Episode 91: The Attacks of Doreen Picard and Susan Laferte
On February 19th of 1982, in a Woonsocket, Rhode Island apartment building, two women were found brutally attacked in the cellar. 22-year-old Doreen Picard was dead upon arrival to the scene, having been beaten with a pipe and strangled with her own sweater. Near her body, 27-year-old landlord Susan Laferte lay face down in a pool of her blood. She was stabilized and brought to the hospital, where she remained in a coma for thirty days. Upon waking up she suffered severe amnesia and couldn’t remember the entire year leading up to the attack.
The obvious questions of who and why were immediately looked into by local police, as the attack was so brutal and intense. It wasn’t until 1990, over eight years later, that someone came forward and named a friend as the perpetrator. 37-year-old Raymond “Beaver” Tempest Jr., who knew Susan Laferte and was rumored to be having an affair with her, supposedly had killed Doreen and attacked Susan. Raymond Tempest’s family was largely involved in the police department, with his own father being the Chief Inspector and his brother being a police lieutenant.
When Tempest was indicted for the murder in 1992, several witnesses testified against him, making several heavy claims about confessions that he had made. A large maroon car had been seen at the apartment during the time of the murder, and that car belonged to a close friend of Tempest, who occasionally borrowed it. The motive of an extramarital affair coming to light also seemed to fit a potential reason for Tempest to attack Susan Laferte, and perhaps kill Doreen Picard as a witness to the beating.
In 2017, Raymond Tempest was released from police custody after working with the New England Innocence Project for several years. His defense team claimed that the investigation had been mismanaged, and that the witnesses had been coerced and fed false information to convict him. He subsequently entered an Alford plea, and had spent a total of nearly 24 years in prison. This case is still unsolved.
Image sources:
unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com - “Doreen Picard”