It appeared police overlooked the pipe during their initial investigation. However, one officer, Sergeant Michael Sweeney, remembered seeing the pipe in the area on the day of the murder. Prosecutors were not aware of that information until the day Sweeney was scheduled to testify at trial. When they found out, they sent Sweeney home before he could testify. Tempest’s supporters contended they did that because the cop’s testimony would have damaged the state’s case.
Ultimately, however, prosecutors called Sweeney to testify. He told the court that when he first saw the pipe, he didn’t think much about it because at that point he was looking for a gun. But he also said he did tell a detective about the case, but he didn’t remember who it was.
Tempest’s backers believed that the Woonsocket police didn’t conduct a very professional investigation because they overlooked, as well as destroyed, crucial evidence during the initial search. For example, they said, police allowed a woman to clean the floor in the back hallway destroying a bloody footprint that had been discovered there.
But despite those mistakes, which appeared to be the result of shoddy police work, prosecutors were still able to convince the jury that the mistakes were part of a police conspiracy to protect Beaver Tempest so he wouldn’t be arrested.
Later it was also discovered that some other pieces of evidence—evidence that might have exonerated Beaver Tempest—were either lost or destroyed at the state’s forensic lab, or after they had been returned to the Woonsocket police.
In order to prove his innocence, as well as to prove that there had been no cover-up to keep him from being arrested and charged with the crime, Beaver agreed to take a polygraph test, which was administered by an independent expert, who determined that Beaver Tempest was not responsible for the murder of Doreen Picard or the assault on Susan Laferte.
However, the problem was that two detectives on the case were not satisfied with the way the test was conducted and wouldn’t accept the results. Tempest’s supporters believed that the two detectives were covering up for someone else and that no one in the Woonsocket Police Department had covered up anything to protect Raymond “Beaver” Tempest.
For years the investigation into the murder of Doreen Picard hit a number of roadblocks, least of which was the fact that the surviving victim, Susan Laferte, said she couldn’t remember anything about the incident. Laferte was in a coma for several weeks after she was beaten. When she came out of the coma, she had even forgotten her husband and two young daughters.
In 1991, there was another twist to the Picard murder case that again made people think police were covering up the case and intimidating witnesses. At that time, Daniel “Danny” Shaw, the state’s star witness, changed his version of the murder. Despite having said for years that he wasn’t with Beaver Tempest the day Doreen was murdered, he changed his story and told police he saw Tempest beat the young woman to death.
But Shaw, a convicted felon and admitted alcoholic, then told Woonsocket commander Rodney Remblad that he saw Beaver Tempest repeatedly beat Doreen with a two-foot pipe in Laferte’s basement on February 19, 1982. According to Shaw, Tempest attacked Doreen because she caught him beating Susan Laferte. Shaw said Tempest said he had to kill her so she wouldn’t tell police he had beat Laferte. Shaw told police he was too afraid to stop Tempest.
That was the break in the case the police needed.
But Beaver Tempest’s supporters maintained that police coerced Shaw into lying. Just months earlier when he had testified at Tempest’s bail hearing, Shaw said he saw Tempest beat Laferte, but he left the house before Picard was killed.
So why did Shaw change his testimony? He said it was because he felt guilty covering up Picard’s murder and just couldn’t take it anymore. Shaw also said he never told police the whole story because he thought once Beaver Tempest had been arrested and sent to jail, he would confess.
But Raymond Tempest, Jr.’s lawyer and others said Shaw’s change in testimony called into question his credibility.
According to Tempest’s supporters, Shaw had told anyone who would listen that Beaver Tempest didn’t murder Doreen Picard, and he, Shaw, wasn’t in the basement of Laferte’s apartment building the day she was killed. Shaw also complained that Remblad was pestering him and trying to get him to lie and say Beaver Tempest killed Doreen. Tempest’s backers alleged that prosecutors intimidated Shaw by threatening to indict him if he didn’t tell the truth—their truth.
But from the very beginning Shaw denied he was with Beaver on the day Doreen was murdered. He did, however, say he had gone to Laferte’s building with Beaver the day before the murder.
Prosecutors tried to get Shaw to say he was mistaken and he was really there the day Doreen was killed, and that he saw Beaver beat both women. Shaw continued to tell prosecutors and the grand jury the same story—he wasn’t there the day of the murder.
But prosecutors weren’t getting the answers they wanted from Shaw, so they continued to bring him back to testify in front of the grand jury. And each time Shaw told the grand jury that he was being intimidated and harassed by Remblad. Again prosecutors told Shaw they’d charge him with perjury if he lied to the grand jury. And again Shaw said he was telling the truth and Beaver didn’t commit the murder.
Finally, though, Remblad was able to convince Shaw that he really was with Beaver Tempest and Beaver’s brother-in-law, Robert Monteiro, on the day of the murder. Shaw gave police a signed statement claiming he did see Beaver Tempest murder Doreen Picard.
But Tempest’s supporters said that police could have easily disproved the information Shaw gave them about the murder because it just didn’t match up with the physical evidence. But, they claimed, the cops were more interested in clearing the case than they were in finding the truth.
It didn’t stop there, though. The police and prosecutors let Shaw know that he needed someone to corroborate his story in order to make him more credible. Shaw knew just what to do. He approached a good friend and former drug dealer, Ronald Vaz, and said he needed him to back his story. He also told Shaw exactly what to tell police.
Vaz, a career criminal, then testified before the grand jury that Beaver Tempest told him on four different occasions that he had murdered Doreen Picard. His story did exactly what police wanted it to do—corroborated Shaw’s testimony.
While waiting for the trial to start, Beaver claimed Shaw called him at home in December 1991. Beaver told Shaw he wasn’t able to talk to him because he was a witness in the case. So Shaw told Beaver to just listen to what he had to say.
According to Beaver, Shaw apologized for lying to the police and the prosecutors about Beaver’s involvement in Picard’s murder. He said the police coerced him into saying he was a witness to the murder.
Beaver then gave the phone to his father, and Shaw told Raymond senior that the police and the prosecutors had used him to make up a story in order to strengthen their case against Beaver. Shaw claimed that most of the time when they talked to him, he was either drunk or high and didn’t really know what was going on. He explained that he finally gave in and did what the police wanted just to get them to stop pressuring him.
Shaw said the police—especially Commander Remblad—manipulated him to get what they wanted. He said that Remblad told the other cops to ply him with alcohol to keep him off guard. He finally told Beaver’s father that he was going to tell prosecutors that he had lied about Beaver’s involvement in Doreen Picard’s murder.
However, later that day, before Shaw was able to get to the office of the attorney general to retract his story, he was hit by a car and hospitalized for a week. When he was released, he went to prosecutors and told them that he was lying and that he never saw Beaver beat Doreen to death. He told them the Woonsocket police forced him to lie. The attorney general’s office then went into damage control mode and began playing down Shaw’s importance as a witness.
It now appeared that the case against Beaver Tempest was in trouble because prosecutors had lost
their star witness. But they shouldn’t have worried, because less than two weeks later, Ronald Vaz stepped up and gave a more detailed statement to police.
In that statement Vaz alleged that Shaw actually participated in Doreen Picard’s murder. Vaz said Danny Shaw told him he punched Doreen in the head before Beaver murdered her. In addition, Vaz said, Beaver and Shaw had visited his house more than 50 times since the murder and each time they had told him that they were both involved in Doreen’s murder. Vaz also told police that Beaver Tempest’s brother-in-law, Robert Monteiro, drove Beaver and Shaw to and from Laferte’s apartment building the day of the murder.
In his unsigned statement Vaz implicated everyone Danny Shaw would have testified against in court. Vaz was now the attorney general’s new star witness.
In October 1991, before Beaver Tempest went to trial, the Woonsocket Police Department conducted an internal investigation into the department’s handling of the Picard murder case. The investigation was conducted to determine if any officials of the department mishandled or interfered with the investigation into Doreen Picard’s murder.
According to a report in the Providence Journal, “almost from the first day” of the investigation into Doreen Picard’s murder, Detective Sergeant Ronald A. Pennington had been concerned about possible misconduct by Beaver Tempest’s brother, Gordon, and other officers. In addition, Francis Lanctot, Woonsocket’s mayor at the time, publicly criticized Lynch’s handling of the case.
After the report was completed, Woonsocket police chief Francis Lynch was suspended—initially with pay, but then without pay—on administrative charges that he mishandled or impeded the Picard murder investigation. The allegations against him included the fact that he showed up drunk at the scene of the murder and repeatedly tried to impede the investigation from the beginning because of his friendship with Raymond Tempest, Sr.
Lynch was also charged with inadequately securing the crime scene, even though he was the ranking officer at the scene, and allowing Gordon Tempest to take over the investigation, even though he was the brother of the known suspect. According to the report, Lynch also withheld evidence from officers investigating the case and failed to cooperate with Rhode Island State Police and Providence police, who were assisting the WPD with the investigation.
As a result of the report, four police officers, including Lynch, were suspended because of allegations that police bungled the Picard investigation and undermined the prosecution’s case. Lynch and two of the officers were ultimately reinstated, but Lynch retired on a disability pension shortly after his reinstatement.
Finally at the end of March 1992, ten years after the murder of Doreen Picard, Beaver Tempest’s trial got under way.
During the trial one of Beaver’s former neighbors testified that she overheard him admit he killed Doreen Picard and brag that he wouldn’t get caught because his father had “paid off a large sum of money.”
She also testified that in early 1983, she heard Tempest tell her boyfriend that he murdered Picard and beat Susan M. Laferte on February 19, 1982. The neighbor said that while she sat on her living-room sofa, Tempest and her boyfriend were in the kitchen talking. She told the jury that she heard Beaver Tempest tell her boyfriend that he attacked Laferte in the basement of her house. She said she heard Tempest admit that he beat Picard when she tried to stop him from bludgeoning Laferte with a pipe.
“‘The other girl came down the stairs at the wrong time,’” the woman said Beaver told her boyfriend. She told the court that Tempest said he couldn’t let Picard get away. He had to do her too. The woman also testified that Tempest bragged that he’d get away with the murder.
“He said his father paid off a large sum of money to make sure that Beaver’s name was never mentioned about this,” she said in court. “The murder weapon would never be found. It had been wiped clean of fingerprints and gotten rid of.”
The woman, a licensed practical nurse and admitted former cocaine addict, told the court that Tempest said he attacked Laferte because she was “going to tell [his wife] something, and he and [his wife] had just gotten back together.” Prosecutors claimed that Beaver Tempest had had an affair with Susan Laferte.
The woman said Beaver Tempest told her that she and her boyfriend had better keep their mouths shut or they would be seriously injured, because his father knew a lot of people.
The woman’s statements seemed to back up the testimony Ronald Vaz provided at trial as well. Vaz told jurors that Beaver Tempest bragged about killing Picard and beating Laferte and told him that his brother, Gordon, hid the pipe he used.
But Beaver’s attorney wanted to know why Vaz had waited nearly nine years to tell police about Tempest’s statements. Vaz said it was because he was afraid for himself and his family and he didn’t want to get involved while Beaver’s brother, Gordon, was still on the police force. He added that he was really scared, because Beaver’s father was a very powerful man who knew a lot of people.
But at the trial Beaver’s father and brother disputed the testimony of the prosecution witnesses who said they helped cover up the murder of Doreen Picard. Despite their testimony, on April 22, 1992, Raymond “Beaver” Tempest was found guilty of murdering Doreen Picard. The jury didn’t even deliberate for two full days.
In 1997, a report issued by an independent consulting firm was released that was highly critical of the WPD and its ability to do its job.
According to the report, the public has not been served. In the face of the report Commander Rodney Remblad retired unexpectedly and a state police lieutenant was appointed acting chief to begin to heal the wounds within the department and repair its damaged credibility.
Factions in the department created animosity among the members, the report read. Several of these factions were associated with the previous chief.
One of the issues that had damaged the department was the investigation into the murder of Doreen Picard.
Was it any wonder that Lee and Nowak wanted to make sure they handled the Mailhot case by the book?
Chapter 15
After Mailhot confessed, the police wanted to learn more about the soft-spoken man who had committed three horrific murders. They soon learned that as a kid growing up in a subdivision on Grandview Avenue in Woonsocket, he kept mostly to himself. His parents divorced when he was just nine years old. He attended Woonsocket schools and graduated from Woonsocket High School in 1989. His mom died of lung cancer in July 1988 when Mailhot was just seventeen. Then when he was twenty-two he lost his dad to the same disease.
As an adult Mailhot tried doing what he could to stand out. After living with his stepmother in Lincoln, Rhode Island, for several years, he moved back to Woonsocket and rented the apartment on Cato Street. He bought a $17,000 Harley-Davidson Fat Boy motorcycle and the requisite leather jacket. He loved to watch wrestling on television and even took up weight lifting to build up his body. For kicks he liked to sing heavy metal songs on karaoke nights at Box Seats, an area sports bar where Woonsocket cops often went to unwind. In fact, Sergeant Steve Nowak remembered seeing him there on several occasions.
Police talked to some of his friends, including Wendy Livingston, his former girlfriend. No one who knew Mailhot could believe that he had murdered three women. He had never even had a parking ticket.
Wendy Livingston told police she met Jeff through a mutual friend, and had known him for about two years. She said they started dating in December 2003 and they broke up sometime in April 2004. She added that she’d always be friends with him. At the time police talked to her, Wendy said she hadn’t seen Jeff for a couple months, although she had talked to him on the telephone.
Wendy said Mailhot was always polite and concerned and treated her and her family very well. She said he was a good guy. While they were dating, she called him “Muffin” and he called her “Butterfly.”
Wendy said she liked rough sex—spanking and bondage—and she’d often ask Mailhot to choke her during sex. She also liked to be
choked as a kind of foreplay before they had sex. But if Mailhot’s grip got too tight, Wendy would tap him and he’d let her go. She said Mailhot would never think of hurting her. In fact, she said Jeff wouldn’t even choke her as hard as she wanted him to, because he really wasn’t into that shit. He liked it soft.
During the time they dated, Mailhot told Wendy that he was depressed sometimes and that he just didn’t want to wake up anymore. Not that he wanted to commit suicide—he didn’t have the balls to kill himself. Mailhot was depressed because his family liked him and because they were always calling him to see how he was doing. He just wanted them to leave him alone. Mailhot wanted to be more like Wendy, who was the black sheep of her family.
The cops also talked to Mailhot’s friend Patrick Harrison. Harrison and Mailhot met when they worked together at Avery Dennison Corporation in 1991. Harrison said the last time he saw his friend was July 3. Mailhot had attended a get-together at Harrison’s Woonsocket house. He left around 10:00 P.M. Harrison assumed he was going home because he still had his work clothes on. Harrison said that it was unusual for Mailhot to attend the party in his work clothes, because he didn’t usually go out unless he had showered and changed.
Harrison said the pair was supposed to go to the ocean the next day, but Mailhot never showed up at Harrison’s house. Harrison tried calling Mailhot’s cell phone around 8:00 A.M., but he got no answer. Harrison said he went to Mailhot’s house on July 9. He had gone to Mailhot’s house to use his beard trimmer, but his friend wasn’t home, so he used a spare key Mailhot kept in a black pipe by the front steps and let himself into the apartment.
The cops asked him if he saw anything out of the ordinary in Mailhot’s apartment.
“No, it’s just like every time I go there, you can eat off the kitchen floor,” Harrison said. “His CDs, DVDs and tapes are in alphabetical order. Remote controls lined up in the middle of the coffee table. He was a neat freak.”
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