Ripper

by Linda Rosencrance

  When police got back to the station, they ran a records check on Guertin and discovered he had been arrested in 1988 in Worcester, Massachusetts, for multiple violent crimes against women.

  A couple days later the police went to the hospital to show Gloria the same photo lineup. Like Gary had, Gloria picked out Guertin and said he was the guy who attacked her. Because Gloria was still in a lot of pain and on medication, the detectives gave her a card and asked her to call them when she felt better.

  When Gloria was released from the hospital, she contacted the police and they set up a time for her to come in and talk to them about the assault. On January 3, she went to the station and gave the police her statement.

  She said that she had gone to Buddy’s Café with a friend named Ernie to celebrate her birthday. She said she was also supposed to meet her mother and her aunt at a Christmas party at the Amvets Post next door. Gloria said she was going back and forth from Buddy’s to the Post and was first approached by Guertin at Buddy’s. After telling him it was her birthday, Guertin offered to buy her a drink. She declined his offer and said she was going down the street to the Hillside Café.

  A short time later she left Buddy’s and walked down to the Hillside. When she arrived, she noticed that Guertin was in his car outside the bar. She walked into the bar and he walked in after her, asking her if she needed a ride home. At first, Gloria didn’t answer him, but the guy kept bugging her. Finally she agreed and left with him.

  Gloria said the guy drove down Sayles Street, but when she told him to turn left onto River Street to go to Park Avenue, where she lived, he just kept driving straight across River Street and continued down Sayles Street. Gloria asked the guy where he was going. Instead of answering her, he started hitting her and she said she may have lost consciousness.

  The next thing she knew, she was out of the car and on the ground. The guy grabbed her, picked her up and told her to walk and do what she was told and he wouldn’t hurt her. When Gloria asked the guy what he wanted with her, he started to hit her again and kick her.

  Then she felt the man put something around her neck and pull it tight. All the while he kept yelling, “You’re going to die, bitch!”

  Gloria tried to pull the ligature off her neck but couldn’t; she lost consciousness. When she came to, she was in the water and the man was pushing her head down. Scared for her life, Gloria took a deep breath, then decided to play dead. Finally the man let go of her and left the area. When she didn’t see him anymore, she got out of the water and started screaming for help. Gloria told police she didn’t remember how she ended up naked.

  Guertin ultimately pleaded guilty to assault with intent to murder, and in February 1999, he was sentenced to twenty years in the Adult Correctional Institutions.

  Gloria wasn’t so lucky.

  On March 5, 2005, Woonsocket police were dispatched to a Green Street residence for a possible overdose. When they arrived, they discovered Gloria lying faceup in bed. She was dead. Police also observed a large amount of prescription medication on the kitchen table. The medication was prescribed to a man named Walter Myers, who lived in the house.

  Myers told police the dead woman was his fiancée, Gloria, and the two had been living together for two weeks, although they had known each other for a number of years. Myers said he went to bed around twelve-thirty in the morning, but Gloria stayed up for a while. She went to bed about a half hour later, gave Myers a kiss and a hug, then told him she loved him.

  When he woke up, he noticed that Gloria wasn’t moving. He started to shake her, but she didn’t respond. So Myers ran to a nearby nursing home and asked officials there to call police and an ambulance because he didn’t have a phone.

  Police processed the scene and contacted the medical examiner, who arrived and pronounced Gloria dead and transported her body to the medical examiner’s office. The medical examiner also confiscated the medication.

  Myers told police that the night before she died, he and Gloria had been drinking wine and she became depressed over memories of the night Guertin raped her. Myers said he gave Gloria two Valiums to help calm her down. Then they smoked some weed. They finally went to bed, but Myers said Gloria kept getting up and going into the kitchen. He figured she must have been getting more medication. He said he fell asleep, and when he woke up, Gloria was dead.

  The ME ruled that Gloria, forty-seven, died from a drug overdose. Most likely, it was an accidental overdose.

  Several years before Gloria died—and about ten months after Christine Dumont was reported missing—Lee investigated the kidnapping and assaults of two other prostitutes. Every time there was a report of a missing prostitute, Lee wondered if it was related to the disappearances of the other women. And he wondered if there really was a psychopath on the loose in Woonsocket.

  According to Lee, sometime around December 2, 2003, a man walked into the Woonsocket police station and said he had picked up a visibly upset woman and given her a ride to the Landmark Medical Center. The man told the police the woman was crying and very upset. He said she told him another woman was tied up in a nearby house and was being held against her will.

  Police went to the medical center to speak with the woman, named Sabrina. She was just nineteen years old. Sabrina told the police she and her friend, Tiffany, twenty, were working at an area strip club when a couple men, Jerome Vance and John Graff, gave her some cocaine. One of the other dancers was jealous and snitched on Sabrina to the manager of the club and the manager fired her. She then left the club with Tiffany and Graff, and they drove to Graff’s Woonsocket apartment, where Vance had also been staying. Graff was letting Vance sell drugs out of his house. Vance decided to spend a little more time at the club before heading back to the apartment.

  Once at Graff’s apartment the trio did cocaine and partied for a while. While they were doing cocaine, Tiffany started to freak out. She kept walking around the house and going into the kitchen. Graff started to get nervous and wanted to get Tiffany out of the house, because one of the rules of the house was that no one went into the kitchen. So they figured out a way to get rid of Tiffany before Vance came home. The plan was that Sabrina would take Tiffany to a local doughnut shop and leave her there.

  When Sabrina got back to Graff’s apartment, Vance was already there. He asked where Tiffany was and became angry when Sabrina told him she left her down the street. Vance told Sabrina that Tiffany was the sister of his drug connection and wanted her back in the apartment so she wouldn’t tell her brother what had happened. Sabrina immediately went back to the doughnut shop, picked up Tiffany and brought her back. The group continued partying.

  At about 1:00 A.M., Vance told the group he was missing about thirty-one grams of cocaine. He said he had had about three hundred grams, but thirty-one grams were gone. He began accusing Tiffany and Sabrina of taking his dope. Sabrina told the police she didn’t steal it, but she didn’t know if Tiffany did. Tiffany and Sabrina started arguing and fighting. Vance grabbed Sabrina and punched her in the face a few times; then he separated the two women and made them take off all their clothes. Next he opened all the windows so it would be cold. He made the women lie down on the floor in the living room and searched them for the drugs. He forced his fingers into their rectums and vaginas. Sabrina tried to fight him off, but he overpowered her. Tiffany just let him do what he wanted.

  During the search he hit Sabrina several more times and then went to the kitchen and started to boil water to pour on them. He told the women they had twenty minutes while the water was boiling to tell him where the coke was. While the water was boiling, Vance got a knife from the kitchen, ran it across Sabrina’s throat and asked her if that was the way she wanted to die. Sabrina told him to go fuck himself and he grabbed a nearby cane and beat her legs with it.

  Vance then went to get the pot of boiling water and put it on the coffee table in the living room. He made them stay down on the floor and tied them up with duct tape. He taped each woman’s ankles tog
ether and taped their hands behind their backs. He took a facecloth, dipped it in the boiling water and flung it around so the water would splash on the girls—all the while he was screaming that they were going to talk.

  Finally Sabrina lied and said she knew where the stuff was so she could get out of the house. She told Vance that she saw Tiffany throw it out at the doughnut shop and she could show him where it was. So Vance untied Sabrina and told her to get dressed. Then she and Graff went to the doughnut shop, where she pretended to look for the drugs. She was really hoping that someone would see her, realize she was in trouble and help her. She even told people she needed help and asked them to call the police, but they ignored her. She thought about running away, but Graff had the car and she was afraid he’d run her over because Vance told him to do whatever he had to do to keep Sabrina from escaping.

  When Sabrina didn’t find the drugs, Graff brought her back to his house. Vance was so pissed that he beat her with the cane and punched her in the head so many times that she passed out. When she woke up, Vance was still hitting her. Vance said the girls would talk or he was going to sodomize them until they were dead. Then he continued beating Sabrina.

  At about 7:00 A.M., Vance sent Graff to a local convenience store to buy more duct tape. When he returned with the tape, Vance tied Tiffany up, even tighter, then took Sabrina back to the doughnut shop to look for the dope. Sabrina again tried to get help, but no one paid attention to her. When he realized Sabrina couldn’t find the drugs, he drove her back to the apartment, punching her in the face on the way. Once they got to the apartment, Vance kicked Sabrina out of the car and told her to walk back to the doughnut shop and find the drugs. He said if she didn’t come back, he would kill Tiffany.

  Sabrina walked down the street and flagged down a car. She told the driver what had happened and he drove her to the Landmark Medical Center and then went to the police.

  When Sergeant Ed Lee got the information that a woman was being held against her will, he and some other officers were dispatched to Graff’s apartment. Maybe this was the break they were looking for that would help them find out what had happened to Audrey and Christine.

  While they surrounded the building, they found Vance outside the side door of the first-floor apartment. Vance told police he was trying to get into the apartment, but no one was answering the door. However, police soon realized that Vance, who was wearing just a T-shirt and pants, had really just left the apartment. So they arrested Vance, put him in a police car and took him to the station.

  Lee pushed the buzzer to the first-floor apartment, and when the door opened, he and another officer went inside. Police saw a man they later identified as Graff holding a cane. They also saw a woman sitting on the couch with her hands tied behind her back. She was screaming for help. As police took Graff down, brought him out to a police vehicle and transported him to the police station, Lee went into the kitchen to look for other suspects.

  When Lee went back into the living room, he noticed that the woman’s legs were also bound with duct tape. He called the department’s Bureau of Criminal Identification (BCI) for an officer to come and photograph the scene. Police asked Tiffany if she could tolerate being tied up a bit longer until the photos were taken. She said she could and added that she wanted to press charges against Vance and Graff. One officer kept talking to Tiffany to keep her calm while they waited for the BCI unit to arrive.

  As they waited, Tiffany, who was wearing a gray sleeveless top, jeans and only one sneaker, told the detectives that Vance and Graff had been holding her captive in their apartment since the previous night. She said she thought the two men were going to kill her. She told police that Vance had used the cane to beat Sabrina. She then told police that there were drugs all over the apartment. Police had already noticed evidence of narcotics use in plain sight in the living room. As they looked around, they saw white residue on a cedar chest, as well as a glass pipe used to smoke cocaine.

  When the BCI officer arrived, he took pictures of Tiffany, and then another officer cut the duct tape off. Once Tiffany was free, she was transported to the Landmark Medical Center to be checked out.

  As they continued their investigation, police learned that Graff had signed a consent form so they could search his apartment. As they looked around, they saw a glass coffeepot on the stove in the kitchen with a white residue on the glass; it was consistent with the way powdered cocaine is processed in crack cocaine or rock cocaine. There was also baking powder, a large number of plastic bags and other paraphernalia used to process cocaine. Police also found a large quantity of crack cocaine in a couple plastic bags. In addition to the drugs, police also seized nearly $900 in cash from the apartment.

  The two men were charged with a number of narcotics offenses, as well as kidnapping and various assault charges. They were ultimately sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

  Despite her brush with death, Tiffany didn’t change her ways and ended up in prison for two years for assault and theft. Sabrina seemed to have fared a little better—she was only arrested several times for driving with a suspended license.

  Unfortunately, that incident had nothing to do with whatever had happened to Audrey and Christine.

  Before taking on the case of the serial killer, Lee said he had also been involved in another, rather strange, well-publicized case of a serial criminal who was dubbed “the serial foot licker.”

  On June 6, 2002, Lee said he was assigned to investigate two simple assaults that took place in a Shaw’s Supermarket on Diamond Hill Road. Lee said two women had reported that they had been assaulted by a black man who licked their feet.

  One of the women, who was wearing sandals at the time, said while she was shopping, the man began to follow her. At one point he stopped and told her he liked her feet. Then he bent down pretending to get an item off a bottom shelf, but he instead reached down, grabbed one of her feet and licked it. The woman immediately left the area, but the guy followed her. He only stopped when she went to a cashier for help.

  Shortly after that, the guy, who was later identified as Raymond Dublin, approached another woman in the cosmetics department of the same supermarket. Dublin told the woman she had pretty feet, then placed his nose or tongue on one of them. The woman called her husband as Dublin walked out of the store. She noted his license plate number, then called the police, who tracked the car down to a George Dublin.

  When Lee contacted the suspect, he said his brother, Raymond, had been driving his car on the day the women were allegedly assaulted. The women then picked Raymond Dublin out of a photo lineup and Lee got a search warrant for Raymond, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. But before he could execute the warrant, Raymond, who found out that the police were looking for him, called Lee and told him George was lying.

  Raymond ultimately had a change of heart and turned himself in. He told Lee that he had never licked the women’s feet. He said he had just dropped a can on a woman’s foot and the woman misunderstood what had happened. Despite Dublin’s explanation, Lee arrested him.

  After the local newspapers got wind of the case, several other women called Lee and told them they had been assaulted by a man who licked their feet. One woman told Lee that about three weeks earlier a man had licked her feet in another area store. She said she filed a police report with the Woonsocket police about the incident on May 18.

  The woman said she was in the Ocean State Job Lot store on Park Avenue in Woonsocket doing some shopping. While there, she said, she was followed by a black man who approached her while she was looking at lamps. The man told her he liked the lamp she was looking at and wanted to buy one for his fiancée. Not wanting to talk to the man, she put the lamp down and walked away to continue shopping, but the guy approached her at least six more times trying to make small talk.

  The last time the man stopped to talk, the woman was bent over looking at an item on the bottom of a display shelf. At that point the man complimented her feet and said her toenail polish
was pretty. He then bent down near her and touched her ankle. The woman said she felt something wet on her ankle like a tongue. Frightened, she went directly to the registers to make her purchases. While she was cashing out, she looked up and saw the man standing at the entrance. He was staring at her.

  When she walked out of the store, the guy walked directly behind her. She said he was so close she could almost feel his sweatshirt against her back. The woman then made an abrupt turn and went back into the store to ask the manager if the store had any security personnel available. The manager said he didn’t. The woman then left the store and drove to the police station to fill out a report on the incident. That woman also picked Raymond Dublin out of a photo lineup.

  Another woman said a man had called her at her office at Northern Rhode Island Community Services, saying he wanted to suck her feet. She notified the police and they traced the call to someone other than Dublin. She told the police that several months earlier a black man had gone into the center’s offices looking for assistance, but she sent him to another social services agency.

  She said she ran into the guy again as she was leaving the center one evening and he asked her directions to the Landmark Medical Center. After giving him the directions, the woman left the area and went to her gym. She said the guy then showed up at the gym and said he wanted to join, although he had previously told her he was homeless and had no money. She said the man never attempted to touch her, but, even so, she felt very uncomfortable. She said after reading the stories in the local newspapers about Dublin, she wanted to find out if he was the same guy who had approached her. Police showed her Dublin’s picture and she confirmed that he was the guy who was bothering her. She also said the guy who telephoned her and the guy who asked her for directions both spoke with a lisp.

  Police soon discovered that Raymond Dublin had been in trouble with the law in the past. In 1991, he was convicted of first-degree sexual assault and sentenced to serve ten years of a fifteen-year sentence, and in 1998, he was convicted of second-degree sexual assault and sentenced to five years of a fifteen-year sentence.