When Stephen Marfeo killed himself in 1999, a Johnston detective's hope of finding Marfeo's wife was dashed.

09:36 AM EDT on Tuesday, October 14, 2003

BY NEIL SHEA
Journal Staff Writer

JOHNSTON -- Detective John Nardolillo Jr. isn't the kind of guy who talks to psychics.

He is a large, square man with a serious brow and hands broad as paddles. He is a onetime politician who favors dark suits that seem barely able to contain his body-builder's frame.

Nardolillo prefers trusting his experience and solving his own cases.

But Doreen Marfeo, a pretty, petite woman with green eyes and blonde-brown hair, had been missing for a year and Nardolillo had nothing. There was no body, there were no witnesses. One of the biggest cases of his life seemed bound to languish on a dusty shelf at police headquarters.

"There came a point where we reached the roadblock to eternity," Nardolillo said. "And that's when we brought in the psychics.

"The bottom line is this: we had nothing. . . . You have to ask yourself, if I was Doreen, would I want the police to make the extra effort?"

Doreen Marfeo has been missing since 1990, yet her name still prompts many Rhode Islanders to narrow their eyes, nod their heads and recall the story of "that girl they never found."

Doreen Marfeo

National TV shows, including Unsolved Mysteries, featured her case and periodic news stories prevent it from fading completely.

By the time Nardolillo and his boss, police Capt. Leo O'Donnell, consulted psychics, they'd quietly shifted from a missing person search to a homicide investigation. Nardolillo had tracked leads to North Carolina, South Carolina, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. He'd worked with police in Arizona, California and Maine. He'd dragged ponds and brought in the FBI.

One psychic from Providence proved helpful. She suggested the same conclusion they'd already reached: that Marfeo's husband, Stephen, was hiding something.

NARDOLILLO SUSPECTED from the beginning that Stephen Marfeo had killed Doreen and buried her body. His theory was built on patterns.

Doreen Marfeo, 34, was neat, punctual and cared about her looks. She was an efficient worker. She called and visited her elderly mother regularly. Stephen Marfeo was macho. He was a body-builder and he enjoyed customizing his beloved truck. When Doreen would visit her mother, Stephen called to make sure she was there. He also called her at work to see what she was doing -- and who she was doing it with.

In the months before she disappeared, Doreen's normal patterns unraveled. He husband's became stained with more jealousy, suspicion and aggression. Nardolillo discovered that a year before Doreen disappeared, Stephen Marfeo had twice hired private investigators to follow her. He was convinced she was cheating on him. Both investigators had reported that Doreen was faithful.

About six months before her disappearance, Doreen quit her job as a purchasing director at the Rhode Island School of Design. She said she needed to fix her marriage.

Then, on March 29, 1990, Doreen Marfeo vanished. That day, she didn't make the normal call to her mother. That evening, when Stephen Marfeo arrived home to an empty house, the husband who had once carefully tracked his wife's movements didn't bother to look for her. He waited two days before he reported her missing, calling the police only after Doreen's mother threatened to do it if he didn't.

Journal photo / Andrew Dickerman STILL SEARCHING: Johnston police Detective John Nardolillo Jr. is confident that Doreen Marfeo's husband, Stephen, was responsible for her disappearance in 1990.

Stephen Marfeo told the police he'd last seen Doreen when he came home for lunch on March 29. She was sitting on the couch, watching TV, he said; their last words were meaningless. Marfeo said his wife apparently packed a suitcase with a week's worth of clothes and slipped away with about $600 from a safe in their home.

Detectives noticed what she didn't take.

She left her curlers, toothbrush and her pet cats. Her 1984 Ford Tempo was sitting cold in the driveway. She didn't touch the $50,000 the couple had in the bank.

The police later seized timecards from Stephen Marfeo's workplace that showed he had taken a 70-minute lunch break that day. Usually, the cards showed, he took 20 or 30 minutes.

"I believe Doreen Marfeo met her fate during that lunch break," Nardolillo says. He believes she had decided to leave her husband, and when he came home, she told him.

Nardolillo thinks Stephen Marfeo exploded and said she wasn't going anywhere. Then, in a rage, he probably strangled her.

JOHNSTON EMBRACES the charm of Rhode Island and is a dead end for its grime.

Thousands of junk cars and broken appliances are smashed into oblivion at a local scrap yard. Aging mobsters occasionally migrate here. Dozens of other towns haul trash here for burial in one of the East Coast's largest landfills.

But in another world, a few streets away, warm mornings bring the pleasant clunk of bocce balls rolled in a leafy park near the heart of town. Gadflies and conspiracy theorists crowd into local coffee shops, players in a thriving political culture full of clashing opinions.

People know each other's names, they remember family histories, and, even if they move, they stay close.

Nardolillo and Stephen Marfeo stayed close, too. For years after Doreen disappeared, the men were locked in a psychological standoff.

The detective lost sleep thinking about the case. It burned him that Marfeo seemed to be getting away with murder. Marfeo claimed the police were trying to "railroad" him.

The men played head games. A couple of times they met at stoplights and stared at each other until the signal blinked green. Nardolillo sometimes followed Marfeo to his favorite breakfast spot, just over the line in North Providence. Marfeo talked to a lawyer about keeping the detective off his back.

One day, Nardolillo was driving past the one-story house the Marfeos had shared on Hartford Avenue. He saw Stephen in the driveway and he pulled over.

Journal photo / Andrew Dickerman ACCUSATION: A note sent to Stephen Marfeo after his wife, Doreen, disappeared in 1990.

"Do you think it's time to tell the truth yet about your wife?" he asked.

"You're a nice guy," Marfeo replied. "But you're in the wrong business."

Nardolillo slowly assembled a murder case against Marfeo, working nights and weekends, often without pay. Detectives spent thousands of hours over several years on the case. In police interviews, Marfeo changed his story several times.

But the attorney general's office believed that without a body there simply wasn't enough evidence for a conviction. Marfeo was never charged with a crime.

IN 1999, nearly a decade after his wife disappeared, Stephen Marfeo, then 50, told family members he was taking a vacation to "straighten his head out."

Shortly after he returned, Marfeo shot and killed an ex-girlfriend named Laura Vincent and seriously wounded her new boyfriend, Sal Puleo. Then he drove to a secluded reservoir in Connecticut and shot himself in the head. Many viewed his suicide as proof he had killed his wife. John Nardolillo saw it as the last move in a battle for control.

"When I heard he killed himself, my heart sank," he said. "I thought, 'now we'll never find Doreen.' "

Stephen left a suicide note for his mother. In it he seems to speak as much to himself as to her, justifying his actions but offering no explanations. The note showed he had been planning the violent ending for some time. He wrote that he hadn't been the same since Doreen disappeared, and that he had finally crossed over forever to "the Dark Side."

He told his mother that he'd been alive "9 years longer than I should have." But he didn't leave any clues about what happened to Doreen.

TODAY, THE LIVES of Stephen and Doreen are told in a half-dozen thick white binders stuffed onto that dusty shelf in police headquarters.

Their stories are also preserved in the memories of their elderly mothers.

Angelina Marfeo, 79, still lives in Johnston. She doesn't know why her son shot Vincent and Puleo and then took his own life. She doesn't think he had a hand in Doreen Marfeo's disappearance. "He was always good to me and good to his family," she said. "I really don't think he killed Doreen. I just don't want to think about it."

Doreen Marfeo's mother, Laura Dobson, is 89. She lives in Central Falls with her four cats. A bony old one named Frosty, for her pure white coat, belonged to Doreen Marfeo.

After her daughter disappeared, Dobson and Stephen Marfeo remained close. She even planned to leave him some money in her will. It was so he could bury her, she said, because she had no one else.

On the morning before his suicide, Marfeo gave Dobson a ride home from the hospital. During their last conversation, Dobson lamented her daughter's fate.

"You two could have had such a wonderful life," she said.

He said, "I know."

Sometimes she had asked him point blank: "Did you kill her?" He'd always denied it. Now Dobson says she can't judge, that's for God to do. She's more concerned with burying her daughter.

"I never thought I'd be asking God to let me live longer, but I pray everyday for him to let me bury her."

MORE THAN a decade ago, Nardolillo allowed a psychic into the case. She told detectives that Doreen Marfeo was alone in a cold, dark place.

Nardolillo doesn't regret working with the psychic. He believes Doreen Marfeo does lie in a cold, dark place, right where her husband buried her.

He just wishes he knew where.

COLD CASE CONTACT: If you have information regarding Doreen Marfeo's disappearance, please contact the Johnston Police Department, at 231-4210.