It

Street home where his younger brother had been beaten and killed.
Dental charts showed conclusively that the body found in Aynesford was not that of the Corcoran youth, who has now been missing for nineteen months.
From the Portland Press-Herald, July 19th, 1967 (page 3):
CONVICTED MURDERER COMMITS SUICIDE IN FALMOUTH
Richard P. Macklin, who was convicted of the murder of his four-year-old stepson nine years ago, was found dead in his small third-floor Falmouth apartment late yesterday afternoon. The parolee, who had lived and worked quietly in Falmouth since his release from Shawshank State Prison in 1964, was an apparent suicide.
‘The note he left indicates an extremely confused state of mind,’ Assistant Falmouth Police Chief Brandon K. Roche said. He refused to divulge the note’s contents, but a Police Department source said it consisted of two sentences: ‘I saw Eddie last night. He was dead.’
The ‘Eddie’ referred to may well have been Macklin’s stepson, brother of the boy Macklin was convicted of killing in 1958. It was the disappearance of Edward Corcoran
which eventually led to Macklin’s conviction for the beating death of Edward’s younger brother, Dorsey. The elder boy has been missing for nine years. In a brief court proceeding in 1966 the boy’s mother had her son declared legally dead so she could enter into possession of Edward Corcoran’s savings account. The account contained a sum of sixteen dollars.
3
Eddie Corcoran was dead, all right.
He died on the night of June 19th, and his stepfather had nothing at all to do with it. He died as Ben Hanscom sat home watching TV with his mother, as Eddie Kaspbrak’s mother anxiously felt Eddie’s forehead for signs of her favorite ailment, ‘phantom fever,’ as Beverly Marsh’s stepfather — a gent who bore, in temperament at least, a remarkable resemblance to Eddie and Dorsey Corcoran’s stepfather — Lifted a high-stepping kick into the girl’s derriere and told her ‘to get out there and dry those goddam dishes like your mummer told you,’ as Mike Hanlon got yelled at by some high-school boys (one of whom would some years later sire that fine upstanding young homophobe John ‘Webby’ Garton) passing in an old Dodge while Mike pulled weeds out of the garden beside the small Hanlon home out on Witcham Road, not far from the farm owned by Henry Bowers’s crazy father, as Richie Tozier was sneaking a look at the half-undressed girls in a copy of Gem he had found at the bottom of his father’s socks-and-underwear drawer and getting a regular good boner, and as Bill Denbrough was throwing his dead brother’s photograph album across the room in horrified unbelief.
Although none of them would remember doing so later, all of them looked up at the. exact moment Eddie Corcoran died . . . as if hearing some distant cry.
The News had been absolutely right about one thing: Eddie’s rank –card was just bad enough to make him afraid to go home and face his stepdad. Also, his mother and the old man were fighting a lot this month. That made things even worse. When they got going at it hot and heavy, his mother shouted a lot of mostly incoherent accusations. His stepdad responded to these first with grunts, then yells to shut up, and finally with the enraged bellows of a boar which has gotten a quiver of porcupine needles in its snout. Eddie had never seen the old man use his fists on her, though. Eddie didn’t think he quite dared. He had saved his fists for Eddie and Dorsey in the old days, and now that Dorsey was dead, Eddie got his little brother’s share as well as his own.
These shouting ma tches came and went in cycles. They were most common at the end of the month, when the bills came in. A policeman, called by a neighbor, might drop by once or twice when things were at their worst and tell them to tone it down. Usually that ended it. His mother was apt to give the cop the finger and dare him to take her in, but his stepdad rarely said boo.
His stepdad was afraid of the cops, Eddie thought.
He lay low during these periods of stress. It was wiser. If you didn’t think so, just look at what had happened to Dorsey. Eddie didn’t know the specifics and didn’t want to, but he had an idea about Dorsey. He thought that Dorsey had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: the garage on the last day of the month. They told Eddie that Dorsey fe loff the stepladder in the garage — ‘if i told him once to stay off n it I told him sixty times,’ his stepdad had said
— but his mother wouldn’t look at him except by accident . . . and when their eyes did meet, Eddie had seen a frightened ratty little gleam in hers that he didn’t like. The old man just sat there silently at the kitchen table with