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This is Murder, She Told. True crime stories from Maine, New England, and small town USA. I'm Kristen Sevey. You can connect with the show at MurderSheTold.com or on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast.
Rita was paranoid. She kept to herself. She had a fear of crime. Despite this paranoia, though, she had regular dates with different boys, including an older photographer. Rita was just 17. She didn't drive and took public transportation everywhere. She worked the night shift at the Rhode Island Fabric Company from 3 to 11 p.m., and this would put her out around midnight, taking public transit home.
She would often run from the bus to her front door and arrive panting and out of breath because she feared that she was vulnerable walking alone at night. There were some other crimes against women in the area that may have contributed to her fears.
The newspapers reported a number of attacks on women in the year leading up to January of 1947. An assailant would drag women from the sidewalk into his car and rape them. The latest attack was on January 26th, a little over a week ago, when a 14-year-old girl on the way home from a movie was seized and punched by a man. She was able to fight him off and flee to safety,
The assailant had not been identified because he always wore a mask. By the end of 1947, Rita had moved out of her foster home and been reunited with her brothers at the home of her aunt and uncle. On the night of Friday, January 31st, 1947, Rita went to work for her evening shift, leaving the house at 2 p.m.,
At the beginning of her shift at 3 p.m., she collected her weekly wages of $34. Combined with what she had brought to work, about $5 or $6, she had a total of about $40 in her purse. At 4 p.m., she asked her supervisor if she could leave for a doctor's appointment, complaining of illness. But her doctor, Gerald Carreri, said that he didn't see her that night.
She also told her best friend, Teresa Patnaud, that she was feeling ill. She told her that she was planning to visit her mother at the Rhode Island State Sanatorium in Burrillville, approximately 40 miles away in the northwest corner of the state. Rita left some uneaten sandwiches at work, which suggested that she was planning to return to the mill. She also told her supervisor that she'd be back later. According to her time card, she departed at 5.27 p.m.,
It's unclear what happened exactly, but Rita never returned to work. That evening, her uncle, Thomas Luminello, went to a club meeting at Stella d'Italia that ran until midnight. When he returned home, he encountered his nephew, the 14-year-old brother of Rita, in the kitchen. Rita's brother didn't say anything about Rita missing, so her uncle assumed that everyone was in bed, and he retired. Neither of them knew that Rita hadn't returned.
By 1 p.m. the next day, Saturday, the Luminellos were concerned about Rita. At first, they figured she had stayed overnight with one of her girlfriends, something she'd done before. But when they called her work and discovered that Rita hadn't shown up for her regular Saturday shift that started at noon, they were alarmed. They decided to wait until the evening and mutually agreed that they would not bring it up to Rita that they knew she didn't go to work, perhaps to see what she'd say.
Unfortunately, that moment never came.
A man named Joseph Curry, who lived about three blocks away at 28 Warwick Road, was out walking on a trail that ran parallel to Ten Mile River. He was off of work from the bleachery and he would often hike through the woods. He spotted what appeared to him to be either a bundle of clothes or a rock that was unfamiliar to him. He took the trail regularly and recognized its features. On closer inspection, he realized that it was the body of a young woman.
He hurried to a nearby house and telephoned the police. When they arrived, he directed them to the clearing where he made the gruesome discovery. The muddy glen was difficult to reach, requiring that you go through a thicket of small trees, huckleberry bushes, and heavy vines. As they approached, their boots sank several inches into the mud.
Rita was gone. She'd been stabbed numerous times and was left for dead. She was found lying on her back, resting on her coat. She wore a light blue print dress with a white belt, yellow bobby socks folded over at the ankle, brown and white saddle shoes, a gold wristwatch on her left arm, and a light gray coat. Her arms were not in her coat. She was resting upon it. Her clothes showed no obvious signs of struggle.
Four feet from her body was a slender birch tree with freshly slashed bark, likely made with an axe. Rita's purse and her money were missing. So were her eyeglasses. But her wristwatch remained, leading police to believe that robbery was not the motive. Police searched the vicinity for clues while waiting for the medical examiner to arrive. Dr. Goddett showed up and gave permission for the body to be removed.
Police took her body from the clearing on a stretcher to a black hearse stenciled with the letters, Ambulance, which carried her to the morgue. Dr. Goddard examined her body that evening and said that he believed she'd been dead for no more than 12 hours, which would have put her time of death as after 4 p.m. Rita was stabbed more than 30 times in her throat, chest, and back. Her neck had been cut from ear to ear.
The doctor ruled her cause of death to be shock and hemorrhage from the stab wounds. One stab wound went through her breast and cut the heart. Another pierced the breast and tore a lung. Two in the back severed major arteries. He said that any four of those stab wounds would have caused her death. But he later said that the fatal stab wound was one of the three that went through her coat and into her back.
The wounds to her body corresponded with the cuts in her clothing, which suggested that she was fully clothed when she was attacked.
Her back had 13 stab wounds, but there were only three holes in her jacket, implying that after the first three pierced her jacket and dress, the killer removed her jacket and continued to stab her another 10 times through the dress alone. Because of the lack of blood in the marshy clearing and the fact that her shoes were free of mud, police believed that Rita had been stabbed to death elsewhere and her body taken to the nearby trail by car and carried to the clearing.
They were on the lookout for cars with bloodstains on the upholstery. She had no identification on her, so they were at a loss as to her identity. Around 4.30, a radio broadcast went out about a young woman's body found in the woods with a description. She was 5'3", weighed 120 pounds, and had brown hair.
Rita's uncle heard the broadcast and believed it could be Rita. After calling the hospital, the police and two detectives went to meet him at his home. Rita's uncle and his son accompanied the two policemen to the hospital and at 7.10 p.m. identified her body. Armand Lemos, a 20-year-old man who'd been courting Rita, arrived at the Luminello house early in the evening to keep a date with her, only to learn of her death.
The spa where her body was found was between Notre Dame Cemetery and Ten Mile River. From the back of the cemetery to the river's edge was a distance of 500 feet, and if you walked through the woods, you would cross two paths.
The first was a dirt road that ran behind the cemetery, barely wide enough for a vehicle the nearby residents said was used as a lover's lane. The second was an overgrown walking path that traversed the river's bank. It had been carved out by some local boys to gain access to a swimming hole off the river that they called Black Beauty in the summer. And it was between these two paths, the dirt road and the walking path, where Rita's body was found.
She was about 125 feet off the dirt road, which police had presumed had been used. The dirt road was accessible from nearby residential streets on either side of the cemetery, and it was assumed that someone either drove Rita there in their own vehicle or was dropped off nearby by a taxi or a bus. It was about two and a half miles from her work at the Rhode Island fabric mill.
The next afternoon, the medical examiner announced that he had submitted her vital organs to the state pathologist for testing to see if she'd consumed alcohol prior to her murder.
Rita's family looked through her things and discovered an old address book that contained the names and addresses of her girlfriends. They turned it over to authorities. Police continued to search the area for Rita's eyeglasses that she always wore, which were not found with her body, and her handbag, which contained about $40. They also searched for the murder weapon, a thin dagger called a stiletto.
Rita's boss and other employees said that she usually walked a block to Prospect Street to get a bus to downtown Pawtucket, and from there, transferred to another bus that took her to North Providence. From door to door, the trip from work to her home was four miles. Another worker at the plant said he took the same bus as her every day, and that Rita invariably sat alone, if possible, and rode without speaking to other passengers.
Police spoke to all of the city's bus drivers from Friday night, and there were several drivers that recalled seeing Rita. Her regular bus driver, who took her from the mill to downtown Pawtucket, said that he remembered, "...a girl with tortoise-shell spectacles and a light coat boarded his bus at 5.35 p.m. on Friday, which would coincide exactly with her 5.27 departure from work."
But the driver of the bus that ran from downtown Pawtucket to her home on Mineral Spring said that Rita was not on any of the three buses that he drove that night. After that, there were a few sightings between 6 and 9 p.m. from other bus and streetcar drivers, but none of them were on her typical route and may have misidentified her. After her bus ride from work to downtown, little could be certain.
Three days after Rita was found, the police chief said that they were without a single clue or suspect. But the mayor wanted all hands on deck. He ordered all officers to cancel their planned vacations and devote all efforts to solving the case. All male employees at the mill who weren't working on Friday night were questioned and cleared of suspicion.
Rita was laid out in an open casket at the A.A. Mariani & Sons Funeral Home in Providence. Plainclothes officers carefully observed the visitation.
No obituary was published for Rita Bouchard in the Pawtucket Times or the Providence Journal. Rita was born in 1929 or 1930 in North Providence. If she were alive today in 2023, she'd be 94 years old. Rita was the second oldest of five siblings. Altogether, there were two brothers and three sisters.
When Rita was just four years old while she was living with her parents in Pawtucket, she was out playing near the Mashawcick River. She lost her balance and fell six feet into its waters. Her friends ran to fetch help and found a 17-year-old boy who ran to the bank, dove in fully clothed, and pulled her out. She was semi-conscious. He administered CPR and revived her quickly.
It's unclear what, if any, long-term effect this had on her life, but it's easy to think that her later general fear and paranoia might be related to this childhood trauma. Her father soon became stricken with tuberculosis, and he went to live full-time at a medical facility called a sanatorium.
Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection that generally affects the lungs. It's still a huge problem today in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia. And in 2020, it was the second leading cause of death by an infectious agent behind COVID. The first sanatorium in the U.S. was built in 1896 with the promise of quarantine and recovery. A common mandatory treatment was daily fresh air, regardless of temperature.
There are strange but amusing photos of people sitting in rows of chairs on porches, bundled up in winter clothes, with their feet propped up, getting some air and sun. Tuberculosis is also known as consumption because of the pallor and weight loss of those afflicted.
Untreated active infections, even today, result in death 50% of the time. In the mid-1930s, in a dense area like Pawtucket, with crowded working conditions, Rita's father was likely vulnerable. It's spread through the air and is associated with poor sanitation.
When Rita's father contracted tuberculosis, effective antibiotic treatments hadn't been invented yet. It wouldn't come until 1946, and the public was keenly aware of the often fatal outcome. Half of all people that entered sanatoria died within five years.
Unfortunately, her father met that fate. He died in 1939 when Rita was nine years old at the Rhode Island State Sanatorium in Burrillville, and her mother wasn't far behind. Rita became a ward of the state, split up from her siblings, and not long after her father's death, her mother, too, went to Burrillville hoping for a better outcome.
During the war years, Rita and her younger sister Mildred lived with a foster mother, Mary Lewis, in Pawtucket. Her brother lived with her aunt and uncle, Thomas and Mary Luminello. Rita was a student at Baldwin Street School, but was grouped with other special needs children. At 15, she left school and started work.
Prior to working at the fabric mill, Rita was employed at a memorial hospital as a kitchen helper. When she left the hospital, her part-time kitchen job was given to her younger sister, Mildred.
Rita spent most of her time outside of work at the movies with her sister Mildred, or at home listening to the radio. Rita had worked at the fabric mill for approximately one year and was well-liked by her boss, Al Baric de Grease. She was obedient and conscientious, but frequently absent. According to her foster mother, Rita, who was 15 at the time, mentioned that she was
met an older photographer when he came to their residence to take photos of her soldier son who was home visiting from being overseas. She said she disapproved of him because of the age difference and forbade Rita to see him.
Despite this, Rita's best friend, Teresa Pattenod, said that Rita and Al went steady for some time without her family's knowledge. Mary recalled a time that she came home late from a work shift and confessed that the older photographer had brought her home. Mary said that her rule was that men had to come by the house to pick her up. Despite this transgression, Mary described Rita as quiet and obedient, but not quick-witted.
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In August of 1946, after having worked at the mill for nine months, Rita moved in with her aunt and uncle and reunited with her brothers. This is where she was living when she was killed. The address was 949 Mineral Spring Avenue in North Providence. Around this time, Rita took out a $1,000 life insurance policy on herself and named her younger sister Mildred as the beneficiary. That's $15,000 in today's money.
According to her uncle, Rita was a very good girl who didn't go out with the boys. She was very quiet and devoted to her siblings. Her aunt described Rita as very timid and expressed fears of being attacked by men. She read about them in the newspaper. Quote, Many nights she came up the stairs panting with fear. Rita customarily asked the bus driver who drove her home to ride past the usual stop so he could leave her directly at her door.
Her sister said that she was afraid of death not only at the hands of some man, she was even afraid of death in crossing streets where traffic was heavy. Her mother Dora, who was confined at the state sanatorium, also described her as a good girl with no bad habits. She spoke to the press and revealed that Rita was worried about violent death.
I suggested that Rita might go to New York to live with her married sister, but Rita said she didn't want to go because she was afraid she might be killed there and cause her sister a lot of trouble. At the time, I thought the statement odd, but I didn't take it very seriously. In a recent visit, Rita had confided in her a vague fear of being killed.
Her best friend described Rita as a nice kid who did not use makeup, was frugal, and saved her money. Her checkbook showed a balance of $311 at the time of her death. The only major purchase in the recent past was about two months prior to her death, a withdrawal of $100 on November 22, 1946, that was used to buy a fur coat.
Other regular entries included the sum that she paid the Luminellos, $10 a week, and the state gave them another $6 weekly. Despite being only 17, Rita was described by reporters as an attractive but spectacled brunette.
On Tuesday, a 17-year-old boy that worked with Rita at the mill, Raymond Pattenaud, was detained for questioning. Police had asked a judge to extend his detention another 24 hours, so it was going on 48 hours of questioning.
He had been off for two weeks because of illness, but he dropped in to see his sister at the mill on Friday, the day of Rita's disappearance, to borrow a dollar. He told the foreman that he would be returning to work as a dishwasher because he was feeling much better. His sister was Teresa Pattenod, Rita's best friend. He was friends with Rita from school and had been on four dates with her in the six weeks leading up to her disappearance.
He said that he saw Rita at work around 3.30 p.m., and he later went to a movie and took a long walk until about 11 p.m., when he got on a bus and went home. He wasn't around on Saturday morning when his family woke up, and he said that he'd been unable to sleep, so he left early around 6 a.m. to go to a restaurant for breakfast.
Though he had initially made no mention of it in his account to police, the cab driver said that he had given Raymond a ride on Saturday afternoon from Providence to Pawtucket. The cab driver also made note of a deep scratch on his neck and a conversation about removing bloodstains from a coat sleeve. Confronted by the cab driver, the youth defiantly admitted that he had been in his cab. Yes, I came out of Providence in a taxi. What of it?
On the basis of this story, police searched Raymond's home and found a small suit with bloodstains on the sleeve. The suit, which belonged to his brother, had a blood spot that was so small they didn't attach too much significance to it. Family members said the brother had stained the coat when he cut a finger. He was sent to a state pathologist for examination.
Despite the persistent questioning, Raymond remained unflappable and answered all questions with extreme politeness, a habit he had learned when he was at the Sakhanas at school, a school for kids that were, quote, idle, vicious, or vagrant.
Two days later on Thursday, a group of policemen conducted the most extensive search to date for evidence in the park that runs along Ten Mile River. They dragged the river, hoping to find the murder weapon and Rita's purse. The police also got permission from a judge to detain Raymond for another 24-hour period. Several calls came into the police station Thursday afternoon and evening.
One man who had a gruff voice and a foreign accent said that he had been hired to do the killing by certain men who he identified to police. He said that he stabbed her and cut her throat and left her body in a swamp. He refused to give his name, but police traced the call to Pawtucket. The acting chief of police said that it might be a crank call, but conceded that it wouldn't be the first time an egocentric murderer called the police to brag about his crime.
Another man with a squeaky voice said that he killed Rita for another man who paid him. He said that the man who hired him feared that Rita would tell on him. Lastly, a woman called the station and accused her estranged husband of killing Rita.
Police looked into it and learned that the man's whereabouts were unknown and that the wife wanted to find him so that she could serve him papers in connection with another pending case. Police believe she lied to enlist their help in locating her husband.
Raymond was finally released after having undergone more than 48 hours of police interrogation. Even though they had permission from a judge to hold him longer, they released him. His alibi was confirmed and police determined he was not involved with Rita's death.
Police said that the taxi driver told them that he'd picked Raymond up at 11 p.m. the night of Rita's disappearance and drove him about a half a mile along Prospect Street. Raymond, who had an affinity for taxi rides, said that he was looking for a girl who had been fighting with her boyfriend, a friend of his. He had hoped to mediate the situation.
After driving around for about 15 minutes, unable to find the girl, the taxi driver let him out near his home. Police located the girl and confirmed that her boyfriend was a close friend of Raymond's and that she was, in fact, angry with him. Also this night, a black-handled hunting knife, a type that was often used by Boy Scouts, was found in a diner's parking lot and turned into police as a potential clue.
The next morning, the knife was sent to a state laboratory for analysis, and by the afternoon, they had their results. The knife had no traces of blood. The marks on it were rust. It was ruled out as the potential murder weapon.
A week after Rita was murdered, police walked back their theory about where she'd been killed. They said it was possible she'd been lured to the spot by someone she trusted and killed there in the marshy clearing. They also said that it might be a woman who was responsible for Rita's death.
On February 18th, a thin dagger, about 12 inches long, called a stiletto, was discovered by an 8-year-old boy near the entrance of the Ten Mile River Park, approximately a half a mile from where her body was discovered. You can see photos of that knife on MurderSheTold.com. He and four other companions were on bikes. He told police that as he was walking near a bus stop, he
He kicked a hard object on the ground, along the inner edge of the sidewalk, and discovered it was a knife. The eight-inch-long blade was one and one-eighth inches wide at its center and tapered down to a sharp point. The black handle was four inches long and was capped off with a brass knob. The guard bent down on one side and up on the other.
The medical examiner said that the knife could have inflicted the wounds on Rita's body and that the stains could be blood. He turned it over to the state to do testing. The acting chief said that the knife was the best lead yet. The next day, a state pathologist and toxicologist said that the staining on the knife was, in fact, human blood. There was so little, though, that they couldn't determine the blood type. No fingerprints were found on the knife.
On February 20th, two days after the knife was discovered, a photo of it appeared in the newspaper, adjacent to a ruler with a precise description. The acting chief said, It's possible somebody lost this knife, or it was stolen. If so, we'd like to know to whom it belonged.
It was an unusual knife, and police were trying to determine if it was a relic from World War II from overseas, or if, perhaps, it was homemade. A couple of men came forward to alert police that they had seen a similar dagger in some homes they were working in. Police followed up the leads and admitted that the daggers were similar, but they were still in the custody of the homeowners.
Around this same time, Pawtucket police sent Rita's clothes as well as soil samples to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C. for analysis. Police said that olive-colored particles of cloth were found on her clothing. Sadly, shortly after Rita's death, her aunt and uncle were evicted, and Rita's brothers and sister were placed into foster homes and institutions.
On Wednesday, March 19th, a month and a half after Rita was found, Raymond Pattenod was apprehended by police on a sexual offense involving an eight-year-old boy. Raymond told police that he had dreamt several days ago that he had committed Rita's murder, so they decided to question him again. He said that he realized it hadn't been a dream at all, but a repressed memory. The Pawtucket Times printed the dream word for word.
I dreamed that the night of January 31st, when Rita disappeared, I went to a movie downtown, early in the evening. Then, all of a sudden, I turned around and there Rita was, sitting beside me. I said, let's go for a walk. We walked up Main Street and went to Collier's Park. We sat on a bench for a while.
Then an automobile pulled up and a man I don't know called out to Rita and asked if she wanted to go for a ride. She said alright, so we went to Slater Park and sat on a bench near the entrance. Then I wanted to come back downtown and I asked to be driven back. They dropped me off near a restaurant and the man asked Rita if she wanted to go back to Slater Park. Rita said she wanted to go back, so they left me.
After a while, I took a bus to go back and see what was happening to Rita. I got to the park, and there she was sitting on the bench. She was crying. I asked her what she was crying about, and she slapped my face and then kicked me in the groin. I passed out. When I came to, I found myself lying on the ground in the woods. I was so scared.
I turned and there was Rita lying alongside me. I called to her but she didn't answer. Then I noticed she was covered with blood and that a knife was near her. I got up and walked away. After a short distance, there was a small bridge and I leaned up against the bridge support. I was feeling tired. Finally, I got out of the woods, took a bus and went home. It was about 9.30pm by that time.
Raymond was a troubled boy. He was described as nervous, impulsive, and restless. At the full moon, he was said to become irritable and impatient and suffer headaches on the side of his head and his forehead. He left school at 15 years old when he flatly refused to go back. He was illiterate. The only thing he could write was his name.
When Raymond was 16, he was sentenced to nine months at the Sauconosset School for Boys on charges of stealing cars and committing, quote, immoral acts with boys and girls on numerous occasions. He had been released in September of 1946, five months before Rita's murder.
After his release, he spent time both at home and working in the mills. He loved taxicabs, being driven around, so much so that his father commented that he thought he spent too much money doing so.
Though the police were desperate to solve the murder, there were inconsistencies in Raymond's story they couldn't overlook. Raymond said that he awoke next to her in the dark, and the acting chief asked him if he had soiled his clothes. Raymond replied casually, Oh, I only had a couple of leaves on the front of my coat, and I brushed them off. The area where her body was found was a few inches deep with mud. It was the beginning of February in New England, and though the ground might typically be frozen,
there had been a couple of uncharacteristically warm days. The day of Rita's murder, the high was 61 and there were trace amounts of rain. The top layers of the ground would have thawed and become quite muddy. The fact that the mud didn't stand out in Raymond's dream and that his clothing was unsoiled seemed off.
Raymond was a very small boy, just 90 pounds. Rita outweighed him by 30 pounds. Police were uncertain whether she had been carried to the spot in the woods or walked there under her own power. One of the clues that pointed toward her being carried was that her shoes weren't muddy.
They ruled out the possibility that Raymond could have carried her there, though, because they figured that it would take someone with more strength to carry her body the considerable distance between the nearest parking area and the spot in the woods where she was found. Police asked him to describe the knife that he used. Well, it was about so long, he said, indicating with his hands a knife with a four-inch blade and a two-inch handle.
While it was possible that such a knife was used, it didn't match the description of the stiletto knife that had been found, which had an 8-inch blade.
Police walked to the murder scene with him and asked him to recall the position of her body. He said her head was pointed toward Ten Mile River, but police said it was just the opposite. Raymond made no mention of her missing purse or missing glasses in his story. He also didn't say that he took the murder weapon with him and a knife was not found near Rita's body. Police asked him, point blank, if he was responsible for Rita's murder.
And he replied, I don't remember. Maybe I did it. I don't know. I only remember waking up beside Rita, and I can't stand dead bodies. So I walked away. It was hard to believe that he was coming forward with this confession, that he had no recollection of the events leading up to the killing or the murder itself. But don't you realize this dream of yours is fantastic? A detective said in exasperation. Raymond stared blankly at him.
But most of all, the thing that discredited his story was the time of death. Raymond said that he left her lifeless body around 9 p.m., but the medical examiner said that she couldn't have been dead any earlier than 4 a.m. the next morning. The police chief believed Raymond needed mental care and sent him to a hospital for psychiatric treatment and tests.
Raymond was admitted to the Charles Chapin Hospital in Providence, where he was received by Dr. Goldstein, a psychiatrist and former administrator at what used to be called the Exeter School for the Feeble-Minded. Raymond would spend about three to four weeks there before being released to the juvenile courts to answer to his morals charge involving the young boy.
Doctors determined that he was learning disabled and had a psychopathic personality disorder. The doctor had no opinion on whether his confession was true. Though we don't have the full record of everything that Raymond said to police, they believed that the inaccuracies overshadowed any possibility that Raymond was the killer. He was never charged.
In August, the resident director at the Pawtucket YMCA reported Rita's sister, Mildred, as missing. She gave her description to authorities, and they sent out the word to the press. Mildred was found the next day. She had been out with a boyfriend the night before, and his car broke down, making it impossible for her to return to the YMCA.
The two detectives working the case traveled to North Carolina to interview an 18-year-old boy who was an inmate there. The chief said that he was acquainted with Rita. A couple of weeks later, the chief declared to the press that he was a definite suspect and that, according to jail authorities, some progress was being made to learn more about the boy.
Around this same time, Raymond made news again. He had escaped from the Rhode Island training school for boys, where he was serving a sentence for a violation of parole. Cranston police sent out an emergency broadcast over the radio to be on the lookout for him. He was described as 5'5", with light blue eyes and light brown hair, wearing khaki clothes. Five days later, Raymond returned on his own volition with no explanation.
Several months later, the police chief announced that a Rhode Island arrest warrant had been issued for the North Carolina boy, Joseph Paulus, on a charge unrelated to Rita's death, and that he would be brought to the state and questioned. Police said that he went to school with Rita and could be placed in Pawtucket in a stolen vehicle on the date of the murder.
In the springtime, about a year after Rita's death, he was brought up, and he did admit to stealing a car in East Providence on the night of the murder and abandoning it the next day in Providence. When the car was discovered by police, it had three broken windows. He also admitted to driving it along a street that was heading into Pawtucket, a street that Rita was known to be on when she waited for a bus.
He was wearing an army uniform that night, likely an olive drab color, on his way to attend a National Guard drill. His alibi, though, was confirmed. It was established that he had attended the scheduled drill, and other witnesses corroborated his story about being in another location several miles away from where the body was found. Shortly thereafter, Pawtucket police brought charges against Joseph for violating the terms of his deferred sentence.
He had already completed a year in North Carolina for auto theft before returning to Rhode Island and was given a three-year sentence in Superior Court.
In January of 1949, approaching the two-year anniversary, there had been several false confessions, but the case remained unsolved. For example, a man walked into police headquarters in Central Falls, Rhode Island, just north of Pawtucket, and said, Lock me up. I did it. I killed her.
The officers began questioning the man and implied that she had been bludgeoned to death instead of stabbed. He took the bait and, in turn, discredited his confession. On February 9, 1951, four years after Rita's death, a woman was murdered in Arlington, Massachusetts, a suburb northwest of Boston, about an hour away from Pawtucket.
She was a 22-year-old switchboard operator, and she was killed in her home, stabbed nearly 40 times in the chest and back with a long, stiletto-type knife. She was fully clothed and not sexually assaulted, which was reminiscent of Rita's murder. Her name was Ethel Ellard, and her body was found by a relative the next day. There were signs of a struggle in her bedroom. The assailant had taken chunks out of the wooden footboard of her bed.
The murder weapon was not located. The Pawtucket police chief and an officer spent several hours going over the details of Ethel's death.
They said that the wounds on her body were almost identical to Rita's. Also in 1951, Raymond Pattenod continued his life of crime. He and two accomplices held up a filling station in Hadley, Massachusetts, and brutally beat the 56-year-old man who operated it, a disabled war veteran, for $3.15 worth of gasoline. That's about $35 today. They struck him in the head with a pistol twice.
They later abandoned their vehicle in Amherst. The next day, on August 7th, Raymond was arrested at gunpoint and charged with assault with the intent to rob, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, larceny of an automobile, carrying a gun without a permit, and theft of registration plates. In October, Raymond was sentenced to five years in prison.
There have never been charges in Rita's case, just lingering suspicions. Could it have been Raymond? After all, he confessed to the crime, even if the details weren't quite right. Or was it the man who'd been assaulting other women in Pawtucket? Had he decided to escalate his crimes to murder? But then again, Rita was not sexually assaulted. Was it someone close to her, maybe?
maybe in her family, that stood to benefit from a life insurance policy? Was it someone she'd dated, she had told friends of a man that had pursued her, of whom she was disgusted? Or was it a woman, perhaps a girlfriend unknown to her, of a man she was dating? Over the next 70 years, little new information from the police was forthcoming, leaving more questions than answers.
If the murderer who took Rita's life were 20 years old in 1947, the year of her death, then he would be 96 today. In 2019, Pawtucket Police Detective Sue Cormier decided to reopen the case. She got in touch with Rita's family, her niece and nephew, who are now in the August of their lives. They said that they were familiar with the tragedy, even though they never met Rita themselves.
Mildred's daughter, Sue, said that her mother, who was Rita's sister, could never bear to visit Rita's grave. She said that Rita had told her mother a secret the night before she was killed, that she was afraid. Perhaps she knew what was coming.
They walked the trail to the murder site and found the tree near the clearing that still bore the scars of the axe that had been made so many years ago. A grim reminder of the open wound that still remains today. If you or someone you know has any information on the murder of Rita Bouchard from 1947 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, please call the Pawtucket Police Department at 401-727-9100.
I want to thank you so much for listening. I am so grateful that you chose to tune in and I couldn't be here without you. Thank you. If you would like to support the show, there's a link in the show notes with options. Another way to support is telling a friend, sharing on social media, or leaving a review. A detailed list of sources and photos can be found at MurderSheTold.com. Thank you to Byron Willis for his writing and research and to Erica Pierce, Sophia Ricker, and Brittany Healy for their research support.
If you have a story that needs to be told or a correction, I would love to hear from you. My only hope is that I've kept the memories of your loved ones alive. I'm Kristen Sevey and this is Murder, She Told. Thank you for listening.