A Fiendish Murder: The Rhode Island Cold Case You Never Heard Of
By: Jason Carpenter
Tags: True Crime, Insanity, Rhode Island

Mind Went Blank

On the Friday afternoon before Rita’s body was found, Raymond Patenaude went to the Rhode Island Fabrics Company on School Street to ask the foreman if it would be alright to come back to work on Monday after being out for a leave of absence. He left at about 3:15.

He then went to downtown Pawtucket, where he entered the Capitol Theater at about 4 p.m. At about 7 p.m., he said, by coincidence Rita came into the theater and sat down next to him. They talked for five minutes and then left the theater and walked up Main Street to Collyer Park at the junction of Main and Mineral Spring Avenue, where they sat down on a bench.

They had been there only a few minutes when a car with yellow registration plates drove up and the driver addressed Rita by name. She went over and spoke to the man, then called to Raymond to come over to the car, and finally persuaded him to get inside.

With Raymond in the back seat and Rita in the front with the driver, they drove to the entrance of Slater Park on Armistice Boulevard. Raymond told them he wanted to go back downtown, so they drove him back and dropped him at the Capitol Theater. As he got out, the driver asked Rita, “Do you want to go home or go back to the park?”

Raymond told police he thought Rita replied she wanted to go back to the park. When they drove away, he got a cup of coffee and then, having been out on dates with Rita before, started to worry about the girl. And so, shortly after 8 p.m., he hopped a trackless trolley and went back to the Slater Park entrance where he found Rita, alone, sitting on a bench, and crying.

He asked her, “What’s the matter?” and — according to Raymond— she slapped his face, and got up to walk way. Persistent, Raymond followed her to a nearby bus stop, and asked her again, “What’s the matter?” and this time, his story ran, she slapped his face and kicked him twice in the groin.

And then, he said, his “mind went blank.”

When Raymond came to, he was lying on the ground in the woods with a girl’s body beside him. After asking twice, “Is that you, Rita?” he saw a knife on the ground, got up, and, following a path out of the woods by moonlight, he took the trolley and bus back to his home, arriving there shortly after 10 p.m.

When pressed as to why he hadn’t revealed this story to police at the start of the investigation, Raymond insisted that he had not lied; it wasn’t until a week later, he said, the he had a dream in which the incidents he now described to police came back to him, whereafter he woke up and realized that what had happened “was real.”

Chief Inspector Wilfred Wadsworth (left) and Chief Mills examine the crime scene

“Maybe I Did It”

After listening patiently to the recital of the boy’s story, detectives and Inspector Wadsworth took him in a police car to Collyer Park and asked him to point out the park bench on which he and Rita were supposed to have been sitting.

Patenaude pointed out a bench. ”Now, where did the car come from?” the Inspector asked.

“From over there,” Patenaude replied, indicating North Providence.

“OK,” Wadsworth said, “now you lead the way and tell us where you went.”

Patenaude then directed the driver of the police car to go down Park Place, swing onto Main Street, thence to Walcott Street, North Bend Street, and finally onto Armistice Boulevard.

At the entrance to Slater Park he was asked to point out which bench they sat on. He pointed one out.

”Now, after you got kicked by Rita, how did you enter the woods?” he was asked.

“I don’t know,” Patenaude replied, “I only remember waking up beside Rita and I can’t stand dead bodies so I walked away.”

The police then led the boy from Armistice Boulevard into the woods at the entrance of the Lover’s Lane where Patenaude said he emerged that night. Foot by foot, he led them nearly to the place where the body was found; but when asked to point out the exact spot, he said, “I don’t remember, there were a lot of trees around.”

At last they took him to the clearing and asked him point blank if he had murdered Rita.

“I don’t remember,” he said. “Maybe I did it.”

Chief Inspector Wadsworth displays the alleged murder weapon for reporters

“Packed With Inconsistencies”

Disconcerting though Raymond Patenaude’s story may have been, police were nevertheless confounded, finding the tale “packed with inconsistencies.”

His description of the knife, for instance, did not answer the description of the blood-stained dagger found at the corner of Armistice and Parkside weeks earlier, nor could he account for Rita’s missing pocketbook and glasses — neither of which had been found.

His recollection of the crime scene was equally suspect. At the clearing in the woods, when asked how Rita’s body lay on the ground, Patenaude indicated her head was pointed toward the river, when actually it was at a right angle to the river when discovered by police. Furthermore, the spot where her body was found was marshy, and on the afternoon of February first, the mud was at least two inches deep. With this fact in mind, Inspector Wadsworth asked the youth that since he had been lying down in the mud he must have soiled his clothes. “Oh, I only had a couple of leaves on the front of my coat,” Patenaude replied casually.

Another puzzling factor for investigators was that Rita had no mud on her shoes corresponding to the mud surrounding the place where her body was found, and so they had ruled out that she walked even a short distance in the woods. Patenaude — undeveloped for his age — weighed only 90 pounds. If she rode near the spot in an automobile, then was carried several hundred feet in the marshy underbrush, a man much stronger than he must be sought, they contended.

But among the most glaring discrepancies, assuming that it was Rita’s body the youth claimed he found at his side, was the fact that Dr. Gaudet placed the time of death no earlier than 6 a.m. Saturday morning; at least eight hours after Patenaude said he woke up in the woods. And, when Rita’s body was found at 2:40 p.m. Saturday afternoon, there was no knife anywhere to be found.

It was not unusual, police later pointed out to reporters, for innocent persons to claim guilt for sensational crimes. “They like the publicity,” Chief Mills said. And so, unable to corroborate any part of the youth’s account, the Pawtucket police wholly rejected his story, believing that he clearly “needed mental care”.

On the very same night of his bizarre confession, Raymond Patenaude was therefore committed to a psychiatric hospital for observation.