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C H R IS T I N E COL E M A K E S H E R WAY D OW N
West Avenue in Pawtucket on a 23-degree day, January 6, 1988, a ten-year-old,
bright-eyed girl with long dark hair on an errand to get groceries for her family.
In her mind, Sue Cormier sees Christine crossing busy Lonsdale Avenue to pick
up clams at Red’s Seafood, now an autobody shop. Cormier, a veteran Pawtucket
police detective and founder of the state’s cold case task force, sits in an unmarked
cruiser visualizing the little girl walking toward home, stopping to play with friends
in the gathering dark, and then going into Saints Market on Slater Street for milk.
And then on this cold winter day thirty-two years ago, the
bright-eyed girl with long dark hair vanishes. She is reported
missing. An all-out manhunt ensues. It snows that night;
newspaper photos show investigators brushing off parked
car windows looking inside for evidence. Or the girl.
Christine’s body would be found fifty-four days later,
washed ashore at Conimicut Point in Warwick.
“I always put myself in a victim’s place, and I always walk
where they walked or where they were, I want to feel it, I want
to see what the victim saw, I want to see what the killer saw,”
Cormier says as we drive away from what was the little girl’s
apartment building near the Central Falls line. “I want to know
how their lives ended. I want to put the pieces together.
“I’d walk this, the route she took,” Cormier adds, pointing
down West Avenue, imagining Christine’s last steps. “She
gets to me the most. They all have meaning, they all have a
story. But she gets to me the most.”
The “all” that she refers to are the faces of fifty-two victims
on a deck of playing cards Cormier created in 2018 to jar
memories and help solve cold cases. The decks are sold for
$5 each, online at coldcaseri.com, at various events and in
commissaries in the state’s prison system. Who knows more
about crime than other criminals, the reasoning goes; more
than 700 decks have been sold to prisoners.
Faces old and new from across the state are in the deck,
from Rita Bouchard, ace of spades, who died at seventeen,
her throat slashed, her back, breasts and neck stabbed more
than thirty times in Pawtucket in 1947, her body found behind
Slater Park; to Norman Baxter, the two of clubs, a young man
with substance abuse issues who went missing from West
Warwick in February 2017.
Christine Cole is the queen of hearts, a blown-up photo of
her on one wall of Cormier’s tiny cold-case office in Pawtucket
City Hall. It is so far the only case with seeming resolution,
though it came not via a tip from the cards but DNA evidence:
58 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l
JANUARY 2020
Joao Monteiro, sixty, arrested in July 2019, was
arraigned on charges and is out on bail. The case is
headed to the grand jury. The Central Falls resident
had lived above the store on Slater Avenue where
the little girl was last seen.
Time may have forgotten many faces in the deck,
but Cormier hasn’t; she knows the details of all by
heart. She is dogged in her pursuit of justice, enlisting
the aid of cops statewide, and most notably Paw-
tucket’s cold case unit she formed in 2018, and the
Rhode Island Cold Case Task Force that she founded
as well. The latter, a statewide panel of law enforce-
ment pros including FBI agents, forensic pathologists
and scientists, detectives and members of the Rhode
Island State Crime Lab Trace Evidence Unit, meets
twice a month to collectively investigate the state’s
cold cases.
It is a labor of love; when Cormier’s daily routine of inves-
tigating major crimes in Pawtucket ends, her cold-case work
begins, virtually all on her own time.
“I joke with people I’m not in this job for the income, I’m
in it for the outcome,” she says in a way that tells you she’s
not really joking at all.
Many faces in her office look down at Cormier, Christine
Cole’s most of all, her bright eyes that of a little girl who will
forever be ten years old.
“I look at her face every day,” says Cormier. “I look at her
face all the time and, as a mother, that hits me hard.”
C
ORMIER JOINED THE PAWTUCKET POLICE AS A
patrol officer in 1993, making detective in 2005 and
working major crimes since 2007. Growing up in the
Cowesett section of Warwick, she showed an early interest in
law enforcement by joining the Warwick police department’s
cadet program that teaches teens the basics of policing.