FAIRFIELD — The active search for a Skowhegan woman presumed killed Saturday night when her vehicle launched into Martin Stream ended late Sunday afternoon.
Family members of Cora Marley, 62, had waited Sunday alongside U.S. Route 201 as Maine State Police divers searched the water and a Maine Warden Service pilot flew overhead.
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Fairfield police Sgt. Matthew Bard said, weather permitting, a warden pilot will fly over the area Monday but it is not likely that divers will return to the stream which flows into the Kennebec River.
Bard said divers had combed the entire inlet area Saturday night and Sunday and had not found Marley’s body.
Visibility, Bard said, was less than a foot in the water, which is 18 to 20 feet deep around the bridge.
Ken Gagnon of Waterville said his sister Marley was driving from Waterville to Skowhegan when the single-vehicle accident occurred about 8:35 p.m. near the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences on the Good Will-Hinckley campus.
He said two witnesses reported that Marley was erratically driving her 2004 Pontiac Vibe before the incident.
Bard said a couple from Canada had been traveling northbound behind Marley for several miles on U.S. Route 201.
They told police they did not see the Vibe’s brake lights activated when the vehicle veered off the road.
Gagnon, a former state senator from Waterville, said his sister took medication for diabetes.
Bard said Marley’s car launched off an embankment beside the bridge and traveled about 60 feet over the stream before it struck an abutment on the opposite embankment then dropped into the water.
The sergeant said it did not appear that Marley was wearing a seat belt.
Both the front windshield and back window were missing from the Vibe when it was pulled from the water late Saturday evening, Bard said.
Gagnon, director of media resources at Colby College, said Marley has an identical twin sister, Dora, as well an older sister, Earlene, and other brothers, Earl and Richard.
Their mother, Lorraine, is 90 years old, he said.
Gagnon referred to Cora and Dora as “two peas in a pod” who were known locally for Spic & Span, the cleaning business they used to own.
Gagnon said the twins so closely resembled each other that in high school they could take tests for each other.
Fairfield police, ambulances and fire units from Fairfield, Skowhegan and Waterville were dispatched to the scene Saturday night, according to the Somerset County dispatch log.
Bard said emergency personnel were on scene until 1 a.m. Sunday then returned to the site Sunday from 7 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.
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