Police arrested Raymond Dublin and charged him with three counts of simple assault rather than sexual assault for licking the feet of the women at the Shaw’s Supermarket and the Ocean State Job Lot.
On July 8, Dublin pleaded no contest to the three charges. He was sentenced to one year at the Adult Correctional Institutions because he had violated his probation on a previous sexual assault conviction.
Like Lee, Steve Nowak, thirty-six at press time, was also born in Woonsocket. He had three brothers and a sister. When his parents divorced, he went to live with his father in nearby Burrillville. He was about ten years old. He graduated from Burrillville High School in 1988. And like Lee, Nowak always wanted to be a cop.
“I always wanted to be a Woonsocket cop,” Nowak said. “I thought of going to a bigger city, but my mother lived in Woonsocket and I spent the weekends in Woonsocket and I always respected the police. My grandfather was a World War II vet, who worked for the United States Postal Service for twenty-seven years. He was very civic-minded. He used to always talk to me about being a public servant. He said it wasn’t about making a lot of money, it was important to do something worthwhile—it was about doing the service.”
After high school Nowak went into the army and was a military policeman overseas for 3½ years. He served in the Sixty-fourth Military Police Company in Bremerhaven, Germany.
“We did law enforcement and we were responsible for transferring ammunition in and out of Europe,” he said.
Nowak got married in Denmark to Dolores, an American, who was an emergency room (ER) technician. They have one son, Devin, sixteen in 2008. They left Germany and headed back to the States in 1993.
“The military is probably the reason I got the job here because it sets you up afterward and it helped me on the test,” Nowak said. “Police departments like to hire people with military experience—they figure if they went through that …”
In his first year on the job in Woonsocket, Nowak got selected to work on the vice squad.
“My first year on the job was in plainclothes and consisted of buying drugs and dealing with prostitutes,” Nowak recalled. “We were hanging out in bars and sometimes I’d be wearing shorts, trying to hide the gun somewhere.”
From 1995 to 2000, Nowak worked in the uniform division, and in 2000, he got promoted to sergeant—first he was a patrol sergeant on the third shift, then he became a district court prosecutor sergeant, and was soon assigned to the detective squad. In April 2007, he was promoted to lieutenant.
Despite their extensive law enforcement backgrounds, neither Lee nor Nowak was prepared for what was about to happen in the case of the missing prostitutes.
“I was only there probably two months when Stacie went missing,” Nowak said later. “When she went missing, I was the union president and I had gone with the chief of police to the mayor’s office to explain to her that the disappearances of Audrey Harris, Christine Dumont and Stacie Goulet might be connected. We told the mayor that we needed to start stepping it up. She agreed, but said she wanted to keep things quiet until we had some proof.”
When Lee and Nowak started working the Goulet case, they learned that Stacie’s boyfriend reported her missing and told police that he had a feeling something was wrong.
“Normally, I wouldn’t be called in on missing persons case, but because of Audrey and Christine, my boss thought it was something we should look into—the third one in a short period of time,” Lee said later.
Lee handled the case just like any other missing persons investigation. He traced Stacie’s last steps and talked with her family members. But he was most interested in her boyfriend at the time—a guy who was pretty much her pimp and kept track of her movements.
“Stacie was out there working to supply their habits,” Lee explained. “He was very cooperative and basically said she just walked up East School Street and disappeared. But I was able to speak with Stacie’s dad, who happened to see her at the fireworks display and basically gave her boyfriend an alibi. Her dad said that was the last time he spoke to her. Little did he know, her walk up that street would be her last and that would be the last time he saw her.”
Lee and Nowak interviewed everyone, including the guy she and her boyfriend were staying with in the Vernon section of the city. They tried to track down what happened to her and whom she was last with. All that took about a week or so.
After talking to all those people, the police determined that Stacie pretty much disappeared.
“Her boyfriend was convinced she went with a customer, but he said it only took her a certain amount of time to perform a trick and they always had a place where they would meet after she was done,” Lee said. “So he kept going back to the park where they were supposed to meet up. But after a couple hours when he didn’t see her, he got concerned. He saw a police officer sitting in the park and he even asked if Stacie had been arrested—he figured maybe she got into the car with an undercover cop. But the officer checked the computer and determined she hadn’t been arrested.”
It appeared that Stacie, like Audrey and Christine, had just vanished off the face of the earth.
But then cops caught a break in the form of an anonymous tip about a woman who had been kidnapped and choked by a john, but had lived to tell about it. That tip led detectives to a woman named Jocilin Martel, who was incarcerated at Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Institutions for violating probation that was related to a drug charge.
On July 12, 2004, Nowak and another officer went to ACI to interview Jocilin about the attack. She told police that sometime during the first week of June 2004, she was walking in the area of High and Arnold Streets. She said it was about 1:30 A.M. when a clean-cut, well-dressed man in a dark-colored SUV pulled up to her and solicited her for sex. Jocilin agreed and got into the man’s vehicle. She said the guy was about five-five or five-six, in his late thirties or early forties and wore his brown hair in a brush cut. He was wearing black denim shorts, a V-neck polo shirt and sandals.
The guy took Jocilin back to his apartment, which was in a lime green house with dark green shutters near Arnold Street. She said the house was two or three houses from Arnold Street and on the left side of the street. She told police she didn’t remember the name of the street, but Joseph’s Restaurant was on the corner of that street and Arnold Street.
After the guy parked his SUV, the pair got out and climbed the stairs to the front door. They went inside, walked down a hallway and entered the guy’s apartment, which was on the right side of the hall. Once inside, the guy led Jocilin to the kitchen. As they walked through his apartment, Jocilin couldn’t help but notice how neat it was. In fact, there was even a vase with plastic flowers in it on the kitchen table.
Jocilin asked the man if he wanted to go to his room, but he suggested they go into the living room instead. Just then, he walked up behind Jocilin and grabbed her around her throat with his arms. As he started choking her, Jocilin jammed her finger in his eye. As he let go of her to grab his eye, Jocilin ran out of the apartment. She told police she truly believed the guy was going to kill her. She said she told some people about it but didn’t go to the police. She said she never saw him again, but she had heard that he had attacked other women.
When detectives got back to the police station, they decided to check department records for similar assaults. They lucked out and found an incident report filed by a Woonsocket woman named Teese Morris. In her report Teese said she had been attacked by a guy in his Cato Street apartment. After doing a little more research, Lee and Nowak discovered that the attacks on Jocilin and Teese had happened sometime between the time Audrey Harris and Christine Dumont disappeared.
Several days later, Lee and another officer interviewed Teese, who told them a horrific story of her struggle for her life.
It was February 15, 2004, her birthday. She was walking on High Street when she was approached by a guy in a truck who asked her if she wanted to go have a drink with him. Teese said she had a co
uple drinks before she met the guy, but she wasn’t bombed and she knew what she was doing when she agreed to get in the guy’s car.
“He seemed very nice,” she told the police. “He was a clean-cut man—very friendly. He didn’t live very far from where he picked me up.”
When they got to his place, Teese was impressed by the way the outside of the house looked.
“We got out of the car and I said, ‘Wow, this is nice,’” Teese explained. “He said, ‘Let’s go in and have a drink.’”
Once inside, Teese sat at the kitchen table and the guy asked her if she wanted something to eat and told her to make herself at home.
“So me being me, ballsy, I’m making something to eat, and out of the clear blue sky, he started acting weird, but he didn’t seem crazy,” Teese told police. “He said his name was Mark and he asked me if I had a pimp, and I said, ‘No, why would I want a pimp?’ And he said, ‘Who you giving your money to? Who’s waiting outside?’ That’s what he kept asking me in the kitchen, ‘Who’s waiting outside for you? Where’s your pimp?’ I guess to make sure the coast was clear.”
Teese said she was a little taken aback by the way he was acting.
“You know a nutty person when you see a nutty person, but this person was very clean-cut, very well spoken, very well manicured, very clean, so it shocked me because I wasn’t expecting it,” she said. “It threw me off. I was like, ‘Where’s this coming from?’ It was as if he had a few issues upstairs. So I sat back down at the kitchen table and the food was cooking and he was like, ‘You got a nice body’ and shit like that and coming on to me and I was being very flirtatious with him.”
Then the guy told Teese to go into the refrigerator and get another beer, which she did. Then she grabbed a napkin off the kitchen to hold the beer. At that point the man told her to follow him because he wanted to show her his bedroom.
“It was a very, very small apartment, and it was neat and clean,” Teese told police. “The guy didn’t appear to be crazy. Everything was clean and in order. I don’t know if that’s how nuts do it. The man was very neat. That’s the kind of person that would attract a lot of women. You don’t want to go with some dirty scrub. He was very clean and he had a brand-new truck—a four by four.”
But before she had a chance to answer, the guy went up behind her and Teese thought he was going to try something sexual.
“But it wasn’t nothing sexual—the man grabbed me and had me [in] a choke hold,” she explained. “I dropped my beer because I couldn’t breathe. I could not breathe and I couldn’t scream. My neck was in his arm and he was squeezing and I was trying to grab him, but he was very clean-cut and there was very little for me to grab onto. So I’m trying to scratch his face, but I have no nails. So I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die.’ I couldn’t breathe and I was getting kind of dizzy.”
Teese said she thought about kicking the table to make some noise, but it was all the way against the wall and too far for her to reach. But she figured even if she kicked, it wasn’t going to make enough noise to draw the kind of attention she needed.
“So when he had me, I was swaying toward the table, and when I pushed myself back up, I went to swing back around and I grabbed his shirt and I pushed him toward the stove,” she said. “And he was just looking at me like he didn’t even see me—like I wasn’t even there. Like he was going to kill me. He didn’t say one word to me and I knew at that point that my life was over. And I started crying and I said, ‘Please, sir, I have a baby. I’m sorry for getting in your car. My money’s in my pocketbook, take whatever you want, please just don’t hurt me.’”
But the guy didn’t let her go. Instead, he grabbed her shirt and dragged her into his bedroom.
“When I went in, I knocked over his little boom box radio and I went to pick it up, but I couldn’t find a handle because he was dragging me,” she said. “Everything was happening so fast. He had, like, a queen-sized bed, it could have been smaller, but I wasn’t trying to measure no fuckin’ bed—I was just trying to get out of there. He grabbed me and threw me toward the bed and I ended up jumping on the bed and there was a double-pane window and I was banging on it. I was banging on it and yelling, ‘Help, help,’ but I couldn’t bust it for some reason. He grabbed me and he just kept choking and choking. And I’m saying, ‘Please, no, please, no, please don’t kill me.’ And I knew I was going to die, I knew this man was going to kill me.”
But suddenly the guy just let Teese go.
“I don’t know what came over him,” she told the police. “I don’t know why he let me go. I don’t know why he didn’t kill me. He just said, ‘Get out of here. I don’t want to see you around here no more.’ And I ran out the door, and ran out the apartment, and I didn’t have any shoes, and I remember there was ice and I slid on the ice. But there was a narrow little path to the street and I could see the street.”
Teese ran into the middle of the street, flagged down some guy and asked him to please bring her to the police station. At the station Teese told the cops she was attacked and that she had to run for her life and left all her belongings in his apartment. One of the cops offered to drive her back to the guy’s apartment.
“When the officer drove me back, I said, ‘There’s his truck. He’s still in there’ and the cop said, ‘What do you want me to do, bust the door down? There’s nothing I can do.’ And I was like, ‘Why are we here if I can’t get my pocketbook and my belongings back?’” she told detectives.
Teese told police that she was furious that the cop wasn’t going to help her get her property back. She said she left her purse containing personal papers and photos, a medium-length brown wig, an earring, a blue sweater and some other clothing in the guy’s apartment. She asked him why he brought her back to the scene of the crime if he wasn’t going to confront her attacker.
Police identified Jeffrey Mailhot as the person who lived in the apartment where Jocilin and Teese had been attacked. Both women ultimately picked Mailhot out of a photo lineup. Lee and Nowak also interviewed three other women who said they had been attacked and choked by a guy who lived on Cato Street. Two of the women couldn’t pick Mailhot out of the photo lineup and the other refused to file a complaint against him.
After they got the statements from Jocilin and Teese, the detectives got a warrant to search Mailhot’s apartment for any evidence of the attacks against the two women. That evidence they were looking for were Teese’s blue sweater, small black pocketbook, brown medium-length wig, personal items in her name and any pictures of her. They were also looking for any physical or trace evidence of the assaults on Jocilin and Teese, including hair, blood or fibers.
Then, on Friday, July 16, 2004, warrants in hand, Lee and Nowak staked out Cato Street, waiting for Jeffrey Mailhot to arrive home from work. When Mailhot showed up at around 7:20 P.M., the two officers pulled their car up behind his tan Chevy Blazer. After they got out of their car, Lee approached the suspect, who was still sitting in his SUV, and asked if his name was Jeffrey Mailhot. When he said yes, Lee asked him to get out and put his hands on the car. Then Lee arrested him for assault with a dangerous weapon—his hands—for allegedly assaulting and trying to choke a prostitute named Teese Morris. Lee also told Mailhot the police had a warrant to search his apartment. Lee cuffed Mailhot and called for another officer to take him to the police station. He also called the department’s BCI, the unit responsible for the forensic processing of crime scenes and evidence seized by police officers during criminal investigations.
“When I first saw Jeff Mailhot, I noticed that he was a short guy,” Lee said. “He was very polite, but he was confused. He really didn’t know what was going on.”
While Mailhot was on his way to the station, Lee and Nowak, who had gotten the key to the apartment from Mailhot, and another officer entered the suspect’s house. They did a quick walk-through to make sure no one else was inside.
At about seven that night, Detective Gerard Durand, of t
he department’s BCI, got a call at home telling him to go to Mailhot’s apartment. Durand, who was about to go on vacation to Hershey Park, Pennsylvania, wasn’t very happy about getting that call. After stopping by the station to pick up his equipment, he went to Cato Street, where he met Lee and Nowak, who told him that Mailhot was under investigation for assaulting several area prostitutes.
Durand began by photographing the apartment; then he helped the detectives look for evidence that would tie Mailhot to the assaults. As he searched the apartment, Durand was struck by how remarkably orderly it was, especially for a guy who lived alone.
“I walked in and surveyed the scene and just started processing the scene,” Durand said. “I took photos and looked for anything that had connection to the assaults. I was also looking for possible weapons, and sometimes they collect trophies, so I was looking for anything that belonged to Teese or Jocilin. And I was checking for anything we could get fingerprints off. Then we started searching the basement, the attic and the other empty apartments to see if possibly the assaults happened in the other apartments. The landlord gave us permission to search the common areas and the other apartments.”
When Lee looked around Mailhot’s apartment, he, too, thought it was a little too neat for a guy who lived alone.
“When we went in the apartment, I wanted to check it out to find something that might help me out in the interview—you’re always looking for little things that you can bring up so you can try to get a picture of who you’re talking to,” Lee said. “So the first thing that stuck out in my mind was how neat the apartment was—it was immaculate. Everything was neat and in order. His remotes were lined up on the table. All his DVDs and videos were lined up in alphabetical order. You opened up his drawers and his underwear and socks were folded. I don’t fold underwear, so I thought that was kind of strange. I remember even making the comment to Lieutenant Kyle Stone, the officer in charge that night, that this guy was too obsessive/compulsive. I figured this guy was either a serial killer or a district court prosecutor, because one of my good friends on the job was a district court prosecutor and everything in his office was just perfect—so, obviously, there was a little cop humor about that.”
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