Though a man was questioned in 1980 and again in 2000 in connection with Diane Drake's slaying, there has been no arrest, and her relatives are tormented at the thought the killer is free.

05:05 PM EDT on Monday, October 6, 2003

BY JENNY HOLLAND
Journal Staff Writer

On Friday, March 21, 1980, a strong storm was blowing through Aquidneck Island. Diane Drake, a 19-year-old Roger Williams College student, was without a car, since just a few months earlier she had finally given up on her old Volkswagen and sold it for scrap. One of her brothers, who planned on getting a new car, had offered to pass along his old one. But that hadn't happened yet.

So that miserable afternoon, she set out on foot in the rain and snow for work at a Photo Patio on East Main Road -- about a 20-minute walk from the row of small white cottages where she lived on Easton's Terrace in Middletown. Her shift began at 2:30. She never arrived.

The next morning, her naked body washed up on Easton's Beach in Newport, less than a mile from the apartment she shared with another young woman.

The cause of death was threefold, the police say. Strangulation, submersion, and blunt-force trauma.

"I know that she must have been really scared," Diane's younger sister Jean Fucile wrote in an e-mail last month from her home in Virginia. "I am sure that she tried to rationalize with her murderer or maybe it just happened so fast that she did not know it was coming. She was too smart to have egged this person into hurting her. If he or she or they wanted something from her and she feared for her life, then she would probably have given it to them.

Journal photo / Bob Thayer QUESTIONS: John and Frances Drake, of Portsmouth, with a portrait of their daughter Diane, who was found slain in 1980 in Newport.

"But what did they want? Her time? Her affection?"

Four different law-enforcement agencies have investigated the case over the years: the Middletown and Newport police, the state police, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The Newport police and the NCIS said they are still actively working on it, and would not comment on specifics.

For the Drake family, the last 23 years have swirled with rumor and false hope that a break in the case was just around the corner.

"It drove us all crazy," says Terry DeVine, the youngest of the nine siblings, who was 14 when her sister was killed. "Leads, leads going nowhere, suspects, rumors. Some of our family members had to move away."

ON A SUNNY afternoon last month, John Drake, a retired Navy captain, sat at home in Portsmouth with his wife, Frances, their daughter Terry and her newborn son, Aidan. The open screen doors let in a pleasant breeze from the sparkling Sakonnet River, setting off wind chimes in the living room. He recounted a chilling story.

The afternoon Diane went missing, an elderly Middletown woman looking out her window saw a man and woman fighting in a car that was stopped in front of her house. The witness lived on Forest Avenue, just around the corner from the photo booth where Diane worked. She called the Middletown police, but when officers got there, the car was gone.

"He was holding her down with his right hand," Drake said, and holding the steering wheel with his left.

Drake believes that woman saw the murder of his daughter. But it was one of many leads that went nowhere.

"How the heck her body got onto Easton's Beach, or where her clothes are, we don't know."

A maintenance crew found Diane's body just before 10:30 a.m. on Saturday. The autopsy concluded that her larynx had been fractured, and that she had been in the water for up to 8 hours, her sister Jean Fucile wrote. There was no evidence of sexual assault.

Some of her injuries may have been caused by a struggle with her attacker. There were abrasions on her hands, and marks on her wrists and ankles indicating that she had been bound. Other injuries, such as broken ribs, may have occurred in the rough surf.

"She was pretty messed up," Fucile wrote. "The theory is that Diane was barely alive when she was thrown in the water and died immediately from drowning . . . She would not have been conscious and was most likely brain dead from lack of oxygen at that point. But, she was still alive."

ELAINE EGAN, Diane's roommate, also worked at Photo Patio, in a booth just down the road from Diane's. When she realized that Diane hadn't arrived at work that afternoon, she became worried. When Diane didn't come home that evening, she became frantic.

She started a search party with friends, she called the Middletown police, and she called John Drake.

He wasn't concerned, he says. He figured his daughter was just off somewhere.

"If I got all upset every time I didn't know where Diane was, I'd have ulcers," Drake recalls thinking. "And that was it. I turned in for the night."

The next morning, he and his youngest daughter, Terry, went to Massachusetts to visit another daughter who had just had her second baby. Mrs. Drake was already there, taking care of the newborn's sister. Diane was meant to join them. John and Terry returned home to Portsmouth about 5 p.m. Saturday. As soon as they got home, a police officer knocked at the door, and told Drake he needed to call the chief.

"I suppose you know by now that we found your daughter's body on Easton's Beach at 10:30 this morning," Drake recalls being told. "We've been trying to reach you all day."

He then broke the news to his 14-year-old daughter.

"I felt like I was on fire," Terry, now 38, said. "I was running up and down the stairs screaming. It was the worst thing I will ever experience."

The police brought Mr. Drake to identify Diane's body. When he first saw her, he said, he thought it was someone else.

"That's my daughter's watch,' he said. "That's my daughter's birthmark. But that's not my daughter."

IN THE SPRING of 2000, Detective John Killian was working in the state police Major Crimes Unit when a letter about the 20-year-old case ended up on his desk.

It was from a Portsmouth woman who had moved out of state. She wrote that a few months after Diane Drake's murder in 1980, a Middletown man told her he had done it.

Killian and a Middletown police officer went to interview the woman, and questioned the man, who had been questioned in 1980, again.

The state police ran checks with every motor-vehicle department in the country, following a lead on a car.

"We looked into it to exhaustion," Killian said.

But 20 years after the fact, nothing could be proven.

"There is a lot of circumstantial evidence," Fucile said, in her e-mail. "Unfortunately, without a confession or a corroborating witness, we may never know what happened to Diane that night."

Elaine Egan talks about her friend's murder as though it happened yesterday. Like Diane's sisters, she is tormented by the fact that the killer has not been found.

She fears it will never happen.

"Realistically, how's it going to get solved?" she says. "Somebody needs to confess."

Newport police Capt. Alan Rolfe, who is now in charge of the investigation, would not comment on specifics of the case. He did say, however, that there was forensic evidence, and that he remains hopeful.

"We will go anywhere at any time to find out who killed Diane Drake," Rolfe said. "If this case is not solved, it will not be from lack of effort."

JOHN AND FRANCES DRAKE raised their family in Portsmouth and in Norfolk, Va. Diane, the seventh of nine children, learned to be independent at a young age.

"With a large family, you had to stick up for yourself, or you'd be lost," Mrs. Drake said. But her daughter was also a calming presence.

"She was a very peaceful person," said Terry. "She was the peacemaker between us, always trying to be diplomatic."

They describe Diane as a carefree 19-year-old who was rarely seen with makeup on but frequently had a paperback book jammed in the back pocket of her dungarees. One of her favorite authors was Kurt Vonnegut. She was studying criminal justice because she wanted to be a juvenile probation officer. She loved Van Morrison and James Taylor. Taylor's song "Blossom" was played at her funeral.

"I don't know how people deal with something like this if they don't have a background they can lean on," said Mrs. Drake. Without church, family and friends, she said, "I would have lost my mind."

Over the years, the notoriety of Diane Drake's murder has diminished on Aquidneck Island. Fewer and fewer people recognize the name. And family members have done their best to go on with their lives, coping with their loss in different ways.

Mrs. Drake says she feels Diane's presence watching over the family, protecting them from harm.

"I know where she is," Mrs. Drake said. "She's our guardian angel."

The older sister of the newborn baby that Diane was supposed to visit the weekend of her death is now a college student studying criminal justice.

"She's going to finish what Diane started," Mrs. Drake said.

After all this time, Diane's father doubts that finding the killer would bring him solace.

"I hoped they would catch up with the guy for several years," he said. "Then I decided it was probably best if we didn't know. We'd have to go through the whole damn thing again."

Terry disagrees.

"I want to find out who is walking around, living, breathing with this horrible secret. I just feel like they're going to get theirs someday."

COLD CASE CONTACT: Anyone with information about Diane Drake's case may contact Newport police Capt. Alan Rolfe at (401) 847-8300.