The Murder of Dora Jean Brimage
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I'm Kristen Sevey. This is Murder, She Told. This episode heavily discusses topics of sexual assault and rape. Please listen with care.

It was Labor Day weekend in Boston, 1987. Whitney Houston's pop hit "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" dominated the airwaves all summer, which wasn't quite over. There was just a hint of fall in the air on Sunday, September 6. In the crowded neighborhood of Roxbury, windows were opened to let in the cool evening air.

It was in this neighborhood, in a low-rise brick apartment building on Ruggles Street, that 19-year-old Dora Jean Brimage lived with her sister, brother, and grandmother. At 8 p.m., Dora was home ironing her clothes. Her grandma, Bessie Kaye, left to visit family and said goodbye to her granddaughter.

Described by her younger brothers as a regular teenager, Dora had a gentle smile and often wore a knit headband over her closely cropped hair. Like a lot of teenage girls, she cared about her appearance and never left the house without adorning her big dark eyes with eyeliner.

She shared her wardrobe and a room with her younger sister, 16-year-old Angie, who said, "She was my best friend." Angie was a star basketball player at her high school, and her older sister was a cheerleader. Dora loved makeup, hairstyling, and taking photos. According to Angie, Dora was a feminine young woman with dreams of working in the beauty industry.

She hadn't finished high school, dropping out with the intentions to return. For now, she was working full-time at McDonald's. When she wasn't working, Dora was helping out with her younger siblings, including her seven-year-old sister Alexis, who she affectionately called "my baby."

She also sang in the youth gospel choir at her church on Dudley Street, where her grandmother was a deaconess. They attended a historically black church called Zion FBH, or Fire Baptized Holiness. The whole family was involved in church and community activities. Both of Dora's parents had moved to Boston as children from South Carolina and Virginia. They grew up in the city, where they met, married, and started a family.

Dora, their eldest, was born when her father was 19 and her mom was just 16. By 1987, Dora and her siblings were teenagers in the city, and they lived with their grandma, Bessie Kay, in the Ruggles Street housing project. It was within walking distance of Dora's work at McDonald's, her family's church, and her high school. Many of her friends lived in the neighborhood, and Dora was well-liked.

On the evening of Sunday, September 6, 1987, the day before Labor Day, Dora planned to attend a birthday party for her friend Laura Harrison and Laura's three-year-old nephew. Laura's name is spelled L-O-R-A, and Dora's is D-O-R-A, friends separated by only one letter. Laura lived in the same housing development on the Prentiss Street side of the community.

Dora dressed for the occasion, a white shirt with a bold pink stripe and matching white sweatpants. Everything matched, right down to her pink socks and pink headband. Dora walked the short distance to her friend's home in a row of low-rise brick apartment buildings. After chatting for a bit, they moved to the gathering on the rooftop of one of the nearby apartment buildings. They were barbecuing, drinking, and having a great time.

The gathering wrapped around 9:30 p.m., but many of the partygoers weren't ready to call it a night. Laura went inside for a moment to change clothes, leaving the rest of the crew hanging out at the front of the apartment building, chatting. Regina, a friend of Dora's, later recalled that Dora told her that she, quote, "had to go meet a dude." When Laura returned downstairs, the group broke up into different cars.

Laura's cousin, Ira, was living at the apartment with her mom, and it was Ira's car that everyone was standing near. Dora asked Ira for a ride since he was going the same way. According to some accounts, another person at the party offered her a ride too, when Ira's brother, James Page, interrupted.

James didn't typically live in Boston, but he was there at the time. He, too, was Laura's cousin. He had sharp angular features, intense eyes, and an air of authority about him. He and his brother, Ira, would drive her. He insisted. Ira worked at his father's construction company with Laura, and although Laura knew him well, Dora did not.

Laura later said that Dora was a little bit hesitant about getting in the car with a man that she didn't know. But Laura assured her that her cousin was trustworthy and reliable. By this time, it was about 10 p.m., and although the sun had gone down, there were plenty of streetlights in the area. Everyone got into their vehicles and took off. That was the last time Dora was seen alive.

Laura, meanwhile, was ready to celebrate her birthday club hopping. She wasn't working the next day doing construction. She and the rest of the crew had recently finished a demolition job. But on Labor Day, other members of her crew would be working, removing debris and doing some masonry. What Laura didn't know was that as she was partying, someone took Dora to that abandoned building.

The comment from Dora that she was going to meet a dude was mysterious. She had a long-term boyfriend named Reggie, who she had known since childhood and had been dating for about five years. But he had turned in early for the night, and they had no plans to meet up. Reggie hadn't even seen Dora for about two to three weeks. Their relationship seemed to be fading.

It wasn't clear who took her, but someone drove Dora down on a narrow residential street, illuminated only by a weak, flickering streetlight. The car turned quietly into an empty parking lot on the backside of a long brick building and slid into the shadows. The car engine stopped. The key slipped out of the ignition. They would not be leaving soon.

In front of the car, Dora could make out an old, run-down brick building that seemed to curve around the parking lot. Some sections were painted white. Along its walls were blank, windowless steel doors. One doorway was not like the others. Instead of a door, there was a piece of plywood blocking the entrance. It opened to the construction site where Laura and Ira worked with their family.

There were no lights in this section of the building, and the storefront was boarded up. On this Sunday night, this commercial district was deserted. No one could hear her screams. Meanwhile, Dora's grandmother had returned to her apartment on Ruggles Street. Bessie stayed up late Sunday night waiting for her granddaughter's return.

She liked to know that her girls were safe, and they might talk a little bit before going to bed. But it was getting late. She hoped Dora was having fun, and she knew the party could go on into the early hours of the morning. But when morning came, there was no sign of Dora, and she grew worried. Bessie called the police to report her missing. She asked Dora's friends and family if they'd seen her, and prayed for her granddaughter's safe return.

An officer came to Bessie's apartment. While Bessie was filling out the missing persons report with the officer in her apartment, she had an unexpected visitor. It was one of her daughters, Dora's aunt.

She had driven past a police investigation and heard that a body was found. Bessie and her daughter wondered if it could be Dora. That it had been found just two miles away after she had gone missing was too great a coincidence to ignore. But the officer could not give them any information. Bessie finished up the report and the officer left. Later, he returned and asked Bessie to come to the station to view the body. It might be Dora.

A group of construction workers had made a terrible discovery the morning of Labor Day at their job site: 655 Warren Street. 655 was just one of many addresses in a long-connected, single-story brick building with a number of retail storefronts, all facing Warren Street. This was a dense part of town, and the storefront was separated from the street by only a sidewalk.

655 was empty. Its windows were boarded up while its interior was under construction. But its neighbors were in business. Behind the long building was a small parking lot bound by a chain-link fence used for employee parking and deliveries. It was accessible from Georgia Street. And this is likely where the construction workers parked. When they arrived, they noticed the piece of plywood used as a temporary door on the rear entrance was left ajar.

The first worker, who pushed it aside and entered, stopped suddenly and told the men looking over his shoulder to stand back. There was something that shouldn't be there, an unmoving figure lying on the ground. At first, he assumed it was someone who was unhoused and was just using the job site as temporary shelter. It took a moment to comprehend what he was seeing.

As he approached, he realized she was mostly nude. She was lying face up, but it appeared that she no longer had a face. Horrified, he looked away and noticed that the new plasterboard behind the body was splattered with blood. He told the other men in the building to leave. They needed to contact the police.

It was decided that one man would stay with the body while the others went for help, and as luck would have it, a police car had stopped at a nearby intersection. At around 10:20 a.m., two young police officers, both in their first year on the job, were together in a cruiser, patrolling the area. They drove down Warren Street past the vacant storefront, pulled briefly onto another street, and then turned onto Georgia.

As they turned the corner, they saw a construction worker standing there in the parking lot. The man approached the car and relayed his discovery. The officers parked and followed the man into the building. The room was dim, lit only by the light streaming in from the cracks between the boards at the front windows and the temporary construction lights. It was almost entirely empty, with just a few piles of debris and stacks of new building materials scattered about.

They saw a woman lying on her back in a pool of blood, her face broken. Under her arm was a small, wooden-handled construction shovel with a broken blade. A big piece of metal that had broken off lay next to it, and pieces of the shattered metal were tangled in the woman's hair. This instrument that destroyed her once beautiful face was considered the murder weapon.

While none of her clothing had been fully removed, her white sweatpants, her red shorts, and panties had been pulled down to her ankles. She wore several things on top: a white sweatshirt with a Mickey Mouse logo, another white sweatshirt with "New York Construction Company" written on the front, and a blue T-shirt with a Boston Rec Center logo.

All of them, along with her bra, had been pushed up. Her pink headband that had been a gift from Reggie was found discarded on the other side of the room. One pink sock remained on her foot and the other was bare. The other sock lay on the floor nearby. Her shoes, pink Converse sneakers, were found at the scene. A white hat with a Cadillac logo on it was found as well, and one unsmoked Newport cigarette.

The medical examiners on the scene noted teeth and bone fragments in the pool of blood surrounding the young woman. Much of the blood was sitting on or absorbed by the plasterboard she was laying on. After photographs had been taken, police removed the body and the shovel from the site, and according to the Boston Herald, detectives removed two large pieces of blood-stained plasterboard, about 3 by 6 feet, from the site for analysis.

When Dora's aunt drove by that morning, she saw a cluster of police cars next to the work site, which was surrounded by yellow tape. She stopped to talk with people who gathered around the area, and they told her what they knew.

Once the body was brought to the police station, police realized that the description of the clothing on an open missing persons report matched the clothing of the woman they had just found. A phone call was made to Dora's grandmother, Bessie, who went down to the station and was confronted with a horrible sight. The lifeless body of her beautiful granddaughter, Dora Jean Brimage.

Though it has been reported different ways, a woman from the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's Office later testified that the autopsy was conducted the same day, on Labor Day, between 1 and 5 p.m. Assisting the medical examiner was Mary Cam. She would go on to have a long career in forensics, but 1987 was her first year on the job, and she would always remember this scene.

She said, This was one of the first homicides that I had ever seen as a new technician with a medical examiner's office in a brand new position. The ME discovered that, in addition to multiple trauma injuries to the head, Dora had also been strangled, and they couldn't decide which had killed her. It's unclear what happened first, the strangulation or the attack with the shovel.

There was evidence of sexual activity. In addition to finding her body unclothed, they also found sperm inside her body. When they viewed the sperm under a microscope, they found that the sperm still had their tails intact, which they lose over a predictable period of time. This gave a window of only 24 hours from the time of her death, presumed to have happened Sunday night, during which the sexual contact happened.

meaning the sexual contact was between Saturday night and Sunday night. Furthermore, they discovered that there was, quote, no sperm on the victim's underwear, which suggested that she had never gotten up and was raped in the place her body was discovered. The workers who found the body were questioned immediately, as was Dora's boyfriend, Reggie. Around the same time, a man covered in blood was stopped by police.

Both he and Reggie gave footprint impressions, but their sneakers did not match those found on the bloody plasterboard. Police asked the public for tips about where Dora had been and with whom, and then questioned the people who had been at Laura's birthday party. These interviews revealed that Ira and James were the last people seen with Dora when they gave her a ride.

James was questioned on Wednesday, September 9th, two days after the discovery of her body, and he said that he and his brother had dropped off Dora at Joe's Jaguar, a club near Dudley Station, the spot where she had asked to be taken.

If police were struck by the incredible coincidence that Dora's body had been found at the same construction site where James' brother and several other family members worked, they kept it close to the vest. The only suspect identified in the papers was the man with the blood on his clothing. He was questioned, his home was searched, and his clothes confiscated for blood testing. But the tests revealed that the blood on him was from a man.

James' brother Ira wasn't questioned until November. They also collected hair that had been in Dora's hand and on her body. Ira and Reggie had both provided blood and hair samples, as well as fingerprints. Forensic testing was done, although DNA tests weren't available in 1987. Instead, the detective on the case explained that they did blood typing. The police investigation was stalled.

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Once Dora's autopsy was complete, the police released her body to the family so they could plan her funeral and burial. On September 12th, a week after the party where she was last seen, Dora's funeral was held at her church on Dudley Street. Because she was so badly beaten, the ceremony was a closed casket.

Few experienced the heartbreak that Bessie had endured seeing her in that condition. And friends only wanted to remember Dora as she was in life, looking her best. Still, the descriptions they'd read in the papers and heard on the TV of the brutal attack perpetrated by an unknown assailant would haunt them for years to come. Dora's family was crushed. Her sister Angie explained, "'When that happened, a piece of me just went away with her.'"

She lost a sister, a best friend, and a role model. Since they shared everything, when Dora was killed, she was wearing Angie's clothes. The room they shared was now a silent void. Angie said, "'She was my roommate, so that's what I woke up to, what I went to sleep to.'" Dora was murdered in a pink and white outfit that she had borrowed from Angie, so Angie decided not to wear pink again. It was too painful."

Dora had been the oldest of a large family and now Angie had to take her place. Although they had worn the same sneakers, Angie felt unready to fill her big sister's shoes. Only three weeks later, another young black woman was found dead in Roxbury. She too had been raped and brutally killed. By Thanksgiving, two more young black women from Roxbury would be found dead.

In December of 1987, the Boston Globe published an article connecting the four deaths. They suggested the possibility of a serial killer, but quotes from cops dismissed the possibility and reassured the public. One woman died from a drug overdose, but the other three were murdered. The cause of their deaths, the Globe implied, was because all four were involved with drugs, cocaine in particular.

One of the girls' mothers said that her daughter had rapidly lost weight and seemed detached from her surroundings. She said, "It seemed like she was living to get high." The article seemed to divert attention from the stalled police investigations to the girls' individual choices, all but saying that the girls brought the violence upon themselves, which is absolutely never the case no matter what the circumstances are.

After that, Dora's case fell from the public view. Her body had been found on Labor Day, Monday, September 7th. The last article focused on her investigation alone was on Wednesday, September 9th. The next article that we could find in the paper wouldn't appear for 29 years. Meanwhile, women feared for their safety.

The murders of young Black women in Boston didn't stop. Today, many are unsolved. Although a combination of new technology, renewed interest, and increased funding has led to closing several unsolved cases, including Dora's.

In 2016, police contacted Doris' family with huge news. They believed they had her killer in custody. After all those years, her killer would finally be brought to justice. Her mother, Doris, saw the breaking news on a hospital TV while recovering from heart surgery, and she cried when her daughter's photo flashed across the screen. She said,

I waited so long to hear that news. I lived it all over again, but it's such a relief.

Thanks to funding from a federal grant, the Boston Police Cold Case Squad was able to test the DNA left at the scene. The sperm left by the perpetrator in 1987 had been in storage all those years. And in 2013, they finally tested it. As soon as they uploaded the DNA profile into CODIS, they got a hit. It matched a profile in their system.

James Page. The same James Page last seen giving Dora a ride. James Page had a rap sheet. In 1996, while still in Boston, James was arrested. He stole a woman's purse and fled in a stolen vehicle, which he crashed after attempting to run over a police officer. Miraculously, no one was seriously hurt in this incident.

At some point, James moved to New Hampshire, where in 2015, he was arrested on a minor drug charge and for resisting arrest. Since they got the DNA hit, police had been tracking down and interviewing people who attended that party in 1987. Suffolk D.A. Daniel Conley said, "'The DNA is compelling and powerful, but there's a lot more that goes into the case.'"

The officers have essentially been reinvestigating the case as if it happened the other day. The police went to speak with James again in 2015 while he was in custody, and this time, he had a slightly different story to tell. In 87, he said that he and his brother had dropped off Dora at a club, but this time, he told police that he and his brother had driven Dora to Georgia Street.

Though the murder site's address was on Warren Street, the backside of the building, where the parking lot was located, was on Georgia Street. Police analyzed the hair found at the scene and compared it against hair samples from Reggie, Ira, James, and Dora. They also reexamined the fingerprints found at the scene in 1987. Once again, there was no conclusive results that either bolstered or hurt their case against James.

On June 27, 2016, prosecutors presented their case to a Suffolk County grand jury and secured an indictment against James Page for the crime of first-degree murder. He had been arrested three days prior for violation of his probation conditions and was already being held at the county jail in Manchester, New Hampshire. He had moved to Manchester in the 90s. He would soon be extradited to Massachusetts and was meanwhile held without the possibility of bail.

Just a week and a half later, on July 7th, he appeared in court in Massachusetts, where a judge confronted him with the charges. He pled not guilty and was appointed a public defender named Daniel Solomon. For one year and eight months, James remained behind bars as the attorneys argued and got ready for trial. On March 6th, 2018, the five-day trial began with opening arguments.

The jury went on a field trip to see the location where Dora was killed. While the storefronts have changed, the rear of the building and parking lot looked much like it did in 1987. The group saw photographs of the crime scene and Dora's broken body. Despite the passage of time, they must have felt a chill imagining the events of September 1987.

An assistant that worked at the medical examiner's office in 1987, Mary Cam, actually testified at trial. She had vivid memories of the case because she was so new to the office. Later in the trial, a substitute medical examiner testified in the place of the original, who had since passed.

In addition to explaining her injuries and the ambiguous cause of death, she explained that Dora was found to have a 0.09 blood alcohol level and a low level of cocaine in her system. Dora's friend, Laura, whose party she attended the night of her death, testified. She spoke in direct, specific terms about what happened that night. She explained that the party was actually for her young nephew. Her birthday wouldn't be for another week. She would be turning 24.

She described it as a small rooftop gathering that Sunday evening with just a few friends and her little nephew. She said that they were on the third floor in the portion of the Ruggles Street housing project that she called Block City, which is on the Prentice Street side of the community. They started taking things up to the roof around 7 p.m., and Dora was there, but not James. They were drinking rum, punch, pineapple juice, white port, and cooking off the grill.

Laura said her little brother, quote, ratted them out to her mother, revealing that her young nephew was on the roof with them, so her mom basically ended the party around 10 p.m. After she dropped off her nephew with her mom, she was standing in front of their apartment building with the others, chatting. She said, "'It was me, Amy, Vanessa, Regina, probably Lisa was there, my brother.'"

They were all just standing there, still, you know, talking and drinking beers or whatever. And then I went upstairs to change my shirt. Ira was upstairs with my mom because he lived with her off and on. And when I was getting ready, Dora was actually leaning on his car that was parked in front of the building. Not just her, everybody was leaning on the car. Ira had a gray, silverish, four-door Mazda 626. When Laura returned downstairs, Ira came with her.

Laura didn't live at this apartment with her mother on 71 Prentice Street, but she still had some of her things there. Dora asked Ira which way he was going, and after he explained, she asked if he could drop her off at a club called Joe's Jaguar, which was near Dudley Square Plaza. He said sure. Laura said that Dora was a little hesitant getting into the car with him and asked her if it would be okay, and she assured her that it would be fine.

Laura said she saw Dora get into the front seat of Ira's car. Critically, she said that James was not in the car, something that contradicted James' own statements to police, both in 2015 and 1987. It was between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., and Laura said that she got in the front seat of her friend Mary's car, who was driving.

Another friend joined her, and the three of them ended up heading in the same direction as Ira. They often saw his car in front of them. She remembered that they passed Ira's car parked on the side of the street, and she said she saw Dora walking alone across the street, headed to the entry door of Joe's Jaguar. Ira was her cousin, and James was his younger brother. Ira sometimes lived with Laura and her family, just like he did that Labor Day weekend.

Laura said that she rarely saw James, maybe once a year, and that he lived elsewhere.

Laura's mother, Doretha, also testified, and she said that she believed she saw James get into the back of Ira's car. She otherwise confirmed the testimony of her daughter. Doretha said that Ira later returned that night around 10.30, and that she also saw him at 5 a.m. the next morning. She described him as kinda nervous, and that he didn't act himself.

He had the same clothes on from the night before, and she said he was kind of upset and crying. She described James as popular with the ladies, a good-looking young man, but he was mostly with his girlfriend, Susan. She was also asked if the police spoke to her back in 1987, and she said no.

There were some major unexpected snafus during trial. One is that the prosecution screwed up and showed a clip of James Page being interrogated, and there was some dialogue that revealed that he was already incarcerated. The lawyers and the judge had already reviewed the clip in detail and agreed that this portion of the dialogue would not be revealed to the jury because it would unfairly prejudice them against James, revealing that he had a criminal record.

something that's generally prohibited from being disclosed during a trial under the umbrella of, quote, prior bad acts. The defense immediately motioned for a mistrial. After a lengthy discussion and some last-minute scrambling overnight trying to sort it out, the judge ultimately decided not to grant the mistrial, but to give the jury instruction to disregard the video completely.

The other thing that happened is that there was a major storm which closed the courts, and the next day, the prosecutor asked to end the proceedings early so that he could get home to contend with the disaster. He said, "'Yesterday, in the storm, I had a huge oak tree fall through my roof.' The judge blurted out, "'An oak tree?' He said, "'Yes, I have an oak tree over my house.'

The defense attorney, with surprising comedic timing, interjected, You had an oak tree. He clarified, Well, I still have a lot of it standing, but a lot of it fell, too. Unbelievable. Dora's boyfriend, Reggie, was called to the stand.

They'd been dating for about five years, from when she was 14 years old and he was 17 until the time of her death. He had grown up in Roxbury as well, and he had known Dora his whole life. He recalled that it was he who had given Dora the pink chucks and the pink headband that she had been found wearing. He recalled that it was Dora's grandmother who had called his family to relay the news.

He said that their relationship was on the rocks, saying, James Page's attorney pointed out the many failures in the early investigation.

Perhaps most glaring was that the police didn't go to the club, Joe's Jaguar, with a snapshot of Dora to ask around and see if anyone had seen her that Sunday night. It was the last place that she was reported to have been. And why that wasn't done seems to be only attributable to poor police work. They also never canvassed the area near the crime scene to see if anyone had heard or seen anything.

His attorney's case basically rested on the fact that James, in interviews, had denied that he was the killer, and that there was no direct evidence that proved that he had. There were no fingerprints on the murder weapon, no shoe prints that matched his, no eyewitnesses, none of James' blood was found at the scene. The only thing, he said, the prosecution had proven…

was that James Page had sex with Dora Brimage at some point in the 24 hours leading up to her death. The prosecutor laid out his case against James. Dora was last seen with James Page and his brother Ira. She was found disrobed at the murder scene, suggesting that a sexual act had just taken place.

He clarified that the only DNA found inside Dora was from James, addressing the defense's implied theory that another man had killed and raped Dora. He said that the fact that there was no sperm in her underwear suggested that she never got up. He pointed out that James had lied to the police about having sex with Dora,

And lastly, he recalled Laura's testimony of all the people that had worked at 655 Warren Street. It was Laura, her brother, James' brother Ira, James' father, James' uncle, and another cousin. A big chunk of their whole extended family all worked together at this particular job site where Dora was murdered. What were the odds that this was merely a coincidence?

Though the prosecution didn't cite it as an argument, the fact that James didn't testify in his own defense may have weighed in as well. The judge gave extensive instructions to the jury regarding the potential outcome. They could find James guilty of first-degree murder under three different theories: second-degree murder, or they could find him not guilty. And of course, if they couldn't unanimously agree, there would be a mistrial.

The prosecution had laid out the broad strokes of what had happened, but there were many missing pieces left to the imagination of the jury. How was it that Dora ended up in a vacant construction site with a man she had just met that night? A man who she was nervous to get into the car with.

Did Dora in fact spend time at Joe's Jaguar? If so, how did she get from Joe's Jaguar to the construction site? It was a mile away. Was it possible that she was killed in the car and her body was carried into the site? What exactly happened that escalated things so much that Dora ended up dead? What was the motive for killing her? These are things that we may never know.

The jury deliberated for two hours on the first day, six and a half hours on the second day, and five on the third. They then came in and read the verdict. He was found not guilty of first-degree murder under the theory of premeditation. He was found not guilty of first-degree murder under the theory of extreme atrocity or cruelty. And he was found guilty of first-degree murder under the theory of felony murder.

Under the theory of felony murder, a defendant must have murdered someone while in the commission of another felony that has a maximum potential sentence of life in prison. In James' case, the other felony was aggravated rape.

In this circumstance, where the charges weren't brought for 29 years, it creates a strange situation. The statute of limitations was up on aggravated rape. If they were not expired, the prosecution would certainly have charged him with that as well. So the jury had to consider whether James was guilty of the uncharged offense of aggravated rape, and if so, did

Did the murder happen as part of the commission of the rape?

Proving rape would have been inadequate because rape, although a felony, doesn't carry a maximum term of life in prison. Aggravated rape includes the infliction of serious bodily injury in connection with the rape. The defense knew that the jury would have to consider this, so they introduced, in closing arguments, some allegations from James, saying, quote, Dora was into prostitution. She was fast.

The state hasn't presented any evidence that would refute that. He continued, Is it feasible? Is it possible that this hookup was a commercial transaction? I don't know. Consider the evidence. The defense was planting seeds in the juror's mind that Dora agreed to the sexual encounter, undermining the central premise of rape, lack of consent.

In general, lawyers have a pretty broad latitude to make their case in opening and closing arguments, but this seems beyond the pale. Neither the defense nor the prosecution introduced any evidence that Dora had engaged in sex work, and the defense attorney seemed to be hiding behind the attribution to his client, the accused murderer, who had every reason to lie.

Also, this isn't to say that sex workers can't be raped because they can. Nonetheless, the jury had to consider whether the sex was A. Consensual B. Non-consensual but not accompanied by serious bodily harm or C. Aggravated rape.

Ultimately, they unanimously agreed that James was guilty of the uncharged offense of aggravated rape, which, in itself, carried the possibility of a life sentence, thus proving first-degree murder under the felony murder theory. There's a lot to untangle there.

To me, it's very strange and pedantic to try to pull apart these two terrible crimes that seem to happen at the same approximate time and place. If there were a crime in the state of Massachusetts called rape and murder, the jury would have had a much more straightforward task to evaluate James' guilt.

The fact that there exists this strange loophole that could have reduced the charges to second-degree murder is unjust. The defense attorney motioned for the judge to overturn the jury's verdict because, he contended, the aggravated rape couldn't have been committed at the same time as the murder.

Daniel Solomon, James' attorney, said in open court, quote, You can't really bash somebody to death with a shovel while having sex with them. It sounds gruesome and somewhat comical, but I think that's what the facts indicate. Here, given the physical aspect of it and given the geometry of how it must have happened, the only thing that could have happened is somebody had sex with this woman, and then somebody killed her.

But the two are not related. The judge dismissed the motion. The first-degree murder conviction stands. In a remarkable, speedy turn of events, the sentencing hearing was conducted on March 20th, 2018, just two business days after the verdict was delivered.

Sadly, Dora's grandmother, Bessie, had died four years prior to James' indictment and six years prior to this sentencing. She died not knowing who killed her granddaughter, the little girl that she had raised.

Dora's sister, Angie, spoke, explaining that she had named two of her children in honor of her sister, and that she hadn't worn pink in three decades because that was the color of the outfit Dora was murdered in. She said, "'I don't think I'm going to be able to forgive him. There's going to be hate in my heart towards him. He showed no remorse. He didn't care.'" She continued,

I don't even communicate too much with guys because I didn't know who killed her. I could have been talking to the person who did this to my sister. So it was hard for me to trust people and let anyone into my life. In a television interview with Boston 25 following the sentencing, Angie wore a pair of small, pink, retro-style rosebud earrings.

James Page spoke during the sentencing for the first time during the court process. In addition to criticizing the police and rehashing the missteps in the investigation, he said, DNA did not put me at the crime scene. We engaged in a sexual act in Mission Hill, not that place. That's what the family don't know. My mom didn't raise no fool, and my mom didn't raise no killer.

We tried to reach Angie for this episode, but we were unsuccessful. But Angie, if you're listening, I'd still love to talk to you and learn more about Dora.

We did reach Dora's boyfriend, Reggie, though. He said that it was still difficult to talk about what happened to Dora. He seemed to still be troubled by the fact that he wasn't with her that night. He said that he had to be home at the shelter by a certain time. There were rules. And that he wasn't with her during the day, in part, because he was hungover from the night before. He said that James Page was, quote, "...somebody that everyone knew."

Dora's younger sister, Alexis, said, For many years, I walked with my head down, something I didn't realize I started to do. These last couple of weeks, I got closure in ways I didn't know I needed. The judge sentenced James Page to life without the possibility of parole. Although James had not known Dora or her family, he was someone who passed in and out of their orbit. He was a close friend's cousin.

Angie said that just a few years before he was arrested, she met him by chance. She didn't know his name or face as the one who was the last to see her sister, but it was just as she'd feared. A random guy that she met in an ordinary circumstance turned out to be the murderer. Finding out he was Dora's killer came as a shock, and she told Boston 25 it was infuriating that she didn't know then when she crossed paths with him.

It makes you wonder how many people like James lurk in the corners of our lives. A friend of a friend, someone's cousin's brother, a neighbor, a member of the community, a co-worker, someone we pass by every day. There are so many people who float in and out of our lives.

Although James has not been linked to any other murders in the area, it's possible he raped or murdered other women in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or anywhere else he visited in the decades since he'd killed Dora. Maybe those DNA kits just haven't made their way through CODIS yet. In the words of the Boston Police Director of Research and Development, Maria Chevers, somebody doesn't rape once.

And what about his brother? Had Ira lent James his car after they parted ways? Was Ira involved in Dora's murder directly? Or did he only cover for his brother? What he saw that night and what he knew about his brother remains a mystery, at least to the public. Ira didn't testify at his brother's trial because of his poor health and passed away shortly afterward.

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Though James remained behind bars, the story didn't end there. James appealed. As it frequently happens, he got a new attorney to review his case and draft the appeal. Her name is Leslie O'Brien, and she focuses on appellate law and post-conviction advocacy. She reviewed the work of his trial attorney and appealed the case on five grounds. I'm only going to focus on one of them, the stickiest one. It was her first argument.

She wrote, "...the evidence was insufficient to prove that he raped the victim." She continued, "...there was no evidence this was accomplished by force rather than the victim's consent." If she were able to erode the foundation of the aggravated rape charge, she might be successful in getting the Massachusetts Supreme Court to reduce the first-degree murder conviction to second degree and substantially reduce James' sentence.

Though she didn't cite it in her appeal, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts located a case with surprising similarity to Dora's, the case of the Commonwealth v. Alex Sesney. Teresa Stone was raped and murdered in 1996 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. She was strangled by ligature and was beaten beforehand.

The crime went unsolved for 12 years. In 2008, the Worcester County DA's office found their man with DNA and charged Alex Sesney with first-degree murder and aggravated rape. In this case, the indictment fell within the statute of limitations for rape, so he faced that charge, unlike in Dora's case where it was an uncharged offense but still considered by the jury.

After a lengthy four-year pretrial period, in 2012, a jury of his peers convicted him on aggravated rape and first-degree murder under the felony murder theory, just like James Page. He appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. There are some factors that the courts consider when ruling whether or not there is sufficient proof that a rape occurred, excluding victim testimony.

which is, of course, impossible in the case of murder. In Teresa's case, there was no semen found in her underwear, suggesting that she hadn't stood up between the rape and the murder, proving that they were contemporaneous. But there were no injuries to the genitalia generally associated with rape, and there was no torn clothing.

But the main argument was that Teresa had a documented history of doing sex work, and her daughter said that she thought her mother might be, quote, going to make some money on the night of her murder.

The justices on the Supreme Court wrote this. Although the victim ultimately suffered severe injuries, there was no evidence favoring the inference that the defendant raped the victim before killing her over the inference that he had consensual sex with the victim and then killed her. So in 2015, they overturned the aggravated rape conviction.

This also shook the foundation of the first-degree felony murder charge, but the jury had found him guilty of felony murder under the two other theories as well, so they considered those again. The court said that because he strangled the victim and that took some time, it implied, quote, deliberate premeditation, and that the wounds could be classified as being extremely atrocious or cruel.

So Alex Sesney's sentence was therefore not affected by their ruling overturning the rape because the other foundations of his first-degree murder charge were still intact. But it established a legal precedent that was very relevant to Dora's case.

As a side note, it seems so unfair and infuriating that a woman's sexual history is fodder for argument in a courtroom, but that a defendant's history of raping and assaulting other women is off the table under the general prohibition of discussing any of the defendant's, quote, prior bad acts, is galling.

If you want to learn more about prior bad acts and how it affects a jury, I recommend going back and listening to the episode on Mark Dugas. When the justices sat down in 2021 to review James' appeal, they had to compare Dora's case to Teresa's and grapple with the legal precedent that was set just six years prior.

In fact, the key circumstances of the two cases were identical except the fact that Dora had no history of sex work. There is an important legal principle called "steri decisis": that which has been decided shall remain decided. For a court to overturn a previous decision in its tall hill to climb, it more often preserves the status quo.

Incredibly, even though there was only a six-year difference , the entire bench of justices at the Massachusetts Supreme Court had changed. Not one justice who was a part of the 2015 decision was still on the bench. It was a set of seven fresh pairs of eyes in a post-MeToo world. They could have easily overturned the rape charge like the previous court.

But they didn't. They created a new legal precedent, saying: "We now conclude, where is evidence that the defendant severely injured and killed a victim proximate to having sex with the victim, the jury may infer that the victim did not consent to sexual intercourse." They set a new legal precedent. 44 years later, Dora's tragic death would change the law.

Future cases will cite hers as a new precedent and empower juries to hold murderers and rapists responsible for their actions. A small silver lining out of such a dark story.

James Page is in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, south of Boston, just 30 miles from Roxbury, but a world away, in a prison called Old Colony Correctional Center, serving his life sentence, still professing his innocence.

655 Warren Street is no longer a construction site, but a beauty supply store called Hairstop. They have wigs, extensions, hair products, things that Dora might have used in the career that she was robbed of. The Boston Cold Case Squad and the DA's office have moved on, putting federal grounds to shake the dust off old police files to test forensic evidence with new technology.

There will be more James Pages held to account. Justice will come for more families. Angie, now 54 years old, has lived most of her life without her sister. And though time goes on, wounds haven't healed.

I hope that justice in your sister's case has given you and your family some peace. I'm sorry for the tragedy that your family has endured, and I hope that telling Dora's story will give hope for other families waiting for their turn and will allow her memory to live on. ♪

Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't left a five-star review, I would absolutely love it if you took a moment to do that. If you want to support the show in other ways, you can tell a friend or click the link in the show notes for more options. A detailed list of sources and photos can be found at MurderSheTold.com.

Thank you to Anne Young for her writing, Erica Pierce and Amanda Connelly for their research, and Byron Willis for his writing and research. If you want to suggest a case, you can email me at hello at murder she told dot com. You can also send a correction or drop a line to say hi. I love getting mail. I'm Kristen Seavey. Thank you for listening.