Zinchuk said Julie Bullard had decided recently to look for a “different adventure” and this spring had put the Black Bear up for sale. Julie Bullard had run an inn in California. Zinchuk said, and the family had been looking for a new start.

Selby Bullard’s husband had been killed in a car accident, Ms. Zinchuk said Julie and Selby Bullard had moved to Maine from the San Francisco Bay area three years ago. “Everybody is just numb with shock,” said Robin Zinchuk, executive director of the Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce. The days between Labor Day and the start of the foliage season, they said, are a typically quiet stretch when tourists canoe and fish in the Androscoggin River or play at the Sunday River Golf Club. The slayings unsettled people in the pastoral towns near the Sunday River resort, about 80 miles northwest of Portland. Bullard’s daughter, Selby Bullard, 30, and Selby’s friend, Cynthia Beatson, 43, when the two showed up unexpectedly at the inn. The next day, he told the police, he killed Ms. Nielsen told the police, he killed Julie Bullard, 65, the innkeeper. Whitehurst, of Batesville, Ark., had been staying at the inn for about a month on undisclosed “personal business,” said Stephen McCausland, a spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety. The suspect told detectives that he killed James Whitehurst, 50, in Upton on Friday, and then dumped his body in the woods there, according to a court affidavit. The killings began at the start of the long weekend. Officials said he had been arrested once for drunken driving.

Nielsen, who last lived in Farmington, Me., was charged Tuesday in Oxford County Superior Court with four counts of murder and was being held at the local jail, the police said. Detectives and officials from the state medical examiner’s office were working Tuesday to remove his remains from remote woods in the nearby town of Upton. The police said the killer had tried to burn the body of the inn guest, a 50-year-old man from Arkansas. The bodies of the three women were found Monday evening at the inn, the Black Bear Bed and Breakfast, a remodeled seven-bedroom farmhouse at a picturesque bend in the road in the rolling hills of western Maine.

The innkeepers bed scene