Friday, January 26, 2007

New Hampshire "Death Car" Sold

Well, okay, every now and then our neighbors over in New Hampshire get weird too. Thanks as usual to Cranky Yankee over at the New England Anomaly's mailing list for catching this juicy tidbit:
Infamous Nashua Death Car sold for $165,000
January 26, 2007
The Telegraph, http://www.nashuatelegraph.com

NASHUA, N.H. --A 1959 Cadillac known in Nashua (New Hampshire) as the Death Car was a big draw at an auto auction this month.

The car, which experts say is the lowest-mileage '59 Cadillac in the world, sold for 165 thousand dollars at last week's Barrett-Jackson Auction Companys car auction in Scottsdale, Arizona. The winning bidder was a collector from Newport Beach, California.

The blue and white Caddy made news in 1959 when it was found in a parking lot, with the murdered body of its owner, Maurice Gagnon, inside. The car was parked in a police impound garage for nearly 15 years before being released to Gagnon's family.

The family sold it to John Pfanstiehl of Florida a decade later, and he sold it last week. He had kept the Caddy in an
environmentally controlled garage in Florida.

Pfanstiehl said people were fascinated by the car's history, and also because of its low mileage -- 22 hundred 24 miles.
There is an interesting entry about the car at 1959cadillac.com, with extensive information and photos from newspapers at the time of the murder trial, as well as a photo of the car in its restored state.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Michelle et al., LOVE the name of your blog, first time i've seen it, got linked to it thru my google alert for "nashua"...yep, we DO indeed have strange stuff over here in no-tax-ville; part of my job is to dig them up and make them public! I'm Dean, a features writer for The Telegraph newspaper, i got tipped on this auction and this is the folo up story we ran the other day. I did a long, web-only account of the bizarre trial at the time but i don't think it's on our site anymore, www.nashuatelegraph.com, but if you wanna read it lemme know, dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com, i'll find a copy.
LOVE maine, roots are there on both sides of my family--mostly sanford/wells area

Michelle Souliere said...

Dean-- Wow! Thanks for the compliments. I'll drop you a line for sure. :) Hello from Maine!