Town note
The name Pawtucket is an Algonquian word for riverfall.
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FILE 456 / 6 January 2024 / 69 MIN / express
we are going to rhode island today our smallest state and um we're going to pawtucket rhode island about 0:03:26
The name Pawtucket is an Algonquian word for riverfall.
about 0:05:31The first settler was Joseph Jenkins Jr, who came from Lynn, Massachusetts, bought land in the 1600s and built a sawmill and a forge.
about 0:05:37The town was destroyed during King Philip's War.
about 0:05:50Later settlers planted crops, built ships and by the 1920s Pawtucket was a mill town with factories, half a dozen movie theatres and two dozen hotels.
about 0:06:20The name Pawtucket is an Algonquian word for riverfall.
about 0:05:31The first settler was Joseph Jenkins Jr, who came from Lynn, Massachusetts, bought land in the 1600s and built a sawmill and a forge.
about 0:05:37The town was destroyed during King Philip's War.
about 0:05:50Later settlers planted crops, built ships and by the 1920s Pawtucket was a mill town with factories, half a dozen movie theatres and two dozen hotels.
about 0:06:20Pawtucket built an ornate movie palace called the Million Dollar Theater.
about 0:06:39"75,200"
Comparison: "much less when the murder happened". No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:04:22
"$56,427"
Comparison: "below the national average by more than $10,000". Direction: above.
As told in 2024 about 0:04:28
"$322,600"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:04:35
3.0 / 5 · average of 3
“the homeliest atmosphere in the world, retro music players at each booth and the most delicious chicken parmesan in the world”about 0:06:50
“gives you this code of everything, hard to explain, one of those places where you have to be in the moment”about 0:07:43
“the crime rate has increased tremendously in the past year, the police do their job but people keep committing crimes, everything is unsafe and people are uncomfortable going out at night”about 0:09:26
“dragon boat races, a dumpling eating contest, a yo-yo performance and lion dancers, with thousands attending every year”about 0:10:16
Sherry Roy was 29 in the summer of 1993, living in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, with two daughters aged about six and eight. She was a heavy drug user whom police called a known prostitute.
Born six weeks premature at three pounds six ounces, he had brain damage in the left frontal region, migraines from the age of four, a stutter and no concentration.
At about ten that evening Roy left the house she shared with her roommate Harold Strobel to buy cigarettes and walked towards Mineral Spring Cemetery, a small city-owned graveyard known as a haunt of drug addicts and prostitutes. She entered the cemetery with them for drugs in exchange for sex, but the boys had agreed to take the sex and give her nothing.
Around half past midnight a neighbour saw two teenage males run from the cemetery covered in blood.
At eight the next morning, 24 August, a woman walking her dogs found Roy's partly clothed body. Her face was so badly beaten that local officers who knew her could not recognise her. The medical examiner found abrasions across the left side of her face and both shoulders, a crescent-shaped defect near her left ear and a skull fractured from the top through the nasal bone; her brain and brain stem had been reduced to small bits. She was alive when the tombstone struck her.
Detectives worked 65 straight hours and lifted fingerprints from the tombstone and a broken tree limb. He admitted being in the cemetery with another male and hitting the girl.
The prosecutor replied that a man who remembered everything and knew the injured woman would have to be killed had not had his will completely paralysed. Roy's sister told the court, 'When you flirt with the devil you dance in hell'.
His lawyers attacked the fingerprints and said he had only watched; the attorney general replied that the beating had covered 103 feet and neither man had stopped the other.
On 7 January 2011 he lost control of his car on I-95 westbound near the Mill Street overpass. Troopers found the car on its roof and a young woman outside it bleeding from the ears, mouth and head.
August 23, 1993 / Mineral Spring Cemetery, Pawtucket, Rhode Island
As told in the episode, on 6 January 2024.
Accused
Accused
Public places are marked on the map.
crime scene
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about 0:38:30police
about 0:36:33landmark
about 1:01:13road
about 1:04:23landmark
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