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  Tim left the house and went to see some friends. When he got back to the party an hour or two later, Audrey was gone. He asked his friends where his sister was, but no one said anything.

  “They were just real quiet,” Tim said. “They never told me what happened to my sister.”

  About six months after Detective Sevigny was assigned the case, Woonsocket police sergeant Robert Moreau was assigned to investigate Audrey’s disappearance because Sevigny was retiring. He was asked to look into the case to see if he could develop any new leads. Moreau knew Audrey from seeing her on the streets. He often stopped and talked to her to make sure she was okay. Everyone was always worried that something was going to happen to her because she was such a tiny woman and most likely wouldn’t be able to handle herself if she got into trouble.

  The first thing Moreau did was meet with Claudette to go over the facts of the case and to let her know that the police were still trying to find her daughter. Claudette told the seasoned detective that Audrey was a good person, but she was mixed up with drugs. She kept telling her mother she was going to quit—she swore every time was her last time—but somehow she’d just fall back into the drug scene. The last time Audrey called Claudette, she said, “Ma, I’m going to come over and see you. I’m all done with these drugs,” but Claudette never heard from her again.

  Claudette told Moreau about the house party Audrey had been at with her brother the night she disappeared, so Moreau talked to Tim Harris about it. Tim told Moreau the same story he had told Sevigny. He said he had to physically pick Audrey up from the chair in the kitchen because she had passed out. The way Tim described her state of mind and her physical condition at the party, Moreau and the other cops figured someone at the party had found her on that couch dead. The cops figured those partygoers didn’t know what to do with her, so they just dumped her body.

  “I met with the people who were at the party and told them that if it was an accident and they just didn’t know what to do, they should come clean so Audrey’s mother should get closure one way or the other,” Moreau said later. “But, of course, it turned out to be fruitless, but that’s why we went down that road for a long time. It’s kind of a spooky thing, but right near that house is an Indian burial ground—it’s not marked anymore, but we had cadaver dogs go in and search that wooded area, but we didn’t find her there, although for some reason that’s where Timmy thought she was. We found a woman’s black shoe there, but it wasn’t hers.”

  Moreau next got a list of people Audrey knew from Claudette and reinterviewed them. He talked to Dave Parker again, but he didn’t learn anything new about Audrey’s whereabouts. Moreau also talked to Pete Gagne, another one of Audrey’s boyfriends, who pointed him in the direction of Kerry Garner. When Moreau first took over the case, he thought Garner was good for Audrey’s murder. He figured Garner was lying about when he last saw her because he was trying to save his job. He was her counselor and he was supposed to be helping her, but instead he preyed on her just like all the other johns.

  In the end none of the leads Moreau followed up on panned out. It would take another nine months before he found out what really happened to Audrey Harris.

  Chapter 3

  The last time anyone saw forty-two-year-old Christine Dumont was Friday, April 23, 2004. Like Audrey Harris, Christine was walking down Arnold Street when she disappeared. And like Audrey, Christine also had a history of drug abuse and prostitution.

  It didn’t take long for Madeline Desrochers, Christine’s older sister, to figure out something was wrong. For one thing, Christine hadn’t picked up her disability check at the post office; for another, she hadn’t called her two sons in a couple days. Despite her lifestyle, Christine loved her kids and she called them every night. So when Madeline learned that Christine’s oldest son hadn’t heard from his mother in two days, she called another relative, who was caring for her sister’s youngest son, Derrick, and asked if she had called him recently. The answer was the same—not for two days.

  So on April 30, a week after Christine was last seen alive, Madeline went to the Woonsocket police station to report her missing. Unfortunately, the officer on duty refused to take her statement. He told her to return on Monday.

  “The police officer who told me that was a smart little guy,” Madeline said. “I told him I wanted to file a missing person’s report and he told me I couldn’t, because he had just seen her the night before. What could I do, I went back Monday.”

  Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered because Christine was already dead.

  “Then I go back Monday and it’s the same guy and he throws the form at me and he asks me for her name and her description, then he said, ‘Oh, never mind, we have all that on record,’” Madeline said. “The guy just stabbed my heart and then he threw the paper at me, and I said, ‘Thank you, I’m going to the media.’ So I filed a report and I went to the local newspaper and television station and I told them about my sister being missing, just like Audrey, but none of them wanted to talk to me.”

  To the local media, Christine may have been just another missing drug-addicted prostitute, but to her family, she was so much more.

  Christine was the third youngest in a family of eight children born to Roland and Auroe Dumont. Madeline was ten when Christine was born on December 12, 1961. Christine’s father, Roland, was a very hardworking man. He worked over forty years in a dye house to support his eight children. The Dumont family may not have been rich, but they lived a comfortable life, and Christine and her siblings had everything they ever needed. “You get what you want second. You get what you need first” was the motto that Roland Dumont lived by.

  “Christine was the youngest for a long time growing up and everybody babied her like she was a little doll,” Madeline said. “She was spoiled. She always wanted her own way. Going to school, she was always well dressed. Her socks matched her clothes and her fingernails matched her outfits. She was a very particular girl. But then the teenage years set in. I was already married and out of the house. My dad tried so hard to be an upstanding citizen, even though he had some rotten kids—two of my brothers were stealing, and then here comes Christine, with problems that didn’t help.”

  Christine didn’t have an easy life. In fact, she almost didn’t have any life at all. When she was fifteen, she was hit by a train on Hamlet Avenue. According to newspaper reports at the time, Christine and a fifteen-year-old girlfriend had gotten out of a car on Manville Road, near the Hamlet Avenue railroad crossing. Christine, who was walking on the sidewalk a couple of steps in front of her friend, apparently did not see or hear the train coming. According to police the red warning lights were flashing and the warning bell was ringing at the crossing at the time.

  Christine was hit by the left front shield of the fifty-two-car train, which was traveling between twenty and twenty-five miles per hour. The shield, which was used to push aside objects that vandals threw on the tracks, prevented Christine from being dragged beneath the wheels of the train. She was hurled about forty feet into the air and landed in a gutter at the crossing. The train finally came to a stop before it crossed Hamlet Avenue. The Woonsocket Fire Department (WFD) rescue squad responded to the accident, administered first aid at the scene, then transported Christine to Woonsocket Hospital. She was then transferred to Roger Williams Hospital in Providence.

  That was the official version of the story. Madeline tells it a bit differently. She said Christine and her friend were smoking pot and playing chicken with the train. Christine lost.

  As a result of the accident, all the skin on Christine’s right side—on her face, as well as her arms and legs—was completely ripped off, and she was already in a coma when the rescue squad arrived. When Christine was first brought to the hospital, the doctor tried to take X-rays of her head to see how much damage there was, but the blood was so thick he couldn’t even see her brain.

  Christine stayed in a coma for three months, and each day Madeline would go to the hospital
to braid her sister’s hair because Christine always wanted her hair to look great. Then, on Easter Sunday, Christine started speaking again. Although she wasn’t speaking very well, Madeline said it was a miracle. When Christine’s injuries started healing, her face looked like one big thick scab. In fact, her whole body was one thick pink scab. Christine was so traumatized by the accident that when she came out of the hospital, she had to go through therapy for two years to help her deal with what had happened to her.

  Christine should have learned her lesson about living dangerously—but she didn’t, unfortunately. And it didn’t help that after the accident Christine’s mother let her do whatever she wanted to do, as if to make up for what she had gone through. However, Mrs. Dumont’s approach to handling Christine didn’t sit well with her siblings, and her sister Denise left home at fifteen because she couldn’t deal with Christine’s behavior.

  After the accident Christine never went back to school. When she was eighteen, she met Joe, who was thirty-one at the time, and she thought she was in love. Christine and Joe moved in together and she seemed to be getting her life back on track. She was clean, sober and very happy. Then when she was around twenty-two, she got pregnant. Her first son, Jason, was born in 1985.

  When Jason was twelve, Christine got pregnant again, but by this time she was using cocaine, although Joe was still clean. She got hooked on coke when a friend enticed her to try the powerful drug. Regrettably, she wasn’t strong enough to fight it and she continued doing cocaine while she was pregnant with her second son, Derrick. Christine was so addicted to the drug that she even took a hit right before she had the baby. But God was looking out for Derrick because he was born normal, healthy and beautiful.

  It’s not that Christine didn’t want to conquer her addiction. She did. She even voluntarily checked herself into rehab—five times.

  “I didn’t want to deal with my sister because of these problems,” Madeline said. “I pushed her away for ten years. My whole family really did. We didn’t want to deal with that. We all had kids and we didn’t want them to see her do that, so we pushed her away. Not one of us is better than the other.”

  Although Madeline didn’t want Christine around her family, she finally had no choice but to take her in.

  “But I had to take her because within months both my parents got very, very sick,” Madeline said. “Christine used to go to my mother and father’s house and tell them stories to get money from them and she’d really make them nervous. They were eighty-five and seventy-five. She used to go over there and harass them all the time. So I told my brothers and sisters that out of the kindness of my heart I would take her in. I didn’t want to, but I did it for my parents.”

  So Christine stayed with Madeline for six months.

  “My sister was a rip-off artist and I didn’t appreciate it,” Madeline said. “She would take money from people, tell them she was going to buy them drugs and then take off with the money. I had a front door and a back door and she would rip off somebody outside, run in the front door and run out the back door. She did it to so many people.”

  Although prostitution was never really her thing—she preferred ripping people off—she sold herself occasionally to get money to buy drugs. Madeline said Christine was once caught soliciting a john for sex, but she was never charged.

  In December 2003, their mother passed away and their dad died in March 2004. When their dad passed away, two Woonsocket detectives, Edward “Ed” Lee, Jr. and Kyle Stone, picked Christine up in front of Madeline’s house, because she was acting erratically, and brought her to rehab. After that, Madeline told Christine she couldn’t live with her anymore. Madeline was planning to move to a new apartment and wanted to make a clean break with her sister.

  “My job was done,” Madeline said. “I kept her away from my parents for six months and gave them a break. She was really sick. I tried my best to keep her away from the drugs. I had her placed in a rehab facility, but two weeks after I moved, she was knocking on my door. I was so angry, but I wasn’t taking her back. I had a fifteen-year-old daughter, who had to watch her go through this for six months. When she tried to come back, she was still doing drugs, and I didn’t appreciate it.”

  After Madeline reported Christine missing, police figured she was dead. And they “liked” a guy named Timothy Scanlon for her murder.

  About a year before she disappeared, Christine Dumont had been attacked by a guy who offered to give her a ride. It was 1:05 A.M. on April 11, 2003. Christine was walking down Arnold Street when a guy in a white car stopped and asked her if she wanted a ride. She told him he could drive her to the Fairmount Project and got in his car. The man drove down Arnold Street, turned right at the old Weiner Palace and then turned right again, onto River Street. As the couple drove down River Street, Christine looked at the guy’s arms and commented on all the tattoos he had. When they got to the Fairmount Project, the man just kept driving down River Street past the Double J Tavern.

  Christine told the man to stop the car because she wanted to get out, but he kept driving. So she opened the door, but he yelled at her to close it. Christine didn’t listen; instead, she put her feet outside the car door and thought about jumping out. The guy kept driving down River Street, then made a hard right, trying to force the passenger side door to close. At that point Christine’s feet were dragging on the ground. After they crossed a nearby bridge, she jumped out of the car in an attempt to get away from the guy.

  But as soon as Christine jumped out, the guy stopped the car, got out and walked toward her. Then he grabbed her like a sack of potatoes, threw her in the trunk of the car and slammed it shut. The guy got back into his car and started driving to a nearby parking lot. Although it was dark in the trunk, Christine felt a soft bristled brush and a tire iron. She started banging and banging on the trunk, then pierced a hole in it, using the tire iron. She tried using the tire iron to pry the trunk open, but she just couldn’t do it.

  The driver stopped the car, got out and went to the back of the car. He began to open the trunk slightly, then closed it again. Each time he opened the trunk, he said, “Drop it, bitch.” The last time the guy opened the trunk, Christine hit him in the stomach with the tire iron. Furious, the guy grabbed her, pulled her out of the trunk and threw her on the ground. Then he started beating her with a pipe he had in his hands. He smashed her head again and again with the pipe. Christine was so weak she couldn’t even cover her head with her hands to protect herself. Finally the guy ran back to his car and got in. Christine thought he was going to turn around and run her over, but, instead, he just sped away out of the parking lot toward the road.

  Scared and bleeding, Christine stayed where she was until she couldn’t see his car anymore; then she started to crawl through the parking lot. She tried to get up, but she just kept falling down. She managed to walk down River Street in the middle of the road, trying to flag someone down to help her. Three cars passed by, but none of the drivers stopped. When she got to High Street, she called the police from a pay phone. She was hysterical, screaming that she had been abducted.

  Patrolman Kevin Greenough was dispatched to the scene a little after 2:00 A.M. When he arrived, he found Christine bleeding from the head. He noticed that she had blood on her hands and a number of lacerations on the top of her head. He called for an ambulance and then tried to find out what happened. Still hysterical, Christine just kept yelling that someone had hit her over the head with something metal. Then she clammed up and refused to say anything else about what happened. She figured the cops weren’t going to help her anyway. When paramedics arrived, they began treating her, then took her to Landmark Medical Center.

  Greenough then called in the suspect’s description and all officers were instructed to be on the lookout for him. Soon another officer, David Antaya, met Greenough at the scene and told him there had been a similar assault about a month earlier. Antaya said as soon as he had heard the broadcast regarding the suspect, he went to the dirt pa
rking lot on Singleton Street, where the previous assault had occurred. While there, Antaya discovered fresh drops of blood on the ground, near what appeared to be tire tracks in the dirt lot. Greenough and Antaya then went back to the parking lot, where Antaya pointed out the tire tracks and the blood drops.

  Greenough went to the Landmark Medical Center to talk to Christine again. This time she told him everything that happened. She described her assailant as a white male with short reddish brown hair and a goatee, between thirty and thirty-five years old, about five feet six inches to five feet nine inches tall. She said he was wearing a cream-colored button-down short-sleeved shirt with pinstripes, black khaki pants and a cheap gold watch on his left wrist. She also described the guy’s car for Greenough. She said she had never seen him before and had no idea who he was.

  While Greenough was talking to Christine, Antaya had called the station to request an officer from the Bureau of Criminal Identification to process the scene. Detective Gerard “Gerry” Durand arrived around 3:15 A.M. and met up with Antaya, who directed him to the crime scene in the rear of an old mill building on Singleton Street. Although the area was hidden from the roadway by brush, the river and the building itself, it was illuminated by several outside security lights attached to the building.

  Antaya told Durand he had already checked out the scene and discovered several pieces of evidence. Antaya then pointed out a beer can that had been used to mark off an area on the ground where officers had found blood. He also showed Durand fresh bloodstains on the ground in another area of the parking lot and some tire tracks in the dirt and grass around the corner of the building. Unfortunately, the tracks indicated that there was very little tread on the tires, which meant they couldn’t be used as evidence.

  After viewing the area, Durand went back to his car to get his camera and other equipment so he could process the scene. The first thing he did was photograph an area in the parking lot where it appeared there had been a struggle. While he was taking pictures, he noticed two open condom wrappers on the ground in the same area; so he photographed them, then picked them up to take back to the crime lab.