they became old and burdened the tribe, they would … just walk away from the tribe and never be seen again. I’m assuming that’s exactly what he chose to do — walk away from the heartache that could potentially burden loved ones around him.”
Mark hopes to visit Maine this summer to meet the people who knew his father.
Brackett’s Funeral Home cremated Ray’s body, and Mark said they told them they would keep the ashes until he visits this summer.
Then Mark hopes to take the ashes to Popham — “the most gorgeous beach I’ve ever seen” — and remember their visit years ago.
“I have those memories to carry with me,” Mark said. “He was the greatest father in the world. I’m going to do right by him.”
bbrogan@timesrecord.com
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