She was 4 years old. She was found at 20 past 6:00 on the morning of March 3rd, 1964, sitting on the back step of a farmhouse in Kettle County, Vermont, in a nightgown, in 11°.
And she had been outside for something in the order of 4 hours. The doctor who came out from the village warmed her in front of a wood stove for 40 minutes, and then wrote seven lines in a medical record about what she said while he did it.
Nobody in 1964 disbelieved her. That is what makes this different from most of these stories.
They believed her, and they wrote it down, and then they worked out that what she had said could not be right because the man she named had been at that farm at 5:00 in the morning, in daylight, in front of witnesses, and the thing she was describing had happened in the middle of the night.
A 4-year-old, they decided, had run 2 days together. That is what 4-year-olds do. She was 55 before anybody asked her again, and when they did, in 2015, she said exactly the same thing she had said at 4:00, in the same words, and the only reason it was worth anything in a courtroom was that a country doctor with a fountain pen had written it down while she was saying it.
But before we get to any of that, we have to go back to that winter.
Because to understand what came out of that house, you first have to understand who Marjorie Choquette was.
Alden Hollow in 1964 was 600 people in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, up against the Canadian line, where the hills come in close and the roads follow the water because there is nowhere else for them to go.
It was cold in a way that the rest of New England is not. 30 below happened.
The snow came in November and stayed until April, and the town road crew plowed with a truck and a wing, and everybody kept a shovel in the car.
March was sugaring. That is the whole calendar up there. You wait all winter, and then for four or five weeks the days go above freezing and the nights go below, and the sap runs.
And every farm with a sugar bush is boiling around the clock, and the whole kingdom smells like wood smoke and steam and something sweet, and nobody sleeps properly for a month.
There was a general store, a Grange Hall, two churches, and a creamery. Town meeting day was the first Tuesday in March, and everybody went.
Johnson was president. And down in the valley they were building the Interstate, which was going to change everything about that county, and about which every single person had a firm opinion.
Marguerite Choquette was 29, and everybody called her Margie. She and Lon Choquette milked 41 head on a hillside farm 2 and 1/2 miles out the Beaver Meadow Road.
They had bought it in 1958 with a loan from his father, and they were by 1964 just about making it.
They had two children. Suzanne was four. Deni was 18 months. Margie had grown up in Sherbrooke, across the line in Quebec, and had come down at 19.
She spoke French to the children and English to everybody else, which in that county in 1964 was ordinary.
She kept the farm’s books, which was not typical, and she was good at it.
She had taken the herd records off her father-in-law in 1961 and had culled the bottom six cows in two years and the milk check had gone up 11% and there were men in Alden Hollow who found that funny and men who did not.
And the thing everybody said about her the thing three people said in 1964 and two of the same people said in 2015 is that she sang in the barn every milking morning and evening in French loud enough that you could hear it from the road.
She was 29. Sugaring had started nine days earlier. Monday, March 2nd, 1964 was thawing by day and dropped to 11° overnight.
Lawn Choquette was in the sugar house. That matters and it is the whole architecture of the night.
The Choquette sugar bush was on the far side of the hill 3/4 of a mile from the farmhouse by the woods road and when the sap is running you boil until it is done and on the 2nd of March 1964 Lawn Choquette went up at about 7:00 in the evening with his cousin and they boiled until 4:00 in the morning.
Two men all night 3/4 of a mile away over a hill beside a roaring evaporator that you cannot hear anything over.
At about 8:30 p.m. Margie Choquette telephoned a neighbor about a delivery of grain. The neighbor said she was ordinary.
At some point between then and about 2:00 in the morning somebody came into that farmhouse.
At 4:20 a.m. Lawn Choquette and his cousin drew off the last of the batch and banked the fire.
At about 5:00 a.m. The milk truck came up the Beaver Meadow Road as it did every morning, and the driver back to the milk house, and swapped the cans, and left.
He did not go near the house. There was no reason to. At 5:40 a.m., Lawn Choquette came down off the hill.
At 6:20 a.m., a neighbor driving to the creamery saw a small child sitting on the Choquette back step.
Suzanne Choquette had been outside for some hours. She was hypothermic, and she was not seriously injured.
Her brother was asleep in his crib inside, unharmed. Marjie Choquette was in the kitchen.
The cause of death was blunt force. There had been a struggle in the kitchen, and nowhere else in that house.
Nothing was taken. The books were on the table. Her wedding ring was on her hand.
The back door had not been forced, because the back door of that house had never had a lock in it.
Dr. Emery Bascom was 52, and he was the only physician in that end of Kettle County, and he had been since 1941.
He got there at about 10:00 to 7:00. He put the child in front of the kitchen stove at a neighbor’s house, wrapped her, warmed her slowly the way you are supposed to, and stayed with her for 40 minutes while the state police did what they did up the road.
And while he did it, she talked. He wrote seven lines about it in her medical record that afternoon, in his surgery, in fountain pen, dated Two of those seven lines are the case.
She said that she had come downstairs. She said her mother had told her to go outside and stay out.
And she said, in the doctor’s transcription of a four-year-old’s phrase, in quotation marks, exactly as she said it that the milkman was cross.
The Vermont State Police took it seriously. That is documented and it is to their credit.
They went to the milk truck driver on the 3rd of March. He was Wilfrid Dupuis, 27, who collected from 11 farms on that route six mornings a week and had for four years.
He had been at the Choquette milk house at about 5:00 in the morning on the 3rd.
This was not in dispute. Leon Choquette knew it. The creamery records showed it and the two farms either side of the Choquettes on the route confirmed their own collection times within minutes.
5:00 in the morning. Broad daylight by the standards of a farm. Hours after Margie Choquette died.
And so the investigation reasoned, entirely sensibly, as follows. A 4-year-old who has been outside in the cold for 4 hours, who sees the milk truck every single morning of her life, has taken a thing she saw at 5:00 on Tuesday and put it into the night before.
Children do that. Children do it constantly. Nobody called her a liar. The file is careful about it.
A detective wrote that the child’s account was not considered deliberately false, but unreliable as to time.
Which is a fair and professional sentence and is also the sentence that cost 51 years.
They cleared Dupuis on the alibi that was never actually an alibi for the relevant hours because nobody ever established what the relevant hours were and nobody thought to ask him where he had been at 11:00 the previous night.
The investigation ran hard for a year under a state police detective named Ferris Hollenbeck out of the Derby barracks.
He looked at Leon Schwenk first because it is always the husband and cleared him properly.
Two men and an evaporator and a hill. He looked at a hired man who had worked the Schwenk place in 1962 and had left badly.
Cleared in 3 weeks. He looked at the Interstate. There were construction crews in the valley.
Several hundred men, a good number of them from out of state. And Hollenbeck spent 8 months on that and it produced nothing.
And here is the failure and it is a peculiar one because it is a failure of arithmetic rather than of belief.
There was no established time of death. In 1964 in rural Vermont, the pathology available gave a window of roughly 8 hours.
That window ran from about 10:00 at night to about 6:00 in the morning. Everybody in that investigation carried around the idea that it had happened in the night because the child was outside for 4 hours.
Because the husband was on the hill until 4:00. Because it felt like a night crime.
Nobody ever wrote down the sentence, it could have been at 5:00 in the morning.
The window included 5:00 in the morning. It had always included 5:00 in the morning.
And the man who was demonstrably at that farm at 5:00 in the morning had been eliminated on the grounds that he was demonstrably at that farm at 5:00 in the morning.
Leon Schwenk raised two children on that farm and sold it in 1971 and went to work at the creamery.
He died in 1993. By 1980, the Interstate had been through for a decade And Alden Hollow had four working dairy farms where there had been 31.
By 2000, it had one. Emery Bascom practiced in that village until 1979 and died in 1981.
His practice records, 40 years of them, in oak card cabinets, went to the Kettle County Historical Society in 1983 because his widow did not know what else to do with them, and the hospital in Newport did not want them.
They sat in a climate-uncontrolled room above a library for 31 years. Suzanne Choquette grew up on that farm and then off it.
She became a school nurse in Burlington. She did not campaign. She wrote to the state police twice in 1989 and in 2001, and both times she was answered courteously and told the file was open and inactive.
What she did instead was never stop saying the same thing. She told her husband.
She told her children. She said it to a reporter on the 30th anniversary in 1994, and it appeared in one paragraph of a piece in the Caledonian Record.
She had never once, in 51 years, changed a word of it. And she had also never once believed anybody was going to act on it.
Because she had been told at 7, and at 11, and at 19, gently, by people who loved her, that she had been 4 years old and cold and frightened and had got the days mixed up.
She has said that the hardest part of her whole life was that she came to half believe it herself.
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The case had been inactive for 49 years when a volunteer started cataloging a room above a library.
In 2014, the Kettle County Historical Society received a small state grant to catalog the Bascom practice records, a genuine local archive of 40 years of rural medicine, and of interest to nobody but historians.
A volunteer named Priscilla Otterson worked through them for 11 months. In January 2015, she reached the C drawer and a card for a pediatric patient dated 3 March 1964 with seven lines on it.
She knew the name. Everybody in Alton Hollow over 60 knew the name. Now, the card did not solve anything, and it had been in the 1964 file anyway.
Hollenbeck had seen it. That was never the problem. What it did was get the file off a shelf.
Detective Sergeant Andrea Vachon of the State Police Major Crime Unit reopened the file in February 2015 and did the one thing nobody had done since 1965, which was work out what the pathology window had actually permitted.
The 1964 autopsy report was reviewed by a forensic pathologist in 2015. The original window, 10:00 at night to 6:00 in the morning, was confirmed as reasonable on the findings recorded.
5:00 in the morning had always been inside it. Then, Vachon drove to Burlington and sat with a 55-year-old school nurse and asked her what she remembered.
Suzanne Choquette said it in the same words, her mother sent her out. The milkman was cross.
And the reason that mattered, the reason it was worth anything at all, is that it was not a 51-year-old memory being asserted against a dead woman’s kitchen.
It was a 51-year-old memory that matched, phrase for phrase, a contemporaneous record written in fountain pen by a physician within 9 hours of the event by a man who had no idea what he was writing down.
That is what makes a witness usable half a century later. Not the memory, the corroboration of the memory’s consistency.
De Colon submitted the 1964 physical evidence, clothing retained by the state since 1964, for DNA analysis in April 2015.
A partial male profile came back in September. Wilfred DePui was 78 and living in Barton.
He had driven that milk route until 1969, and had then worked at the creamery for 26 years alongside Lon Choquette, which is a sentence that people in Kettle County have not been able to get past.
He had no criminal record. He had been married for 51 years. He had four children and nine grandchildren and had been a volunteer firefighter for 19 years.
He had been 27 in March 1964, and he had been at the Choquette farm at 5:00 in the morning on the 3rd, and that had never been a lie.
He had simply never been asked about 11:00 the night before, and had never been asked why a milk collection driver would have had any reason to be at a farmhouse door at all, at any hour.
And nobody had ever put those two questions in the same room. He was arrested at his home in November 2015, aged 78.
He made no statement. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 2017 and sentenced to 35 years to life.
He was 80. He died in custody in 2021. Alden Hollow, or what is left of it, has handled this quietly.
In the way that part of Vermont handles things. What it has not been able to handle is the creamery.
26 years of two men on the same floor. Marguerite Choquette was 29 years old.
She kept the herd records on a hillside farm in the Northeast Kingdom and culled the bottom six cows in two years and put the milk check up 11% and there were men in that town who thought that was funny.
She spoke French to her children. She sang in the barn at every milking, loud enough to hear from the road.
And there are two people still alive who will tell you what that sounded like.
And in the last minute of her life, she sent a four-year-old out the back door into 11°.
Which every person who has looked at this case understands perfectly. And which the child herself did not understand until she was in her 40s.
Suzanne Choquette was 57 at the sentencing. She read a statement that was four sentences long.
Three of them were about her mother. The fourth one was that she had told them in 1964.
She was asked afterward about Dr. Bascom. And she said that she had no memory of him at all.
None. Not a face. Nothing. And that a man she could not remember had sat with her in front of a stove for 40 minutes and written down seven lines because he thought it might matter.
And that everything she has now came from that. Vermont has since begun a review of unsolved homicides from before 1990 in which a child under seven gave an account that was recorded and set aside as unreliable.
Six such cases have been identified. Two are under active reinvestigation. Here is what a case like this leaves you with.
Nobody disbelieved Suzanne Choquette. That is the thing worth sitting with. The 1964 file treats her account with real care and records it accurately and reasons about it responsibly.
And the reasoning was that a frightened four-year-old had confused two mornings. Which is a true thing about four-year-olds.
And was the wrong conclusion about this one. It took nothing more to correct than someone writing down the sentence the window includes 5:00 in the morning and in 51 years nobody wrote it down.
Because everybody already knew it happened in the night. So tell me what you think.
What would it have taken in 1964 for somebody to test the child’s account instead of explaining it?
Which sits worse with you? An alibi that was never an alibi. Or 26 years of two men working the same creamery floor.
And how much of what we call an unreliable witness is actually a reliable witness measured against an assumption nobody checked.
Justice found Margie Choquette after 51 years. Stories like hers are why this channel exists.
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