Town note
Little Compton was originally inhabited by the Sakonnet Indians, related to the Wampanoag and speakers of the Massachusetts language.
about 0:08:07The story
Little Compton is a small town in Newport County, Rhode Island, at the far south-eastern corner of the state, on the largest of the islands off that coast. It lies about forty-five minutes from Providence, an hour and a quarter from Boston and forty minutes from Warren. In 1999 it had roughly 3,500 residents and a median age of fifty-three, and it had a reputation as an affluent, unspoiled New England town where many people did not lock their doors. Angela Spence Shaw, sixty-six, was a widow who lived alone in a house she was having extended. She worked, had a social life and was considered extremely reliable.
On Friday 28 May 1999, the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, a three-man construction crew broke through a wall of her house to begin the addition. They covered the opening with a tarp, and it stayed that way over the holiday. The same day, Patricia Rogalin, in her mid-twenties, drove from Fall River, Massachusetts, to her parents' home in Falmouth on Cape Cod with her young son and other family members. He was a construction worker, and he was one of the three men who had opened the wall at Angela Spence Shaw's house.
She escaped by jumping from the moving car in the car park of a restaurant.
A seventeen-year-old neighbour, Kelly Stokes, saw him in a neighbour's yard that night, drinking rum and beer and sharing it with teenagers until about one or half past one in the morning. He asked her to come home with him; she refused.
At some point in the early hours of Sunday 30 May, between one and three in the morning according to the medical examiner's estimate from the contents of her stomach, Angela Spence Shaw was attacked in her bedroom. She was beaten severely, sexually assaulted and then drowned in the bath in the upstairs bathroom. A hair dryer was plugged in and placed in the water. Her friend Sally came to the house when she failed to appear for work and found her in the tub. The house was not ransacked. More than $500 in cash in a ceramic box on her bedroom dresser, her wallet and her jewellery were untouched, and there were no signs of forced entry. Blood was pooled on the bed and floor and smeared on the carpet, the walls and the door frame leading into the bathroom; the bed had been pulled away from the wall and stripped, and a bloodstained pillow lay nearby. The medical examiner found extensive blunt force injuries and evidence of forced intercourse inflicted while she was alive.
He arrived between half past nine and ten, said hello, threw up and then slept for most of the day. He told her he had stayed home drinking, leaving out the teenagers and the rum.
Patricia and her family drove back on the Monday morning and found Rhode Island state police at the door.
The investigation quickly settled on the construction crew, since the hole in the wall meant that anyone could have walked in. He told Detective Sergeant Stephen Bannon of the State Police Major Crimes Unit that he had worked until three, gone home, argued with Patricia, drunk beer and rum and gone to sleep, apart from a spell in the front yard with some teenagers. On 3 June, interviewed again at the site, he changed the account: he said he had gone to a bar after work and stayed until about six, that he had spoken to Patricia several times rather than once, that he had ordered a Domino's pizza, and that he had called a friend, Chris Taylor, at one in the morning to ask about getting weed. That same day he asked Patricia to take the shoes he wore around the house to Cape Cod and keep them there. She did, then later brought them back and hid them in the toy room.
The state forensic laboratory tested twenty-three samples from people connected to the house and excluded twenty-two of them. The remaining sample matched the semen recovered from Angela's body. He was interrogated for about five hours that evening, was given pizza, soda and cigarettes, and denied everything.
Patricia said they had never had sex in the morning and that he normally cleaned himself with their son's baby wipes. The prosecution also pointed out that the vagina is a closed space and that the bath water could not have carried semen into it. The detective denied ever taking a semen sample in eleven years with the state police.
The judge admitted the evidence. He said he had drunk about twelve bottles of Heineken and three-quarters of a bottle of rum and was too drunk to have driven to Angela's house or carried out the attack. Witnesses said he had not been stumbling, and the state argued that he had been sober enough to use a pillow to shield himself from blood, to clean the bathroom, to strip the bed and to drive home.
Angela's sons, Gerard and Justin Spence, sued the construction company, New England Home Building and Restoration Inc. and its owner David Peckham, in Newport County Superior Court, claiming negligence in leaving the house open. In 2017 the Rhode Island Supreme Court vacated that ruling, finding that he should have had an evidentiary hearing on his application, and remanded the case to the Superior Court.