When he finished in the parking lot, Durand went to the bridge on Singleton Street, where Christine said the suspect had slammed on his brakes. Examining the ground, Durand noticed a skid mark, which he photographed. Once finished, Durand headed to the Landmark Medical Center to talk to Christine. On the way he got a call from Patrolman Greenough, who said he thought he had uncovered another piece of evidence. Durand immediately went back to the scene, where Greenough gave him a large metal pipe he had found in a Dumpster on the mill property. As Durand photographed the pipe, he noticed bloodstains on it.
After processing the pipe, Durand went to the Landmark Medical Center to talk to Christine, who showed Durand where the man had beaten her. Durand photographed her injuries, then went back to the police station to process the evidence. He tested the pipe for blood and fingerprints, but he came up empty.
During their investigation police learned that another woman had suffered a similar assault several weeks before Christine. On March 2, Antaya and Patrolman George McCann responded to a call to go to Singleton Street, where they found a naked woman lying in the street bleeding. When police arrived, she sat up, told them her name and said her shoulder hurt very bad. The police immediately called for an ambulance. As they waited, the woman explained that she had left Buddy’s Café on Arnold Street around 12:30 A.M. She said an acquaintance offered to give her a ride home and she agreed. However, rather than drive her home, the man took her to Singleton Street, where he raped and beat her.
Officer Antaya went to the place the woman described, to see if he could find her clothes, while McCann waited for the ambulance to arrive. When it did, McCann went to help Antaya with the investigation. The officers discovered fresh tire tracks in the parking lot, just north-east of the bridge on Singleton Street. It appeared as if the vehicle drove into the parking lot, then backed up four hundred to five hundred feet to the rear of the building. Antaya found blood in the snow, but he did not find any of the woman’s clothes. While Antaya photographed the scene, McCann went to interview the woman, who had been taken to the Landmark Medical Center.
Although the woman told McCann she wanted to file a complaint against the person who raped and beat her, she was reluctant to tell McCann what he looked like. Finally she said he had blond hair and glasses and drove a gray truck. When Officer Antaya arrived, he told the woman that the man may have assaulted other women. Antaya asked her if David Porter was the name of the man who picked her up. She said it was, adding that she wanted to kill him for what he had done to her.
She said that Porter had picked her up near Buddy’s Café and she agreed to give him a blow job for $40. Porter drove to the parking lot of Singleton Street and started to assault her, calling her a “fucking whore.” Porter made the woman empty her pockets and then strip naked. He said she was going to get what was coming to her. Then he held a screwdriver to her face, neck and throat and started forcibly inserting his fingers into her vagina and calling her a whore. He yelled at her to get out of the truck and he got out as well. He threw her against a wall of the building and kicked her in the stomach. He told her he was going to kill her, but first he demanded oral sex.
As the woman begged him not to kill her, the man took her arm and twisted it behind her back, breaking her shoulder. He forced her to kneel next to the passenger side of the truck while he sat on the edge of the seat and forced her to perform oral sex. While she was doing it, he pulled her hair and called her a “bitch” and a “whore.” He told her if she used too much teeth, he’d slap her and make her do it right. When Porter was finished, he shoved the woman and kicked her in the stomach. He told her he was going to leave, and if she looked at his truck while he drove away, he’d come back and kill her. Then he left.
The woman tried to look at the license plate on the truck, but she couldn’t see the number. So she ran to Singleton Street to try and flag down a car to get some help. The first person who drove by her kept on going, but the second person stopped and told her he’d call the police.
McCann filed a complaint for her, took photographs of her injuries and called her nephew to tell him she had been assaulted and was in the Landmark Medical Center.
The next day police went back to the hospital to talk with the woman about the incident. She described the suspect to police. She said he was driving an older gray SUV. She told police she remembered the truck from the last time she went with the man, but she said it was red at that time.
Because police thought David Porter, who lived in Massachusetts, was the man who attacked the woman, they started looking for him and asked for his photo from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles so they could present it to Dumont and the woman as part of a photo lineup. But when they got the photo, they realized it didn’t look anything like the man the woman described, nor did he have a truck that matched the description of her attacker’s truck.
So they created a photo lineup, which included Porter’s picture, and showed it to the victim, who did not recognize any of the men in the photos as the man who attacked her. She said the man who assaulted her was younger and heavier than the men in the photographs. Police had her go to the station so she could look at photos of men in their system—so they could get a better description of the suspect and figure out who he was. Although the woman was able to describe the man in more detail, she wasn’t able to identify him from the photos police showed her.
At the end of the interview the woman told police she forgot to mention that while she was in the guy’s truck, he stopped to use an ATM at the Sovereign Bank on Social Street. When he got back into the truck, he told the woman that he had taken out $100 so they could party. She said it was about 1:00 A.M. When she asked the guy to take her home because she didn’t want to party, he started stabbing her and assaulting her. He said he was going to party—even if she didn’t want to—and then drove her behind the mill building, holding her head down as he drove.
During their investigation the police went to Sovereign Bank and viewed the tape of the ATM transactions from the morning the woman was assaulted. They observed a man who fit the description the woman and Christine Dumont had given them using the ATM at about 12:55 A.M. on March 2, 2003. Police then learned the ATM card the man used was from UniBank. Police went to the UniBank branch in Blackstone, Massachusetts, and provided the manager with the account number of the ATM card, which she identified as belonging to Timothy Scanlon, of Woonsocket.
When the police got back to the station, they entered Scanlon’s name into their database and discovered that he had been arrested a month earlier. They checked his booking photo against the photo taken at the ATM and found they matched. They then created a photo lineup and took it to Christine Dumont, who was in Landmark Medical Center. Christine immediately picked Scanlon’s photo out of the lineup. When she saw his face, she became emotional and told police, “That’s the motherfucker.”
After trying unsuccessfully to find the other woman who had been attacked by Scanlon, so she could view the photo lineup, police went to the suspect’s home looking for his car. When they didn’t find it, they went to his father’s auto body shop on Valley Street in Blackstone, Massachusetts, and found it there. They ran the license plate and discovered it was registered to his mother. Police kept the car under surveillance while they obtained a warrant to arrest Scanlon for kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon. When Scanlon didn’t show up at the garage to get the car, police went to his girlfriend’s house, where they arrested him.
After Scanlon was taken to the police station, Sergeant Todd Fernandes and Sergeant Luke Simard spoke with his girlfriend. She explained that while Scanlon was her boyfriend, he didn’t live with her, although he stayed over on occasion. After she talked with police, the girlfriend gave them permission to search her apartment. During their search police found some of Scanlon’s clothes in the bedroom and took them back to the station.
Scanlon’s girlfriend told police that Scanlon usually drove the Mercury Marquis, but it
was in his father’s shop because it needed new ball joints. She said his father hadn’t given him the car back because he hadn’t paid for the work. She also told police he used to drive a gray GMC Jimmy, but he recently brought it to the Privilege Street junkyard because it was a piece of junk.
Fernandes and Simard went back to the police station to talk to Scanlon, who opted to give up his right to remain silent and talked to the cops about the attacks on Christine Dumont and the other woman. He denied he was the person who assaulted the women. The cops, however, asked how one of the women would know that he had stopped at the Sovereign Bank ATM to get some cash if she hadn’t been with him. Shortly after that, Scanlon told police he wanted a lawyer and the interview stopped. While police were booking Scanlon, he voluntarily told them that he had a drug problem and recently had ripped off several dealers, who had probably put the women up to implicating him in the attacks.
After Fernandes and Simard finished processing Scanlon, they went to find the other woman to show her the photo lineup. She immediately pointed to Scanlon and said he was the person who attacked her. She said she was 100 percent positive because she could never forget his face.
When the officers got back to the station, they charged Scanlon with kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon in Christine’s case. They also charged him with first-degree sexual assault and assault to commit rape for the attack on the other woman.
On April 16, police went to talk to Scanlon’s mother, who confirmed that although she owned the Mercury Marquis, Timothy drove it. With her permission police searched her apartment, but they didn’t find anything that belonged to Scanlon. During their investigation police learned that Scanlon had sold his 1988 GMC Jimmy on April 11, 2003, and they discovered that it had been crushed and was in a pile of crushed vehicles in an auto parts junkyard in Woonsocket. The auto parts company removed the wreck and brought it to the police station to be inspected. Police also had the Mercury towed to a garage at the station so they could also process it for evidence of the alleged attacks.
When police inspected the Mercury, they noticed some damage to the rear quarter of the driver’s side, as well as to the top of the lid of the trunk. There was also some other damage to the lid of the trunk. When Detective Durand opened the trunk to check inside, he was able to detect some fresh scratch marks and dents to the inside of the driver’s-side wheel well. The dents and scratches matched up with the damage to the outside of the car. As he continued his investigation, Durand also noticed damage to the gray carpeting inside the trunk, and when he examined the black rubber gasket around the opening of the trunk, he saw a reddish stain that looked like blood near the marks on the lid of the trunk. He also noticed red stains that looked liked blood on a driver’s-side floor mat that was in the trunk. Durand collected and bagged the evidence.
Police arrested the twenty-four-year-old Scanlon on April 15, 2003, for kidnapping and assaulting Christine and the other woman. A Providence County grand jury indicted him in October 2003. Scanlon was held without bail until his trial on July 22, 2005.
A Providence County Superior Court jury heard five days of testimony from five witnesses, including the Woonsocket woman, before deliberating eight hours over two days and convicting Scanlon of three counts of first-degree sexual assault, one count of first-degree robbery, one count of assault with a dangerous weapon and one count of felony assault.
Although Scanlon had also been charged with assaulting and kidnapping Christine, the Rhode Island attorney general was forced to drop those charges because Christine had been murdered before she had a chance to testify against him.
On November 17, 2005, Rhode Island Superior Court judge Robert Krause sentenced Scanlon to fifty years in prison for beating, raping and robbing the woman he attacked before he assaulted Christine. The judge also sentenced Scanlon to twenty years’ probation to be served after his release from prison.
As it turned out, police soon realized that Scanlon had not been involved with Christine’s disappearance or her death, even though he had threatened to kill her while he was in prison.
Chapter 4
Stacie Goulet, twenty-four, went missing from the same area as Audrey Harris and Christine Dumont, sometime between the evening of Saturday, July 3, and the early-morning hours of Sunday, July 4, 2004.
On July 7, her boyfriend, James Nelson, went to the Woonsocket police station and spoke with Sergeant Luke Simard and Sergeant Steve Nowak about Stacie’s disappearance. He told them he had actually reported her missing for the first time, on July 4.
He explained that on July 3 he and Stacie had done some crack cocaine with a friend in an apartment on Park Avenue and had planned to watch the fireworks at World War II Memorial State Park in Woonsocket at about 9:00 P.M. Instead, at 9:30 P.M., they left the friend’s apartment to go to East School Street so Stacie could do a trick and they could get more cocaine.
Around 10:30 P.M., they ran into Stacie’s dad, Raymond Boerger, who was driving his green Ford pickup truck, across from the mill on East School Street. Boerger asked Stacie how she was doing and she told him she’d stopped prostituting herself. Boerger then got on Stacie about her bad housekeeping and told her he wanted her to get clean, take care of her kids and stay out of trouble. They ended their conversation on good terms and Stacie hugged her dad good-bye and he drove off. That was the last time he ever saw her.
Stacie and Nelson then walked up East School Street toward Pond Street. Stacie told Nelson she wanted to work that night and began looking for customers near a park in the area. As Stacie kept walking, Nelson stopped a guy he knew on the street to ask for a cigarette, but he didn’t have one. When Nelson turned around, Stacie was gone. He looked up and down East School Street, but he couldn’t find her. He then walked all the way up to Pond Street, looked up and down that street, but still didn’t see her.
Nelson walked back down to the park and hung out there, because that’s where they would meet up after Stacie had done a trick. At about 11:15 P.M., a park services worker named Ken passed by and Nelson told him he was waiting for his girlfriend, Stacie. Ken said he knew Stacie and her dad. The two men talked for a bit and then Ken left. A little while later, Nelson was stopped by police, who asked him what he was doing in the park, and then ran his name to see if there were any outstanding warrants on him. There weren’t. Nelson asked the cop if Stacie had been arrested, and was told he had to go to the station to get that information. The cop also told him to leave the park.
Nelson walked across East School Street and sat on a hill for a while before deciding to go to the police station. Nelson was getting worried because Stacie was never gone more than an hour when she was turning a trick. He figured she must have been arrested. But when he got to the station, the officer on duty told him Stacie wasn’t there. He decided to go back to his friend John’s house, where he was living. He got there around 1:00 A.M. and went to bed.
The next day Nelson met up with a friend named Ray, who had a car, and they drove around looking for Stacie in some of the places where she would typically go to turn some tricks, but they couldn’t find her. They searched in the Oak Hill Cemetery, a cemetery in nearby Blackstone, Massachusetts, and on the road under the Hamlet Avenue bridge. When they didn’t find Stacie there, they went to the Blackstone Police Department (BPD) and the North Smithfield Police Department (NSPD) in Rhode Island to see if she had been arrested. But the police hadn’t seen her. So Nelson went back to the Woonsocket police station to file a missing person’s report.
Nelson told police that she had been missing one other time for about twenty-four hours. She had been with a guy named Gary, who had a room at the County Squire Motel in North Smithfield. It turned out Gary kept Stacie in the room against her will and forced himself on her. Nelson also told police that Stacie had complained to him in the past about other customers who wouldn’t let her leave, including a married guy who drove a blue Oldsmobile and lived on Estes Street. Stacie told Nelson that he had held her for a wh
ile against her will, but he eventually let her go unharmed. She never reported those incidents to police.
During the interview with police Nelson was behaving rather strangely. Sometimes he would stare at the cops for long periods of time without blinking. Other times he would become agitated, especially when he didn’t like the questions they were asking him.
Nelson also told them he just decided to quit doing drugs and move to Providence. One of the cops, Sergeant Steve Nowak, asked Nelson why he wanted to get clean all of a sudden, especially since his girlfriend hadn’t even been missing for twenty-four hours. Nelson explained that he had wanted to do it for a long time, but couldn’t do it and just figured it was time to get straightened out. Nowak, who had to continuously prod Nelson for information during the interview, was convinced James had killed Stacie. He would soon learn that wasn’t the case.
Like Audrey and Christine, Stacie turned to hooking to earn money to feed her drug habit. But there was more to Stacie than her life as a prostitute.
Stephen Kreig, the father of Stacie’s two young children, was twenty-two when he first met Stacie, who was just turning sixteen. At that time in her life she was bouncing back and forth from her mother’s house and her father’s house in Woonsocket to her aunt’s place in Milford, Massachusetts.
Stacie’s parents, Ray and Debbie Boerger, split up after she was born, and Debbie married a man named Norman Goulet, who adopted Stacie. But Stacie didn’t like living with Norman and she always wanted to live with her real father. Debbie ultimately divorced Goulet, and she and Ray remarried, but they divorced almost immediately after Stacie was murdered.
Ripper Page 3