1913
A lot of French Canadians moved to Woonsocket; in 1913 the city had the sixth largest population of French or French Canadian foreign nationals in the entire country.
about 0:08:34The story
Woonsocket, Rhode Island, is a small city of about 41,500 people in Providence County, twenty minutes from Providence and an hour from Boston, its population falling since a peak in 1950. In the summer of 2004 police there were looking at three women who had vanished from the same few streets in a little over seventeen months: Audrey Lynn Harris, Christine Dumont and Stacy Goulet. All three were drug users who worked the street, and at first there was nothing to connect them beyond geography.
Audrey Lynn Harris was thirty-three, five foot one and about a hundred pounds, the mother of three children. She had telephoned her mother, Claudette, that day and said she would come to visit, and then never arrived. Her family said it was unlike her not to check in. A woman who had given her a shower and some clothes said Audrey had been seeing a man called Kerry, said to be a corrections officer; he turned out to be Kerry Garner, a retired counsellor who had been chief of treatment services for the substance abuse division of the Rhode Island Department of Mental Health. He admitted she had sometimes stayed at his flat and had sex with him, and he refused to let police search the apartment. Detective Paul Savini took the case on 3 April 2003. In November 2004 her mother held a memorial service for her.
Christine Dumont was forty-two and the mother of two sons. As a teenager she had been struck by the front of a train, dragged under the wheels and thrown forty feet, and she spent three months in a coma; the skin on the right side of her face and on her arms and legs was torn away, and she never returned to school. She married a man named Joe at eighteen, the marriage failed, and she turned to drugs. Her sister, Madeline De Rochers, described her as a rip-off artist who took money from people promising to buy drugs and then ran out of the back door. She sold herself only when she needed extra cash. She was last seen on 23 April 2004 getting out of a car on Arnold Street, and when she failed to collect her disability cheque or call her sons, her sister knew something was wrong.
Stacy Goulet was twenty-four, the mother of a seven-year-old son, Dana, and a three-year-old daughter, Kimberley, and she was pregnant. She had been working the street since her teens to pay for crack. On the night of 3 July 2004 she smoked crack with a friend on Park Avenue, left a friend's apartment at about half past nine to work on East School Street, and met her father, Ray, at about half past ten; he told her to clean up her life and they hugged before he drove away. Her boyfriend said she went looking for clients in a park, that he turned away to ask a man for a cigarette and that when he looked back she was gone. He reported her missing at the Woonsocket police station on 7 July, saying she had never been gone more than an hour. In July 2004 parts of a woman's body were found in a landfill in Johnston, Rhode Island, and were later identified as Stacy's.
Christine had told police that a man had thrown her into the boot of his car and beaten her, and that she fought back with a tyre iron. They also recovered a 1988 GMC Jimmy he had sold, crushed at a scrapyard, and searched it for DNA. He was not responsible for the three deaths.
She described going to a man's apartment for sex and being attacked, and the building she described matched Cato Street, a four-unit house where only one tenant lived. He was thirty-three, five foot three, softly spoken, with no criminal record at all; his landlord called him the ideal tenant and his friends called him generous and good humoured. The detectives thought there had been a mistake.
The interview lasted six hours. He described putting them in a chinlock from behind, leaving them unconscious on the floor and letting them go when they came round. He said he had choked five or six women in the previous year or two, and that alcohol was the trigger. When the detectives laid out photographs of Audrey Harris, Christine Dumont and Stacy Goulet, he said he had never killed anybody. Pressed further, he began to cry, said yes when asked whether he had pushed it too far, and said all three were dead. He said he had cut them up in his bathtub with a handsaw and put the parts in drawstring bin bags from Walmart, dumping them in skips and bins around Woonsocket; the first, Audrey Harris, he disposed of near the Rockeridge apartments and the Brunswick Bowling Alley. He had picked up Stacy Goulet in front of Warehouse Liquors on Arnold Street. He said he had picked up as many as thirty prostitutes over the years, that ten or twelve had escaped, and that he had killed his first victim in February or March 2003. Asked whether he would kill again, he said he probably would.
A search of Cato Street found blood throughout the bathroom: the grout, the tub, the toilet, the floorboards and the pipes all reacted to luminol, and the room was stripped back to a hole down to the basement. A recently bought handsaw with a shark on the handle was hidden behind the washer and dryer, and surveillance video from a hardware store showed him buying it the day after Stacy Goulet disappeared. Police also seized a Halloween photograph of him dressed as a wrestler choking a teddy bear, his computer, and more than 170 items of evidence. Public works crews examined the sewer line, where worms had gathered around a high-protein material that may have been flesh, but found nothing usable. A search of the landfill recovered a body part that identified Stacy Goulet; no trace of Audrey Harris or Christine Dumont was ever found.
A former girlfriend continued to exchange letters with him and said he sounded upbeat. Stacy Goulet is buried at St Jean Baptiste Cemetery in Norfolk County, Massachusetts. The other two women were never recovered.