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  A KILLER’S CONFESSION

  Detective Lee’s heart was beating out of his chest. He had a feeling Mailhot was just about to spill his guts. Lee could hardly breathe. His heart had never pounded so fast in his life. He had a lot of adrenaline rushes on the job, but nothing like that, because Ed Lee knew Jeffrey Mailhot had murdered the three women—and he was just about to confess.

  “Do you want to tell me something?” Lee asked, trying like hell to stay calm. “Jeff, your life will be over—over—unless you get this off of your chest. Okay? I know what happened. I know what happened. I know you’re not a bad man. I know you just took it too far. What happened? You pushed it too far one night, right? Things got out of hand, huh?”

  “Yes,” Mailhot said finally, burying his head in his hands and crying.

  “All of them?”

  “Hm-hmm.”

  “All three?” Lee asked, just to be sure.

  “All three,” Mailhot responded.

  “All right. Good job. Where are they? Where are they, Jeff?”

  “Dead.”

  Lee was so caught off guard by Mailhot’s confession that he could hardly even think. His head was spinning and his heart was racing. For a split second he thought maybe some of the other cops were playing a joke on him and put Mailhot up to confessing serial murder.

  Then Mailhot started to choke up a little and Lee had to keep the pressure on to find out what he had done with the women’s bodies.

  “Where are they?” Lee asked, in no way prepared for Mailhot’s response.

  “They’re—they’re in garbage bags.”

  Also by Linda Rosencrance:

  AN ACT OF MURDER

  MURDER AT MORSES POND

  RIPPER

  LINDA

  ROSENCRANCE

  WITH CAPT. EDWARD LEE, JR.

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  A KILLER’S CONFESSION

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  Notes

  For my friends Craig, Libby, Matthew and Alec Costanza.

  —LR

  I would like to dedicate this book to my father, the late Chief Edward J. Lee, Sr., my inspiration to go into law enforcement and my greatest teacher.

  —EL

  Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.

  —The Merchant of Venice, Act ii, Sc. 2

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to everyone who helped me with this project, especially my coauthor, Captain Edward Lee, Jr., Lieutenant Steven Nowak, Detective Gerard Durand and all the members of the Woonsocket Police Department. I would also like to thank the families of Audrey Harris, Christine Dumont and Stacie Goulet for their help.

  Last, but not least, special thanks to my agent, Janet Benrey, of the Benrey Literary Agency, and my editor at Kensington, Michaela Hamilton.

  —LR

  I would like to recognize the hardworking men and women at the Woonsocket Police Department. Without their dedication and professionalism this case would not have been possible.

  —EL

  Prologue

  Woonsocket, Rhode Island, was formed in 1888 from six mill villages that sprouted up along the Blackstone River. The villages were Bernon, Globe, Hamlet, Jenckes-ville, Social and the largest, Woonsocket Falls Village, which occupied what is now the downtown area of Woonsocket.

  For a number of years the economic life of the city revolved around its textile and rubber mills. As the city increased in size, more independent stores, including grocery, hardware and furniture stores, opened up. In 1914, McCarthy Dry Goods Company, founded in 1889, opened a new six-floor department store on the corner of Main and Court Streets, the site of what is now City Hall Park.

  Until the 1960s, Main Street was Woonsocket’s retail district. But soon it could no longer compete with suburban shopping malls, and many shops, like W. T. Grant, F. W. Woolworth Co. and even McCarthy’s, relocated to the Walnut Hill Plaza in East Woonsocket. In 1989, city leaders began taking steps to improve the appearance, business and general image of Main Street, and those efforts to attract new retail, housing and businesses to the area continue to this day. Main Street’s two anchors are the Museum of Work and Culture and the restored historic Stadium Theatre.

  But despite the emphasis on the downtown area, Woonsocket remains a working-class city. The area where Jeffrey Mailhot lived is known as the Cato Hill Historic District. Cato Hill, which sits above Main Street, was typical of Woonsocket’s working-class neighborhoods in the mid-1800s. It was home to mill workers from Ireland, Canada and Ukraine.1

  Around the corner from Mailhot’s house on Cato Street is an area known for its dives, drug users and pushers, drunks, prostitutes and johns. That neighborhood is the last place Audrey Harris, Christine Dumont and Stacie Goulet were ever seen alive.

  Chapter 1

  It was just before midnight on a cold February night in 2003 in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a working-class city of about forty-four thousand people right on the Massachusetts border. Calling no attention to himself, a clean-cut thirty-two-year-old machinist was driving home from the K2U, a strip club on Front Street.

  Audrey Harris, thirty-three, an African-American prostitute who regularly plied her trade outside the neighborhood’s seedy bars and tenement houses, was walking down Arnold Street. She was intent on hooking up with a lonely guy to get the money for her next fix. Selling herself on the streets to feed her habit was a way of life for Audrey—try as she might to kick it.

  When the man saw Audrey, he pulled his car up close to her and asked if she wanted to go to his place. She agreed and got in his car. The fact that he wasn’t bad-looking didn’t hurt. Most of the johns that came around were a little on the creepy side, so getting in a car with someone who looked like this would probably have made Audrey feel safe.

  On the way to the man’s apartment, the pair agreed on $30 for straight sex, and the man told Audrey he’d pay her when they got to his house. Once he got Audrey inside, he slammed the door shut and threw the three dead bolt locks. After giving Audrey a brief tour of his apartment, they went into the bedroom. Audrey took off all her clothes, while her client stripped down to his undershorts.

  Audrey then asked the man for the $30 they had agreed on. He got the money from his dresser and was about to give it to her when she turned around and faced away from him. Suddenly hit with an uncontrollable urge, the john went up to Audrey from behind and started choking her. Terrified, Audrey kicked and scratched at her attacker, fueling his rage even more. It wasn’t hard to subdue the five-one, one-hundred-pound woman, so he wrestled her to the ground and, lying next to her on the floor, continued choking her.

  Although she was still fighting for her life, Audrey was getting weaker and having a hard time breathing. About twenty to thirty seconds after her attacker got her on the floor, Audrey stopped struggling and he loosened his grip around her neck. H
e stood up and looked down at the dying woman. Audrey’s eyes were just staring up, but she didn’t seem to be really looking at anything. She was gagging, and blood bubbles were coming out of her mouth. Figuring she was still alive, the man got a pillow from his bed, put it over Audrey’s face, pushed down hard and finished her off. After he removed the pillow, the man just looked at Audrey’s dead body, then sat back on the floor for a few minutes in a state of disbelief.

  Realizing that he had just murdered Audrey, the man paced around his bedroom, trying to figure out what to do next. He checked on Audrey again after a couple minutes just to make sure she was dead. About ten minutes later he dragged Audrey’s lifeless body into his bathroom, put her in the bathtub, then put her clothes in a trash bag in the kitchen. Unlike some serial killers who keep souvenirs, he didn’t keep any of Audrey’s possessions. He threw them all away. Then he went to bed and either fell asleep or passed out.

  The next morning the man woke up with no memory of what had happened the previous night. But when he went into the bathroom and saw Audrey’s body in his bathtub, it all came flooding back to him. Realizing he needed time to figure out what to do, he called his boss and said he was taking a sick day.

  He left Audrey in his bathtub and drove to Wal-Mart, where he bought a roll of heavy-duty plastic wrap and a roll of carpet. He brought the plastic wrap and carpet home, rolled Audrey’s body in the plastic and then in the carpet. Then he put her in his GMC Jimmy and drove around town trying to find a place to dump her.

  Scared that someone was going to see him, he went back home, carried the carpet into the house and dropped it on the kitchen floor. He left Audrey in the carpet in the kitchen while he came up with a plan to get rid of her so that no one would find out.

  Some hours later the man remembered an episode of the television show The Sopranos he had seen a few months earlier. In that episode Tony Soprano strangled Ralphie Cifaretto in his kitchen, then got rid of the body by hacking it up in the bathtub.

  So the murderer unwrapped Audrey and placed her back into his bathtub. Then he went to the basement to get a saw—not an electric saw—just a regular handsaw. He got some latex gloves from the kitchen, then went into his bedroom and changed into a black T-shirt with Kid Rock written on it in red, white and blue letters, and a pair of shorts. He took off his shoes and socks and walked back into the bathroom barefoot.

  Standing over the bathtub, he draped Audrey’s head over the side of the tub and sawed it off. The he cut off her hands and feet and arms and legs, draping each body part over the tub as he sawed it off. Finally he cut her torso in half. He wanted to make sure her body parts were small enough to fit in his trash bags.

  The killer put Audrey’s hands, feet and head into one bag and each half of her torso into a separate bag. Her legs and arms went into another bag. Then he wrapped each trash bag up in some heavy black plastic wrap, tied those “packages” up with duct tape and put each package in a couple more trash bags and tied them at the top.

  When he was done wrapping up Audrey’s mutilated body, he washed out the tub, wiped up any residue and flushed it down the toilet. He cleaned up the blood on the floor, which had seeped out of Audrey while he was cutting her up. Then he threw the bags into his truck and deposited them in a number of area Dumpsters. He also tossed out Audrey’s clothes and disposed of the saw.

  Chapter 2

  On April 3, 2003, Detective Paul Sevigny was assigned to investigate the disappearance of Audrey Harris. That day Audrey’s mother, Claudette, had filed a missing person’s report on Audrey. Claudette said she last spoke to her daughter on February 9, 2003, when she called to tell her mother she would be by for a visit. But she never made it.

  Claudette explained to police that even though Audrey, a mother of three who had a fondness for teddy bears, was a drug user and didn’t have a permanent address, it wasn’t like her not to call home occasionally to let her family know she was okay.

  Claudette told police she had gone to talk to people at some of the local bars that Audrey used to frequent, but no one had seen her around for a while. Claudette hung her daughter’s picture on utility poles around the city, and a civic group even offered a small reward for information about her. Still, nothing. That’s when Claudette knew something was wrong and went to the police.

  After catching the case, Sevigny soon learned that Audrey hadn’t reported to her parole officer since she was released from prison on January 25, 2003. Audrey had been on probation for a simple assault and battery, as well as for resisting arrest. So Sevigny contacted some of the vice squad cops about Audrey, but they told him they hadn’t seen her either. The detective then checked with nearby police departments on the off chance that they had her in custody. Another dead end.

  Knowing Audrey was a well-known street person and substance abuser, Sevigny made frequent trips to the corner of High and Arnold Streets and Blackstone Street, near Railroad Street, to try and locate her. The other women in the area said she hadn’t been around recently.

  One of the women said she had last seen Audrey at the end of January. The woman said she let Audrey take a shower at her house and gave her some clothes to wear. She told the police Audrey was seeing a corrections officer named Kerry from the Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI), who had given her a new winter jacket and some money.

  The police tracked the guy down, and they discovered he didn’t work at the prison, but had been a substance abuse counselor for the state. His name was Kerry Garner, and until his retirement in March 2002, he had been the chief of Treatment Services for the substance abuse division of the Rhode Island Department of Mental Health.

  Garner, who had worked for the mental-health department for twenty-eight years, had known Audrey for about ten years. Garner said he got to know her a little better when she went to him for a referral for substance abuse treatment, sometime around 2000. Garner said at that time he referred her to the Talbot House in Providence, Rhode Island, for treatment.

  He told police he last saw Audrey on January 25, 2003, when he picked her up in front of the public defender’s office in Providence. Audrey had called Garner because she needed a ride home. Garner dropped Audrey off at the top of West Park Place in Woonsocket and went on his way.

  A few days later, Audrey called Garner to ask him for a ride to the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston so she could pick up some money she had left in an account during her last incarceration. Audrey also wanted to pick up some clothes she had left in Garner’s truck. But Garner could tell Audrey was high and he didn’t want to get involved with her problems. He told her he’d leave her clothes inside the door in the downstairs hallway of his house.

  When Audrey showed up to collect her belongings, she rang Garner’s bell, but he didn’t want to see her so he didn’t answer the door. He could hear Audrey talking out loud and cursing as she picked up her stuff and left. That was the last time Garner heard from her.

  Garner said he had no idea where she was, but he did know some of the people she hung around with and some of the places she’d stayed at in the past. Garner said Audrey used to stay with some guy named Pete on Park Avenue and another guy named Dave who lived on Fifth Avenue.

  Garner also admitted that sometimes Audrey used to stay at his house when she had no place else to go. She’d stay a couple nights and then take off. That happened a few times. While Audrey stayed at Garner’s house, she also had sex with him, but apparently she wasn’t good enough to share his bed—Garner made Audrey sleep on his living-room floor in his sleeping bag.

  For some reason, Garner refused to let police search his apartment for any of Audrey’s belongings. Police checked and determined that Audrey did withdraw $42.30 from her inmate account at the Adult Correctional Institutions on January 30.

  Audrey’s friend Dave Parker said he hadn’t seen Audrey since the end of January or the beginning of February. Parker, who had also known Audrey for ten years, said although the pair initially had a sexual relationship,
they ended up being just friends.

  In fact, in September 2002, Parker said he had to take out a restraining order on Audrey because she was so high on drugs she became really violent with him. Just before he applied for the restraining order, Parker said he and Audrey were in his car and she started assaulting him while he was driving. So he drove straight to the Woonsocket Police Department (WPD), where she was arrested for assault.

  When asked what he thought had happened to Audrey, Parker said, “I guess she got in with the wrong person and someone killed her.”

  Police interviewed Tim Harris, Audrey’s brother, some months later. Like the rest of Audrey’s friends and acquaintances, Tim had last seen Audrey at the end of January. Tim said he and a friend were driving down Park Avenue when he saw Audrey in a gray pickup truck near Dunkin’ Donuts. Tim stopped, and when Audrey saw him, she got out of the truck and got into his car. Tim’s friend left and Tim and Audrey went to a party at a nearby house.

  They did some crack and then they talked. Tim said Audrey called their mom and told her she was going into rehab. Hungry, Tim asked Audrey if she wanted to go to McDonald’s to get something to eat. She said no, so Tim left her there and went out. It was about 8:00 P.M. when he got back to the party.

  When he walked into the kitchen, Tim saw Audrey sitting on a chair, leaning over with her head on her lap, sleeping. But Tim was worried because she was sitting so close to the stove and the oven door was open for heat. He asked the others why Audrey was sitting like that, but no one answered. He woke Audrey up and told her to go lie down on the couch in the living room. He asked her if she was going to spend the night there and she said yes. He offered to take her shoes off, but she said no.