Stacie and Kreig went out for a couple weeks, and the first time they slept together, she got pregnant with their son Dana. They soon moved in together in Woonsocket. Stacie was seventeen when Dana was born in 1998. Then a couple years later their daughter, Kimberly, was born.
Although Stacie was a quiet person who usually kept to herself, she and Kreig had the same interests. They liked watching movies, sitting back and listening to their favorite bands and fishing. In fact, the couple would often go out fishing in a little boat Kreig owned. Other times they’d go to the park and walk around or go down to the beach and pick shells; Stacie was always looking for the perfect shell. They’d go out to eat occasionally, but neither one of them really drank all that much. However, they both smoked marijuana, the only drug Kreig ever saw Stacie do. But then she ended up meeting some guy who got her hooked on coke.
When their son was born, Kreig bought Stacie a ring and asked her to marry him. She said no. Then when she got pregnant with their daughter, Kreig again asked Stacie to marry him. He told her that’s what people who had children did, but she said she didn’t know if that was what she wanted. She felt she was too young to get married. On the other hand, Kreig was getting older and all he wanted to do was settle down, get married and raise his kids.
Kreig tried to get closer to Stacie and kept trying to change her mind, but she pushed him away. Ultimately she pushed him out of love with her. He told Stacie that although he loved the death out of their kids and would do anything for them, he just couldn’t stay with her. Stacie begged Kreig not to leave her, but he packed up his stuff and moved out.
Shortly before Kreig left Stacie, he met someone else—his next-door neighbor’s sister-in-law, who used to watch his kids some nights when neither he nor Stacie was home. At that time Stacie was going to night school to get her GED because she wanted to go to cosmetology school, and Kreig, a self-employed contractor, was working and attending court-mandated counseling sessions for some trouble he had been in.
Things between Kreig and the babysitter, who was older then he was, started out innocently enough. One night she had dinner waiting for him when he got home from work. Soon she began filling Stacie’s role as woman of the house and Kreig started having feelings for her. He found her very interesting and liked the fact that she was a very mature and responsible person.
At the time the babysitter had a husband, who was in jail, but they were in the middle of a divorce. Before Kreig knew it, the two were exchanging kisses and beginning to fall in love. When Kreig moved out of the apartment he shared with Stacie, he moved in with the babysitter for a month until he saved up enough money for them to move into another apartment in Woonsocket. After her divorce was final, Kreig and the babysitter got married.
When Kreig left Stacie, he told her that if she continued to let him see his children, he would pay all her expenses, including her rent, which was $775 per month, as well as her utilities and even her cable bill. And he said he’d buy the kids whatever they needed. Stacie agreed. But then her family got involved, and her parents told her not to let Kreig see the kids if he didn’t want to be with her.
“So she didn’t let me see the kids. Then she took me to court for child support and I was ordered to pay seventy-four dollars a week, every Friday,” Kreig said. “I made my payments every week. And I thought if she wanted to be like that, she could see what seventy-four dollars a week would get her. But she still didn’t let me see my kids. So this went on for a month, two, three, eight months, and finally I said, ‘I’m not buying your oil. I’m not paying the electric bill.’ And since the apartment was in my name, I told her I was telling the landlord to take my name off the lease. I said I wasn’t going to do anything extra for the kids if she didn’t let me see them. It was like I didn’t even have children.”
Shortly after that, Stacie called Kreig and his wife and said she needed them to babysit the kids. Kreig found that strange because she hadn’t let him see them for 8½ months, even though he was supposed to have court-ordered visits with them.
“So I told my wife to go pick up the kids and we brought them back to our house, but at eleven P.M. we still didn’t get a call from her, so we just brought them back to her house,” Kreig said.
When he walked into Stacie’s apartment, her roommate was there, but Stacie wasn’t. It was the middle of winter and the apartment was freezing. Stacie’s roommate said they didn’t have any heat. Kreig looked around and noticed there was dog shit and piss all over the house. The roommate said Stacie’s boyfriend had a dog and he never took the dog out, so it messed wherever it wanted.
“I’m thinking my daughter is crawling around in this,” Kreig said. “Next I go to the pantry and open cupboards and there’s nothing in the cupboards and there’s nothing in the refrigerator. All the baby’s clothes and toys are just thrown in piles all over the place. The whole apartment was in shambles. So I called the Department of Children, Youth and Families and I told them what was going on. I told them I wasn’t living in the house, but I paid my support and I was ordered to see the children, but she wouldn’t let me see my kids and she was going against a court order. I told them she had no food in the house, she had no heat and the kids were living in unsanitary conditions.”
The agency sent over a police officer, who went in the house himself so he could document the situation firsthand and note it on file. Then he immediately granted Kreig temporary custody of his children until further notice.
“It made me happy but sad at the same time,” Kreig said. “I was hurting her but helping my kids. It was hard to hurt someone you love to help someone else you love. We went back and forth in court about visitation. I wanted full custody because she was still out running around and that guy got her hooked on crack, and that’s when she turned to the street. They split up because she couldn’t control her habit. She was only on the streets for about a year before she was murdered.”
Kreig finally got full custody of his two children two years before Stacie was killed, and the court even stopped her visitations because she tried to remove her daughter from the Kreig household on one of her visits.
During their investigation of Stacie’s disappearance a Woonsocket police officer called Kreig and asked him to go down to the police station for questioning. The cop told him he was the number one suspect in her disappearance. The officer explained that when someone was missing, they usually looked at the person closest to the missing person.
Kreig was dumbfounded. He told the cop he wasn’t all that close to Stacie. In fact, he said, they couldn’t stand each other and stayed away from each other.
“If we see each other, she chucks me the bird and I’ll say something stupid to her,” Kreig told the officer. “Other than that, we don’t see each other.”
But the cop said he still needed Kreig to go down to the station. So he told Kreig to go down the next morning, but shortly after, he called Kreig back and told him to forget it. The police had a lead.
“When I heard she had been murdered, I felt real sad. I wanted to cry,” Kreig said. “No matter what was going on between us, I always loved her because she was my kids’ mother. The kids saw it on the news and I had to be honest with them because I didn’t want them to hear it from someone else or from a kid my son was going to school with.”
Kreig said Stacie was a good person before she got hooked on drugs.
“She had a good side to her, she was bright and had the most balls I’ve ever seen on a woman,” he said. “She would just stick up for herself if she thought she was right. She was a little spitfire. She was unbelievable. She was one big ball of energy. But she was also very gentle. She liked simple things. She wasn’t one of the flashy ‘I want, I want’ girls. She just wanted the simple things. She just wanted to get by in life and be happy.”
But Stacie, like Audrey and Christine, never had that chance.
Chapter 5
As Audrey, Christine and Stacie undoubtedly learned, the life of a prostitute
was not an easy one. Many a young woman entered into prostitution because she came from a dysfunctional family: her parents drank, her father probably abused her mother, and both parents probably abused their kids physically and emotionally. Maybe her dad couldn’t hold down a job, so there was never enough food to eat and no money for heat. Her mom was probably too afraid to take the kids and leave. And if her mom was brave enough to strike out on her own, living in a broken home was no fun either. Maybe she saw her mother turning tricks to make enough money so they could have a roof over their heads.
Thanksgiving, Christmas and birthdays probably didn’t mean anything to her when she was growing up. And she probably got picked on at school because she was on the school lunch program and wore the same clothes three or four days in a row.
Then before she knew what was happening, her new “uncle” or maybe even her own father started sexually abusing her—a touch here, a tickle there and then the repulsive acts she tried to forget, but never could. Hoping, praying that someone, anyone, would save her. But no one ever did. She blamed herself. She must have done something to make that man do those horrible things.
School was never easy, but then it became a nightmare. Homework began to suffer and she figured she was just stupid. So the first chance she had, she ran away. A young girl—fourteen or fifteen or sixteen—on the street. Everywhere to go. Nowhere to go. But free.
She had a little money that she’d borrowed from a friend, so she bought a ticket and hopped a bus to a new city—any city. But when she got there, she was scared, so she hooked up with the first guy who talked to her and offered to take her home. At first, she was happy. She had food to eat, nice clothes to wear and, best of all, she wasn’t being abused.
But that soon changed. Her friend gave her drugs—pot at first, then cocaine. And when she was high, he demanded sex. Then he told her she had to pay for her upkeep and he turned her out onto the streets. She couldn’t run away—she needed him and the drugs. Besides, where would she go? So she sold herself for money to give to her guy. At first, she thought it was exciting, but then he started telling her she needed to bring in more money.
Soon she got tired of working for him, so she left, headed for a new city and went out on her own. She found a cheap room and worked day and night to support her drug habit. She knew she could go to jail if she was picked up, but she didn’t care. She needed to get high. Life on the street wasn’t good to her. She was only twenty, but looked forty.
She tried to get out of the life. She found a real boyfriend, not a john. She got clean. They had a couple kids. Everything was going great—for a while. She became too overwhelmed taking care of the kids and a house. And the pull of the drugs was too great, so she left and went back to the only life she could really handle—a life on the street. Not because she was a bad person, but because she needed to feed her habit.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that getting into a car with a stranger was dangerous, but she knew she could take care of herself.
That’s what they all thought—all the women, all the prostitutes, who went missing or were murdered in Woonsocket before Audrey, Christine and Stacie.
There was the Jane Doe who was discovered, nearly naked, floating facedown in the Blackstone River on January 31, 1990. Her arms, torso and left leg were floating freely in the river’s strong current, but her right leg appeared to be caught on some rocks. Jane was about seventeen or eighteen years old, five-two and about one hundred pounds. She was wearing red socks with white socks under them on both feet. There was a pair of black sweatpants wrapped around her ankles. She was wearing three rings on the fingers of her left hand. On her index finger was a yellow band with double hearts. On her ring finger was a gold band with what looked like a diamond and on her baby finger was a ring with a turquoise stone.
Jane’s body was blotched and disfigured and the medical examiner couldn’t tell exactly what her race was or how long she had been in the water. However, he estimated she was probably in the water for four weeks and she appeared to have dark skin. What he did know for sure was that the front of her head had been cracked open. A large portion of the hair from her scalp was missing, but what was left appeared to be curly—similar to the hair of an African-American woman.
Police were never able to identify the woman.
Jane wasn’t the only woman to get murdered in Woonsocket that year. On November 9, 1990, police found the body of a white female lying facedown on the ground behind Shaw’s Meats on Social Street. The woman was partially dressed—she was still wearing her jeans on her right leg and she still had a sock on her left foot. Her left shoe was on the ground next to her right leg. She was also wearing a red pullover-type shirt with a multicolored sweater over it. Next to her right arm, which was extended to her side, was a blue winter jacket. A man’s white handkerchief was lying on the ground next to it. On the middle finger of her left hand was a gray metal ring with a red heart and a blue heart. There was a piece of rope wrapped around her neck.
Her body was surrounded by trash. To the right of her body was an old condom, which was deteriorating. There was an empty Marlboro cigarette box near her right leg, and a few feet from her body toward the building was what appeared to be a recently smoked cigarette. A few feet from the woman’s hand was a green plastic cap and several feet from that was a sixteen-ounce bottle of Sunburst Lemon Lime Drink. To the left of the bottle was an unopened package of Bristol Lights Menthol 100 cigarettes. Police noticed a puddle of liquid that was probably urine coming from her body.
When the doctor from the medical examiner’s office arrived to view the body, he noticed a small piece of glass on the woman’s right cheek, which he removed, placed in an envelope and gave to police. Examining the scene further, police picked up a similar piece of glass near her body.
After the woman’s body was taken to the medical examiner’s office, police tried to determine if the killer had left any fingerprints on it. He hadn’t. During her autopsy the medical examiner (ME) noted needle marks on the woman’s arms, indicating she had been a junkie at some point. The medical examiner said she was strangled to death with some type of ligature. Police identified her as Dianne Irene Goulet (no relation to Stacie).
Dianne’s murder remained unsolved for five years. But it wasn’t because police didn’t actively work the case. Sure, maybe she was just a prostitute to the guy who murdered her, but to the Woonsocket police she was someone’s daughter, someone’s mother, someone’s sister. But as hard as they worked, they still came up empty in the beginning.
They finally caught a break on October 16, 1995, when a guy named Marc Dumas walked into the station and claimed he had information about Dianne’s murder. For twelve hours he gave police a detailed account of how she was killed. He said that in the early-morning hours of November 9, 1990, he and another guy left a local bar and saw Dianne, who they knew was a prostitute. He said Dianne agreed to go with them to the back of Shaw’s Meats and have sex with them. When they finished, the other guy said he wanted to kill Dianne and started choking her with his hands. Dumas said he tried to stop him, but couldn’t. Dumas said after Dianne was dead, the other guy told him he “knew a lot of people” and insinuated that Dumas would be in deep shit if he ever told anyone what had happened. Dumas told police there were some details that he couldn’t remember.
During the interview police decided to show Dumas some photos of Dianne’s body to try and jog his memory. When he looked at the photos, he told police he was the one who put the rope around Dianne’s neck. The minute those words came out of his mouth, police stopped the interview and read him his rights. At some point he used the word “lawyer,” a word that would become a bone of contention later in the case.
Despite making a reference to a lawyer, Dumas continued talking and told the police he figured Dianne was already dead, so he put the rope around her neck—he said the other guy told him to do it—and then had sex with her corpse. Again he said the other guy forced him t
o do it so that he would also be implicated in the crime.
On January 19, 1996, Dumas was indicted and charged with murder. The other guy was also arrested, but was never indicted for Dianne’s murder. Dumas was tried and found guilty of second-degree murder in January 1997. He was sentenced to fifty years—thirty in prison and twenty on probation. Dumas appealed his conviction, claiming that his rights were violated because he asked for a lawyer but didn’t get one. He won his appeal and got a new trial. Again he was found guilty of second-degree murder, and his appeal of that second conviction was denied.
Then there was Katrina Marie McVeigh, who disappeared sometime in May 1992. She was twenty-seven years old and had three small children. Katrina’s mother, Charlotte Saulnier, who had custody of her grandchildren, reported her missing in June of that year. She called police after receiving a disturbing telephone call from her son-in-law that convinced her something had happened to her daughter. She said her son-in-law told her that Katrina was dead and that she could be found by a riverbank. Charlotte told police she hadn’t seen Katrina since April when she delivered an invitation to her for her brother’s wedding. Katrina told her mom nothing would make her miss that wedding. The wedding took place May 16; Katrina didn’t show up.
Officer Edward Lee just happened to be assigned to Katrina’s case. Lee went to Katrina’s last known address and talked to Judy, her roommate, who was also her lover. Judy told police she last saw Katrina on May 14 when they left a local pizza joint. Judy said as they were leaving, a white male driving an older-model car pulled over next to them and Katrina got in his car, presumably to turn a trick. Lee talked to some of Katrina’s other friends, who said they thought she had gone to drug rehab.
Police also talked to her estranged husband—the man who had called Charlotte—and asked him what he knew about Katrina’s disappearance. The man denied telling Charlotte that Katrina’s body could be found by a riverbank or making any other statements that could lead her to believe Katrina was dead. He said the last time he saw Katrina was in January and he had no idea where she was at that point.
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