WEST BATH, Maine — A man who admitted killing both his parents and two of their friends before shooting at motorists on a highway plans to enter pleas Monday that will resolve his criminal case, his attorney said.
Joseph Eaton withdrew his insanity defense late last year, and his attorney told The Associated Press that they expect to “resolve” charges for four murders and other charges at a plea change hearing.
The Public Prosecution Service did not want to comment on a possible settlement prior to the hearing.
Law enforcement officials say Eaton confessed to the murders at a property in rural Bowdoin, and wounding three more people while shooting at vehicles on Interstate 295 in Yarmouth. The shootings occurred just days after Eaton was released from prison for unrelated crimes. Eaton has been re-imprisoned since his arrest in April 2023 near the tumultuous situation along the highway, where traffic was at a standstill as heavily armed police officers searched for the shooter.
The dead were Eaton’s parents, Cynthia Eaton, 62, and David Eaton, 66, along with longtime friends Robert Eger, 72, and Patti Eger, 62, the couple who owned the Bowdoin home where they all stayed. The family dog was also killed, resulting in an animal cruelty charge.
Shortly after the bodies were discovered on April 18, 2023, three people were injured when wild shooting broke out on I-295 in Yarmouth, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) outside Portland, Maine’s largest city. Eaton faced separate charges because the two shootings at Bowdoin’s home and on the highway happened in different counties.
Maine Public Safety Commissioner Michael Sauschuck called the shootings “an attack on the soul of our state.” But the crime’s heavy toll was surpassed months later when an Army reservist, who also lived in Bowdoin, killed 18 people at two locations in Lewiston. , in what would become the state’s deadliest mass shooting.
Police still don’t know Eaton’s motive for the murders.
An unsigned note found at the scene of the murders stated that “someone was freed from pain and that the writer of the note wanted a new life,” according to a criminal affidavit. Eaton told the Portland Press Herald newspaper in jail interviews that he had no control over his actions at the time of the shootings and did not understand why he did so.
Eaton, 35, had a criminal history in Maine, Kansas and Florida and had just completed a prison sentence in Maine stemming from an aggravated assault case. Eaton’s parents stayed with their friends in Bowdoin after Cynthia Eaton picked up Joseph Eaton from a Maine prison on April 14.