PORTLAND, Maine — When news broke last week that a building on the controversial, and now-defunct, Elan School campus in Poland burned down, Alice Dunn started getting text messages.
“I got like 50 of them, with heart emojis and everything,” Dunn, who owns Portland Architectural Salvage, said Wednesday.
She attended the school in the 1970s and later recalled, as a witness in a high-profile 2002 murder trial, how its students were routinely abused both physically and mentally.
Many of the messages Dunn received speculated the fire was the work of some vengeful former student or that Dunn must be happy to hear the news about the facility, which operated from 1970 until 2011. Others assumed she would be flooded with bad memories and upset with the school back in the news after so many years. Most texts expressed sympathy for what Dunn endured there.
But the well-intended messages were unnecessary, she said.
Dunn doesn’t believe the fire was payback and has come to terms with her time at the Elan School. She’s even thankful for part of it, saying it helped make her the self-sufficient Mainer she is today.
Dunn grew up in privileged Scarsdale, New York. Her neighbor was Herman Tarnower, who devised the mega-popular, high-protein Scarsdale Diet in the 1970s.
But Dunn’s mother died young, and her father was unable to cope with his children.
“We were out of control,” she said.
That’s what landed Dunn at the Elan School from 1975 through 1978.
The expensive, waterfront residential school was founded by harness racing track owner, former heroin user and eventual Maine gubernatorial candidate Joseph Ricci. It employed extreme humiliation as a therapeutic tool in treating children with emotional, behavioral and substance use problems.
According to court testimony, the Elan school encouraged students to police each other’s behavior through confrontational screaming matches and forced them to box one another on occasion. One student died after such a boxing match. Another was hospitalized after a brutal spanking from staff. No one was criminally charged in either incident.
The school was frequently investigated by authorities from multiple states, including Maine, but continued to operate for 40 years before closing due to falling enrollment.
The school gained its largest notoriety in 2002, when former Elan student Michael Skakel was put on trial for the October 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, 15, in Connecticut. The prosecution alleged Skakel admitted to the killing during a humiliation session at the school.
Dunn was friends with Skakel and testified at his trial about the abusive treatment.
According to a United Press International report, Dunn said that in the days before the humiliation session, “They had [Skakel] in a corner of… the dining room of Elan 3. He had to sit for an hour and stand for an hour for three days with basically no sleep.”
That dining hall is the one which burned down on Nov. 18. State officials on Tuesday said they could not determine a cause.
Dunn remembered that the dining hall echoed “like a cathedral” as Ricci and other students then took turns berating Skakel, trying to get him to admit he’d killed Moxley.
Then, Dunn recalled at trial, Skakel was forced to box other students. After each round, he’d again be asked if he’d killed Moxley. When Skakel denied it, he’d be given a fresh opponent and forced to box another round.
The abuse only stopped when Skakel changed his answer to, “I don’t know,” Dunn testified.
“To this day I have nightmares about that,” Dunn said on Wednesday. “I still don’t think he did it. Michael was the nicest person.”
Skakel was convicted of Moxley’s murder in 2002, but a series of court reversals and counter-reversals, which only ended in 2020, eventually left him a free man.
After her time at the Elan School, Dunn lived in a few different states before settling in Portland and opening her architectural salvage business in 1995. She said she’s learned to live with her Elan memories and doesn’t dwell on them.
“It was a bad experience in my life,” Dunn said, “but I don’t have bad things to say about it anymore.”
She’s even grateful for what the school taught her about the real world, outside of Scarsdale.
“I learned to work with my hands,” Dunn said. “I don’t know who I’d be today without that — other than just some rich kid.”
She described the payback theories about the recent fire as “far-fetched,” though she once looked into buying the property herself.
Mostly, Dunn said, time has healed her wounds.
“That was 50 years ago — I’m 50 years older,” she said. “Time goes on.”
