Ripper

by Linda Rosencrance

  They killed because it was what they wanted. They killed because they could. They killed to satisfy their evil desires.

  Chapter 17

  While Lee and Nowak were continuing to interview Mailhot, Durand received word that the suspect had confessed to murdering three prostitutes and dismembering them in a bathtub with a “shark saw.”

  After hearing that, Durand immediately went upstairs to Mailhot’s bathroom and looked at the edge of the bathtub. What he saw seemed to confirm Mailhot’s story. There was a group of three marks facing in one direction and two other marks about six inches away from the first group, facing in the other direction. There was also a wider and longer mark on the face of the tub and a pinkish stain on the beige bathroom wall that looked like someone had wiped something off from it.

  While waiting for the search warrant that would allow him to look for evidence relating to three murders, Durand photographed the basement area and began making a diagram of each room in Mailhot’s apartment. A little after 4:00 A.M., Durand was notified that a judge had signed off on a new search warrant based on Mailhot’s confession. At that point he began vacuuming Mailhot’s couch, den rug, bedding, bathroom floor and an area under the kitchen table. He also took the bedding and bed pillows, as well as the floral pillow from the recliner in the den—the pillow Mailhot used to smother Audrey Harris—and ultimately brought them back to the lab.

  Lieutenant William Labossiere and Detective Claire Demarais, of the Rhode Island State Police, were also brought in to help Woonsocket police look for evidence. When Labossiere and Demarais arrived at Mailhot’s home, they were briefed on the investigation and then got to work.

  On the refrigerator in the kitchen Labossiere noticed a piece of paper with the dates of several holidays written on it.

  “On this paper was a reddish stain near the notation for the July Fourth holiday,” Labossiere said.

  In the bathroom Labossiere saw what looked like blood spatter stains on the floor near the doorway, around the base of the toilet and on the lower portion of the outside of the bathtub. An area on the wall above the toilet tank appeared to have been wiped down, leaving a pink discoloration. There were several streaks of color on the edge of the fiberglass bathtub, as well as on the inside of the tub.

  Labossiere and Demarais went down to the basement, which was divided in half. One half of the basement, which appeared to be for storage, was a mess. Jeff Mailhot kept his workout equipment in the other half of the basement, which also contained a washer and dryer, stereo equipment, a furnace and a water heater. Along the far wall behind the washer and dryer, police notice several boxes. On top of one of the boxes was a hacksaw and blades, a handsaw, which was covered with a cardboard sheath decorated with a picture of a shark, and a hatchet.

  Shortly after police started searching the basement, Durand received a telephone call from another detective, who said Mailhot had just confessed to killing three prostitutes with a “shark saw.”

  The detectives then examined the bathtub for other marks and notches and photographed the notches on the outside and inside rims of the tub. They also took pictures of the notches and scratches they found on the inside of the tub. Then they photographed and took samples of what appeared to be blood spatter on the outside base of the tub. The officers also took samples they thought might be blood from several other areas in the bathroom, including the floor, the wall between the bathtub and the toilet, behind the toilet and the floor in front of the toilet.

  The forensic team also cut out the drainpipes in the cellar that connected to the bathroom, as well as the drains in the bathroom, and took swabbings from the pipes and the traps of the drains. Before they disassembled the tub, toilet and floor, they sprayed luminol on the bathtub and floor. The bathtub and the floor near the tub and toilet glowed blue, indicating the presence of blood. But the grout between the tiles on the floor and a curved swipe mark near the sink really fluoresced brightly. The police knew they had hit pay dirt.

  The investigators cut out a piece of the wall behind the toilet that appeared to have a discolored swipe mark on it. They also seized the toilet and dismantled and seized the tub and shower stall. When they removed the base from the bottom of the tub, they discovered a reddish brown substance that ran along the length of the base. Once the bathtub and shower stall were removed, police called a member of the Woonsocket Fire Department, who arrived with a “hooligan” tool to remove a section of the tile floor near the tub. The police first took the evidence back to the station, then brought it to the Rhode Island State Health Laboratory to be examined.

  While Labossiere continued processing the bathroom, Demarais and Durand went to the Woonsocket police station to process Mailhot’s 2004 Chevrolet SUV. After photographing the SUV and listing everything inside it, the detectives noticed a stain on the rear passenger-side wheel well. They tested the stain to see if it was blood, but it wasn’t. They sprayed luminol in the vehicle, but again they didn’t find any blood.

  When he finished processing Mailhot’s vehicle, Durand went back to Mailhot’s apartment to continue looking for evidence to connect him to the murders of Audrey, Christine and Stacie. While there, Durand confiscated a black plastic “drop cloth” roll, a roll of gray duct tape, an opened box of thirty-gallon Hefty Cinch Sak trash bags, a pail and two mops from a storage closet in the apartment. He also seized a utility knife from a red toolbox, which was in the kitchen. When he was finished, Durand brought everything back to the police station.

  While doing some paperwork at the station on July 21, Durand and Detective Lieutenant Timothy Paul got a call to go to Mailhot’s apartment. When they arrived, they learned that workers from the Woonsocket Sewer Department (WSD) had placed a remote camera in the eight-inch sewer pipe that led down Cato Street, near Mailhot’s address. The workers showed the police video of some live segmented worms in the gunk in the pipes. They explained that it was unusual to find worms there. After seeing the worms—known as protein worms—investigators directed the sewer workers to dig up the street so they could find out if the pipes contained genetic material from any of the three murdered women.

  When the pipe was partially exposed, police dug up the soil from underneath and around it and sifted it for possible evidence. When enough of the pipe had been exposed, Durand wrapped it with plastic and duct tape to preserve any evidence. The pipe was then cut and Durand also wrapped the three ends of the Y connection of pipe with plastic and duct tape. The pipe was removed from the hole, and Durand and Paul took it to the state medical examiner’s office.

  But on the way they got called back to Cato Street because the plumbing company that was scoping the sewer pipe that led from the street to Mailhot’s house found a large amount of something that looked like hair. They also found a mass of sludgelike material that the plumbers said was uncommon. Then using a snakelike video camera, which was placed into the pipe, police also located another mass of matter and more worms.

  Police seized all the materials and even swabbed the camera for possible evidence. They ultimately transported everything to the medical examiner’s office. However, no DNA from the women was ever found on the pipes or anything that had been inside the pipes. And it was later determined that the protein worms had been feeding off the protein shakes Mailhot used to drink.

  Later that day Woonsocket police located the GMC Jimmy that Mailhot owned when he murdered Audrey Harris. Police discovered that the SUV was owned by Brian Duffy, proprietor of Quality Van Sales in Norton, Massachusetts. When detectives met with Duffy, they learned that he had bought the vehicle at auction and had had some bodywork done on it before painting it in camouflage colors and giving it to his son as a birthday present.

  Duffy told police the SUV was in bad shape because his son had used it as an off-road vehicle on the forty-five acres of land behind his Attleboro, Massachusetts, home. The cops made arrangements to seize the vehicle and obtained Duffy’s permission to search it.

  When they went to pick
up the vehicle, police spoke to Duffy’s son, who told them that he got the truck for his birthday on February 2, 2004, and used it for joyriding with friends on his family’s property. He said he had vacuumed the SUV a couple times since he got it. He told police he used a Sears sixteen-gallon wet/dry vacuum, but he had never emptied out the contents of the machine since he had the vehicle. Police confiscated the vacuum because they thought it might contain evidence of Audrey’s murder.

  Police brought the vehicle and the vacuum back to the station to process them, but like Mailhot’s Chevy SUV, they, too, were clean.

  During the investigation Massachusetts state trooper Jon Provost was asked by his superiors to assist the Woonsocket police in their investigation. Provost’s job was to check out some of the Dumpsters where Mailhot said he tossed the remains of the three women. Provost checked out the four Dumpsters behind the Bugaboo Creek Steak House on Route 109 in Milford, Massachusetts, where Mailhot said he dumped some of Christine’s body parts on April 24, 2004.

  Provost met with the manager, who showed him where the Dumpsters were located. The restaurant’s four containers were located about thirty feet away from the building. However, two of the Dumpsters located closest to the building belonged to the Dollar Tree store, another business located in the same building as Bugaboo. The other two belonged to Bugaboo, along with two other containers made especially for the disposal of grease.

  All of the Dumpsters were serviced by BFI in Auburn, Massachusetts, while the grease containers were handled by Baker Commodities, Inc., in North Billerica, Massachusetts. Provost contacted the disposal companies to determine how soon after April 24 the trash and grease had been picked up and where they had been taken. It’s unclear when the trash was picked up, but the grease was picked up on April 22, May 10, June 4 and June 28, then taken to Baker’s facility to be processed and shipped overseas.

  Provost didn’t find any evidence that Mailhot had dumped Christine’s remains in any of the four Dumpsters.

  A couple days later, however, Bugaboo’s general manager called Provost and told him that a couple months earlier one of the restaurant’s employees found a power saw in one of the restaurant’s Dumpsters. Because it still worked, the employee, who also worked as a carpenter, took it home. Provost met up with the employee at the restaurant and took the saw from him. The employee wasn’t sure exactly when he found the saw, but he told police after he removed it from the Dumpster, he brought it inside the restaurant to see if it worked. It did, so he brought it home. Provost confiscated the saw and ultimately transported it to the WPD. The saw, however, had not been used by Mailhot to cut up the bodies of the three women.

  Chapter 18

  After Jeffrey Mailhot confessed, it was up to Ed Lee to coordinate assigning the people to do certain tasks, like finding the Dumpsters where Mailhot dumped the bodies and body parts, and tracing the trash to the Rhode Island Central Landfill in Johnston.

  “We were really only looking for Stacie, because of the time period,” Lee recalled. “We knew Audrey and Christine were long gone, but maybe there was a chance Stacie could be found in a Dumpster and in the landfill.”

  Wearing protective gear and equipped with garden rakes, twenty or so volunteers from the WPD, as well as the RISP and the city of Woonsocket, began the unenviable ten-day task of digging through tons of compressed garbage in sweltering July heat.

  “We had a state police dog looking for a scent,” Lee said. “And he had some certain areas of interest. but you’re looking at a football field full of compressed trash—one hundred yards and fifteen feet deep—and on top of all the trash, they put a kind of mulch and continue to layer it. The people who ran the landfill told us that Audrey and Christine were down so far that their bodies were decomposed with bacteria or burnt off with methane and it would have taken a monumental effort to locate them, so it was out of the question to even think we were going to find them. But they said maybe we would get lucky and find some of Stacie’s remains. But her body parts could be in different parts of the landfill, depending on what Dumpster he had put them in and when those Dumpsters were emptied.”

  Mailhot had told the cops what to look for—black plastic bags, with yellow drawstrings—so the volunteers spent their days digging through garbage, looking for those bags.

  “It was one of the dirtiest, grossest tasks we’ve ever taken on,” Lee recalled. “When the excavator goes in and pulls away the dirt and goes down deep into the trash, the smells were awful. None of my officers threw up, but a state trooper did. We wore gloves, masks, but still the smell got through. And when you went home at night, you’d have to throw away whatever you were wearing that day, because you could not get rid of the smell. It was summer, it was hot—mid July. The whole time I was there—we were saying we are never, ever going to find anything.”

  But as the week progressed, the Rhode Island Resource Recovery employees helped the cops work up a system to make it easier to search.

  “They would dig out a certain section, put it in the back of one of these massive dump trucks, bring it down to the bottom of the hill, dump it, and a team of officers, investigators and volunteers were able to go through that trash, scoop it up and put it back in another location,” Lee said.

  Finally, on day ten, Steven Fairley, a cadet from the police academy sifting through the trash with his rake, just happened to see a human skull and hair in a trash bag.

  “He called over the lieutenant, who called the chief, and then the chief told me and Steve,” Lee said. “Steve and I flew down there, and the guys were jubilant. They were celebrating, because—literally—we found the proverbial needle in a haystack. It was unbelievable. There was a head and arms in the bag—the bag was ripped open, but there was enough there to identify her through DNA. We stopped then, even though we wanted to find the bodies for the other families, but it would have taken so much more work. The other families were upset, but we had to explain that it just would have been an impossible task, if there was even anything left.”

  The discovery of Stacie’s remains was huge for the police. It was the evidence that was going to back up Mailhot’s confession at trial and put him away for a long time.

  “We thought this was going to trial, but I don’t think he had any intention of going to trial,” Lee said later. “He said he wanted to help us bring closure to the families and then he wanted to die. But I had to explain to him that there wasn’t any death penalty in Rhode Island. I said, ‘We’d like to oblige you, but we can’t.’”

  Durand was at the police station when he got word that police had recovered a skull, hair and possibly some hands, at the Johnston landfill. Durand gathered up his equipment and went to the medical examiner’s office with Detective Ron Tetreau.

  Shortly after they arrived, Lee and Nowak and a member of the ME’s office arrived from the landfill with the remains, which were in a black garbage bag with yellow ties, similar to a Hefty Cinch Sak. Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, the medical examiner, then began to examine the contents of the bag. She first tried to determine if she could identify the remains using fingerprints. She exposed both hands, and Durand examined them to see if he could locate any ridge skin for possible fingerprints. Although he couldn’t find any ridge skin on the fingertips, he was able to see some faint ridge skin on the thumb area of the palm of the right hand. When Laposata examined the skull and hair, she located a tooth, which she said was an incisor. She also found a hair scrunchy, which was still attached to the victim’s hair.

  Durand and Tetreau went back the next day to the medical examiner’s office to witness the postmortem examination of the remains. Before the police arrived, Laposata had separated the remains and X-rayed them. When Durand and Tetreau got there, the ME started by examining the two black plastic garbage bags, as well as a heavier black plastic material that was similar to a plastic drop cloth. There was also a piece of gray duct tape stuck to the plastic drop cloth and some trash, including several plastic bags, pieces of plastic and
a small ripped piece of latex or rubber in the trash bags. The piece of latex appeared to be the wrist end of a rubber glove.

  Laposata next examined the hands and arms. She told police that it looked like each of the humerus bones had been cut. Each humerus bone was separated from the elbow and cut farther up toward the shoulder area. Durand was able to locate some faint ridge skin on the second joint of the left ring finger. He inked and rolled it and was able to get a very faint fingerprint, which he planned to reexamine later. Laposata then examined the skull and hair. She found a skin fragment with a fingernail tangled up in the hair. The skin had some ridge characteristics, so Durand inked it and rolled it and was able to see some fingerprint ridges.

  At that point Durand and Tetreau brought the garbage bags, the plastic drop cloth, the right hand, the left hand and the ridge skin fragment to Ed Downing, the fingerprint examiner at the state crime lab. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find any ridge detail on the fingers of either hand, so he gave the hands back to Durand and Tetreau. However, he kept the garbage bags, as well as the drop cloth with the duct tape. He wanted to see if there were any fingerprints on the duct tape and he was also going to try and match the black plastic drop cloth with the black plastic drop cloth police had confiscated from Mailhot’s apartment.

  When they were finished, they went back to the medical examiner’s office to bring back the hand and arm, but they kept the skin fragment. While there, they learned that after the ME cleaned the humerus bones, she observed marks that looked like saw marks on them. She also found another skin fragment, which was turned over to the police, who took it back to the station and secured it with the rest of the evidence. On Monday, they took the saw they had seized from Mailhot’s apartment, picked up the humerus bones from the medical examiner’s office and took them to the state crime lab.