An Ordinary Guy

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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.”