A Maine State Prison inmate, charged in Montana with the death of one of his wives, committed suicide by jumping from a third-floor window at the maximum-security prison, officials said last week.
Dennis Larson, 50, was in a work room where inmates make crafts when he put duct tape over his mouth, climbed on a bench and jumped out the window on December 31, said Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Larson's body hit a wall and tumbled into a courtyard, where he was pronounced dead. A suicide note was found in his cell, McCausland said.
Maine State Prison Warden Jeff Merrill told the Helena (Mont.) Independent Record that Larson's personal writings indicated he was concerned about being extradited to Montana.
Few other details were released about any witnesses to the incident or the sequence of events leading up to Larson's leap from the window.
Larson was serving a 50-year sentence in Maine for murdering his third wife by pushing her off a cliff. Three months ago, he was charged with killing his first wife by pushing her into a Montana creek in 1975.
Officials in Montana had hoped to extradite Larson so he could stand trial for murder, which carries a maximum sentence of 100 years in prison.
Larson, who was from Great Falls, Mont., had claimed his wife fell into Prickley Pear Creek, which was swollen with spring runoff, and that her body was carried off in the swift current on June 10, 1975. Her body was never recovered.
In 1982, authorities finally ruled Leslee Reynolds Larson dead, and her husband collected $20,000 from a life insurance policy.
Five years later, on Oct. 11, 1987, Larson was accused of pushing his third wife, Kathy Frost Larson, off an 80-foot cliff in Acadia National Park.
Larson initially claimed she fell while walking along the cliffs, but he later changed his story and said she died while the couple was fighting. He told Maine State Police that his wife shoved him first and that she tumbled off the cliff when he shoved her back.
Larson and Frost had met weeks earlier when she responded to a personal ad. They were married three weeks later, and Larson immediately took out a $400,000 insurance policy on his bride.
A friend who testified against Larson at his 1989 trial recounted a hunting trip 10 years earlier during which Larson said he would like to get married, arrange an apparently accidental death and collect the insurance.
The similarity between the two cases prompted Montana authorities to reopen their investigation of Leslee Larson's disappearance.