“Yes.”
“Why is that?”
“’Cause I wanted to make sure it was small enough that I could dispose of the bags.”
“So eleven parts of Audrey—eleven Dumpsters, or some in the same?”
“No, some in the same,” Mailhot said. “I mean, eleven parts, but a lot of them, like their hands and their head, went in the same bag and, uh, the feet too, so there was five parts in one bag and I think that each half of the torso was in a bag each, and the legs, I can’t remember how many bags I used for that.”
“A question on the first girl—you said you took her out of the tub,” Nowak said.
“Yeah.”
“And you put her in the rug.”
“Hm-hmm.”
“And where did you take the rug to?”
“I just put it in the back of my vehicle at the time.”
“Which is the old truck?”
“The old truck.”
“Now, you have her in the back of your truck?”
“Yeah.”
“Put her in the back of the truck and what happened then?”
“I was just driving around,” Mailhot said. “I was just looking to see if I could find somewhere I could dump her, and I was too scared to take her out and dump her somewhere, so I just brought her back to my apartment.”
“And what did you do with her?”
“And then that’s when I took her out of the carpet—actually, I just left her in the carpet in my kitchen and I was trying to figure out what to do, or how I could get rid of her without anybody knowing, and then that’s when I came up with the idea of cutting her up.”
“What did you cut her up in?”
“In my bathtub, in my apartment.”
“Where did the rug go?”
“Ah, it went in the trash.”
“The regular trash?”
“Yeah—no, actually, not my trash. Honestly, I can’t remember. I think I dumped it—I think there was a Dumpster in Milford, [Massachusetts].”
“When you’re cutting these girls up, what do you do with the blood?” Lee asked, taking over the questioning as Nowak got up and left the room.
“There wasn’t that much blood.”
“Was there debris left over when you sawed them?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, and what did you do with that?”
“I’d clean it up and flush it down the toilet.”
“The toilet or the tub—trying to get it down the drain or—”
“Well, whatever won’t go down the drain in the tub, I flushed it.”
“A lot of debris went down the drain of the tub?”
“Yeah, blood and—”
“And the toilet?”
“Yeah.”
“How about the sinks?”
“No, just the toilet and the tub.”
“What were you wearing when you’d do this?”
“Just shorts—a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I think I might have been wearing a T-shirt for the first girl, but not for the last two.”
Lee asked Mailhot what he did with the clothes he was wearing when he cut up the women’s bodies.
“Where is that clothing that you’d wear?” Lee asked.
“It’s in my house.”
“Okay, blood?”
“Ah, no, I don’t think so.”
“You never got blood on you when you cut these girls up?”
“I got blood on me, but I washed it off.”
“You washed your clothes off?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, but you had blood on your clothes.”
“Yeah, a little, yeah.”
“You didn’t throw the clothes out?”
“No.”
“Okay, so the first girl, Audrey, what were you wearing then?” Lee asked again.
“I was wearing a pair of shorts and, I believe, I was wearing a T-shirt.”
“Shorts and a T-shirt. What color were the shorts? Do you remember?”
“It would be either gray or black.”
“Okay, do you know where they are right now?”
Mailhot said the shorts and T-shirt he was wearing when he cut up Audrey were in his bedroom, either in one of his dresser drawers or on the floor of his bedroom if they were dirty.
“I was in your apartment,” Lee said. “Your bed was unmade and there was some clothes on the floor and, I believe, there was a black pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Are those shorts the one?”
“They might be, yes. Were they black?”
“I believe they were.”
“Did you wear the same shorts for all three girls?”
“Yeah, I think so. I either wore the gray or the black shorts.”
“Gray or the black shorts for all three? And the gray ones are where?”
“They’re also in the house. They’re either in my dresser … the middle drawer. I might have worn them again and they might be in my laundry basket or on the floor in the bedroom,” Mailhot said, explaining that he wore the shorts so he wouldn’t get blood on his clothes. “They’re in my bedroom somewhere.”
“How about the T-shirt that you were wearing—same one for all three girls?”
“I just wore it for the first girl.”
“And where’s that T-shirt?”
Mailhot said that T-shirt—the black one with red, white and blue lettering and Kid Rock’s name on it—was on his bed. He said he didn’t throw his clothes out, because he figured they’d be okay to wear again if he washed them.
“Where do you normally do your wash?” Lee asked.
“Downstairs, in the basement there’s a washer and dryer—that’s where I did the washing.”
“Any shoes on?”
“No.”
“Are you inside the tub with the [bodies]?”
“Yes, no.”
“When you are dismembering them, what do you do?”
“I’m standing outside the tub while they’re in there and I have whatever part I’m cutting—like, when I’m cutting the arms, I drape it over the side of the tub and I’m cutting it that way.”
“So, if you draped it over the side of the tub, then actually you’re, like, keeping it all in the tub. Is it fair to say that blood’s coming out of the side of the tub onto the floor?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
“And then you’d have to wash that floor area up?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so there’s been blood on that floor, right?” Lee asked.
Before Mailhot could answer, Nowak, who had come back into the conference room, asked him if he was ever interrupted by a telephone call or a knock on the door when he was in the bathroom mutilating any of the three women. Mailhot said he was never disturbed while he was cutting them up.
“You were pretty lucky that way,” Nowak said.
“Yeah.”
Nowak also wanted to know more about the saw that Mailhot used to hack up Stacie.
“It was a wooden-handled—like a woodcutting saw, and I think it’s called, like, shark tooth or something. It’s got a shark handle on it.”
“Did you clean that saw?”
“Yeah, [with] just soap and water.”
Mailhot said he got rid of the first saw—the one he used on Audrey Harris—in a Dumpster at Avery Dennison, where he used to work. He tossed it out about a month after he killed Audrey. He said he might have thrown the second saw—the one he used to chop up Christine—in the Dumpster at the Brunswick bowling alley or the Rock Ridge Apartments, but he wasn’t sure.
“Did you wear gloves at all?” Lee asked.
“No.”
“No?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. For the first girl, yes. I wore plastic, like, latex gloves. The disposable kind.”
“Where did you get those?”
“I think I had gotten those from where I work at Avery Dennison,” Mailhot said. “I take a box every week. That’s where I got those.”
“You still got a box of those
gloves in the house?”
“I think I do,” he said. “I think they’re under my kitchen sink.”
“With Audrey, you wore gloves, but the second two, you didn’t wear gloves. Any reason why?”
“I had a couple drinks while I was doing it to calm my nerves down.”
At about 10:42 P.M., Lee stopped the tape so Nowak could take Mailhot to the bathroom. Lee left the room as well and didn’t come back for a while. When Nowak and Mailhot returned a couple minutes later, Nowak again asked Mailhot if he had anything else he wanted to get off his chest.
“I told you everything.”
“You feel bad about it?” Nowak asked.
“Yeah, I still don’t feel good about it, but I feel better because I talked about it…. And I just want to thank you guys for being professional, the way you have.”
“No, listen we understand, we’ve seen this stuff, all right? It’s okay,” Nowak said.
“It’s not okay. It’s not okay.”
“We’ve seen this,” Nowak repeated. “You’re going to get through this, okay? You’re going to get through this. We’re just the first people that are going to be here to help you; there are going to be a lot of people here to help you? Okay?”
An emotional Mailhot started to cry.
“There are going to be a lot of people to help you and we are going to help you get through this—they are going to help you get through it. Okay? Hang in there. Obviously, this is something that you are going to be dealing with for a while,” Nowak said. “But it’s the first step.”
“I know.”
“Okay, so we want you to hang in with us, all right? You know, if you need to sit down, take a break, relax, kick back for a second, you know, to collect your thoughts, it’s fine,” Nowak said. “We want you to help yourself. We want you to help these girls. Like I told you, and Detective Lee told you, that’s what we’re looking for here.”
“I’m not hiding anything anymore,” Mailhot said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
“All right. What Detective Lee’s going to do when he comes back is, we’re going to go through each girl, okay? And we want you to try to remember as much as you can, no matter how minute,” Nowak said. “We’re going to try not to jump around, okay? We’re going to try to stick to girl, to girl, to girl, okay? We’re going to try to get you to tell us what happened with each one, you know? And if it takes an hour on the first girl, then it will take an hour. If it takes five minutes on the first girl, it doesn’t matter. What we want to know is everything you can remember, to help us, to help yourself, to help the families of these girls, to help these girls themselves…. They deserve to have the truth told, okay? So everything that you can remember, however minute, you’ve got to let us know, okay? Do you understand all that?”
Mailhot said he understood.
Chapter 12
After Mailhot again gave Nowak and Lee the gory details of how he dismembered Audrey’s body and tossed her away like yesterday’s trash, the cops wanted to know where he dumped Stacie Goulet’s body.
“I want to go over a few things now,” Lee said. “Where’s Stacie? She’s the last one?”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“Let’s go over the Dumpsters again and you can show us where they are.”
Mailhot said he remembered where all the Dumpsters were and he could lead the cops to them. He said the first Dumpster he used to dispose of Stacie’s cut up body was in back of the Brunswick bowling alley, near a lake. Mailhot said he threw three bags containing various parts of Stacie’s body in that Dumpster.
“I just brought them and then just threw them in,” he said.
“All right, but you don’t remember what specific parts you put in?”
“No.”
Mailhot said the second Dumpster was at the Rock Ridge apartment complex, at the end of a long, winding road. He said he used those two Dumpsters, as well as one at the Plaza Village and another in Milford, Massachusetts, to get rid of the bags containing the body parts of Audrey and Christine.
Lee asked Mailhot if, in the process of cutting up the bodies of the women, he cut off any identifying marks, like tattoos or birthmarks, or if he pulled out their teeth to make it more difficult for police to identify them.
But that wasn’t Mailhot’s style. The only reason he cut them up was to lighten the load and make it easier for him to carry the trash bags. He added that he didn’t always put the same number of body parts in a bag.
“You know we’re going to try to find these bags,” Lee said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you have any way we can help these families out by trying to locate these bodies?” Lee asked.
“I don’t know what to do. I mean, that’s the last thing I did with them, you know—trash gets taken away. I’m not sure where it goes.”
“You didn’t hang on to anything?”
“No.”
“Anything at all?”
“I didn’t hang on to any clothing. I threw the clothing away from the first girl and actually [from] all three, but, uh, the last two, she was wearing some, like, black—I don’t know—like, black jogging pants, and she had on, like, a black tank top that I left on,” Mailhot said. However, it was unclear if he was talking about Christine or Stacie.
“So all their clothing was in their bags with their bodies, or is there any other clothing?” Lee asked.
“No, the clothing—I didn’t put [that] with the bodies.”
“Where is the clothing?”
“The clothing is with the regular trash. It went out with the regular trash.”
“From your house?”
“Yes. Oh … oh no, no, no, no. I’m sorry, with the first girl I actually dumped the clothing in another section of Rock Ridge.”
“In a Dumpster?”
“Yes.”
“And that would be Audrey?”
Lee asked Mailhot what kind of clothes Audrey was wearing the night she ran into him.
“I think, she had a coat, a shirt—I think she was wearing jogging shorts. I can’t be sure at this time.”
The cops then wanted to know a little something about what happened to Christine.
Mailhot said he actually met Christine on two occasions. The first time was at a local bar. After talking to her for a little while, Mailhot asked if she wanted to go back to his house. She agreed and once there she gave him a $20 blow job.
“And nothing happened that night?” Lee asked.
“No, she just left, and that was the end of that.”
Lee started to ask Mailhot if he remembered what Christine had been wearing the first time he met her. Mailhot said he was having a hard time remembering, because he didn’t pay much attention to clothes. Suddenly Mailhot got a little woozy.
“You okay?” Lee asked.
“Just a little dizzy.”
“Take your time,” Lee said, asking if there was something about the women’s clothes that was making him sick.
“No, no, no. I’m actually having a really hard time, you know. I’m struggling really hard to remember…. I honestly didn’t pay much attention to the clothes.”
“You’re doing a great job, you know. Take your time,” Lee said. “Take all the time you want.”
“I don’t want to say something, like, if I’m not really sure, and I don’t want to tell you something that’s not [true]. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, exactly,” Lee said. “We don’t want you to do that either. So take your time, but anything comes to mind you think of—but where were the clothes? Do you remember where you dumped them?”
“Honestly, offhand, I don’t remember where I dumped them. I can’t remember right now,” Mailhot said, although he already told the detectives that he threw the clothes out with his regular household trash.
“Are they still in the house by any chance?”
“No, no, no, they’re definitely gone.”
“Okay. Want to go to Stacie and her clothes?”
&nbs
p; “I pretty much kept all her clothes on her…. She was wearing, like, a black tank top type of shirt, and, like, black jogging pants, like windbreaker material pants. Actually, she had a pair of sneakers that I put in my garbage and went out with my garbage…. The trash was picked up the day after I choked her.”
“You cut through her clothes?” Lee asked.
“Yeah, I cut around the pants. I mean, they were pretty light.”
“Yeah, you didn’t use a saw for that—to cut around her pants?” Lee asked.
“No, I used a box cutter knife.”
“Where’s that?”
“I have a red toolbox in my kitchen.”
“On the side of the refrigerator?”
“Yes.”
“And the box cutter’s in there?”
“Yes.”
“Did you cut her skin with that at all?”
“When I went to cut the pants, I probably caught her skin with it.”
“Okay, why do you say ‘probably’? You saw cuts there?”
“No, I didn’t see the cuts. I mean, I felt [them]. I didn’t see any blood.”
Mailhot said the only tools he used to cut the women were the handsaws and the box cutter. He disposed of two of the saws and kept the third in his basement.
At that point Nowak wanted a little more information about exactly what happened to Stacie.
Mailhot explained that before he killed Stacie, she gave him a blow job, but he didn’t reach orgasm.
“What happened?” Lee asked.
“I was drunk. I had a couple beers, and usually when I do, I don’t finish.”
“Did she just stop? She just stopped, or did you tell her to stop? Were you mad that she stopped?” Nowak asked, thinking maybe Mailhot killed Stacie because she decided to stop servicing him.
“No, no. She just stopped because she was doing it for a while and nothing was happening, so she said she couldn’t do it all night because she had to go.”
“Was she waiting when you grabbed her?” Lee asked.
“Yes.”
“So, no other tools at all?” Lee asked.
“No.”
“No pair of underwear or anything that was left behind?” Lee asked, jumping from one subject to the next.
“No.”
“You weren’t thinking about keeping anything just to remember them for some reason?” Lee asked, knowing if they couldn’t find the bodies of the three women they needed something to tie them to Mailhot.
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