Two days after Christmas 2023, the bodies of Jean C. Robinson, 76, and her daughter, Allison “Joy” Cumming, 53, were found dead at 274 Red School Road in Farmington, the location of Joy’s small business, the Pawsitive Dog Kennel.
The Maine State Police (MSP), two weeks later, said the Chief Medical Examiner had ruled that both Robinson and Cumming died as the result of homicide.
The MSP said an autopsy for both women had been completed on Dec. 28, but the state police agency gave no further information about the investigation into the killings, including the way the women were murdered.
In March, MSP spokesperson Shannon Moss told Maine media outlets that there was “no update” about the murders, explaining that the investigation was complex and not dictated by the public’s desire to know details.
Since then, there has been no additional public comment about the case. No suspect has been named in the slayings, nor any persons of interest, and no motive has been released.
More than 230 days later, the double homicide remains unsolved, but The Maine Wire can now report a new twist in the murder mystery that has roiled Franklin County: William “Neville” Cumming Jr., Jean Robinson’s son and Joy Cumming’s brother, was found dead in Bar Harbor by his father, William Cumming Sr., four days after the murder of his mother and sister.
Although no public announcement about Cumming Jr.’s death has been released by law enforcement, as is customary with suicides, multiple sources who knew him personally, including his father, have confirmed New Year’s Eve morning and that cops investigating his death have said the cause was suicide.
Additionally, a police report the Maine Wire obtained via a Freedom of Access Act request from the Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island Police Departments shows that seven police officers responded to an address connected to Cumming in Bar Harbor early on Dec. 31, 2023.
The narrative from the police report states only the following: “On 12-31-2023 and 1-1-2024 Officers assisted the Maine State Police in an ongoing investigation.” (emphasis added)
That confirms the MSP regard Neville’s suicide as bearing some connection to an ongoing investigation, with the most likely candidate being the ongoing search for his mother and sister’s killer — or killers.
Days before he was found dead, Maine State Troopers had to track Neville down, asking friends and associates questions about his state of mind and whereabouts, indicating he might be a suspect in his mother and sister’s murders.
Neville’s father, Bill Cumming, Sr., was the one who discovered his son dead at the condo in Bar Harbor that serves as the head quarters for a nonprofit he has run for years.
In the hours before his death, the pair had talked at length, with Neville betraying no indication of what he was about to do.
Since the initial police response in Bar Harbor, Cumming Sr. has heard little new from the MSP and has grown frustrated with the lack of answers provided to him after losing three members of his family in just four days.
“The police have told me absolutely nothing about what happened,” Cumming Sr. said.
“All I know is that my daughter and her mother were murdered, and four days later, my son committed suicide,” he said.
Asked for comment about the two murders and the suicide, MSP spokesperson Shannon Moss declined to address Cumming Jr.’s death and reiterated her comments from March.
“This is still an active investigation,” Moss said in an email. “Hoping for an update at some point soon. Detectives and the AG’s office are waiting on results from the crime lab to come back.”
It’s unclear why the state crime lab has yet to produce results for the Attorney General’s Office more than 230 days after Jean Robinson and Joy Cumming were found murdered, and Neville Cumming was found dead. But the lack of new information regarding the three deaths points to a complex crime scene, mysterious motives, and a case that has been difficult for law enforcement to untangle.
The deaths have caused no shortage of speculation and rumor-mongering in Farmington, with several community Facebook pages featuring often-heated exchanges of gossip.
Some Facebook users have made comments suggesting Neville’s death is widely known, while others have claimed that he killed his mother and sister before taking his own life out of guilt.
Another comment condemned an unnamed local school teacher for, supposedly, telling students that the mother and daughter had been brutally stabbed to death.
A Go Fund Me started to raise funds for Joy’s funeral expenses raised more than $5,000, with several community members commenting about how well-liked she was in the area.
Multiple sources who knew Neville, including his father, and several who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for their safety, said they did not believe he would have been capable of killing his mother and sister.
The sources said Neville was more affable than aggressive, and that he often spoke of his mother’s ailing health and his desire to help her. She had recently returned from Florida to Farmington, rather than entering a nursing home, to live out what her family believed would be the natural end of her life.
“I wouldn’t call us friends,” said one former partner. “But I have nothing bad to say about that guy.”
“That guy didn’t kill anybody, he was quite pleasant,” they said. “I’m quite certain he loved his family.”
If Neville didn’t kill his family, as appears to be the conclusion of the state police, considering the investigation remains open despite his death, then who did?
Failed Cannabis Entrepreneur
Further fueling intrigue around the deaths: Neville’s criminal history, his connections to Maine’s current drug scene — both legal and illegal — as well as the serious financial crisis he’d found himself in by the end of 2023.
Nearly 25 years ago, Neville was the subject of a Maine Drug Enforcement Agency (MDEA) investigation that began after local hunters were forced off a parcel of land in Phillips at gunpoint by two “Hispanic-looking men” with rifles in Nov. 1999.
The ensuing investigation determined that the Phillips property was owned by a defunct Florida-based company, Ian Fabrication, of which Cumming was part owner along with Andrew Diehl, who was also living at the camp, according to court filings.
Cumming was indicted on May 17, 2000, after the investigation confirmed that he and his co-defendant Diehl were using the property as a major illegal marijuana cultivation site.
Considering this was 2000 — 16 years before Maine would vote to legalize the adult use of recreational marijuana — the penalties for large-scale cannabis cultivation ranged as high as 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine.
Cumming was sentenced to 37 months as part of a conditional plea deal and eventually released from federal prison in 2003.
Nearly two decades later, his brush with the law long in the rearview mirror, Cumming had once again returned to marijuana growing, attempting to establish multiple legal cannabis businesses in northern Maine.
Along with some business partners, Cumming attempted to build a marijuana cultivation facility out of a former Christian school in Canaan and a legal dispensary out of an old diner in Avon, north of Rangeley.
But those endeavors failed to thrive, and it’s unclear whether Cumming ever actually attempted to run the cultivation site or the dispensary as legitimate, legal businesses.
Although Neville told multiple people in his life that he was pursuing licenses to grow marijuana legally and operate a legitimate dispensary, there’s no evidence he ever did.
Under Maine law, Neville’s felony drug conviction would have prevented him from obtaining a cannabis business license unless he obtained an exception from the state. Because his felony conviction occurred more than ten years before he would have pursued a license, Neville would have been eligible for such an exception.
A spokesperson for Maine’s Office of Cannabis Policy said the agency never received or approved any application for a cannabis business license in Neville’s name or the name of his company.
Neville could have nonetheless been part of a legal cannabis business that was licensed under someone else’s name, but there’s no evidence that he had such an arrangement.
The lack of a legal license, which would have made it difficult for Neville to sell any cannabis he grew in Canaan into Maine’s tightly regulated adult use market, may have contributed to his financial problems.
County registry records show multiple liens for unpaid taxes were filed against the properties while he was attempting to build them into cannabis businesses. Eventually, he was hit with foreclosure and eviction orders at both the Avon and Canaan properties.
On Oct. 30, 2023, he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Around the same time, he had abruptly broken off communication with and stopped paying the owner of land in Canaan that he was renting for the grow site.
Those who knew Cumming personally or were familiar with his business endeavors offered other information confirming that he was in dire straits financially in the weeks and months prior to his untimely death.
Cumming Sr. recalled a time last year when one of his son’s business partners came looking for Neville at the Canaan location in a state of anger, demanding to speak with him about a significant sum of money Neville owed. A heated confrontation ensued.
The business partner, whom the Maine Wire is declining to name, confirmed the altercation and said he contacted the Somerset County Sheriff’s office after the dispute.
The partner alleged that Neville owed him and others more than $50,000 in personal loans, including tens of thousands of dollars that Neville had borrowed to pay off the considerable electrical bills for the marijuana grow.
Although there’s plenty of evidence that Neville was growing a fair amount of marijuana, including the electrical bills, no one the Maine Wire spoke with ever knew exactly where any of the cannabis went, how Neville would have sold it, to whom, or what he would have done with the money.
He certainly wasn’t paying back his creditors, nor was he showing signs of living extravagantly.
Cumming Sr. said the during his time living at the Canaan site, where he served as something of a night watchman, the building hardly operated at maximum capacity or efficiency.
In that instance, the crop came to maturity — but Neville never harvested it.
“None of it makes any sense,” said Cumming Sr., who was previously unaware of the extent of his son’s financial distress.
“He’s in financial trouble, so he lets an entire room of marijuana go to waste?” he said.
Former business partners confirmed the story about the entire crop of cannabis flower going to waste.
Neville, they said, told them an issue with the grow lights had scorched the weed.
Although they encouraged Neville to have the flower tested nonetheless, to see if any of the psychoactive ingredients might be salvageable and salable, nothing ever came of it.
The Boston Connection
On Feb. 17, 2023, Neville took a trip to Boston. Later he would say he had gone to visit a former acquaintance.
He never told his friends, his family, or his business partners about the trip or who he went to see, but when he returned something was different about his behavior.
Neville’s former girlfriend of three years, whom the Maine Wire is declining to name, ended up breaking things off last year and moving out as a result, in part, of the strange changes in his behavior.
“He wasn’t coming home like he was before, and it was always some excuse not to be home. Picking fights with me all the time,” she said.
“It was always, it was me that didn’t want him, and things like that, like [he was] very much putting distance between the two of us.”
“That’s why I moved out in November,” she said.
During the time the pair lived together at the Avon location, it was never a functioning dispensary.
Prior to that February, she said, she’d never known Neville to travel at all to Boston.
By the time Neville had died, the pair seldom talked.
The last time might have been in December, after the state police paid her a visit and she contacted Neville to let him know his mom and sister had been slain.
She only learned of his suicide after contacting the state police in February to ask for a welfare check on Neville, and whoever responded to the call informed her of his status.
Neville’s former business partners also saw an abrupt change in his behavior in 2023.
“If he didn’t answer [a phone] call, he’d call me at some point that very day, and then overnight that changed,” one ex-partner said.
“Something very much changed in how he communicated with me — and it wasn’t like over time, it was overnight,” he said. “He stopped making his monthly payments. He never even responded me to the point that I called his dad.”
Multiple people who knew Neville hinted at or openly speculated to the Maine Wire that Cumming might have been involved with unsavory characters, such as an organized crime outfit out of Massachusetts.
Another said that, although Neville himself was never known as a user of hard drugs, he’d made comments in the past bragging that he was “never more than a phone call away” from as much as a kilo of cocaine.
“The thing I can imagine happening is he did something to piss off an organized crime family, and to teach him a lesson, they killed his sister and his mother. He felt so badly about it that he killed himself,” one person said. “That scenario I can imagine.”
Neville served his federal prison sentence at FCI Ray Brook in New York.
According to Bureau of Prison records and publicly available records, several infamous mafiosos with connections to New England would have been at that facility at the same time, including members of the Gambino and Genovese families, as well as Patriarca family boss Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo.
Could Neville Cumming have traveled to Boston to meet up with Italian mafia contacts he’d made 20 years earlier in federal prison?
If that’s true, it’s a secret Neville may taken with him to the grave.
Note: This story has been updated to correct the time at which Neville Cumming was found dead. He was found dead in the morning, not in the evening.
Readers may contact Maine Wire Editor-in-Chief Steve Robinson at the following email: robinson@themainewire.com.
Anyone with information about the murders of Jean Robinson and Joy Cumming can contact the Maine State Police’s Major Crimes Unit here.
maybe someone told him to “eat a dick”
sad
Fascinating story! Sounds like this fellow was deeply involved with some people who are not reluctant to use “murder” as a business tool when they see the need. Ann Rule is needed to sort this mystery out.