In June 2004 a woman Jeffrey Mailhot had picked up outside the Thundermist health center in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, turned away from him in his apartment and felt his hands at her throat. She headbutted him and poked him in the eye, and when he stumbled back she ran. She did not go to the police. They learned of it when an anonymous man called a tip line and said they might want to talk to her. She did not know his name, but from her description of the apartment detectives worked out who he was, and she picked him from a photograph. Another woman had earlier filed a complaint that he had attacked her.
Mailhot was born on November 9, 1970, graduated from Woonsocket High School, worked at a paper mill, and lived in a first-floor apartment downtown. He had no criminal record, and neighbors knew him as quiet and polite. In early 2003 he picked up Audrey L. Harris, a thirty-three-year-old sex worker, outside a laundromat, took her home and strangled her as soon as they were inside; accounts date her disappearance to February or March. He kept her body in the apartment for a day and a half, then, he said, took the idea from an episode of The Sopranos, bought a bow saw at a hardware store, dismembered her in the bathtub and threw the bagged remains and the saw into dumpsters around Woonsocket and nearby towns. Her mother put up missing-person posters on utility poles.
About fourteen months later, in April 2004, he killed Christine C. Dumont, forty-two, the same way. In July 2004 he picked up Stacie K. Goulet, twenty-four, after a Fourth of July fireworks show in a local park, and killed and dismembered her too.
Police arrested him on the steps of his home in July 2004, and within hours he confessed to the murders and the other attacks. He appeared remorseful, said he enjoyed trapping his victims, and said he was glad to be caught because he knew he would not be able to stop. Investigators found Dumont's and Harris's blood in his bathtub and the saw he had used on Goulet, and store surveillance video showed him buying it at Lowe's. Tracing the dumpsters, they searched a landfill in Johnston for ten days and found Goulet's remains. The remains of the other two women were never found.
Charged with three counts of first-degree murder, one of assault with intent to murder and one of felony assault, he pleaded guilty to all five in February 2006 and was sentenced to life terms plus ten years; accounts give the date as February 15 or 16 and describe the sentence as two or three life terms. He is held at the maximum-security prison in Cranston and will be eligible for parole in 2047, when he is seventy-seven.