SCITUATE -- Sometime before she died, Paula Proulx slipped a
single, blood-red bead through the laces on one of her favorite boots.
The police found her, stripped, stabbed, bludgeoned and dumped in a
Scituate sand pit in May 1987. The bead and the old-fashioned, low,
lace-up boots were the only things her killer had left her.
Proulx, 33, was murdered in the murky anonymity that sometimes surrounds
people who are down on their luck and living on the edge. Her
10-year-old daughter did not hear her final words, nor did her younger
sister, who had propped up Proulx's life as it unraveled.
Proulx lived hard and stubbornly. She was, says that sister, Linda
Muldoon, kind-hearted and naive. She'd bring food to the homeless in her
Olneyville neighborhood, and she'd let people without electricity run
extension cords into her apartment despite warnings from worried
relatives.
Proulx had the kind of blind generosity that disregards ugliness and
greets danger with open arms. Sometimes she let drug addicts, alcoholics
and strangers into her home.
"The last few weeks of her life she fell in with bad people," says
Muldoon. "She was very easily led into things."
Proulx stayed out late. She bounced between jobs. It was a side of
Proulx her sister had never seen.
"When she wasn't coming home till 4 or 5 in the morning those last few
weeks, I said to her, 'Paula, the only people who are out this late are
drug addicts and prostitutes.' "
Muldoon let the words hang in the air. She says she never pried further.
Some things even a sister doesn't want to know.
"She asked me to adopt her kid, and I thought it was just because she
couldn't handle her kid. She seemed to know something was coming."
Proulx was raised in Cranston, the third of five children. Her mother
was kind and soft, her father a harsh man who could "kill you with
words," Muldoon says.
On the night Proulx disappeared, Muldoon watched her head off to a
nearby bar called the Mercury Lounge on Hartford Avenue.
Their last words were practical, meaningless. Muldoon had an earache and
an abscessed tooth and wanted to stay in; Proulx said she was heading
out for beer. She told Muldoon she'd call, but she never did.
"After two or three days I knew she was gone," said Muldoon, who
reported Proulx missing. "It was just a matter of finding her."
MURDER IS RARE in Scituate. The town is quiet and green. People drive to
work on the serpentine, tree-lined roads surrounding Rhode Island's
largest reservoir. They come home to a sky dark enough to see the Milky
Way.
The last murder here was in 1998. A drugged-up Foster man killed a
Cranston woman and left her floating in a creek. But that case was
solved.
Police don't think Proulx was killed in town. Scituate inherited her
death. So did Police Chief William F. Mack.
Mack arrived in Scituate after a career on the Woonsocket force, where
he rose to chief of detectives, the number-two spot in the department.
Woonsocket bristled with action; Scituate, it seemed, stirred only when
the wind blew. It was the kind of job change an accomplished cop makes
along the road to retirement.
When Mack took over the tiny force, Proulx had been dead 10 years. Some
of the officers involved in the case had retired; others had moved on to
different departments.
Still, for Mack and many chiefs, an unsolved murder is a stain and a
challenge. Shuffling through the small pile of police records collected
after her death, Mack noticed several problems. The biggest was an
apparent wrinkle in the timeline of the murder.
Proulx was last seen leaving the Mercury Lounge in the early morning on
Sunday, April 26, 1987. Her body was discovered the next Sunday. There
was remarkably little decomposition. The first medical examiner at the
scene said she'd been dead 24 to 36 hours. Later, during the autopsy,
another medical examiner decided she'd been dead for "several days."
This puzzles Mack.
"Which was it?" he asks. "Where was she during that whole week?"
Mack determined that temperatures at the time did not seem cold enough
to preserve a body for a week. Maybe the killer or killers stuffed her
in a freezer, Mack hypothesizes. Or maybe she lived for days after she
disappeared.
The missing week makes it difficult to place Proulx with specific people
or in specific places, Mack said. It's hard enough tracking a dead
person back through the final hours of life. When the time of death is
unknown, it grows even harder.
The original coroner reported that she'd been shot several times. But
the autopsy uncovered no bullet wounds.
The killer got close, smashing in her skull and stabbing her repeatedly
in the chest and neck. Then he dumped her in an overgrown gravel pit,
not far from the road. She was left naked except for the brown and
white, sharp-toed, high-heeled boots with the red bead.
IN 1987, Scituate police worked with Providence detectives on the case.
They questioned several people and reconstructed Proulx's movements on
the night she left for the Mercury Lounge.
Michael Calenda was one of the Scituate investigators. In his nearly
20-year career, Calenda rose to sergeant and was decorated for bravery.
The Proulx case stares back at him across the years, unfinished and
frustrating.
"That case should have been solved," says Calenda, now a teacher at
Ponaganset High School.
The police narrowed their search to one suspect, an odd-job man from New
York with a criminal record. He was 38 in 1987, and Linda Muldoon says
he had stayed in the house she shared with Proulx in Olneyville for a
few months before Proulx was killed. Proulx invited him in because he
was living out of his car, and it was winter.
The police suspected him partly because he disappeared around the time
Proulx did. When he surfaced in New York, Calenda and then-Sgt. William
Helm went after him. They questioned him for two days at the police
station in Pelham, just outside New York City.
The man told the police he'd left town days before Proulx disappeared.
But a manager at the Mercury Lounge said she'd seen Proulx and the
suspect leave together at about 2 a.m., closing time, the night she
disappeared. The manager was the last person to see Proulx alive,
according to the police.
Calenda dug into the case. But after awhile, then-Chief William Lawton
told him he wouldn't be paid overtime anymore to keep going. He tried
forging ahead on his own, but he couldn't close the case.
The investigation stalled. The New York suspect was never charged.
"I had good leads. I had good suspects," Calenda says. "I was down in
the Bronx for three weeks. Obviously, there's 20/20 hindsight." But "if
things were done differently in the beginning stages of the case, we
would have solved it."
"I think they gave up too early. I told Sgt. Helm and Chief Lawton that
we should have worked it harder. But we had philosophical differences .
. . "
It's one thing if a case just goes cold, Calenda says. But Proulx's
didn't. Calenda wanted to question more suspects, track more leads. He
says he shepherded the case as far as he could. But Helm and Lawton were
his superior officers, and in the strict hierarchy of a small-town
police force, Calenda didn't have the rank to push harder.
Mack believes the killer or killers would be about 50 now. He believes
they've talked over the years, either bragging drunkenly at bars about
the murder or confiding in friends. Someone sitting on a barstool
somewhere knows exactly what happened to Proulx, Mack says.
"I'd like to see this case solved. If new evidence turns up, we'll take
it from there."
Some of the evidence sealed in plastic bags at the Scituate police
station, including hair and fiber samples and clothes found scattered
near Proulx's body, may yet help. Modern technology and investigative
procedures often resurrect stale evidence.
"I JUST WANT to know what happened," Muldoon says.
With murder, the dead aren't the only victims. Muldoon, along with many
survivors, wants closure.
In a photograph taken before she died, Proulx smiles for the camera. Her
dark, carefully curled hair spills around her head and her eyes flash.
She seems happy, but weary.
Proulx's life was spinning out of control at the end. She was drinking
and may have been taking drugs, and couldn't hold a job for long, but
none of that matters to Muldoon.
"She had a heart of gold," and besides, she says, echoing Mack, no one
deserves to die that way.
"She had a hard time in life," says Muldoon. "She used to say,
'Sometimes I think being dead wouldn't be so hard; you wouldn't have to
pay the bills.' There isn't a day goes by that I don't see her lying out
there in Scituate."
COLD CASE CONTACT: Anyone with information about Paula Proulx's
case may contact the
Scituate Police Department at (401) 821-5900.
