It’s early in the morning when the sound of his beeper awakens a Fall River
detective. It’s a body, he’s told, a murder. What he doesn’t know is that the crime scene
he’s about to see will strike fear in the hearts of all Americans. There are Satanists among us,
people will hear from their TVs. No one is safe. The victim was named Doreen Ann Levesque.
Abandoned from a young age, she’d had the worst kind of childhood and later
found herself doing sex work. She was brutally murdered on October 13, 1979.
Her body was found under the bleachers at Diman Vocational High School. The two joggers that made
the grisly discovery could hardly believe their eyes. She’d been tied up and viciously beaten,
her face barely recognizable as the girl she’d been. Notably, to some,
the murder had a ritual element to it. It wouldn’t be too long until people
started whispering the word “Satanist”, but as you’ll see, people can get carried away,
especially when they’ve grown up hearing dark tales about the devil.
As city names go, Fall River certainly sounds pretty. But to be frank, this wasn’t a pretty
place back then. Once a fairly prosperous textile town, Fall River in the late 70s
and early 80s had fallen on hard times. That was evident when you walked down some of the
streets and witnessed the many drunks, the drug addicts, and prostitutes trying to
eke out a living in some very harsh conditions. Levesque was one of many young girls who’d ended
up on the wrong part of town. On some nights, there were so many prostitutes and prospective
“Johns” that it caused traffic jams. Still, while the place was rundown somewhat, the murder
shocked everyone, the sheer brutality of it. The next victim was 19-year Barbara Raposa.
She was reported missing in November, but her body wasn’t found until January 26,
1980. Like the first victim, she’d been bound and hit over the head and face with a heavy object.
Also, like the first victim, she had been a victim herself of the travails of a difficult
life. Like Levesque, she was known to frequent bars in some of the rougher parts of town,
and she was said to have had a drug habit. To make ends meet, she also got involved with sex work.
So, there were two young, female victims. Both had been brutally killed after being tied up.
These murders it seemed were not crimes of passion. The modus operandi in the killings
pointed towards a possible serial killer. It also looked as though Levesque’s body had
been moved in a specific way, something that police call “posing.” This sometimes happens
in an attempt to hide something from police or because the act of posing gratifies the killer.
But cops at the time were looking for perhaps something bigger than a lone serial killer. They
had reason to believe Satanists were in their midst. They’d heard rumors about such people.
On February 8, 1980, the same police were talking to a 20-year-old sex worker named Karen Marsden.
It goes without saying that in a small city such as Fall River if you worked on the streets then
you knew the other sex workers. Marsden was with cops that evening in
a state of terror. She was rambling and at times making no sense, although she seemed
to suggest that she knew something about the satanic rituals that had been going on, usually
out in a place called Freetown State Forest. Police asked her who headed this murderous cult,
but the only name she’d give them was “Satan.” She didn’t actually mean Satan himself, but some evil
person who’d been given the name Satan. She told cops that if she actually told them who this Satan
person was she’d be dead in no time. She refused to believe that the authorities could protect her.
Marsden then told police to drop her off at St. Mary’s church. She was so shaken up she
said she wanted to talk to a priest. The next day she was reported missing by her grandmother.
She wasn’t seen again, alive at least. A couple of months later, her skull with
some teeth attached as well as clumps of her hair was found in a nearby forest.
Her body was nowhere to be seen. Now we’ll introduce another important
person to this story. She is Robin Marie Murphy, who was 17 when police started talking to her.
Murphy was yet another victim in this story, a girl who had suffered at the
hands of men since she was just young. This trauma led her into a life of darkness,
and at some point, she ended up working as a pimp on the mean streets of Fall River. It’s
there that she got to know the murder victims. Like the other folks in this tale, she could often
be found around the housing projects in the city called Harbor Terrace. On any given night there,
you could score a gram of whatever, hear the screams and arguments of drunks,
and watch the sex workers head towards their place of choice, Bedford Street.
Strangely, this hub of criminal activity was just around the corner from the police headquarters,
but the cops it seemed didn’t interrupt the various transactions that took place there on
a nightly basis. They did, however, often visit their informants. One of them became Murphy.
Murphy, according to those that knew her back then, was a fearsome character. She might have
been smaller in size than many of the male hoodlums, but she was said to have little
fear of them. One of the males she might have had reason to fear was a pimp and so a competitor.
His name was Carl Drew, and he was 26 years old when all this was going on.
Now we have all but one of the main pieces in place, we can tell you how cops began to
solve the crimes…Well, how they thought they solved the crimes. You’ll soon agree that
they could have gotten many things wrong. So, there were two pimps on the streets,
one man and another a womanl. Police believed that Drew ruled the streets for the most part.
They said he was one mean man, and he led his territory by putting the fear of God in people.
Well, we should say the fear of Satan, because cops believed that he was this Satan character.
They thought that Drew used Satanic rituals to scare people. That body found under the
bleachers was his work and the reason he could get away with it was his control over people.
The police believed that it was Drew who killed Marsden, too, because she had known about his
earlier murder. One story had it that Levesque was killed because she wouldn’t work for Drew.
It didn’t help Drew’s case – a man that couldn’t read or write and had a hard
knock life himself – that Murphy said he was indeed Satan and the leader of rituals.
She also said that Marsden had told her that she’d been forced to watch Drew kill Levesque.
Marsden and Murphy had certainly been close. It seems they’d become lovers at one point,
and so if anyone knew Marsden’s closest secrets, it would have been her.
Murphy agreed to testify against Drew. She told detectives that he’d killed Marsden
because of the threat that she was going to talk to the cops. She said Drew often had Satanic
rituals out in the forest where he sacrificed animals on an altar in the name of Satan.
Murphy said on the night that Marsden had been killed, Drew had forced her to cut her throat,
after which, they decapitated Marsden and even played around with her head.
This sounded utterly crazy, which among other things, created what was called a “Satanic Panic.”
All over the US at the time, there was talk about Satanic ritual abuse. These so-called followers
of Satan did terrible things to their victims to propitiate their devil leader. The very talk
of such rituals sent shockwaves through the US, but let’s remember such talk also sold newspapers
and had people glued to their TV screens. The witch hunts, you should recall, were also keenly
followed a few hundred years earlier in Europe. There were eight churches in Fall River,
so talk about God and the devil and the destruction the latter wreaks on mankind was not
out of the ordinary. Strange beliefs even today are held in what’s called the US’s “bible belt”,
so buying into stories of Satanic rituals was not too strange back in the 1980s.
What’s of importance here, though, is out of all the thousands of rumors of Satanic
ritualism happening, there has never been much proof they actually happened, if any proof at
all. Much of the panic started because of a book called “Michelle Remembers.” The book featured a
woman who, through hypnotism, could recall moments in her life in which Satanists had ritually abused
her. That book has now been widely discredited. A Satanic cult murdering people in Fall River got
a lot of air time, and many people believed the stories, but besides the words of a few people,
there was absolutely no evidence they happened. Still, the newspapers back then wrote that
Drew was accused of threatening his girls with Satanic violence if they ever got out of hand.
Prosecutors explained to the court that Drew had told people that he was the son of Satan. The
court heard that Murphy had been possessed by Drew when she committed those terribly violent acts.
The prosecutor asked her, “And what did you do?” Murphy answered, “Cut her throat.”
She also said that Drew had cut off one of Marsden’s fingers and taken the ring
from it. Another young woman testified that one night Drew had given it to her in a bar.
It didn’t help his case that when Murphy was testifying, she wore a cross around
her neck. The prosecution had done a good job at pitting the devil against a God-fearing victim.
So, when Murphy said Drew had carved an “X” into the victim’s body the court almost shook
with fear. When she said that Drew had spoken in an unknown language while doing this sacrifice
the palpable fear almost had people wanting to run out of the door.
Murphy said he’d often speak in this foreign tongue when conducting other rituals that
didn’t involve murder. She said she’d attended around 10 of them from October 1979 to February
1980. “The killing of Doreen Levesque was an offering of the soul of Satan, and so was the
killing of Miss Marsden,” she told the court. We should state something very important here.
There was no physical evidence whatsoever that put Drew at any of those crime scenes.
Nothing. Zilch. Here was a man that couldn’t read or write that later said he thought the justice
system could never send an innocent man to prison. And guess what? Murphy had been lying,
and we mean telling very tall tales indeed. She later said that she’d been coerced by
prosecutors into fingering Drew for the crime. As for the Satanic stuff,
she said she’d also been pushed to talk about that. She’d been told she’d get no
more than 12 years for a second-degree murder conviction, which, as you’ll see, didn’t happen.
She later said she did believe that Drew had committed the first murder. She didn’t know it
for a fact, but she was convinced enough to let him go down for the other murder.
As we said, she was a victim herself, too. She’d suffered at the hands of a man named Andy Maltais,
someone who had committed heinous crimes against young women in the area.
We won’t go into details, but he was a pervert to the extreme, a wicked man if ever there was
one. During the murder investigations, he’d been talking to cops, apparently trying to
offer some help. Here was a man with a history of violence against young women, a man who was
known to keep “tools” in his car to commit such violence, and he was trying to help the police.
He told police that he thought he knew what happened to the last victim,
Ms. Raposa. He said he’d had a vision in a dream in which he saw her being killed.
Here is some of the transcript when he was interviewed by the police:
Police: What was in his hand? A knife? A gun? Maltais: Two hands- in the air – something
holding in between- Police: Knife or a gun?
Maltais: From what I could see, it looked like a rock.
Police later took him to the scene of the crime and Maltais knew exactly where the body had been
found and which direction it had pointed in. He even told police, “I sense a murder weapon
here. It might have been a piece of concrete.” He was right about that. He knew too much.
Police didn’t think that Maltais had some kind of psychic ability and
instead they charged him with the murder. Murphy later testified in court again,
this time saying she’d actually been with Maltais at the time of the murder.
Years later, she admitted to making that up too as retribution for the things he’d done to her.
To recap, Murphy said she took part in one murder and then later said she’d totally lied about that.
She also said she’d been with Maltais on the night of another murder, but she’d lied about that, too.
At least one other victim would later come forward and say Maltais had done horrible things to her,
but she’d been ignored by local police when she’d made a complaint.
We now also have another man in prison serving time for the Marsden murder.
Drew was convicted of that and sentenced to life without parole. While police tried to
say he’d killed her because she could talk about the Levesque murder, Drew was never
convicted of that crime for lack of evidence. The connection was still used against him, though.
Not too long ago, some documentary filmmakers started investigating this dark
tale. They looked into that ring that Drew had apparently given to a woman after taking
it from Marsden’s hand. The woman told the documentary makers that there had been no ring,
that she’d made the story up. The reason, she said, was cops threatened her with prison for
another crime if she didn’t testify to that story. If this couldn’t get more confusing, another woman
said she was there for the Marsden murder and she said it didn’t take place in a forest. She said
she saw Murphy committing the murder on a rooftop. The documentary makers said this in an interview:
“You could literally just go into the Fall River Superior Court and read the trial transcripts,
11 volumes. No one that reads those trial transcripts will come away thinking Carl Drew
was guilty, despite what the jury said.” In fact, hardly anyone who has studied
this case with new eyes thinks Drew had anything to do with the murders. He might
have been a violent and unethical man, a trafficker of vulnerable young women,
but that doesn’t mean he should be serving that long sentence if he is innocent of the murders.
Some people think that it was Maltais who was likely behind all three murders.
He was certainly a sexual deviant, and the more you know about him you could be convinced he
was capable of serial killing. He died in prison many years ago, so no one can speak to him again.
He once told police, “Once I worshiped Satan, but now I worship Jesus.”
We doubt he ever really worshipped anyone. He was a ruthless criminal,
and there is nothing especially occult about hurting young people.
It seems beyond doubt that no crimes in Fall River back then took place because of any belief
in Satan. There is enough evil in the story to fill a book, but no devil pulled the strings.
There are a lot of victims, but it seems there is no overarching dark power involved except
all the jagged pieces that fit in place to condemn some people to a life of misery.
One of those victims could be Drew, who might well be a victim of the justice system. He later said,
“I was thrown into the middle of a mass nightmare that involved macabre accusations
of devil worship and human sacrifice. Totally off-the-wall accusations that was right out of
some thriller novel. None true as far as I was involved and nothing like what was being said.”
As you watch this, the Massachusetts Innocence Program is still trying to get him a new trial,
but since his appeals have been exhausted, it might mean some new evidence needs to come to
light if he’s ever to get out of prison. Murphy had been released on parole after
her second-degree murder charge based on the lies she’d told, but she didn’t adhere to the
conditions of her parole and was sent back to prison. She will have a new hearing soon.
Now you need to watch arguably an even stranger murder mystery, “Brutal True
Story of What They Didn't Tell You About the Burger Chef Massacre.” Or, have a look at...