Town note
The area was named after the Narragansett, an Algonquin tribe who lived there.
about 0:09:34The story
South Kingstown is a town of about 30,000 people in Washington County, Rhode Island, in the south-central part of that small state. In 1975 it had roughly 15,000 or 16,000 residents. The Foreman family lived in the village of Peacedale, on Schaefer Street, in a neighbourhood where children played outside from morning until the street lights came on. John Foreman and his wife Joyce had three children: Raven, ten, John IV, seven, and Jason, five. Joyce turned 25 on Sunday 18 May 1975.
At about half past three that afternoon Joyce had the window open and could hear all three children playing outside with four other neighbourhood children. Jason, the five-year-old, told the others he was going home and ran down the hill past the fire station; his street was about thirty yards beyond it. The other children watched him go and went back to playing. Nobody saw him again.
When the children came in, Joyce asked where Jason was. They said he had gone home an hour earlier. He had not. The family searched the house and yard, called the neighbours and then the police. State police brought dogs and searched the woods the next day, going house to house on the theory that a small boy might be hiding, trapped or have fallen somewhere. That Saturday, six days after he vanished, the police organised a search of up to 2,000 volunteers working in shifts over a five-mile radius, combing woods, ponds and swamps; National Guard, Navy and Marine personnel from Newport were expected.
The case drew national attention. Posters and flyers circulated and a $6,500 reward was offered. Tips came from New Jersey, Montana, California and elsewhere and amounted to nothing. The police were also interested because a five-year-old boy, David Lewison, the son of an attorney, had disappeared without trace in Brockton, Massachusetts, on 18 June 1974, exactly eleven months earlier, and the captain thought the cases were parallel.
Jason's mother never stopped searching. In 1977 she became a school crossing guard, work she took up to protect other children, and she later changed her name to Jason in her son's honour. A 1981 newspaper article described her still expecting him to come wandering in one day. Peter Schofield, Jason's uncle, was stationed at Fort Dix when he was called home; he was transferred back to South Kingstown for two weeks to help search under Hawksley. Jason's older brother John remembered only playing with him and watching him go home.
The case broke on 15 April 1982, again on Schaefer Street. Dale Sherman, a 14-year-old newspaper delivery boy, was talked into a house on the street, given beer and liquor and passed out. He woke with someone trying to garrot him. He fought the man off and ran home to tell his father, who called the police and then went to the house and punched and beat the man.
A detective who had worked the Foreman case asked him about Jason's disappearance. He said he had lured Jason into his home, sexually assaulted him and stabbed him in the heart. He had put the body in a plastic bag and hidden it in a small trunk in his room, which is why his father, told to search his own house during the house-to-house search, never found it. He later dismembered the body, ate part of the flesh and boiled the meat off the bones, which he cleaned and shellacked and kept, with a journal, in a black box on his dresser.
He had no criminal record and no history of mental illness, and he was sent to the Institute of Mental Health. The attorney general said he would be prosecuted as an adult even though he had been 16 at the time. Neighbours described him as a loner who always stopped to talk to the children in the street. He had told a therapist before the killing that he wondered what it would be like to kill someone, thought it would be easy to get away with and thought it might be some fun.
The medical examiner, Dr Arthur C. Burns, said the bones showed traces of flesh deliberately removed by boiling them with lye and soap, and that they had been shellacked. She said he had eaten her baby brother and that she still woke up screaming.
On 6 March 1983 Jason was buried in a tiny white coffin in Riverside Cemetery, across the street from the family home; half the town turned out. Joyce Foreman died of lymphoma in 2000 and is buried with Jason.
He was being held in protective custody at the Department of Corrections facility in Cranston. The state erupted. Online groups against his release gathered thousands of members within days, there were protests, and a protecting children rally was held on 8 April 2011.
In October 2012 he asked for an absentee ballot. In 2017 the Joint Commission issued a preliminary denial of accreditation for Eleanor Slater Hospital, citing ligature risks such as door hinges, shower rods, bed frames and television mounts. Jason's father said there was no forgiveness in him, only revenge.