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Then weeks later, when her body was found miles away, those fears were confirmed. And the questions just started stacking up. What happened to Christine Cole? Investigators have considered multiple persons of interest and suspects over the last 30-plus years and even made an arrest. But the evidence crumbled as allegations of misconduct rose to the surface. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Christine Cole.
on Dark Downies. It was around 8.15 p.m. on January 6th, 1988, and Margaret Cole was waiting by the apartment window watching for her 10-year-old daughter, Christine Cole, to come walking down West Avenue. According to reporting by Suzanne Espinoza for the Providence Journal, Margaret, who also went by Margie, had given Christine a food stamp voucher and sent her out to get some milk and clams for supper around 5.15 p.m.
Christine asked her mother if she could use some of the money to buy a little penny candy, too, and Margie said yes. Christine just had a birthday two days earlier, so it would be a special treat. The store, Red's Seafood at 286 Mineral Spring Avenue in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, was just about a half mile away from their apartment, depending on the route, and Christine knew her neighborhood well.
Margie was a young single mother who had her hands full, and Christine was the oldest. So it wasn't unusual for her to run some errands for mom or go out walking on her own. It also wasn't unusual for Christine to not return when she should. Reports say that Christine had been reported missing in 1985 after she did not come home for several hours. When searchers found her, she was in a dumpster looking for a key she said she lost.
Just the previous summer, Christine was reported missing again when she was gone for more than six hours. She was found playing at a friend's house a few blocks down the street. That afternoon, though, Margie gave Christine specific instructions about where to go and what to buy. She told her daughter to get the milk and some clams at Red's, but if Red's Seafood was closed, she could walk to Saints Market about two blocks further down on Slater Street.
But even then, the trip on foot wouldn't have taken this long. Margie's boyfriend, Oscar Waldron, had already gone out looking for Christine when she didn't return by 6.30. When he checked at Saints Market, the clerk told him Christine left the store just 15 minutes before he got there. So Oscar turned around and went back to the apartment, assuming Christine was headed there too and would probably beat him home. But she didn't.
It had been over three hours with still no sign of Christine. By 8:45, Margie couldn't take it anymore. She called Pawtucket police to report Christine missing. The first attempts to locate Christine began with retracing what should have been her movements that afternoon.
Christine was a regular at Red Seafood, so the employee there definitely recognized her and told police that Christine came into the store just before 6 p.m. and bought three pounds of clams and a bag of chips, both of which were packaged up in a white paper bag that she carried out of the store. Christine apparently made a detour because she was next seen at a friend's apartment on Wilmarth Court about six blocks away from Red Seafood.
The friend's mother told police that when Christine arrived to play with her daughter, she didn't have a white bag of clams with her. The mother said the two girls played dolls for an hour, and then Christine said she had to go home. The mother reportedly offered Christine a ride home, but Christine refused, saying it was a short walk. When the friend's mother caught sight of Christine walking down the street, though, it was in the opposite direction of home.
The next confirmed sighting of Christine that night was at Saints Market around 7 p.m. Susana Espinoza reports for the Providence Journal that the owner of the store said Christine didn't have a white shopping bag with her when she came into the store either. Christine started browsing in the candy jar section and then bought a gallon of milk. From the change, she popped a dime into the gumball machine, but the gumball got stuck.
The store owner helped Christine get 10 gumballs with 10 extra pennies and put them into a small paper bag. The owner noticed that Christine was hanging onto a broken necklace, so she put the pieces into the bag with the gum too. As she handed the bag over to Christine, she felt the girl's cold hands.
The temperature was dropping below freezing outside and felt even colder than that with the windchill. So the store owner handed Christine one mitten someone had left behind and told her to keep the other hand in her pocket on the way home. After that, Christine's whereabouts were harder to pin down.
Her interaction with the owner at Saints Market is the last confirmed sighting. However, police said that the manager at Star Market, located on Barton Street, saw Christine at the store with someone, another girl, between 9.30 and 10 p.m. that night.
Alexander Reid reports for the Boston Globe that after seeing a photo of Christine, the manager said that he was pretty sure she was one of two girls he kicked out of the store for quote-unquote acting up. A teenage employee, also working at the market that night, would later tell police that the girl with Christine looked about the same age, maybe 10 or 11, but she was wearing a red Tolman High School jacket.
Star Market was just under a mile away from Saints Market, in the opposite direction of home. If Christine was there after 9.30 that night, she would have been more than late for supper with those clams. But what even happened to the bag of clams? Neither the friend's mother nor the owner of Saints Market saw Christine carrying a white bag. And was that girl at Star Market even Christine?
If so, who was the other girl she was supposedly with? The questions were only beginning to mount because Christine didn't turn up that night or the next. By the fifth day, the FBI and authorities from other states joined the effort to find the missing girl. Connecticut State Police lended a bloodhound to the search, and the dog followed Christine's scent from her home all the way to Star Market.
It gave investigators a little more confidence that the sighting of her there was legitimate, but the dog couldn't trace the scent any further. Additional tracking dogs were brought in the following day to search the area surrounding Star Market, including the railroad tracks that ran just beyond the store, below a steep embankment. But the dogs lost the scent there, too.
Elkim Tan reports for the Boston Herald that as concerning as it was for so many days to pass with no sign of Christine, police weren't ready to say they suspected any foul play involved in her disappearance. They just didn't have any evidence to draw the conclusion she'd been abducted or harmed. But one of the biggest concerns that police kept coming back to at the time was the severe winter weather.
A recent snowstorm blanketed already ice-covered sidewalks, and if Christine was trying to survive outside for whatever reason, the frigid temperatures would have made it dangerous or even deadly to do so. One investigator theorized that maybe Christine lost the bag of clams she bought. Maybe that's why she wasn't seen with it at her friend's house or Saints Market.
Maybe she was worried that she'd be in trouble for losing it, so Christine decided not to go home and she fell asleep outside somewhere. Maybe she fell victim to the elements. There were a lot of maybes to unravel, but until they found Christine, nothing could be corroborated. Nine days into the search, police were still trying to track down the girl reportedly seen with Christine at Star Market.
They hoped the girl would confirm if it was in fact Christine Cole with her that night, and if so, get some information about where Christine was heading next. They assured the girl via the newspaper that she wasn't in trouble, but she could be helpful in tracking Christine down. Whether police were ever successful in locating this girl, though, is unclear. The phone was ringing off the hook with tips for police to run down,
According to reporting by the Providence Journal, one anonymous caller said he killed Christine and left her body in an abandoned house on Hendricks Street in Providence. Police searched the house but didn't find anything. The call was a hoax.
With the days ticking on without her, a local philanthropist offered a $10,000 reward for information via Crimestoppers, hoping that the incentive would bring more witnesses forward and give the investigation something new to go on. But nearly two weeks later, the tips had run out, and Christine was nowhere to be found. The sinking feeling that maybe something bad did happen to Christine was hard to ignore.
By the start of the third week of searching, police had administered polygraph tests to four people, including Christine's mother, Margie, Margie's boyfriend, Oscar, the mother of the friend who Christine played with the night she disappeared, and someone else, a man previously questioned about the murders of two children just a few months before Christine went missing.
Nine-year-old Frankie Barnes and six-year-old Jason Wolfe were found murdered in Providence, Rhode Island in December of 1987. By the time Christine went missing, the suspect in Frankie and Jason's cases, 21-year-old William Sarmento, had already been arrested. But how police came to suspect Sarmento for those crimes was by way of a man named Alphonse Tobey.
According to a UPI report by William Levesque, police received a letter from someone apparently confessing to the murders of Frankie and Jason with the words, quote, Alfonso Toby, catch me if you can, ha, ha, ha, end quote. Though the spelling of the name in the letter was apparently incorrect, investigators tracked down a man by the same name and arrested him.
During the interviews with Alphonse Toby, he repeatedly denied having anything to do with killing Jason and Frankie, but told police about some arguments he'd gotten into with a guy he knew as Billy. They were fighting over a girlfriend, it sounds like. He later identified Billy from photos as William Sarmento, and police then matched Sarmento's handwriting to the confession letter they received.
They surmised that Sarmento was trying to frame Toby for the murders, but he has no known connection to the actual crimes that I could find. Even still, investigators in Christine's case wanted to chat with Alphonse Toby. Reports say he lived just down the street from Christine's house, and police had to eliminate any doubt that he could somehow be involved.
Toby's lie detector test, and that of Christine's mom, her boyfriend Oscar, and the friend's mom, all showed no signs of deception. Police said that none of those four individuals questioned were considered suspects in Christine's disappearance. Around the same time, Christine's father, Robert Cole, who lived in Providence, was also eliminated as a suspect. Days and days of searching left investigators empty-handed.
More than 40 police officers, FBI agents, and volunteers searched a cemetery near the seafood market on Mineral Spring Avenue. They looked in backyards, landfills, alleyways, and checked the railroad tracks again and again. But the active search for Christine Cole was coming to a close. Pawtucket Police Chief Theodore King said they'd exhausted all avenues and now all there was left to do was wait for something to come along to direct their efforts.
Investigators thought maybe, with the snowmelt, that new answers would be revealed. But it only eliminated the lingering suggestion that Christine fell asleep outside and died in the snow. They hadn't located her body anywhere at all. The FBI continued the investigation on a national level, but there'd been no reported connections to other missing persons cases in other areas of the United States.
However, police did say they were following up on a report out of Boston that a quote-unquote drifter was found with a newspaper clipping about Christine in his pocket. That person was MIA when Rhode Island authorities tried to track him down, though, and I can't tell what became of that lead. More than a month and a half later, police were still grasping at any shred of a tip to find Christine.
On February 25th, following the suggestion of an anonymous psychic from the Narragansett tribal nation, investigators searched the Blackstone River, which led into the Seekonk River through Pawtucket. Detective Lieutenant John Haberly spent two hours aboard a Coast Guard powerboat scanning the riverbanks from Pawtucket to East Providence, but found nothing.
Just a few days after that river search, though, the drawn-out effort to find Christine Cole came to an end with a heartbreaking discovery almost 20 miles away from where she was last seen. On February 28, 1988, the body of a female child was found washed up on Conimicate Beach in Warwick, Rhode Island.
The state medical examiner concluded during the autopsy that the girl had been in the water for several weeks. Because of the condition of her remains, determining how the girl died with certainty was difficult. Her cause of death was ruled as asphyxia with submersion. There was water in the girl's lungs. However, the ME couldn't be sure if it was because the victim drowned or if the water was there because of the condition of the body.
The asphyxiation could have occurred before the victim entered the water. With that, her manner of death was listed as undetermined. The victim was found fully clothed except for shoes in the same outfit that Christine Cole was last seen wearing. Investigators believed the body was Christine, but they only had a tentative identification.
The medical examiner planned to compare dental and heel print records, and Christine's mother was asked to view photos of the remains, only from the neck down, to confirm that it was in fact her daughter's clothing. Investigators spared the mother from photos of the victim's face. As the medical examiner worked to establish the identity of the victim, another discovery across the bay in Bristol, Rhode Island, was at first believed to be connected to Christine's case.
Someone out on a morning walk found a pair of blue and white sneakers, similar to the ones Christine was wearing on January 6th. Police at first couldn't be certain that they were connected to their still-yet-to-be-identified victim, but the fact that the body didn't have any shoes on was a compelling detail. However, when Margie Cole saw the shoes, she said they weren't Christine's after all.
Finally, though, after much difficulty due to the lack of dental records and fingerprints, five days later, the body of the young victim was positively identified as Christine Cole. Suzanne Espinoza and Dean Stark of the Providence Journal spoke with Margie a few days after the remains were discovered.
Despite the preliminary findings of an undetermined manner of death, Margie believed that someone did something to Christine because she wasn't the type of kid to just get in the car with a stranger. And for her to be in the water or anywhere near it didn't make sense. Christine didn't know how to swim and was reportedly afraid of water. Police, too, found the circumstances surrounding Christine's disappearance and death to be suspicious.
Lieutenant Haberly said Pawtucket police were investigating the case as a homicide. By the time her remains were pulled from the water and identified, police had a rough timeline of Christine's movements after she left home on the afternoon of January 6th. There were several confirmed and a few tentative sightings of her at various locations as late as 10 p.m. that night, with the last known location about a half mile away from the banks of the Seekonk River.
Investigators believed that she likely entered the water either by force or by accident in Pawtucket, which was upstream from Warwick where her body was ultimately recovered. Police theorized that she could have been carried downriver by the current, but was possibly stuck in ice jams when they initially searched there.
If she had been attacked in some way before ending up in the river, her body didn't show any obvious signs of that kind of physical trauma. Court records that referenced the original autopsy report say that Christine had no bruises or cuts anywhere, no fractures or bone injuries, and no evidence of internal hemorrhaging.
The medical examiner declined to say if there was evidence of sexual assault, but said Christine's clothing was not torn. Christine wasn't wearing any underwear when she was found though, something her mother indicated was unusual. Court records also state that her pants were "haphazardly fashioned" and "fully zipped and tightly buckled twice at the waistline." All testing for spermatozoa was negative.
Despite the contradicting evidence regarding possible sexual assault, investigators started looking at persons of interest with a history of related charges. According to reporting by W. Zachary Malinowski for the Providence Journal, a little less than three months after Christine's remains were identified, Lexington, Massachusetts police arrested 42-year-old Richard J. Graves for the sexual assault of a 5-year-old girl.
As investigators swept the man's hotel room where he was arrested, they found a newspaper clipping from the February 29th edition of the Pawtucket Evening Times about the recovery of remains that were later identified as Christine Cole. The article had a photo of Christine.
Paul Langer of the Boston Globe reports that police also found in Graves' hotel room the phone number of the cemetery where Christine was buried written on a piece of paper with a note about placing flowers. There were also a bunch of books about child psychology and information about setting up ministries for children.
Police in Massachusetts had been investigating the guy for a while and had observed him at soup kitchens quote-unquote befriending female children between the ages of 9 and 10. This was Graves' second arrest for sexual assault, and he was out free on bail at the time. He was also facing charges for the sexual assault of the 5-year-old victim's sister the previous year.
Given his pending charges and the fact that there was a press clipping about Christine's case in his hotel room, Richard Graves does sound worthy of some police attention, at the very least an interview. But Graves' lawyer wasn't letting him talk to Pawtucket police, and I honestly don't know if they pushed the issue or were able to learn anything regarding his whereabouts on the night Christine disappeared. Pawtucket police didn't flat out call Richard Graves a suspect either.
I struggled to find any follow-up on that lead, so maybe Richard Graves is still on a list of people to be ruled in or out. The investigation into Christine Cole's death was still ongoing when another tragedy struck Rhode Island, less than 10 minutes away from Pawtucket in Central Falls.
According to reporting by W. Zachary Malinowski for the Providence Journal, seven-year-old Michelle Norris was playing with her friends down the street from her grandmother's house around 8.30 p.m. on May 28, 1988, when she disappeared from the group. Police and firefighters and volunteers searched all weekend. That Monday, two days later, Michelle's remains were found on the banks of a swampy waterway just three blocks away from where she was last seen.
Michelle's body was nude and her clothing was found neatly folded nearby. The medical examiner found marks on Michelle's neck, back, and limbs that gave the impression she fought back against her attacker. She did not have any other overt injuries, however. Dr. Kristen Sweeney said that she wouldn't describe Michelle as being beaten and she didn't have any bruises. The ME ruled that Michelle had been sexually assaulted and died of suffocation.
Police were treating it as a homicide. The early investigation into Michelle's case included interviews with six individuals and a few polygraph tests. Among them, police spoke to Michelle's father, William Norris, and an 18-year-old neighbor of Michelle's named Paige, but the nature of those interviews is unclear.
Investigators in Central Falls weren't saying if they had a suspect or any leads or really anything at all because there was a gag order in place until they made an arrest. Pawtucket police were keeping close tabs on the ongoing case. Michelle was the second female child from the same area to disappear and turn up dead by a similar cause of death in a six-month span.
Despite the similarities though, Pawtucket investigators were saying they actually didn't see a link between Michelle's murder and the death of Christine Cole, but they weren't ruling it out. There just wasn't enough evidence to say one way or another.
Neither the case of Christine Cole nor that of Michelle Norris saw a single update throughout the early summer of 1988. But in August of that year, the arrest of a man in Warwick revealed yet another suspect being investigated for both Christine and Michelle's deaths.
According to reporting by Nick Tate and Beverly Ford for the Boston Herald, 21-year-old Richard E. Gardner was out on bail after pleading guilty to the kidnapping and sexual assault of a 12-year-old boy in Massachusetts when he kidnapped and sexually assaulted a 6-year-old boy in Warwick, Rhode Island.
Warwick police revealed at the time of Gardner's arrest that he was also a suspect in the deaths of Michelle Norris and Christine Cole, as well as other similar unresolved crimes in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Investigators were considering him in at least five other kidnapping cases in Providence, too. Richard Gardner was ultimately convicted in one case of sexual assault in Massachusetts and received convictions in three kidnapping and sexual assault cases in Rhode Island.
The trials received a lot of publicity and debate around culpability of those who have experienced abuse in their lives. Part of Gardner's defense was that he was sexually assaulted as a child in the Boy Scouts, which led to his attacks on children as an adult. Gardner committed all three of the kidnappings and sexual assaults he was charged with in Rhode Island during 1988, the same year of Christine and Michelle's deaths.
But based on what he's actually been charged with and convicted of, Richard Gardner has never escalated to homicide. So even though he was reportedly a suspect in Christine Cole's murder and Michelle's, the cases don't really fit his M.O. I don't see any further talk about Richard Gardner in the source material I've been able to obtain for Christine's case or the case of Michelle Norris.
It's unclear if he remains on the list of suspects in either case or if he's been ruled out in some way. Christine Cole's case seems like it got a lot of attention during that first year and police were running down leads and looking into possible suspects as they came up. But investigators just couldn't seem to get the evidence or information they needed to determine what happened to her.
As the one-year anniversary of Christine's disappearance and death passed, Pawtucket police waited for new developments. In Central Falls, Leeds and Michelle Norris' case dried up too. In 1990, after a year and a half, police finally broke the gag order that had been in place since day one, telling Susanna Espinoza for the Providence Journal that they actually thought they knew who was responsible for Michelle's death.
The male suspect knew Michelle and still lived in town at the time. Police Chief Robert Chiquette said, quote, I think we could have gotten an indictment, but I don't think it was fair for us to go forward with a case we couldn't prove. We didn't have enough evidence, end quote. Chief Chiquette did not think the suspect was a threat to anyone else because the person was scared. He also mentioned that he didn't think the suspect intended to kill Michelle.
Barring new information, the investigation was at a standstill. And soon, both cases were cold. Christine Cole's case bounced around to new detectives throughout the years. The original detective, Lieutenant Haberly, was promoted to captain. And in 1991, Christine's four-inch-thick case file was passed on to Detective Joseph Corey.
As of April of that year, he hadn't received any new information in months, and a follow-up on one tip from the previous summer didn't turn into anything concrete. Three decades later, in 2018, a new detective assigned to Pawtucket Police Department's cold case unit reopened Christine's case.
Detective Susan Cormier and her partner, Detective Trevor Lefebvre, began leafing through the stack of documents, reviewing old interview notes, and scrutinizing the efforts of investigators who came before them, trying to find a path forward now 30 years after the fact.
According to reporting by Brian Amaral for the Providence Journal, one of the first things Detective Cormier did as part of the renewed investigation was pay a visit to the state medical examiner's office to take a look at the autopsy findings. That's when she realized something. There had been testing done on evidence 10 years earlier, but none of the paperwork ever made it into the case file.
Court documents show that in 2008, a since-retired detective reviewed the physical evidence in Christine Cole's case and found something that wasn't mentioned back in 1988. There was a small brown stain near the crotch of the pants Christine was wearing when she was found. The original autopsy findings in 1988 had noted how Christine's pants were buckled tightly and haphazardly, but there was nothing about that stain.
It looked like it could be blood. Court documents explain that investigators didn't know how or when the stain got there. It could have been on her pants before she died, or it could have been transferred to her pants while she was in the water or among debris when she washed up on the beach. Initial tests indicated that the stain was blood, but a second test done to confirm the findings was actually negative.
So, it's possible that the first result was a false positive. Still, the stain was sent to the Rhode Island Department of Health to test for possible DNA. Two years later, in 2010, the results of that testing showed a partial YSTR DNA profile from the stain on Christine's pants. But only six alleles on the Y chromosome were identified.
With the Y chromosome, investigators could rule out that the stain was from Christine herself. But they didn't have enough to figure out whose DNA it was at the time. Paperwork and details regarding the partial profile was filed away for another decade until Detective Cormier found it. Forensic DNA analysis had come a long way in those 10 years, so Detective Cormier wanted to see what they could learn from the stain now.
She submitted the evidence to the Rhode Island Department of Health, where senior forensic scientist Tamara Wong began testing the stain. That new round of testing revealed another partial DNA profile, but a more complete one than before. Combined with the previous partial profile, there were 14 total alleles, enough to conduct familial DNA analysis.
When investigators ran the partial YSTR profile in the Rhode Island Department of Health database, they got a hit. Except there was an issue. It matched a person who wasn't even born yet at the time of Christine's disappearance and death. There's no way he could be involved. However, the Y chromosome genetic marker would be shared by other males both up and down the gene line, such as a grandfather, father, uncle, or brother.
So, Detectives Cormier and Lefebvre started looking at male relatives, and their gaze soon fell on the father of the person whose DNA matched the partial profile. His name is Joao Monteiro.
According to an affidavit, Detective Cormier's investigation into Joao Monteiro, who went by John, revealed that he moved more than a dozen times over the course of 30 years and at one point, he lived directly above Saints Market, one of the locations where Christine was last seen.
Detective Cormier described Joao as living a covert life, parking next door to his apartment building in Central Falls instead of right outside, and he had his mail delivered to his sister's house instead of his own. Montero also had a criminal record, including a 1989 charge for felony assault with a dangerous weapon. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to two years probation.
There was also a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction and two arrests for DUI, one of which was dismissed. Before DNA led investigators to him, Montero never appeared within the case file for Christine Cole's murder. When detectives Cormier and Lefebvre interviewed Montero, he denied having anything to do with Christine's death.
But with a search warrant in hand to obtain a DNA sample, investigators collected a cheek swab for comparison to the stain on Christine's pants in July of 2019. The same day the sample from Montero was collected and tested, Tamara Wong from the Department of Health sent a text to Detective Cormier, quote, it's a match, end quote. Detective Cormier responded with, quote, OMG, end quote.
Joao Monteiro was arrested on murder charges the next day. An arrest in Christine Cole's unsolved case more than 31 years later was huge news. Detective Cormier said at the time that the arrest should be a warning to those still walking free in other long-standing cold cases.
But soon after evidence came together to arrest the suspect, the veracity of that same evidence came into question, unraveling the entire case. Following his arraignment, João Monteiro was actually allowed bail, which isn't common when the charge is murder. This could have been for a number of reasons, but as some began to wonder, maybe the evidence against Monteiro wasn't as strong as it was first presented to be.
You see, Detective Cormier didn't go through the Attorney General's Office and Superior Court to arrest Montero, which was more routine, you could say, for homicide cases. Instead, she went through state district court, a step that is commonly taken when there's some urgency to make an arrest, like maybe the suspect is a flight risk. In order to prosecute a capital case, though, a grand jury would ultimately have to find probable cause and indict the suspect.
The AG's office would be involved at that point anyway, so when the AG's office reviewed the evidence against Montero, they realized Pawtucket police didn't have an ironclad case. The glaring issue with the evidence was with the partial YSTR DNA profile.
Forensic scientist Tamara Wong communicated via text to Detective Cormier that she'd identified a, quote, match, end quote, between Joao Montero's cheek swab and the stain on Christine Cole's pants. However, in the full report of her findings, Wong states that while the profile was shared among male members of the same genetic line, it could be shared by as many as one in every 1,909 males.
That full report clarifying the probability is stated to be attached to the original arrest warrant application. However, court records indicate that the magistrate who reviewed the application didn't recall seeing such a report before the arrest of Montero. However, he did remember a series of texts with Detective Cormier regarding a DNA match.
Yes, João Monteiro couldn't be excluded as the contributor of that stain on Christine's pants, but neither could any of his male relatives, nor could any of the other one-in-1909 unknown males who also shared that marker.
Court records suggest that Detective Cormier and her partner didn't look into any of Montero's relatives, but singled him out for other reasons. Not least of all was the detail that he once lived above one of the locations where Christine was last seen. But that, too, was called into question. When Montero spoke with police, they conducted the interview in English, which was not his primary language. When he asked for an interpreter, he was denied one.
Montero now alleges that detectives deliberately misconstrued what he said about his previous addresses in the arrest affidavit, using his language barrier to their benefit. In reality, he didn't live there until the 2000s, well after Christine disappeared. He claims he can corroborate that with records of a car he reported stolen from that address in 2001. And anyway, police had reports of sightings of Christine after Saints Market.
The suggestion that Montero lived a covert lifestyle was contradicted by the fact that he held the same job for over a decade and had a public Facebook account. He explained in a later court filing that the reason his mail was delivered to his sister's place was because it was easier to get there. He didn't park outside his own apartment because his assigned parking spot was in the lot next door. Those multiple addresses, not all of them were verified as his.
Some belonged to another person by the same name. Other than the alleged DNA match, there was nothing else that tied João Monteiro to the death of Christine Cole. For six months, the case hung in the balance while the Attorney General's office reviewed the evidence. In January of 2020, the AG finally announced an update. They were dropping the charges against João Monteiro.
Ryan Amaral and Tom Mooney for the Providence Journal report that after extensive review, the Attorney General's office found that the DNA and other evidence did not, quote, "...narrow the field of those culpable for the death of Christine Cole to the degree necessary to move forward with the prosecution of the defendant," end quote. To put it lightly, João Monteiro was relieved to have the charges dropped. His attorney said he felt vindicated.
But none of the relief or vindication made up for the fact that his life had crumbled around him. Being a murder suspect, no less a person charged with the death of a child in a case that haunted the Pawtucket area for decades, had cost him his job, his apartment, and his independence. A court filing states he moved in with a family member who had to help him take care of himself. His sister described him as a recluse.
He no longer visited friends or family or did the things he once enjoyed doing. He was scared. A year after the charges against him were dropped, João Monteiro filed suit against Pawtucket Police Detective Susan Cormier and Detective Trevor Lefebvre, as well as other Pawtucket PD officials, the forensic scientists who conducted the DNA testing, Tamara Wong, and the city of Pawtucket.
He alleged that he was wrongly accused, framed, and arrested for murder in the case of Christine Cole. Katie Mulvaney reports that the defendants in the case filed motions to dismiss, saying that there was probable cause to arrest Montero, and they were entitled to what's called qualified immunity, basically protection from liability for public officials if they acted reasonably, which they argue they did.
United States District Attorney Mary McElroy reviewed the case, and in September of 2023, she ruled that many of Montero's claims were valid, and his suit against Detective Cormier and the other defendants for malicious prosecution and violation of his rights could move forward to a jury trial. The lawsuit awaits further activity as of this episode's recording in February of 2024.
Judge McElroy's 42-page ruling discusses and analyzes the evidence that was presented in the search warrant and arrest warrant, as well as the evidence that was omitted from those documents. And it turns out that Detectives Cormier and Lefebvre had interviewed someone about a different potential suspect around the same time they were looking into Montero.
The suspect allegedly confessed to his involvement in the Christine Cole case to a fellow inmate in prison. A court document shows that Detective Cormier and Detective Lefebvre interviewed inmate Anthony Suarez at Fort Devens Federal Prison in 2019. During this interview, Suarez implicated another inmate named Pedro Ortiz in the death of Christine Cole.
According to Soares, Ortiz said he took a quote-unquote beautiful little girl named Christine to the fort and she didn't like it. The girl said she didn't swim and didn't like the water. The girl, quote, kept crying but I make her stop. She wouldn't shut up but I made her shut up, end quote. Soares said Ortiz continued on saying they'd never know and they wouldn't find her.
Ortiz had allegedly referred to someone named Margie when talking to Soares about the little girl, which was the name Christine's mother went by. Ortiz also told Soares there was a scar on his forearm that he blamed on, quote, the little bitch, end quote.
Ortiz was known to be unhoused at the time of Christine's disappearance and living in the back corner of the Star Market parking lot where Christine was last seen and along the railroad tracks where the search dogs followed but lost Christine's scent. At the time he allegedly told Soares all of this, Ortiz was incarcerated for a murder conviction.
In Judge McElroy's ruling, she states that even though investigators could have obtained a blood sample from Pedro Ortiz to test against the DNA profile found from the stain on Christine's pants, they didn't. Detective Cormier did not pursue any further investigation into Pedro Ortiz for reasons that aren't immediately obvious. Maybe some context will be revealed in testimony when Montero's lawsuit makes it to trial, but
But until then, endless questions remain. In 2020, Christine's brother, Clint Cole, told ABC6 reporter Amanda Pitts that the loss of his sister tore their family apart. They had a great life, perfect even. But when Christine died, everything changed.
Although he was discouraged when the charges against Montero were dropped, he said he kept his hope that Christine would have justice and answers one day. Quote, I just hope that she has her day and that way she can finally be at rest. Because who's at rest if the case is not solved? End quote.
Pawtucket police have said they are still committed to finding answers for Christine Cole and her surviving family members. But whether they followed up on the Pedro Ortiz lead or any of the other suspects who landed on the list between 1988 and today is unknown. It's now been 36 years, and Christine's case is still unsolved.
In much of the source material, her manner of death is listed as undetermined, though the case is being treated as a homicide. Michelle Norris' homicide also remains unsolved. Investigators have not concluded if there's a definitive connection between the two cases.
If you have any information about the 1988 unsolved case of Christine Cole in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, or the 1988 unsolved murder of Michelle Norris in Central Falls, Rhode Island, please call 1-877-RI-SOLVE. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at darkdowneast.
This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East. Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audiocheck. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?