Every city has a dark side. On the afternoon of February 19, 1982, Doug Heath was climbing the back stairs of his three-story apartment building in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, thinking only of getting home after a long day. Instead, he found the landlord’s three-year-old daughter, Nicole, locked outside and standing alone on the steps. When he asked where her mother was, the little girl told him she was downstairs in the basement, lying down.
What Heath discovered inside that basement would haunt the tightly knit mill town for decades, and the silence that followed would make the truth nearly impossible to reach. Woonsocket in 1982 was a small, inward-looking city in the northern part of Rhode Island, still living in the shadow of the textile mills that had built it a century earlier before their fortunes faded. The streets were filled with French-Canadian Catholic families whose roots ran generations deep. People knew their neighbors intimately, and strangers rarely moved in.
That closeness was a double-edged sword. When something terrible happened, the perpetrator was almost never an outsider, but that same loyalty meant everyone also knew how to protect their own. At 409 Providence Street stood a three-story apartment building owned by 27-year-old Suzanne Lefevre and her husband Ernie. They lived on the first floor with their two young daughters.
The third-floor apartment was rented to 22-year-old Doreen Picard, who lived there with her boyfriend. Doreen had grown up twenty minutes away in Bellingham, Massachusetts, where she had been crowned homecoming queen in high school. She was studying child development and training for a career in childcare. By February 1982, she had grown close enough to the family downstairs that the landlord-tenant barrier had all but faded, and she was in the middle of packing her entire life into boxes to move to a new place on the other side of town.
The cruel irony of that particular day was that Doreen was not supposed to be there much longer. Suzanne spent the afternoon having lunch with her sister Carol. Around 1:30, two men arrived at the apartment. They were friends of Suzanne’s, coming to look at a litter of puppies she had in the basement and had advertised for sale in the local newspaper, right next to another ad for the upstairs apartment that Doreen was in the process of vacating.
Carol recognized one of the men. The other she had never seen before in her life. The four of them stood talking at the doorway for a while before the two men headed downstairs to inspect the puppies. By 1:45, Carol said her goodbyes and went home.
Roughly ninety minutes later, Doug Heath arrived home from work. As he came through the back door, he found Suzanne’s three-year-old daughter locked out of the apartment, standing alone on the steps. He tried the Lefevres’ door, found it locked, and went to the basement to see for himself. There he found them.
Blood was splattered through the laundry room, and both women were lying there. Sergeant Doug Cornell of the Woonsocket Police Department was among the first investigators to enter that basement. Even with all the difficult days he had seen in his career, this scene was among the worst. It was not a simple assault that had gotten out of hand.
It was closer to a frenzy, a pure and excessive act carried out with a 28-inch metal pipe, swung again and again at the two women, long after it was impossible for either of them to pose any threat to the person holding it. Doreen was pronounced dead at the scene. She had been beaten, then strangled with her own jacket. Suzanne was clinging to life and was rushed into surgery that lasted two and a half hours, during which doctors placed a fiberglass plate in her skull to hold what remained of it together.
She survived the operation, but instead of waking up, she slipped into a coma. Police officers stationed outside her hospital room were not there for appearances. Sergeant Cornell genuinely feared that the man responsible might try to return and finish what he had started. If Suzanne woke up, she would be the only living person capable of identifying him.
After thirty days, Suzanne finally opened her eyes. The problem was that she remembered nothing at all. Not the attack, not the pipe, not the face of the person who had stood over her. She suffered complete memory loss.
The damage to her body was permanent: a ruptured eardrum, ongoing balance problems, and partial loss of use of her right hand. She had entered that basement as a young mother with a house full of children and a husband who loved her. She came out of her month-long coma with a body that did not work as it once had and a mind with a deep void in the middle of it. Everyone had expected her to wake up and simply name the man, ending the case entirely.
That never happened. She later said that whatever happened in that basement, her mind had closed the door on it completely and never opened it again. In fact, the entire period from New Year’s Eve 1981 until February 19, 1982, was, in her own words, a total black void. There were two newspaper ads, one for puppies and one for a room for rent, meaning any number of strangers could have come to the house with a perfectly legitimate reason not only to enter, but to be welcomed inside.
Both ads could explain Suzanne taking someone down to the basement to show them either the puppies or the laundry room. The theory police developed was that Suzanne was attacked first, and when Doreen heard the commotion and came to help, she was beaten with the same metal pipe. The motive was completely unclear. Neither woman had been sexually assaulted.
Nothing had been stolen. It was simply a brutal, violent crime committed in the middle of the day. As for the people known to have been in the house around that time, there were the two men Carol had seen there about the dog. The one she recognized was Raymond Tempest Jr.
, a local construction worker from an influential family, known to everyone by the nickname Beaver. The stranger she had never met turned out to be John Allard, a man living with the sister of Tempest’s ex-wife. The only reason they were there was that Tempest had loaned his male dog to sire the puppies. He had been promised one of the litter and intended to give it to Allard, whose children wanted a dog.
Carol was there in the apartment with them and watched them look at the puppies. Allard picked one out, and they left without any trouble before 1:45. Little Nicole had something very interesting to say. Her grandmother Florence spent months patiently trying to draw the memory out of her, and the child’s story never changed on a single point.
Nicole said she had opened the door for a man she thought was a friend of her mother’s. That was what he told her. When she asked where her mother was, he said she was downstairs. Nicole described him as bigger than her father Ernie, with a mustache, wearing jeans, sneakers, and a baseball cap turned backward, with a red and white cloth hanging from his back pocket that she described as polka-dotted.
She said she heard her mother scream and started going down the stairs, but the man was coming up as she was going down, close enough that he passed right by her before locking her in the hallway and disappearing out the front door. It was a remarkably specific description for a child so young, and that was exactly the problem. She was only three years old, and Sergeant Cornell later admitted that while a strong eyewitness account would have been valuable, Nicole’s story shifted enough through repeated interviews that it was not enough on its own to point investigators toward a specific name. No one suggested she was lying.
She was a traumatized child being questioned over and over about the worst day of her life by strangers in uniform, and children that age want nothing more than to give the adults around them the answer they are looking for. All police had was a description from a three-year-old that changed depending on who she was talking to, Suzanne’s missing memory, a murder weapon that had been wiped clean of fingerprints, and two men known to have gone there for a puppy who both said they had not done it. For years, the case stalled with no real progress. Doreen’s parents, Ron and Simone, went door to door, talking to anyone they could reach, trying to gather threads.
In return, they received a flood of anonymous phone calls demanding they stop. Every time they pushed harder, the calls became more threatening. Callers told Ron to watch his family or his auto repair shop might burn down if he did not drop the matter. Police never identified the callers.
Rhode Island had a legendary reputation for corruption. Organized crime had deep roots in Providence, which had been the headquarters of the New England mob for decades under crime boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca.
The Wall Street Journal had once described the state as plagued by crime and corruption, and that rot had seeped into many politicians and, of course, some police officers. For roughly six years the case sat frozen, until 1988, when the television program Unsolved Mysteries took it up and Suzanne agreed to an interview, requesting her identity be hidden on camera because she was still afraid of what might happen if the person responsible recognized her voice. That broadcast brought in new tips, meaning more pressure, and eventually it reached a man named Daniel Shaw. In 1990, Shaw, a 36-year-old with a long history of alcoholism and mental health problems, walked into the Woonsocket police station and told them he had been at the scene of the crime that day.
He said the man who attacked both women carried the same name that had hovered over the case from the beginning: Raymond Tempest Jr. When Shaw started talking, other people started talking too. A neighbor named John Guarino said that about a year after the murders, he had asked Tempest directly if he had done it. Tempest laughed a little and said he had gone down to that basement and hit one woman with the pipe, and when the second one came down and saw what was happening, he hit her too, reenacting the motion like he was swinging a golf club.
Guarino did not take it seriously at the time. But weeks later, Tempest showed up at his apartment visibly agitated, insisting that police were watching his house, and warning Guarino to keep his mouth shut or he and his girlfriend could get hurt. Another man, Ronald Fass, came forward. He and Tempest had used cocaine together, and he said Tempest confessed to him repeatedly over a period of months, starting only two days after the attack.
According to Fass, Tempest said it all began as an argument over a puppy and escalated. Suzanne wanted him to leave his wife and he refused, she hit him, and he hit back. A third man, Terrence Gallinas, confirmed that he had seen Tempest’s father near the scene that day. Tempest was not just some ordinary man off the street.
His father had served as chief inspector of the Woonsocket Police Department before retiring, and at the time of the crime, he held the office of high sheriff of Providence County. Tempest’s brother Gordon was a lieutenant in the Woonsocket Police Force, the very officer who took the first statement from his brother after the attack. According to Ronald Fass, that day at the crime scene, Tempest’s father and a police chief named Francis Lynch cleared everyone out of the building and ordered Gordon to find the murder weapon and wipe it clean. When Gordon could not find it, they called Raymond directly and asked where he had left it.
Once he told them, Gordon retrieved the pipe, wiped it down, and hid it elsewhere, so that it could be discovered days later during a subsequent search that was, at that point, little more than a performance. Eventually, prosecutors felt they had enough to convene a statewide grand jury, which heard testimony from 80 witnesses over sixteen months. On June 4, 1991, the grand jury indicted Tempest for Doreen’s murder, and he was arrested the next day. He was only charged in connection with Doreen’s killing.
The period before trial turned ugly. Ronald Fass was dragged from a country road in Burrillville and beaten by people who were never identified. In a separate incident, someone shot at him with a shotgun. Just before trial, Daniel Shaw recanted his 1990 statement, claiming it had been coerced, and was excluded as a witness entirely.
The prosecution’s first dominoes fell before the trial even began. Tempest’s defense argued that he had been targeted by investigators so desperate for a conviction that they coached witnesses into telling the story police wanted to hear. His attorney, Michael Kendall, argued that new DNA evidence examined in 2004 proved his client’s innocence. There was no physical evidence directly linking Tempest to that basement.
The entire case was built on secondhand accounts of things Tempest supposedly said to people while drinking and using drugs years after the fact. On April 22, 1992, Raymond Tempest was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 85 years in prison. His brother Gordon was arrested shortly afterward and charged with perjury for lying about an interview he had conducted. In July 1993, he was sentenced to seven years.
Throughout it all, Tempest never stopped insisting on his innocence. He flatly denied having an affair with Suzanne and denied that any argument ever happened in that basement. In 2002, Tempest contacted the New England Innocence Project, which took up his case, building an argument that two police officers, Sergeant Ronald Bennington and Police Chief Rodney Rembold, had targeted Raymond for reasons unrelated to actual guilt, stemming from old grudges. That investigation uncovered a name that had not received much attention before: Donald Dejesus, who died in 2011 and who, according to multiple accounts, had made incriminating statements over the years.
And there was the three-year-old girl. At a gathering after Doreen’s funeral, little Nicole reportedly saw Dejesus across the room and said she thought he was the man who hurt her mother. She had never shown that kind of reaction to Tempest himself. In 2014, Tempest filed a formal petition to vacate his conviction based on the new facts.
It was denied. He tried again in 2015, and this time, after reviewing the full record, Rhode Island Supreme Court Justice Daniel Procaccini agreed there was a real problem. The court found constitutional violations of Tempest’s right to a fair trial, requiring the conviction to be vacated. None of this proved Tempest was innocent.
It proved only that his trial had not been fair. He was released on bail and placed under house arrest while the state decided its next move. In 2016, the Rhode Island Supreme Court upheld the decision to overturn his conviction. His attorney announced that Tempest had decided to enter an Alford plea, in which he maintained his innocence but acknowledged that the prosecution had enough evidence to obtain a conviction.
Because of this plea, he was sentenced to time already served and walked free after 24 years behind bars. Legally, the case was closed. Tempest accepted responsibility for Doreen’s death, and however one interprets the fine details buried in an Alford plea, he remained a free man carrying that conviction on his record for the rest of his life. But closed is not really the right word for a case like this.
The whole affair was never really about whether Beaver Tempest was the one who swung that pipe. It was about everything that happened around the event: a murder weapon that disappeared and reappeared neatly inside a cabinet, wiped completely clean; a brother wearing a police badge taking the first statement; a father who was second-in-command of the entire department; witnesses run off the road and shot at; a victim’s parents receiving threatening midnight phone calls simply for asking questions. A girl was killed and a woman came close to losing her life, and no one is behind bars for it now. Whether the system was protecting a guilty man or wronging an innocent one, it did the same damage either way.
It made it impossible for anyone to ever know the truth. That is what corruption truly steals: not just a fair trial, but the whole truth.