Jeffrey Mailhot was born in 1970 and was a machinist. His parents divorced when he was nine, his mother died of lung cancer when he was seventeen, and his father of the same disease when he was twenty-two. His photograph is missing from his 1989 high school yearbook, with the words camera shy printed beside his name. Former classmates and neighbours remembered a man who kept to the back of the room, while a small circle of friends described him as generous and good-humoured. A woman who dated him said she could have said nothing bad about him up to the day of his arrest.
He lived at 221 Cato Street in Woonsocket, in a four-unit house where the other flats had emptied one by one until he was alone in the building. Around the corner was Arnold Street, where women worked, and he picked women up there.
Audrey L Harris, thirty-three, disappeared in March 2003. Christine C Dumont, forty-two, followed about fourteen months later. Stacie K Goulet, twenty-four and reported to have been pregnant, vanished on July 3, 2004 after a fireworks display. Each was killed in his flat, strangled with his hands. He then cut the bodies up in his bathtub, put the parts into small refuse bags and dropped them into commercial dumpsters around Woonsocket and nearby towns, reasoning that small bags would not be noticed.
He was not caught by the murder investigations. Two women he had attacked in the same way had survived and complained, and on July 16, 2004 he came home from work to find officers waiting with a warrant for assault with a dangerous weapon, the weapon being his hands. Their accounts were almost identical: each had gone to his flat expecting a drink, found herself in a chokehold, and then been released and told to leave. The magazine account of the case says that perhaps a dozen women narrowly escaped him.
In the interview room he denied ever picking anyone up, then admitted it. Detectives then laid photographs of the three missing women across the table. He said he did not know any of them, and added that he had never killed anybody, which was not what he had been asked. One of the detectives, who had learned earlier in the interview that both his parents were dead, told him that those women's families could not bury or mourn them. Asked what had happened, whether he had pushed it too far, he said yes, it went too far. His confession ran to six hours of videotape.
Only Goulet's remains were ever recovered, from a landfill at Johnston, after a search in which about thirty officers spent ten days raking through debris. Investigators found the saw in his flat, together with saw marks on the bathtub and blood from the victims. He had bought the saw on July 4, 2004, the day after Goulet disappeared, and the groove marks on it were consistent with marks on her arms.
He pleaded guilty on February 15, 2006 to three counts of first-degree murder and two of assault, and was given three life sentences, two of them consecutive, plus ten years. Members of the victims' families gave evidence at the sentencing. Goulet's father showed him a photograph of her two children. Her mother said she wanted to know where her daughter's body had been left. Reports at the time noted that even with that sentence he could eventually be eligible for parole.
He made no plea for mercy, saying that nothing he could do would take away the pain he had caused.
Stacie Goulet's age is given as both twenty-four and twenty-five in the reporting.