photo gallery

Jeff Mailhot strangled three young women, dismembering his victims with a saw. Mailhot then tossed the women's remains into trash bags which he discarded in area dumpsters.
 

An Ordinary Guy

By John Larrabee and Russ Olivo - Rhode Island Monthly

May 2007

Anyone traveling down Woonsocket’s Arnold Street in the afternoon or evening will likely see a few hard-looking women making eye contact with passersby, each hoping a lonely guy will stop to help her collect the freight for one more toke on the pipe. Occasionally a deal is struck, and — seeming oblivious to the risk — a woman rides off with a stranger.

Jeffrey Mailhot had stopped along the ramshackle strip of tenements and bar rooms more than a few times. The thirty-three-year-old machinist would usually invite his pay-for-play dates to his bachelor apartment, just around the corner on nearby Cato Street. As with so many things in his life, the pick-ups were something he kept strictly to himself.

But no secret stays secret forever. On July 16, 2004, Mailhot returned home from work and found officers waiting to arrest him. Soon he was seated in a small room at the Woonsocket Police Station, and detectives were lobbing questions his way.

“Ever picked up a prostitute?” Detective Sergeant Edward Lee asked.

“I’ve seen ’em around,” Mailhot said, “but I haven’t picked any up…. I mean, I picked up a girl I thought I’d seen before. I thought she needed a ride, but then she propositioned me, so I let her out.”

His interrogators knew otherwise. Mailhot was in custody on a warrant charging him with assault with a dangerous weapon — in this case, his hands — and the complainants were two women he’d met on Arnold Street. Their stories were remarkably similar. Each told how she’d gone to his place expecting drinks and relaxation, but instead found herself squeezed in a choke hold and gasping for air. Each time the attack ended with him releasing his grip and telling his victim to leave.

The detectives had also pulled several pictures from the missing persons files, showing three women who had once been familiar faces on the street. If Mailhot liked playing rough with hookers, they reasoned, maybe he could explain a disappearance or two. After all, it would be very easy for his game to take a wrong turn.

Lee gave Mailhot a hard look.

“This is serious stuff,” he said, “so try to be as truthful as possible. If you picked up a prostitute, you picked up a prostitute. If you’re embarrassed, we don’t really care. We’re trying to get to the bottom of something. But if we start out like this, where it appears you’re not telling the truth, it doesn’t look good for you.”

“It goes downhill from there,” Detective Sergeant Steve Nowak added.

Mailhot responded with a nod.

“Ever pick up a prostitute?” Lee asked again.

“Yes.”

The questioning continued for another half hour. Then Lee opened a file folder and spread the pictures he’d gathered earlier across the table. There was Audrey Harris, missing sixteen months; Christine Dumont, gone almost two months; and Stacie Goulet, whose disappearance had been reported twelve days earlier.

Mailhot looked jolted. “I don’t know any of these girls,” he said.

“How are you so damn sure?”

“Because I never killed anybody. That’s what you’re getting at.”

“I don’t know if anyone in these pictures was killed,” Lee told him, “but they are missing.”

It was a eureka moment. The detectives knew they’d struck a nerve. Earlier in the interview, Mailhot had revealed that both his parents had died of cancer by the time he was twenty-two. Nowak seized on that.

“You know they had proper burials, that they’re in consecrated ground,” he said. “The families of these girls can’t mourn and say goodbye. They’ll have to live with that the rest of their lives — or until we get to the bottom of this.”

The only answer was a downcast look.

Lee spread out the pictures again. “What happened, Jeff?” he continued asking. “What happened? You just pushed it too far? Things got out of hand?”

Mailhot’s reply was barely audible. “Yeah,” he said with nod.

“What happened?”

“It went too far.”

They melt into the world like average nobodies, their dark secrets hidden by a mask of normalcy. They go to work, pay their bills, maybe relax with a beer now and then. They have friends who think they know them, but the only folks who really do are dead.

According to some experts, thirty to fifty serial killers may be prowling the United States at any one time.

Jeff Mailhot, one of the few to make Rhode Island his stalking ground, is nowhere near the top of the body count list. He dispatched three women with his choke hold; perhaps a dozen more narrowly escaped. By contrast, some serial killers have claimed responsibility for a score or more murders. Ted Bundy, for example, confessed to more than thirty, and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer of Washington state, pleaded guilty to forty-eight.

Nevertheless, Mailhot stands out as a textbook example of such a monster.

Criminologists have sketched a demographic profile, and he fits it to a T. The typical serial killer is a white male who first takes up homicide around age thirty. The majority target strangers or near-strangers exclusively. Though a few travel about, leaving bodies here and there, most operate within a specific locale.

Beyond that, Mailhot displayed a predator’s psyche. He killed not for money or vengeance, but for the thrill of it. He snuffed out lives with his hands (never a knife or gun) to savor every moment of his victims’ suffering and fear. He preyed on a specific group — prostitutes — whom he’d come to regard as less than human. And he concealed his horrifying depravity with an unremarkable, everyday routine: He could dismember a body, toss the parts in a Dumpster, and stop for a Bud on his way home.

Today Mailhot is behind bars at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston, and he’ll likely remain there the rest of his life. When folks in Woonsocket talk about him, they still use words like “quiet” or “nerdy” or even “nice.” Then they ask, how could he do that? The police case may be closed, but the real mystery remains unsolved.

Some possible answers turn up. You might hear them in the gossip passed around a Main Street lunch counter, or read them in a sociologist’s reports. And in his rambling confession (captured on six hours of videotape) Mailhot offers some himself.

Nothing sums up Jeff Mailhot’s social thumbprint better than the image he left behind in his 1989 Woonsocket High School yearbook — which is to say, none. There’s a blank spot where his photograph should be, with the words “camera shy” beside his name.

Even after the big headlines, most Woon-socket residents could remember little about him. In the days following his arrest, reporters scoured the city for details of his background, badgering co-workers, high school chums, and even prostitutes on the Arnold Street strip. Many seemed to know him, yet knew little about him.

“I’d see him at parties or in bars, always toward the back of the room, never out mingling,” recalls John DiChristofero, a former classmate. “That’s the memory most people would have of him.”

On Grandview Avenue, the leafy-green subdivision where Mailhot grew up, former neighbors could describe him only as a kid who kept to himself. A few thought they knew the reason: trauma and tragedy had filled his early years. He was nine years old when his parents divorced, seventeen when his mother died of lung cancer, and twenty-two when his father succumbed to the same disease.

If he barely cast a shadow in the city he called home, it was not for lack of trying. As he moved into adulthood, Mailhot strived to shake off the anonymity of his teen years. He swaggered about like a tormented Walter Mitty, trying on various macho identities. He bought a Harley Davidson and a leather jacket and tried to fit in with the crowd of weekend outlaw bikers. He cheered TV wrestling and took up weight training to build a physique like that of the tough guys in the ring. On karaoke nights at Box Seats, a local sports bar, he’d grab the mike and shout heavy metal anthems by Metallica or Kiss. “I wanna rock ’n’ roll all night…”

Yet no matter how loud he screamed, few noticed. “He really didn’t stand out in a crowd,” says a manager at Box Seats. “Bad or good, he never stood out.”

His attempted metamorphosis may have flopped, but somewhere deep inside him, changes of another sort were happening. After several years at his stepmother’s Lincoln home, he went looking for a place of his own. He ended up back in Woonsocket, at 221 Cato Street. There were four units in the aging Greek Revival house, but two were vacant, apparently awaiting renovations. For a time an elderly woman occupied the apartment across the hall. Then she died, and no new tenant moved in.

That left Mailhot in the building alone. He’d found a perfectly private cocoon. He did have a small circle of friends, who saw him as something other than a misfit or introvert. They remember a sensitive soul — generous, good-humored, sometimes even gregarious.

“The Jeff I knew was never quiet,” says a Woonsocket woman who dated him off and on. “He was always laughing. And no matter what someone needed, he couldn’t say no. Up to the day of his arrest, I could say nothing bad about him.”

Nor was he the guy in the corner nursing the same drink all night, as some Woonsocket bartenders have maintained. She recalls him sitting by a campfire and sucking down beer until his head was nodding and his words became mumbles. On those nights his friends took his keys and found him a place to crash.

Even through the good times, though, she knew something was wrong. Mailhot, she says, was more than a neat freak. She suspected an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Every item in his home, his car and even his pockets had to be in the right spot. He constantly checked his wallet to be sure every bill faced the same way, with the stack always a quarter inch above the leather. Visitors to his apartment were afraid to touch things, especially his carefully sorted CDs and DVDs. If they did, they knew he’d be on his feet a moment later, trying to look casual as he anxiously saw to it that everything was in its place.

Then there were his dark moods. She and other friends took note of the spare house key he hid outside his door, so they could get inside to check on him if need be. “Sometimes he wouldn’t answer the phone or come to the door for days,” she recalls. “It was like he dropped off the earth.”

One evening she confided she was falling for him, and was floored by his response: “He told me, ‘I’m sorry, I can never be in love with anyone. I’ll always be alone.’ ”

The emotional swings grew more intense in the months before his arrest. She remembers a night they were laughing out loud at a comedy video; a moment later tears were rolling down his face. “I asked him what was wrong,” she says, “and he told me, ‘I think I should be alone for the rest of my life.’ ”

Despite his quirks and the shock and pain that came following his arrest, she has fond memories of the relationship. She talks of sitting behind him on his motorcycle, riding for miles until they spied some little place with a pool table. He called her Butterfly; she called him Bear.

She felt secure enough with him to introduce some risky business during sex. In passionate moments she would allow him to grasp her neck until breathing became a struggle. Then he’d let go, and she’d gulp some air.

“We both enjoyed it,” she says. “I remember telling him, my God, you look so psychotic when you do that.”

From time to time, as far back as the early ’90s, Woonsocket police had speculated that a serial killer could be preying on the city’s prostitutes, who seemed to disappear with a grim sort of clockwork. In the summer of 2004, with three women gone in seventeen months, the notion was once again making the rounds. “Just because there was nothing,” Nowak recalls. “They just disappeared. We had no clues. No suspects. They just kind of vanished. So it was always in the back of your mind.”

But Nowak and Lee were not entirely convinced. In the past, police had always been able to pin down the sporadic deaths as isolated cases. Often the streetwalkers were victims of their own high-risk lifestyles. Probably, it would turn out the same with Harris, Dumont and Goulet.

The break came in mid-July, with a tipster’s call to police headquarters. He suggested detectives contact Jocelyn Martel, a local woman with an arrest record for drug offenses and prostitution. They found her at a detention center, awaiting trial.

Martel told of a harrowing encounter with a man who offered cash for sex, and then attacked her inside his apartment. Her description of the building and its location matched 221 Cato Street. The detectives got Mailhot’s name from utility bills, and his picture from the DMV. They showed her a photo spread, and she picked him out as her assailant.

In the days that followed cops tracked down several more women who described similar assaults. One joined Martel in signing a complaint. That was enough to get an arrest warrant.

But their first encounter with Mailhot knocked Lee and Nowak off balance. He seemed more milquetoast than multiple-murderer. He was polite, friendly, soft-spoken. His police record was clean. His landlord called him the ideal tenant, a guy with a steady job who always had the rent check. Though weightlifting had packed some muscle onto his five-foot-three-inch frame, his fair complexion and cheeky face gave him a Campbell Soup Kid look.

“He had the whole Jekyll-and-Hyde thing going,” Lee remembers. “Everybody he worked with loved him. The landlord, he’s yelling we should leave the kid alone. We thought, maybe he had something to do with one of them, maybe two of them, but no way is this guy a serial killer.”

Then Mailhot buried his brush-cut head in his hands and began to talk.

“I just want to be totally honest,” he said. “I don’t want to hide any more. I don’t want this shit inside me anymore. I want to do what I have to, to help the situation, any way I can, and I want that to be my last act. I’m not expecting forgiveness.”

As the minutes ticked by in the spare interrogation room, Mailhot recounted his adventures in Woonsocket’s night town. Over the years, he said, he’d picked up perhaps thirty prostitutes. Most trysts took place at his apartment, where privacy was guaranteed. He couldn’t recall exactly how many women he’d throttled, but he guessed ten or twelve had survived and escaped. Mailhot’s words picked up speed as he recalled the attacks. At one point he rose to his feet to demonstrate his squeeze technique. He held his left arm in front of his chest, as if grasping a victim, and gripped his wrist with his right hand. “I lean back,” he said, “so it puts more pressure on their neck.” With minimal prodding, he provided details on several chokings. On two occasions his victims fell to the floor unconscious; both were back up in minutes, and neither wasted time getting out the door. Another who got away stood outside shouting that she had a cell phone and she’d dialed 911; the cops never showed. One woman convinced him to back off by playing the submissive slave. “She’s standing in the bedroom saying, please, master, please let me go,” he recalled. “I think she offered my money back.” “Any of these girls fight back? Any of them cut you or anything?” Lee asked. “A couple of scratch marks,” Mailhot replied. “One of them, she gouged my eye to get away.”

Things finally spun out of control the night he picked up Audrey Harris. He was driving home after too much beer at the K2U strip club when he spied her on a sidewalk. He pulled up beside her and suggested a quick trip to his place. She agreed.

“I was gonna have sex with her, just straight sex,” he told the detectives. “She got undressed, I got undressed…I went to get her the money, she turned around, and that’s when I went up behind her and started choking….She was kicking, scratching, trying to get away. As she was losing her breath she stopped struggling. Then I let her go. I looked at her — her eyes were open, but she wasn’t looking at anything. I figured she was dying. That’s when I got the pillow. I suffocated her.” “So it wasn’t accidental,” Lee said. Mailhot insisted it was. “I didn’t want to do that,” he said. “But once I realized what was happening, I was scared to death. I had to finish it.”

By his own account his actions left him stunned for several minutes. Then he shook off his disbelief, dragged the body to the bathroom, and stumbled to his bed for a night of drunken slumber. The next morning he wandered to the toilet and was startled to see a corpse in the tub. The previous night’s events rushed back into his head. He called his employer to say he needed a day off. That evening he wrapped the body in a cheap rug and loaded it into his SUV. He drove about the city, searching for a place to dump his cargo, and then returned home, convinced it was too risky.

For two days the body lay in his apartment while he pondered how to make it go away. Then, like an episode from “The Sopranos,” he used a newly purchased handsaw to dismember it in the bathtub. An aerosol spray helped mask the smell, and a few drinks steadied his nerves.

The parts went into trash bags, and the bags into various commercial Dumpsters. No one would notice the small bags, he reasoned, and he was right. He made the drop offs under cover of night, but early enough to allow himself another stop at the K2U before bedtime. Mailhot picked up Christine Dumont some fourteen months later, and Stacie Goulet two months after that. Both women died in his apartment. Again, the bodies were dismembered and disposed of in trash containers. He no longer told himself the deaths were accidents. “Just an urge,” he said. “What are you thinking about when you’re driving around to get a prostitute?” Lee asked. “Sex or choking?” “Sex,” Mailhot replied. “What’s the biggest rush?” “I’d say maybe the actual getting them into my place.” “The door shuts, and …?” “You could say it like that.”

For nearly six hours the two detectives listened while a butcher described his deeds. Since that night they’ve looked back on the episode many times, and not surprisingly, they have their own ideas as to why Mailhot killed. “For him, it was all a fantasy,” Lee says. “He’d slip into this fantasy to escape his depressive world. And once he’s taken that final step, once he kills, he’s like an alcoholic. He’s had a taste, he’s addicted, and no way is he going to stop.”

It’s a bulls-eye analysis, experts say. Criminologists and psychologists have described the typical serial killer as a frustrated guy who dreams of being at the top in the pack. He stalks his victims to satisfy that desire.

“There is a thrill and tremendous power to killing, whether anyone admits it or not,” says Ronald M. Stewart, a forensic psychiatrist from Providence who has testified at numerous criminal trials.

“When someone doesn’t have much control over their own life, they might seek gratification this way. They become predators. They seek out targets of opportunity. Prostitutes are frequent victims because they’re just that — isolated, desperate people out on the streets.”

The alpha-dog-wannabee theory is endorsed by Jack Levin and James Alan Fox, criminology professors at Boston’s Northeastern University. In their book Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, they ascribe such a killer’s motivation to a need for power.

“One common trait among serial killers is that they’re losers,” Fox says. “If Jeffrey Dahmer had learned to bounce a basketball, maybe he could have been the popular kid, maybe he would not have killed seventeen people.”

“Killing is his way of feeling special,” adds Levin. “In a way he’s playing God.”

In that context, Mailhot’s fantasies about motorcycle rebels and TV wrestlers become something more than comical trappings of arrested male development.

“He was trying to replace his inadequacies with identities that imply power and control,” Stewart says. “That’s probably what he was trying to achieve the whole time.”

Many serial killers are sociopaths, the psychiatric term for a person with no capacity for empathy and no conscience whatsoever. But that label doesn’t fit every case, according to Levin and Fox. Some killers, they argue, neutralize their feelings of guilt by dividing people into two groups; those they care about, and those they victimize. And that may explain why Mailhot and others confess and express remorse when caught.

“They prey on people whom they’re able to dehumanize or devalue, maybe prostitutes, or the homeless,” Fox says. “They see their victims as less worthy, just as Nazi doctors were able to experiment on Ausch-witz inmates by dismissing them as vermin.”

“As long as he’s alone he can hold onto these wrongheaded notions that he’s ridding the streets of filth,” Levin adds. “But once he’s apprehended and he gets some feedback, the fantasy bursts and he realizes he’s done despicable things.” Some psychologists believe the killer’s need for dominance springs from chaotic events during childhood, such as abandonment or extreme abuse. Levin suspects that holds true for Mailhot. While his parents may have been kind and loving, their divorce and early deaths could have left him feeling lost and adrift. “We’re talking about frustration, catastrophic losses in this guy’s life,” he says. “I think that’s a key to understanding this.”

Throughout his confession, Mailhot himself tried to explain his motives, and his words jibe with the researchers’ theories.

He dismissed his victims with contempt and disgust. “Maybe I was doing them a favor,” he said, “because they were just killing themselves anyway…. They were just going down the toilet.”

He described his existence as purposeless, his world as dark and ugly. “It’s stupid for me to be saying this,” he said with a dry chuckle, “but with all the killings and all the bad and all the drugs, the world is someplace I don’t want to be…I know I’m not doing anything special with my life. I mean, I’d like to have a million dollars and do all kinds of things, but I don’t have the motivation.”

Lee and Nowak asked if he’d kill again if had the chance. “I probably would,” he said. “I probably would.”

A confession alone is no guarantee of a conviction; after all, a good defense lawyer will make every effort to discredit any incriminating statements. With that in mind, police quickly launched an exhaustive search for physical evidence.

Even before Mailhot concluded his grim account, officers from the Woonsocket Police crime scene unit were searching 221 Cato Street. At first glance they saw a typical bachelor pad, three small rooms furnished with mismatched hand-me-downs and all the latest electronic gadgetry. Before long, though, they uncovered signs of the slaughter as they darkened the bathroom, and then sprayed the tub, floor and walls with an aerosol can of Luminol. Every fan of “CSI” or “Crossing Jordan” knows the procedure: the chemical reacts with the iron in blood by producing a blue-green glow, and tiny traces that would otherwise escape the naked eye shine and become visible.

The bathroom light went off —and the investigators gasped. The porous grout lines between the tiles became a luminescent grid, revealing the gore Mailhot had tried to scrub away.

Out came the tub, out came the toilet, then floorboards, pipes, and sections of tiled wall. By the time the officers finished their work, all that remained of the bathroom was a hole gaping to the basement below. Every item and chunk of debris — carefully packaged and labeled — was headed to a state lab for forensic scrutiny.

The hunt for evidence didn’t stop there. The mop Mailhot used to clean the floor proved to be another trove of blood evidence. Investigators seized his home computer, too, to determine if he’d ever discussed his crimes on Internet sites. (He hadn’t.) They also grabbed a Halloween party snapshot; it showed their suspect dressed as a TV wrestler and choking a teddy bear.

In the basement, officers found a handsaw that matched Mailhot’s description of the ones he used to cut up the bodies. The officers then reviewed tapes from a surveillance camera at a local hardware store, and discovered footage of the suspect buying the tool just a day after the last victim’s disappearance.

From there the search moved to the street. Mailhot had told Lee and Nowak he’d disposed of a latex glove and some small body pieces by flushing them down the toilet. With that in mind, investigators launched a probe of the sewer line outside his building. They first explored the pipe using a small video camera attached to long cable. What they found was an infestation of tiny worms apparently attracted by high-protein material coming down the drain.

A public works crew then dug up several feet of the sewer line. For all that effort, the pipe proved to be a dead end. The lab team determined Mailhot’s diet had provided a feast for the worms; he’d been sucking down protein shakes to help him bulk up at the gym.

At the same time some two dozen local and state officers were scouring the Central Landfill in Johnston. Armed with garden rakes and dressed in protective coveralls, they combed through tons of rotting garbage, a stinking, sweaty task in the July heat.

Twelve days after Mailhot’s arrest an officer-in-training tore open a plastic trash bag and found human body parts inside. The state medical examiner collected DNA material and compared it with samples from relatives of the three missing women. The procedure produced a match, and investigators were able to tell Stacie Goulet’s parents that they had found the remains of their twenty-five-year-old daughter.

While the landfill search turned up nothing of Harris or Dumont, similar DNA tests on the blood evidence from the apartment corroborated Mailhot’s confession.

By the end of their investigation, police had gathered more than 170 items of evidence. Not one piece was ever presented in court, however, as the defendant decided to forgo a trial. On February 15 of last year in Providence Superior Court, a teary-eyed Mailhot pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and two of assault. The judge sentenced him to two life terms plus ten years. He should be eligible for parole by age seventy-seven.

He made no plea for mercy. “Nothing I can do can take away the pain,” he told the court. “I hope God can give the families — both the victims’ and my own — some peace.”

Since Mailhot’s arrest, a few things have changed in Woonsocket, but not much. The cops who prompted him to confess have received promotions: Lee is now captain of detectives, and Nowak, a lieutenant. Buddy’s Cafe, an Arnold Street hangout some saw as a prostitute magnet, closed its doors after forty-eight years. The hookers and johns, however, have yet to retreat from the area.

The relatives of Mailhot’s victims continue to struggle with his painful legacy. ”I still get nauseous when I see garbage trucks,” says Steve Krieg, Goulet’s ex-husband and the father of her two children. “I try to not ride behind them.”

As for Mailhot, he’s adjusted to prison life, at least according to the letters he sends his ex-girlfriend. “He sounds upbeat,” she says. “I wrote back and asked, did you ever feel that way — that rage — with me? He said never.”

Murders in Woonsocket

By Michael Levenson - The Boston Globe

March 5, 2006

WOONSOCKET, R.I. -- He smiled at neighbors, sculpted himself at Power Shack Gym, and worked in a paper mill. Nights meant beers at Box Seats, the local sports bar, or spinning tunes as "Jazzy Jeff," a karaoke DJ, backed by his buddy, "Crazy Scott."

In Woonsocket, a blue-collar mill city of cheap furniture stores, neon tattoo parlors, and old-time lunch counters, Jeffrey S. Mailhot fit in like family. Chevy Blazer, buzz cut, and a love for the Rolling Stones: A nice guy, they all said.

All the while, he was killing women in his living room.

Between February 2003 and July 2004, Mailhot strangled three young women, dismembered them with a saw, tossed their remains in trash bags, and threw them in dumpsters.

Authorities say he would have continued killing, had he not met Jocelin Martel, a 27-year-old brunette he picked up on the pitted streets where he trawled for victims. Now, as Mailhot, one of the worst serial killers in Rhode Island history, begins a long prison sentence, people are calling Martel, a prostitute with a history of drug addiction, a hero. As everyone from the attorney general to the lunch crowd at Simply the Best Bakery on Court Street hails the end of Mailhot's bloody reign, Martel has emerged as the unlikeliest of hometown saviors.

Mailhot, 35, had never had so much as a parking ticket when he began killing women. A graduate of Woonsocket High School, he lived in a first-floor apartment in the back of a large green house with a brown picket fence, high on a hilly side street downtown. He collected DVDs -- ''Platoon," ''Spider-Man," and ''Hannibal" -- kept an electric guitar by his bed and a Harley-Davidson in the yard. When police gutted his apartment after his arrest, they found blood under the floorboards and bathtub, a bench press and mirror in the basement, and in the fridge, Slim-Fast bars, Budweiser, and bottled water.

In February 2003, Mailhot was driving through Woonsocket when he found his first victim, Audrey L. Harris, 33, one of the prostitutes who worked outside the bodegas and Laundromats five minutes from downtown. He picked her up, drove her to his apartment, and almost as soon as he closed the door behind her, he turned, put his hands around her neck, and choked her to death.

Unsure what to do next, he stayed with the body for a day and a half, until ''The Sopranos" gave him an idea, he later told police. He watched an episode in which Tony Soprano kills Ralph Cifaretto and then looks on as a goon dismembers Cifaretto with a saw in a bathtub. Mailhot drove to a hardware store, bought a bow saw, and used it on Harris in his own bathtub. He threw the saw and bags of remains in dumpsters in Woonsocket and other communities.

Then it was back to work at PROMA Technologies in Franklin, Mass., back to the weights at Power Shack Gym, back to Alex Market, a bodega near Box Seats, where he shopped.

''You know, everything you did for him, he said -- 'Thanks,' 'Thanks a lot,' 'Have a nice day,' " said Alex Castillo, 40, the market's owner.

''I'm telling you, if anybody come in here and [said] this guy is a killer, I'd say, 'No way, forget it.' This guy was always clean, never dirty or smelling anything like that, just normal people."

Fourteen months after killing Harris, Mailhot murdered Christine C. Dumont, 42, another prostitute. He followed the same grisly routine, picking her up in his Blazer, strangling and dismembering her, and getting rid of her remains in dumpsters.

Neighbors recall seeing Mailhot looking crisp in the mornings before work.

''He was clean-cut, he was in good shape," said Joe Pamula Jr., 53, a guitarist who lives in a white bungalow next door. ''I never thought, 'You have a nutso living two doors down from you.' "

Although relatives reported Harris and Dumont missing, detectives had no idea where the women were, said Police Captain Luke H. Gallant. The women seemed to have vanished.

''The reason Jeff Mailhot got away with this, and the reason why we were chasing our tails, is not because they were prostitutes, it is because they got into a car willingly, there was no fight on the street, there was no abduction, there was no neighbor who would look outside and see a man and a woman having an argument," Gallant said. ''They got into a car willingly, and anybody who saw that wouldn't think anything of it. And they were gone, they were just completely gone."

In June 2004, Mailhot was cruising for his next victim when he found Martel standing at night outside Thundermist Health Center, a clinic for the poor in Woonsocket. He asked her if she wanted to go home with him, and they arranged a price for sex.

In an interview, she recalled that they walked up the steps to his apartment, and he let her in. The place was spotless, the remotes to his entertainment center lined up by size on the coffee table. Martel looked at Mailhot. ''Do you want to go to your room or the living room?" she asked. When she turned away, he lunged from behind, and began choking her. But she fought back. She butted him with her head. He stumbled back, and she jabbed him in the eye with her thumb. And then she fled.

''He was hurt," she said last month in a Cranston prison, where she was finishing a 10-month sentence for a probation violation related to a drug conviction. ''He really wasn't trying to get up to go after me, so I just ran out the door."

A month after their encounter, Mailhot murdered Stacie K. Goulet, a 24-year-old prostitute, after picking her up at a Fourth of July fireworks show at a Woonsocket park. Again, he bought a saw, dismembered her, and discarded the remains.

Police were desperate for leads when a few days after Goulet was killed, Detectives Luke Simard, Steven Nowak, and Edward Lee received an anonymous call from a man on a police tip line: ''Police might want to talk to Jocelin Martel," said the caller, who was never identified. The detectives located Martel at the Gloria McDonald Awaiting Trial and Medium Security Facility in Cranston.

''Jocelin was the one that prompted really the whole investigation," said Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch of Rhode Island. ''That's what really sets in motion a full understanding of just how evil he really was."

Sitting with Martel in prison, detectives asked about the disappearance of Harris, Dumont, and Goulet. Although she did not know their whereabouts, she recounted her own ordeal. She told them about a short man in a green house not far from downtown who had choked her. Later, she identified Mailhot in a photo and signed a criminal complaint accusing him of attacking her.

In their investigation, police located Teese Morris, another prostitute who was choked at Mailhot's house in February 2004, and she signed a similar complaint. Three days after talking to Martel, on July 17, 2004, officers arrested Mailhot on the steps of his house.

At the Woonsocket police station, Mailhot calmly leafed through photos of known prostitutes, pointing out a few he knew, until detectives put photos of Harris, Dumont, and Goulet in front of him, and he cracked, police said.

''Oh, I know you think I killed those girls but I didn't," Mailhot said, according to Gallant, who saw a videotape of the interrogation.

The detectives looked at one another with mock surprise. ''What do you mean killed?" one of them said. ''We never mentioned anything about killed."

Over the next four hours, Mailhot sobbingly confessed to strangling Harris, Dumont, and Goulet and to attacking Martel and Morris. He told them about ''The Sopranos," the saws, the bathtub, the dumpsters. He said he didn't know why, after three decades of humdrum existence, he had become a serial killer.

''He said he was sorry, he didn't know why he did it, it was an urge that was bigger than him, and he was glad that he got caught because he knew he wasn't going to be able to stop," Gallant said. ''He didn't blame anybody for it, he didn't say, 'It's because my mother beat me up,' it's not that he hates his grandmother, he doesn't know why, and to this day I don't think he knows why."

Mailhot told police he enjoyed trapping his victims.

''His rush, for lack of a better word, was the act of closing his apartment door behind them," Gallant said.

Police traced the locations where Woonsocket's dumpsters are brought, and 30 officers spent 10 days raking through garbage at a football field-sized landfill in Johnston, until a cadet found Goulet's remains. Tearing apart Mailhot's apartment, they found the saw used on Goulet, saw marks on the bathtub, and blood from the victims. They tracked down a store video of Mailhot buying the saw at Lowe's in Woonsocket. The remains of Harris and Dumont were never found.

In Woonsocket, home to 44,000 people, 52 miles south of Boston, the disappearance of three prostitutes turned out to be the work of a planned killer, a lifelong resident.

When residents found out, Lynch said, ''it was panic."

''It was like, 'Oh, my God, where did I move to?' " said Lisa Boyd, 31, who moved to Woonsocket from West Warwick to start Simply the Best Bakery. ''How do you kill somebody and cut them up and never worry and wonder about their family and go to work everyday?"

When Castillo saw the kind man who bought soda at his store appear on the news, ''I got goose bumps," he said.

''The biggest surprise of my life," Castillo said. ''It's really confusing to see a quiet, nice person and after that discover that he's a criminal. I mean, wow. That was really scary."

Last month, Mailhot pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, one count of assault with the intent to commit murder, and one count of felony assault. Sobbing in court, he was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences plus 10 years. With probation, he could be released in 2047, when he is 77.

''He made an incredible step when he pled guilty," said Mailhot's lawyer, Robert B. Mann. ''He said himself, he could not bring anybody back and an apology wasn't enough, that's all he could do."

Last month, as Mailhot arrived at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston, Martel was preparing to leave. With an 11-year-old son, she said she was looking forward to staying clean and settling down to live with her mother in Woonsocket. She said she does not consider herself a hero. After years of dodging police, she wanted to help authorities stop Mailhot to protect other women on the streets of Woonsocket, she said.

''The reason I went out of my way is because if the shoe was on the other foot, I'm sure the girls would have [done] the same for me," she said. ''Even though we all had drug problems, we all had families and moms that loved us. I felt I had an obligation, because I got away, like I had reason. God did what he did for a reason."

City cops reveal how they stopped a serial killer from striking again

February 20, 2006

Mailhot Trial on Hold

Mailhot is accused of strangling three woonsocket women, dismembering their bodies, then throwing them in trash bins.

Judge delays Mailhot case

But the most valuable clues of all came from Central Landfill in Johnston, where more than two dozen state and local police officers, under a blazing July sun, combed through tons of rotting debris for a week. There, they unearthed physical remains of Goulet, the only one of Mailhot’s victims for whom police ever recovered recognizable body parts.

After the discovery, police formally charged Mailhot with the murders last July 29. He remains held without bail at the Adult Correctional Institutions, Cranston. State prosecutors have put him on notice that they intend to seek a sentence of life without parole, the harshest criminal sanction on the books in Rhode Island, which does not have the death penalty.