“Nope.”
Lee and Nowak tried to get Mailhot to confess to the murders of Harris, Dumont and Goulet by explaining that if he accidentally killed the women, it would be better for him to confess because he would face a lesser punishment than if he had intentionally killed them—not necessarily a true statement, however.
“Do you understand the difference at what I’m getting at?” Nowak asked.
“Yes, yes.”
“And that’s what we’re trying to get at with you,” Nowak continued. “We can’t tell you what to say, but we want to let you know what the story is—what we’re looking at.”
“Right.”
“And that’s why it’s important for you to tell us the one hundred percent truth,” Nowak said.
Suddenly Lee threw down the pictures of the three dead prostitutes on the table in front of Mailhot.
“I—I don’t know any of these girls,” Mailhot said before Lee or Nowak had even asked him a question about them.
“No?” Lee asked.
“Mm-mm. None of these is the ones that I had.”
“Are you positive? That was a pretty quick look,” Lee said.
“Yeah, well, there’s three of them.”
“They all kind of look the same?” Lee asked. “I mean, I can think of some of the girls that talked to us about it. I mean, are you sure?”
“Positive.”
But Lee wasn’t about to let up because he saw something in Mailhot’s eyes when the suspect first looked at the photos of the three women—a hint of recognition in Mailhot’s otherwise cold, vacant stare.
“Well, you weren’t even sure it was a black girl. So how can you look at these three pictures and right away say it wasn’t any of these girls?” Lee asked.
“Well, because, you know, I’m looking at their faces.”
“Have you seen them before?”
“No,” Mailhot said as he looked at the photos.
“You’ve been out there for two years now,” Lee said.
“Yup.”
“These girls are all over—you never even seen them before?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t recognize them, you know, ’cause it’s usually dark out.”
“So you’re not a hundred percent sure?”
“No, I’m pretty sure.”
“But you’re pretty sure they’ve never been in your apartment,” Lee said.
“They’ve never—none of these have ever been in my apartment.”
Lee wanted to know how Mailhot could be so sure, considering the fact that he was drunk when he choked the other women.
“You’re drunk when these chokings go on, but you’re still not drunk enough where you would be able to recognize these girls [with] no problem that you’ve had in your apartment,” Lee said.
But before Mailhot could say anything, Lee hit him with another question.
“So I’m going to be able to show you other girls, and more than likely you’re going to be able to point out which ones you had the choke session with?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe next time I throw a picture down, I think you’re going to be able to pick ’em out like that because you were awfully quick on these three girls.”
“Hm-hmm.”
“How come?”
Stammering quite a bit, Mailhot said that he would know by looking at pictures of the women if they had ever been in his apartment.
“It’s easy to know when I see them like this. I mean, I would remember if I had them in my apartment because if I saw a picture of each girl that I was with, I could probably identify her.”
Next it was Nowak’s turn to try and get Mailhot to say something to incriminate himself.
“Jeff, you know something, we deal with these girls all the time. Maybe I’m not a very good cop or anything, but I forget their names,” Nowak said. “We’ve been dealing with them for ten or fifteen years and I forget their faces—forget who they are, and yet somehow, you’re telling us that you drink so much that you go into doing this thing that you like, but yet you can still clearly, one hundred percent, on the drop of a dime, tell us that none of these are them?”
“No, they’re not.”
“Can you pick them out?” Lee asked. “Keep looking.”
“Don’t matter,” Mailhot said.
“No? Do you think we’re trying to get at something?” Lee asked.
“I don’t know.”
“No? It’s just odd that you answered awfully quick,” Lee said.
“Are you sure that these girls were never in your apartment?” Lee asked.
“Do you watch TV?” Nowak asked.
“Yeah.”
“What do you watch?”
“I watch comedies, like Seinfeld, Simpsons, stuff like that.”
“Watch the news?”
“Once in a while.”
“National news—local news?”
“Both of them.”
“Do you get a newspaper?”
“No, I don’t subscribe to a newspaper.”
Nowak was trying to point out that because the story of the missing women was all over the local newspapers and television station, Mailhot should have recognized the women. But the fact that he kept insisting that he had never seen them made him look guilty.
“Are you sure that these girls were never in your apartment?” Lee asked.
“No, I said I’m pretty much positive I’ve never seen—any of those girls have never been in my apartment. I may have seen them walking down the streets and stuff.”
“So our evidence collectors from our BCI division aren’t going to find any of their hair anywhere,” Lee said.
“Nope.”
“And if they do—what? Just mistaken identity? ‘They were probably in there, but I don’t remember.’ They’re going to go through that apartment with a fine-tooth comb,” Lee said. “Are there going to be any fibers from those girls in there?”
“No.”
“And if there are?”
“There’s not going to be.”
“How do you know there’re not going to be? How are you so damn sure that these [girls] aren’t coming forward?” Lee asked.
“Because I’ve never done any—I’ve never killed anybody. That’s what you’re getting at.”
“Who said these girls were killed, first of all?” Lee asked.
“Because you—you’re basically accusing me of, you know, choking, choking this girl, you know, choking her until she didn’t wake up,” Mailhot said, clearly nervous.
“Right. What does that have to do with whether these girls were in your apartment?” Nowak asked.
“You’re just saying … ‘Are we going to find these girls somewhere in the apartment?’ That’s what you guys just asked me,” Mailhot said, although that wasn’t what Lee had asked him.
“No, I said are we going to find any of their hair in the apartment,” Lee said, explaining that Mailhot misinterpreted his comments.
“Oh.”
“I think you misunderstood that, although I said it pretty clear. [I said] any traces of their hair, not traces of their bodies. I mean, you come out and tell me—‘Because I never killed anybody,’ which I never said anybody in these pictures [was] killed, but they are missing,” Lee said.
“Okay,” Mailhot responded.
“Okay, but you wouldn’t know that because you don’t read the newspapers or anything like that, right?” Nowak asked.
“No.”
“I’m going to say it one more time—we know you have a problem,” Nowak said. “You’ve admitted that.”
“Right.”
“Mailhot was getting more nervous, especially when I threw down the three pictures of the three missing girls,” Lee said later. “And it looked like someone walked over his grave when he saw those three pictures and he immediately said, ‘I never saw these girls before.’”
Lee said Mailhot didn’t have a reaction to any of the photos of the prostitutes he had been looking at, but the minute he saw
the three dead women, he nearly fell off his chair.
“Before that, we were looking through the book of photos of the other girls, still not accusing him of anything else,” Lee said. “He looked at them and said he really didn’t recognize any of them. But when he saw the three [dead] girls, he had an immediate reaction, so my questioning intensified a little bit more to make him aware that I knew that he had a reaction. So we then tried different techniques of talking to him. Steve tried talking to him about the guilt weighing on him—that’s when we stepped up the questioning a little bit more. We said those three women are all missing, and that’s when he blurted out, ‘I never killed those girls,’ and that’s when I came back on him and said, ‘Jeff, what are you talking about? I never said anything about anyone killing them.’ Then I saw his reaction and it’s like he knew he was caught. He even looked over at Steve, like he was asking Steve to get him out of the mess he just made for himself. He was looking for some way to back out of it.”
Lee said at that point his goal was to get Mailhot to tell him his side of the story. Lee explained that if any of the dead women had ever been in his apartment, the police were going to be able to find DNA, hair fibers—something that would prove that the women had been in the Cato Street home. Lee told Mailhot he understood that he wasn’t a bad guy; he was just a guy who took things too far one day and something bad happened.
“When I’m talking to him about this stuff, tears were welling up in his eyes and he was getting real nervous,” Lee said.
Trying to establish a connection with Mailhot, Nowak told him that they were all guys, and as such they probably all had some “weird tendencies” that they didn’t share with anyone.
“We already know that you have your own things. You’ve already told us that you’ve done this with these girls, okay? You’ve already agreed that things could go bad with these girls, okay?” Nowak said, referring to Mailhot’s statements that he had choked some women. “Now I’ve already told you that what it looks like is that one of these things could have happened [and it was] an accident. All right? So we’re all clear on that?”
“Hm-hmm.”
“[It’s] like the sergeant told you, these girls are missing. We want to find out what happened to these girls. We want their families to have closure. If you have something to do with it, we want you to have closure if it was accidental.”
“I have nothing to do with this.”
Lee then played to whatever sense of decency Mailhot had by reminding him that he knew what it was like to lose a loved one because he had lost both his parents. The detective told Mailhot that he would never be able to live with himself if he had something to do with the death of the three women and didn’t get it off his chest.
“Jeff, you know what it’s like to lose a loved one,” Lee said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I mean, God Almighty, especially losing your parents like that.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“If you took it too far with one of these girls …”
“I never did.”
“Because, like you say, you’d never be able to live with yourself,” Lee told him.
“It’ll eat at you forever,” Nowak added. “It will never go away.”
“You know nothing about these three girls I showed you?” Lee asked.
“No.”
“And you know nothing about their disappearance?”
“No, I swear I don’t.”
“You can understand why we’re asking.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because of what I just told you.”
It was clear Mailhot knew nothing about interrogation techniques. If he had, he would have known that experienced investigators would pick up on his excessive statement of truth: “No, I swear I don’t.” Making such statements to police was one of the pitfalls of talking to them in the first place.
Lee then asked Mailhot if it was just a coincidence that he’d been choking prostitutes for the past year or two and now three prostitutes were missing.
“It is a coincidence that I’ve been choking girls and these girls are missing,” Mailhot said.
“Since how long?” Lee asked.
“Since what?”
“Coincidence that these girls have been missing,” Lee said. “How long have they been missing? Do you know?” Lee asked.
“I have no idea. You just told me they were missing.”
“And you told us they were dead,” Nowak said, throwing Mailhot’s statements back in his face.
“I didn’t tell you—I said that you were accusing me of killing people,” Mailhot said, not falling into Nowak’s trap. Again he told the cops he didn’t do anything to the three women who were missing.
“That’s what I thought. I mean, I’m sorry if I misunderstood.”
“We’re looking for you to answer truthfully,” Nowak said. “And I think my partner here knows that you want to answer truthfully and we know it’s difficult. It’s not easy to blurt out these things that you’re telling us. You know, it wouldn’t be easy for me. It wouldn’t be easy for him.”
“I already told you what I did,” Mailhot said.
“But you gave it to us piecemeal—a little at a time. We want to skip right to the chase and get right to the end,” Nowak said.
“Well, as far as I go, there’s no end to me and these girls,” Mailhot said. “I’ve never done anything to those girls.”
“No, and you’re positive about that?” Lee asked.
“Hmm.”
Lee looked down at the photos of the dead women and then asked Mailhot if he could pick out the women that he had done something to, and Mailhot replied that he could.
Then Nowak asked the suspect if any of the prostitutes he had been with had ever talked to him about the missing women or told him they were afraid of walking the streets.
“No,” Mailhot responded, adding he wasn’t even aware of the missing prostitutes.
“No? You knew nothing about this at all?” Nowak asked.
“No.”
“The whole community is well aware of what’s going on with this, so … You know nothing?” Nowak asked.
“They’ve never said anything to me about it.”
“It never came up—when they’re drinking?” Nowak asked. “They said, ‘Holy shit, we’re worried—we’re scared’?”
“No, the only thing they’re scared of… is they actually keep asking me if I’m a cop. That was the thing they were nervous about.”
Nowak told Mailhot that at least a hundred people had talked to the police about the missing women, so it was hard to believe that he didn’t know anything about them.
“I hope you’re telling the truth, because if we find any stuff in your apartment … you know all about DNA and all that stuff now, right?” Lee asked.
“Oh yeah.”
“Christ, everybody’s getting nabbed on that.”
“Yup.”
“I mean, this is your opportunity to be straightforward, so … if it went too far, I mean, obviously, you’re showing a pattern that you’re letting these girls go. But look, all over the country, I mean, it’s happening to police. A suspect’s put in a choke hold and they end up dead. I mean, obviously, the police didn’t intend to kill people,” Lee said.
“Right.”
“But it happens, okay? That’s what you need to think about yourself. If something happened … one of these girls was in your apartment and something took place and you said, ‘I can’t deal with this,’” Lee said.
“Nope, I never did anything like that. I couldn’t. Like I said, I couldn’t.”
“Jeff, you can’t say, ‘I’d never,’ or ‘I could not do it,’” Lee continued.
“Well, no.”
“Any of these other girls could well have passed away in your grasp. Okay? You’re a rugged, big guy and you put the squeeze on a few of them, okay? To the point of passing out. I mean, are you trained in the choke hold?” Lee asked.
“No.”
“Well, don’t say, ‘I would never do it,’ because any one of these other girls that you’re talking about could have died. Okay?”
“Yup.”
“And while your intent probably wasn’t to do that, but your intent was to let them go, but an accident could have happened. And you’re fulfilling whatever fantasy and your rage that you get built up when you drink—if it happened, this is the time to tell us, because this is before you’re made into this monster or something,” Lee explained.
“Yup,” Mailhot said, not biting.
“Jeff, do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I understand. It didn’t—it didn’t happen. I never—I never killed anybody,” Mailhot said nervously. “It never got … it never went that far.”
Lee asked Mailhot if he’d be willing to prove that he never killed anyone by taking a polygraph test. Mailhot said he would do anything to prove he was telling the truth, including taking a lie detector test.
“Did you think something was up when I showed you those three [women]?” Lee asked as Nowak looked at the pictures of the three dead women still on the table.
“I thought—I thought something was up. I thought you guys was trying to get at something.”
“Why? Why did you think that?” Nowak asked.
“Well, you just laid three pictures out in front of me. I thought something was up.”
Showing Mailhot pictures of other women, Lee asked if he had ever choked any of them. Mailhot said he didn’t know the girl in the first photo Lee showed him. Then Lee handed the photos to Mailhot and told him to flip through them to see if he recognized any of the women. At that point Lee stepped out of the room to talk to the other detectives who were monitoring the interview, and Nowak continued to question Mailhot about the girls in the photos. Mailhot said several of them looked familiar, adding that he had taken one of them to his apartment.
When he was finished looking at the photos, Nowak told him there were about five or six women that Mailhot hadn’t recognized, even though he should have.
“Well, what would you say if I told you that … there’s about five or six more of them that you missed, even though you had such a good memory? What would you say to that?”
“I’d say, ‘I didn’t—I didn’t have that good of a memory of every—of everybody.’”
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