“Where did the smartness go?” Raymond asked. “All you did was embarrass your family, your friends and hurt your loved ones. And my only question for you is, are you sorry about the murders or are you sorry you got caught? I think you’re sorry you got caught, because you had no intentions of stopping. And I’m glad you’re locked away for the rest of your life so you won’t murder anybody anymore. ”
Raymond then showed Mailhot pictures of his family—the family he said Mailhot destroyed.
“Stacie didn’t deserve to die by your brutal hands,” he said. “And I hope that your days in jail will do something for you, because I got to remember for the rest of my life what you did. I’m sure your parents ain’t going to see you in heaven. You better get a book and pray.”
Stacie’s mom, Debbie Boerger, was the last family member to address the court.
“First I would like to set the record straight about who Stacie really was,” she said. “My daughter, Stacie, was never arrested for drugs. And about her living a high-risk lifestyle, that wasn’t her either. She got caught up in a situation she knew was wrong. She was changing that situation around to get her life back on track until the brutal, violent murder that took her life away. The day the police came and told me you admitted to murdering Stacie was the day you ripped my heart apart. You took away my only daughter, who meant everything to me.”
Debbie said although she and Stacie didn’t always agree on everything, she never thought her life was going to be cut short by a vicious man, like Mailhot. Debbie said she was looking forward to many happy times with Stacie, who, she said, was kindhearted and smart.
“She wasn’t only my daughter,” Debbie said. “She was also a mother of two, a friend, a sister, a cousin and aunt to many people who loved her very much. She always smiled even when things were tough. She would say to me, ‘Mom, things are going to get better. You’ll see.’ Because of you my daughter will never see better things happen. Myself and many others will never understand how you could do such a horrific act of violence.”
Debbie told Mailhot that she was sorry that his parents died when he was young. But she also wondered what they would think about what he had done, if they were alive.
“Your life here on this earth now lies in the hands of the court,” she said. “If it were up to me, even if the death penalty was allowed, it wouldn’t be good enough. I don’t know if you knew that Stacie was three months pregnant. When you took Stacie’s life, you took her unborn baby’s life too.”
Then Debbie told Mailhot that because of him Stacie’s two children will have to live without their mother for the rest of their lives. She said she didn’t understand how Mailhot could have murdered Stacie and the other women. And she told him his fate was in God’s hands, even while he was still on earth. She said she turned to her faith to help her find a way to forgive him for what he had done.
“God always says we must forgive those who have wronged us,” she said. “To remain unforgiving shows we do not understand that we ourselves need to be forgiven. It took me a lot of praying and church counseling to be able to say today, ‘Yes, I forgive you.’ But I have one question for you. Did you forgive yourself? I have heard that you tell people that you are sorry. It’s one thing to say you’re sorry and mean it, or just say it because that’s what you think we need to hear.
“One thing I have learned from you is looks can be deceiving,” Debbie said. “Let me tell you something, Jeff, God looks at the heart of a person and only God knows whether you’re truly sorry and if you mean it. Many people have asked me how I cope with this whole ordeal. I was angry, hurt and numb inside, all at the same time, until one day God spoke to me and said Stacie has given her life to Jesus and now she lives her life in heaven. So I know that when I die I will see my daughter again. And I give thanks to the Lord God Almighty. And my closing remarks, I would like to say, Jeff, read the Bible. Turn away from your sinful nature and change your ways, and turn your life to Jesus Christ and know that he is real and that he is there for you and that he can give you eternal life forever because Jesus loves you.”
The court then sentenced Jeffrey Mailhot to two consecutive life sentences and an additional ten years in state prison. However, he could be eligible for parole in 2047, when he’s seventy-seven years old.
After he was sentenced, Mailhot addressed the court.
“I would like to make an apology statement to the families here and also to my family,” he said. “There is nothing I can do that’s going to take away the pain of the actions I have done. I just hope God can give the families, not only the victims’ families, but my family, also, peace to be able to move on from this and knowing I am going to be paying for this for the rest of my life. That’s all.”
Chapter 21
After Mailhot was sentenced, Jocilin said she had come forward because she wanted to help police put Mailhot away so he wouldn’t hurt anyone else. She believed God helped her get away from Mailhot so she could save other women. She also said she wanted to live with her mother in Woonsocket and take care of her eleven-year-old son. And she wanted to stay clean.
But despite her near-death experience with Mailhot, the lure of the drugs pulled Jocilin back to the streets, and once again put her in harm’s way. A little over a month after Mailhot was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail, Jocilin again narrowly escaped death at the hands of a john she met on Arnold Street.
It was about 9:00 P.M. on Tuesday, March 28, 2006, and Jocilin was walking alone on Arnold Street heading toward Church Street. After she passed an auto repair shop, she ran into an African American man who propositioned her. She agreed to go with him and they walked down an embankment to the railroad tracks. Once they got there, the man took out his wallet and Jocilin noticed that there wasn’t any money in it.
Realizing something just didn’t seem right, Jocilin had a change of heart and started to walk away. But before she could get very far, the man grabbed her from behind by pulling her hair, which was in a bun. He dragged her down another small embankment closer to the tracks. Jocilin started screaming for help and struggled to get away, but the guy smacked her in the face a few times while she was on the ground, then started choking her.
Still screaming, Jocilin started kicking at the man. Enraged, he picked up a big wooden stick and started beating her with it. As he beat her, he yelled at her to stop fighting and give in if she wanted to live. Jocilin tried to keep fighting him off, but finally she gave up, exhausted. But she continued to scream for help. Her assailant told her if she didn’t shut up, he was going to kill her. Then he got on top of her, unzipped his pants and told her to perform oral sex on him. Fearing for her life, Jocilin did as she was told. However, the guy couldn’t get an erection. After a while the man made her stop and let her get off the ground, telling her if she knew what was good for her she wouldn’t try to escape and she wouldn’t scream for help.
They both walked back up the embankment and onto Arnold Street. When they got to a local dive called Buddy’s Café, Jocilin ran in the front door and started crying and yelling for the bartender to call the police. At that point Jocilin’s attacker took off running down Arnold Street. One of the guys in the bar drove Jocilin home. A couple days later she went to the hospital to get treated for her injuries. Hospital personnel called the police, and Patrolman David Paradis was dispatched to take Jocilin’s statement.
In his report Paradis noted that Jocilin’s left eye had been badly injured and was swollen shut. Her arms were scratched, her neck was bruised and her face was also badly swollen.
Police went to the area where Jocilin was assaulted—coincidentally, right near the Cato Street apartment where Mailhot had attacked her—and photographed the scene. But they didn’t recover any evidence that would lead them to her attacker.
Unfortunately, Teese didn’t learn any more from her brush with death than Jocilin had.
On July 26, 2007, Teese was again arrested for prostitution. For several months before sh
e was arrested, Woonsocket police had been monitoring the area around Blackstone Street, near Gordy’s Pub, which had become a hotbed of prostitution. Officers from the department’s vice squad had seen an increase in the number of prostitutes hanging around, as well as johns driving laps around the area trying to pick them up.
On more than one occasion Detective Daniel Turgeon ran into Teese and told her to stop loitering. On Tuesday, July 24, 2007, at about 5:00 A.M., police flooded the neighborhood to get rid of the prostitutes, including Teese, before they conducted a “john sting”—an undercover operation using male and female police officers as decoys to trap the men trying to pick up prostitutes.
Turgeon asked Teese to leave, which she did, but she returned several minutes later. Again Turgeon asked her to leave or he was going to arrest her. Teese flipped him the bird and told him to fuck himself, then walked away.
Wanting to keep up the pressure on the prostitutes and johns, and because most of the prostitutes knew who they were, detectives from the Woonsocket Police Department contacted detectives from the Central Falls Police Department (CFPD) and asked them to continue the undercover surveillance.
Around 9:20 P.M., on Thursday, July 26, Central Falls’ detectives were driving down Blackstone Street in an unmarked car, and Teese was standing outside Gordy’s Pub. As the detectives drove by Teese, they slowed down. Thinking they were just johns, Teese walked over to them, opened the rear passenger-side door and jumped in. Teese asked the cops what they were doing in the area, and they responded, “What do you think we’re doing around here?” Then she asked them what they wanted to do and said a blow job would cost them $20 each. They agreed. Teese wanted to take them back to her house, but they declined that offer and settled on the driveway of her house instead. When they arrived at her house on East School Street, the detectives called Woonsocket police, who responded and arrested Teese.
And even what happened to Audrey, Christine and Stacie hasn’t stopped other women in Woonsocket from taking to the streets to support their drug habits. Maybe they thought they were safe because Mailhot was behind bars. Unfortunately, for thirty-three-year-old Vicki Connolly, at least, that wasn’t the case. In November 2007, Vicki’s body was found by hunters in the woods of Burrillville, a small town not too far from Woonsocket.
According to a story in the Woonsocket Call, Vicki’s mother, Allison, last saw her daughter when she picked her up at the Price Rite store on Diamond Hill Road and drove her to her apartment on Libbus Street, just about a day before Vicki disappeared on September 6.
The last words Vicki said to her mother were “Bye, Mum, I love you.”
Police believe Vicki disappeared sometime after speaking with her roommate and heading out late at night to see some friends. People reported seeing her in the area the day after she saw her mother. While police were investigating Vicki’s disappearance, someone found her purse in the Social Street area of Woonsocket a few weeks after she was reported missing. It looked like it had spots of blood on it. Her Social Security card and license were still in her purse, but not her cell phone. Her family tried calling her cell phone, but it wasn’t working.
Then two hunters chasing a deer in the Burrillville woods discovered Vicki’s body. After her body was identified, Burrillville police, working with Woonsocket detectives on the case, said she had been murdered, although at the time they weren’t sure exactly where she had been killed or who had killed her.
In an eerie coincidence Vicki’s aunt was Dianne Goulet, who had been murdered by Marc Dumas seventeen years earlier. And Vicki’s body was found on November 9, the same date Dianne’s body was found behind Shaw’s Meats on Social Street.
Like the other women who met violent deaths, Vicki, too, had problems with drugs. After her divorce she took up with a crack user. It was another bad relationship. During the eighteen months before she disappeared, Vicki continued to struggle with drugs. She tried to get off the streets, but she just couldn’t make a complete break. She really wasn’t a bad person—none of them were. In fact, she had only had one prostitution arrest.
Before she got hooked on drugs, Vicki had been a good wife, and a good mother to her son Marc, who was eleven when her body was found. She was a teacher’s aide in Marc’s school in Woonsocket.
But everything went downhill after her divorce. Her new boyfriend got her into drugs. He even sold her car to finance his drug habit. Knowing she couldn’t take care of her son, she gave her ex-husband custody of the boy.
But all through the bad times, Vicki tried to turn her life around. She got a job and was seeing a counselor. She even entered a substance abuse program, but maybe the lure of the drugs was just too much. Or maybe her life on the street finally caught up with her.
Despite the ever-present dangers, these women are so desperate for the money they need to feed their habits that not even the risk of death will keep them from the gritty streets of Woonsocket trolled by johns looking for sex.
Chapter 22
Nearly four years after Christine Dumont was murdered by Jeffrey Mailhot, her family put up a permanent memorial at River Island Park in memory of her and the other women Mailhot murdered—Audrey Harris and Stacie Goulet.
“This is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time,” Christine’s brother, Robert, told the Woonsocket Call in November 2007.
Robert and his sister, Madeline, had the simple memorial erected after receiving the go ahead from Woonsocket mayor Susan Menard, who also donated a tree that was planted at the memorial.
Robert told the newspaper his family had never recovered from losing his sister, as well as both his parents, over a five-month stretch beginning in November 2003.
“It’s been tough on the entire family because the pain is still there,” he told the Woonsocket Call.
Tragically, on January 14, 2008, Robert hanged himself in a cell at the Woonsocket police station, just forty-five minutes after he had been arrested and jailed for breaking and entering his landlord’s apartment. His family said he was still depressed over his sister’s murder.
Madeline said she hoped the memorial to her sister and the other murdered women would bring closure to their families.
“It’s something that will never go away,” she told the Woonsocket Call. “You would never think something like this can happen in a small town, but it did. It’s something that not only my family, but the entire city, will remember.”
The plaque on the simple pink stone memorial reads: With love and fond memories we dedicate this tree to Christine Dumont, Audrey Harris and Stacie Goulet.
Epilogue
Ed Lee and Steve Nowak did what they set out to do—help bring the person who murdered Audrey Harris, Christine Dumont and Stacie Goulet to justice and restore the citizens’ faith in the Woonsocket Police Department.
But their efforts just weren’t enough. In fact, the Woonsocket police are under even more scrutiny than they were in the months and years leading up to the Mailhot case.
For one thing, prostitutes still walk up and down Arnold Street and the surrounding area, hoping to get the money for their next fix. And johns still drive up and down the streets, looking to get lucky. Despite the best efforts of police to curb prostitution in their city, it’s two steps forward, one step back.
And as for the department itself—not much good has happened since the Jeffrey Mailhot case.
In November 2007, five Woonsocket police officers were disciplined for not properly searching a woman they had arrested. That woman was able to smuggle a loaded gun into a jail cell, where she was held overnight until her arraignment on drug possession charges the following day. The police found the gun the next day as the woman was getting on a van headed to district court in Providence for her arraignment.
The gun, a Colt .380 automatic, apparently fell out of her pants.
After an internal investigation Police Chief Michael L. A. Houle reprimanded the officers who processed the woman. Two officers, who faced charges of unsatisfact
ory performance and lack of knowledge of police directives, each received a two-month suspension without pay. One officer received a four-day suspension without pay, and another received a two-day suspension without pay for unsatisfactory performance and lack of knowledge of police directives. An additional officer received a letter of reprimand for unsatisfactory performance.
The police department then ordered all its officers to be retrained in search and seizure procedures, as well as procedures for custody and control of prisoners.
That incident was just the latest in a series of incidents that resulted in investigations and suspensions in the police department. All of the incidents caused people to question the department’s leadership.
In May 2007, Police Chief Michael Houle was suspended for two days without pay after he admitted destroying drug evidence that he said was tainted with broken blood vials and uncapped hypodermic needles.
The city’s public safety director, Michael Annarummo, issued a report on the incident saying Houle’s decision to dispose of the evidence was not well-thought-out and that his actions were “unbecoming of the chief of police.”
The investigation was launched after Houle admitted incinerating eight large cardboard boxes filled with bags of drugs because he wanted to clean out the evidence room.
In the report Annarummo said that an internal audit revealed that evidence concerning ten out of 110 pending drug cases was missing. He said instead of destroying the evidence, the chief should have contacted the public works department and the fire department after he found what he considered to be a biohazard.
Annarummo recommended that the chief develop written policies for destroying controlled substances, as well as for handling contaminated or hazardous evidence. He also said the department had to hire an expert to look at the way the evidence room was run, as well as establish a computerized system for tracking evidence. The public safety director said the department also had to employ a full-time evidence officer.
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