Cold Case Files - The Deadly Stroll

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

When three women go missing in Woonsocket, Rhode Island - investigators follow a trail that leads them to the state landfill in search of human remains. Check out our great sponsors! Truebill: Don��t fall for subscription scams! Start cancelling today at Truebill.com/coldcase  LifeLock: Join now and save up to 25% off your first year by going to LifeLock.com/coldcase  Prose: Take your FREE in-depth hair consultation and get 15% off your first order today at Prose.com/coldcase  Shopify: Go to shopify.com/coldcase for a FREE 14 day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features! Credit Karma: Head to creditkarma.com/loanoffers to see personalized offers with your Approval Odds right now!

Thank you for listening to this Podcast One production, available on Apple Podcasts and Podcast One. In 2003, three women from Moonsocket, Rhode Island, went missing without leaving a single clue behind. The women were sex workers, known to work on the corner of High and Arnold Street. The police started their investigations on that same corner. From there, the case would take several twists and turns. Eventually, though, they found the information they needed, which took their search to the Rhode Island landfill. They were on the lookout for garbage bags

containing human remains. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. I'm Brooke, and here's the accomplished Bill Curtis with a classic case, the deadly stroll. The amount of trash that was here, just realizing, I mean, you're kind of, in essence, looking for a needle in a haystack, I guess you can say. On July 27, 2004, Officer Steve Fairley heads out to the state landfill with a team of officers and a backhoe. Basically, what we were looking for was several black bags wrapped several times with yellow ties. And that was supposedly dismembered body parts in those bags.

For seven days, officers dig for the remains of three women. Finally, Fairley catches a break. When I did open it, it was kind of, you know, a little shock to me. I saw the remains of a scalp, a crushed scalp. I believe it was two forearms. The skin was removed, the bones were crushed. The discovery will seal the fate of a serial killer, one who found his first victim in the spring of 2003.

Right now on my main street, I'm heading to the corners of High and Arnold. That's an area where prostitution activity is extremely high in this city. Paul Savini is a detective with the Wound Socket Police. In April of 2003, he works the missing persons case of a local prostitute. Her name was Audrey Harris. She was in her 40s, a black female.

I interviewed and spoke to several prostitutes that worked that area that I was familiar with. The reason I did that is because prostitutes are street people. They're out on the road 24-7. They're the best source of information a police officer can have in trying to solve a case. But with this case, it was totally different. Nobody had seen her or heard of her for a week or so. The lifespan for a prostitute working a street corner in Woonsocket is typically five years.

It's a tough business, and many simply don't survive. John will pick them up, and you don't know the individual. They don't have no clue who this individual is. They just jump in a vehicle with this guy, perform what they have to do just to get the money to go back out on the road and buy their narcotics. It's an extremely dangerous lifestyle that they're living. But this one here was like just a dead-end street. No matter what leads we got to investigate, it always came up empty-handed. A month after Audrey Harris goes missing, her case remains unsolved when a second woman disappears off a Woundsocket

Street corner. My partner and I were assigned a missing persons case on a Christine Dumont. She was a 42-year-old white female, reported missing May 3rd of 2004. One of the problems we ran into was her sister that reported her missing had last seen her April 23rd. So we had about a 10-day span from when she was last seen to when it was brought to our attention that she was missing and there might be something, you know, something going wrong. Like Audrey Harris, Christine DeMont is a woman on the edge, a drug user who has worked the streets for years and is now missing. You're not getting a feeling like there's going to be a happy ending to this,

but there's just nothing to go on. Lieutenant Kyle Stone hits the streets. This was an area that Christine frequented throughout my years on the job. It wasn't uncommon to see her walking these streets, perhaps, you know, going from bar to bar. You know, as each day went by, the longer a case goes, the colder and colder the trail goes, and you became less and less optimistic

that you were going to get anything solid to go on. It was very frustrating, very sad. Like Audrey Harris, Christine Dumont is simply gone. And like Audrey Harris, her disappearance finds its way into the cold files. And I used to tell her, like, Stacy, you better be careful, you know, think about what you're doing.

But like all kids, one in one, not the other. Debbie Berger worries about her daughter, Stacy, a good girl who fell in with the wrong crowd. I think she was looking for fast money and got up in the wrong situation and liked the cash, but didn't like what she did. In July of 2004, a mother's worst fears are realized when Stacy's boyfriend files a missing persons report with police.

He says, Stacy's missing. I says, what are you talking about? He said, yeah, she didn't come home last night. That's it. It's like she disappeared off the face of the earth. Sergeant Edward Lee catches the case. It was actually July 4th. There was a fireworks display, and she was with her boyfriend there. And he'd last seen her walking up East School Street towards North Main Street, and he had not seen her again.

By now, it's a sad yet familiar story. Three street girls in the city of Woonsocket vanished in less than two years. Could this be a serial killer? You hear the word thrown around a lot and everything, but you never think it could happen in a community like this. Lee shares his suspicions with his partner, Sergeant Steve Nowak. The people who were missing, we knew that they were arrested before for prostitution. We know that's a high-risk endeavor.

The pair dig into the three cases and quickly ID a pool of suspects. We really had no other suspects other than a potential John. We want to know everyone that's coming into the city picking up these prostitutes. You know, it was going to be a long, tedious process. On July 15th, Lee and Nowak hit the streets and set up a John sweep. This is an area that we decided that we would send decoys out,

undercover police women, to try to pick up Johns. Want to have a party? I love to party. What are you looking for? Everything? Within just a few minutes, prospective Johns begin to approach the undercover officers. There was probably 15 or 20 contacts within an hour or two. I'm working, sir. I got to make my money. What do you want?

Mail job? What's your house? Morning? She was wired so we could monitor her. We had a couple of guys in one vehicle across the street from her with tinted windows. We could hear everything that was said between the two. When we heard that a transaction had taken place,

we would radio them, they would move in, and stop the car and take into custody the customer. Although the sweep amounts to little, an anonymous call to the PD gives detectives a fresh lead. The information was a phone call, an anonymous phone call, that said we might want to speak with Jocelyn Martell. Investigators Steve Nowak and Edward Lee received anonymous information about a sex worker who might be able to help them locate the missing women.

We're returning to the investigation to find out what information Jocelyn Martell shared with the investigators. Jocelyn Martell worked as a prostitute for more than eight years. I had a heroin addiction. I did it because I needed the money for my drug addiction. In July of 2004, cold case detectives sit down and listen as Martel talks about the night a trick almost turned deadly. He pulled up. I was walking on the sidewalk and he's like, you want to make some money? And I was like, yeah, you know. We went into the house. We spoke about money for sex. I asked him where he wanted to go, and as soon as I turned my back to him,

he put his arm around my neck and started choking me. What I did was I banged my head back on his head, and we both fell backwards. And when we both fell backwards, I stuck my thumb in his eye. And he let me go, and I ran out the door. Jocelyn survived the assault but never reported it to police. It's unfortunate a lot of times they think that the police aren't going to help them because of the lifestyle they're in that's certainly not the case. We're happy to get the tip and obviously with having nothing else to go on at the time, we were just happy to have something to follow up on. Jocelyn doesn't know her attacker's

name, but she remembers where he lives. The color of the house, and she described the shutters, the trim. She described how she got in. We were able to get that address, run it through our computer system, find out who lives there. The house is rented by 33-year-old Jeff Mailhut. He's nowhere to be found in our database. Not a ticket, not an arrest. Mailhut seems clean. Then detectives run his home address through their computers. We did a computer check, and then Eddie found that there was another case at that house that had happened several months earlier with another prostitute. Another prostitute who tells detectives about a John who tried to kill her.

Interview with Tease Morris. Time is 1428. My job was to contact Tease. We tracked her down. We spoke to her, and then when we explained to her what we were investigating, she gave us an in-depth account of what happened to her. Sergeant Edward Lee is investigating a man named Jeff Mailhut, a man Lee suspects has killed three streetwalkers and attacked at least two others. excited because she was actually with a clean-cut guy, a guy that seemed like to be a nice guy. He said, all right, you know, come in, have a drink. So I sat at the kitchen table,

you know, and we was talking and everything like that. I opened up a can of beer and I grabbed the napkin. And when I went to turn back around, he was behind me. He comes up from behind, gets her in a chokehold, and she has a violent struggle with him. She remembers the point of almost losing consciousness. The man grabbed me with his forearm and had me like this in a chokehold. I could not breathe, and I couldn't scream. So I'm thinking, oh, my God, I'm going to die.

I'm going to die. She just screams and pleads for her life, please, please, please, let me go, I won't say anything to anybody. He didn't say not one word to me. And I knew at that point my life was over. And I started crying, I'm saying, sir, please, I have a baby, my money's in my pocketbook, please just don't hurt me.

She says this, gives him this cold stare, and just tells her to leave. And she walks out the apartment. I don't know why he didn't kill me. I don't know why he let me go. He just said, get the f*** out of here. I don't want to see you around here no more. T's Morris is the second woman to allegedly be attacked by Mail Hot and live to tell about it. I mean, this guy's playing this game. He's already choked two girls. I mean, chokehold is a very, very dangerous move. If he tried it on these two, obviously he might have tried it on other girls, and maybe they didn't get away. And that was our whole theory. So, yeah, we had our arrest warrant and our search warrant, and we were very hopeful to get him in.

On July 16th, Sergeants Lee and Nowak head to 221 Cato Street and slip the cuffs on Jeff Mailhut. Just great anticipation. You're hoping he's going to talk. You hope he's not going to lawyer up. You hope he's going to go in there and tell us the truth, or just, hey, even if you're not going to tell us the truth, we want you to talk to us. Several brave women came forward with information

about a dangerous man who had choked and beaten them while working on the street. This information led the investigators to their lead suspect, Jeffrey Mailhot. Mailhot was arrested and taken to the police station to be interrogated. Let's go back to the case. Hi, Jeff. Any idea why you're here? No idea. No idea. In a small interrogation room, cold case detectives sit down with Jeff Mailhut. It's a game. You go into that room, and your sole purpose is to retrieve whatever he's hiding. You get this off your conscience, it's going to be like someone left in a fucking car with you back.

I've been seeing it a thousand times. What is it? I'm fine. You what? I've gotten a little physical. Yeah. Okay. What do you usually do? I choke them a little bit. Yeah? That's why I'm trying to get it. Okay.

I'm sure you feel better getting that off your chest. Mail Hut admits to choking prostitutes, but will go no further. It's never going too far. I've never killed anybody. You've never choked someone that didn't wake up? No. Detectives aren't buying Mail Hut's story. Lee switches gears and slides photos of three girls across the table.

I don't know any of these girls. No? Mm-mm. None of these is the ones that I had. You positive? That was a pretty quick look. When I threw those three photos down there, the three victims, he had an immediate reaction. You could see it all over his body, his body language, his expressions. He was very nervous, and he knew there was something there.

I've never killed anybody. That's what you're getting at. This is something these girls are killed for. He told us, you guys think I killed these girls. We had never told him that the girls were dead. We didn't know the girls were dead. So that was a red flag for us. That's when we really started hitting them a little harder

with, you know, the questions we were asking. I hope you know the truth, because you're playing stuff and you're a vomit. I'm going to have anything you know about DNA and all that stuff. Detectives are walking Mailhot closer and closer to the very edge of a triple homicide. It was apparent that he was going to give it up. I mean, he was starting to cry, he was shaking, he would pause, long, unnatural pauses, like he was thinking, well, what should I do? You're playing a dangerous, dangerous game out there with these girls.

Any one of these girls could have ended up dead. Our whole resources, the state police resources are going to be put into this. We will scour your apartment. We will scour the neighborhood. We will scour every, we will talk to everybody. We will get to the bottom whether or not you had these girls in your house. Tears start to well up in his eyes that you can't see on the videotape, but sitting there

that's when you realize, you know, oh my God, he's going to confess to this. A little more than an hour into the interview, MailHot breaks. Jeff, your life will be over. Over, unless you get this off your chest.

I know you just pushed it too far. What happened? You pushed it too far one night, right? Things got out of hand? Yeah. All of them? All three? All three.

All right. Good job. Where are they? Where are they, Jeff? There. You're working so hard, and then when it finally comes, it's like, oh, my God, he's really done this. A million things are going through your mind,

your heart's racing, your adrenaline's flowing. Where are they? They're in garbage bags. Garbage bags? Where? I just dumped them in trash containers. How did you fit them in trash bags? He described how he did it. He did it in a careless, callous manner. At times, stopping, going to have a beer, going back in, finishing the job.

Mailhot says he cut up each victim in his bathtub, wrapped their body parts in black plastic bags, and threw them in dumpsters. I wanted to choke them myself. I mean, I could not believe that a human being could do that to another human being, but they did not deserve this. They were somebody's daughter.

They were somebody's mother. They had family. They had friends. Just before 9 p.m., Alehart is cuffed and led to a jail cell. With confession in hand, detectives believe their case is complete, that is, until the DA decides the state needs more. It's not enough for somebody to say, I did it.

You have to give some evidence that it occurred, and we didn't have the bodies. Where are they? Where are they, Jeff? Where are they? They're in garbage bags. Within minutes of Jeff Mailhot's confession to three murders, crime scene technicians work their way through his apartment.

We walk into the scene, and it doesn't seem like it's going to support a triple homicide with a dismemberment. You know, it's an orderly scene. You know, everything's in its place. And as you keep going through the scene, it's just strange. You know, his sock drawer, his socks are separated by color and folded up, and everything just is, it's just odd that this was the scene of a triple homicide.

But when Detective Jerry Durand heads to the bathroom, he uncovers the first pieces of murder. Now it starts to fit. Now we start looking closer, and, you know, small stains on the floor that just look like dirt or some sort of grease. You know, you look closer, and you do a presumptive test, and it's a blood stain. And we also did luminal tests on two mops in the linen closet

and we tested one of the mops and it just fluoresced. This is the tub taken from Mail Hot's apartment. In this tub you can see where the, actually the kerf marks or the saw marks are located where the cutting was done upon the body parts and went down into the tub. This is where the faceplate would have been. Underneath the faceplate, detectives find more traces of blood determined to be from two of the victims. We knew we had hit the jackpot, forensically, so to say, when we located blood.

Still, detectives want more. So we were interested in whether we could recover any evidence from the sewer pipes from the house. For two days, detectives tear up the street and snake cameras through the pipes, looking for human remains. In the end, the search uncovers nothing. I just dumped them in trash containers. Where?

All around in one socket. Yep. Where is she? She's, I don't know right now where she is, probably in a landfill right now. If Jeff Mailhot dumped his victims like trash, their remains should be at the local landfill. On July 19th, cold case detectives head out with a backhoe. It's kind of hard to believe the magnitude of what's behind me, but the size of the landfill, the amount of trash that was here, just realizing, I mean, you're kind of in essence looking for a needle in a haystack, I guess you can say. In Rhode Island, 96% of the state's waste ends up here, at the central landfill.

We're digging deeper and deeper in different areas, and we're able to spread that out amongst, say, a football-sized field area, and just sift through it, you know, one by one. It was a tedious task, and it was hot, dirty, it smelled. I mean, it was the worst of working conditions, I can say that. For six days, the team searches, but comes up empty-handed. On the 7th, Detective Fairley unearths a small black bag wrapped in duct tape. When I did open it, it was kind of, you know, a little shock to me.

I saw the remains of a scalp, a crushed scalp. I believe it was two forearms. The skin was removed, the bones were crushed, but I was able to decipher what was what, distinguish those amongst other body parts. The remains are eventually ID'd as Stacy Goulet, the last of Jeff Mailhot's victims. The remains of Audrey Harris and Christine Dumont

are never recovered. It's a somber thing that, you know, what you find, you're finding human remains, and, you know, it's sad, and it's an awful thing. But we were happy, you know, we celebrated because we knew we were bringing closure to this case. He was an atypical defendant, certainly an atypical serial killer. Patrick Youngs prosecutes Jeff Mailhot for murder. On February 15th, the defendant pleads guilty

to three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of assault. So he got life plus life plus 10 years. That's how it broke down. At sentencing, Mailhot addresses the packed courtroom. There's nothing I can do that's going to take away the pain of the action that I've done.

And I just hope that God can be famous in not only the victim's families, but my family, also peace, to be able to move on from this. He did apologize. I think that was sincere.

I don't know that he knows why he did these things. So I think he wanted to get it behind him as well. Due to my drug addiction, I was out trying to make money, and he picked me up, and we went to his apartment. Jocelyn Martell could have been Mailhot's fourth victim. Instead, she survived and helped put him behind bars. Martell is still trying to come to grips with the fact she escaped and her friends didn't. There's three women that are my friends

that are dead right now. You know what I mean? And one of them could have been me. I think I got away so I could put a stop to it and help all the girls and give the parents closure and the kids closure against what he had did so I could testify and make things right. To be truthfully honest, that's what I believe in my heart. I believe God spared my life so I could be here today and testify against Mr. Milhart. She was just like a guardian angel sent to save us all. Otherwise, I wonder if he would still be out there.

That's scary. All families are here today so we can get some type of closure by seeing you locked in prison for the rest of your pitiful life. One by one, friends and family of the three victims stand in open court and speak their piece. For Debbie Berger, it's a chance to express the loss of her only daughter. My daughter and I may not have always agreed on everything, but I never thought her life was going to be cut short by a vicious man like you.

Getting a chance to talk to him that day was just kind of like closure for me, just to say, you know, you're a dog, you know. I was like, how dare you, you know. Who made you God and decide that you're going to take someone's life? And he stated that he took these girls' lives because he felt they didn't have nobody that cared about them. I tell you, when we went to the courthouse that day, was he wrong?

Because these women had families, they had lives, they had kids. Jeffrey Mailhot is currently at the Maximum Security Prison in Cranston, Rhode Island. He's serving life for three counts of murder and 10 additional years for one count of assault with the intent to commit a felony. He's 48 years old, and he has no release date in sight. Cold Case Files is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McKamey Lynn and Steve Delamater.

Our executive producer is Ted Butler. We're distributed by Podcast One. Cold Case Files Classic was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by the one and only Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at aetv.com or learn more about cases like this by visiting the A&E Real Crime blog at aetv.com slash realcrime.