A wrongful arrest lawsuit ends with a settlement. Now man accused in cold case is starting over

John Monteiro lost his job, his apartment and his reputation after his 2019 arrest in a decades old cold case that may not even have been a murder at all. (Michael Salerno/Rhode Island Current)

“Big” preceded John Monteiro’s first name on the work shirt he wore when sheriffs led him in handcuffs into Providence District Court on July 18, 2019. Online comments would soon offer other names for the man Pawtucket police had charged with first-degree murder in the death of a 10-year-old girl four decades ago.

Names like “scumbag monster” and “this sick f**k” and “paedo.” 

Police claimed they had DNA evidence linking Monteiro to a small stain they said was blood on the inside crotch of the pants Christine Cole was wearing on the bitter cold night she went missing. Christine left her family’s Pawtucket apartment on an errand at around 5:15 p.m. on Jan. 6, 1988, and never returned. Fifty-four days later, her body was found washed up on Conimicut Point Beach in Warwick.

Monteiro’s arrest — the first by a cold case unit established within the Pawtucket Police Department led by Detective Susan Cormier — made national news. Christine’s face appeared as the Queen of Hearts in a deck of playing cards devoted to Rhode Island cold cases Cormier created in December 2018. Fifty-two cards in a deck presented an ideal framework for WPRI-TV 12 to feature a case every week for a year in a series of compelling, stylized stories that were nominated for a regional Emmy; the Cole case was the first case to be profiled.

But six months after Monteiro’s arrest, the murder charge was dismissed. The Office of Attorney General acknowledged there was no conclusive evidence to prove Monteiro killed Christine or had even crossed paths with her. By then, he had lost his warehouse job, his apartment, and his reputation. He moved in with his sister, Rita Correia, who told Rhode Island Current he struggled with depression and anxiety. Correia said in a deposition that her brother seldom left the house and stopped taking care of his personal hygiene and socializing with family and friends. 

On Jan. 26, 2021, Monteiro filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island against Cormier along with Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves and other members of the department and the former Rhode Island Department of Health forensic scientist who conducted laboratory testing on evidence.

The case was scheduled to go to trial on Monday, Dec. 2. But early Tuesday afternoon, two days before Thanksgiving, Monteiro agreed to settle for $1 million, one of his attorneys, Bill Devine said.

“I wanted to go to trial because I want people to see what they did to me, how they destroyed my life,” said Monteiro, 64, a Cape Verdean immigrant who speaks Creole, in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon with his sister Rita Correia interpreting.

“Money is not everything in my life. I want to clear my name and I want people to know that I’m an innocent man, hardworking father of four, and family man.”

Monteiro said he let go of the desire for an apology from Pawtucket police and is thankful he can put the case behind him and focus on rebuilding his life.

“It’s a good settlement,” said Mark Loevy-Reyes, one of Monteiro’s attorneys. “The client’s happy with it. It’s a significant amount of money, the kind of amount of money (that) although they won’t admit wrongdoing, I think suggests that they know that they did something wrong.” 

The case remains an open homicide case, said Grace Voll, a spokeswoman for the city of Pawtucket. Voll confirmed that the city’s insurer, the Rhode Island Interlocal Trust, had reached a tentative agreement with Monteiro to settle the case. 

“Until the settlement paperwork has been finalized and signed, the City reserves further comment,” Voll said.

A deeply flawed investigation

A DNA match may sound like an open and shut case. But volumes of court records portray a cold case investigation flawed from the start.

In August 2018, Cormier learned that a detective lieutenant had submitted evidence from the Cole case to the state health lab for forensic testing in 2008. The detective had been promoted to captain and assigned to the patrol division by the time DNA test results came back in 2010 and never received notification of the results. He retired in 2012.

Cormier met with the state’s forensic science supervisor to review the results, which revealed a small, red-brown stain on the inside crotch of the mauve-colored pants Christine was wearing the night she disappeared. Lab notes on the stain — no files made public ever offer measurements of its size — showed a positive presumptive test for blood but a second test was negative. The discovery of the stain was unusual, because the FBI had already analyzed the pants in April 1988, looking for any foreign hair or debris. At that time, there was no mention of a stain. In 1998, another FBI lab report found no presence of semen and blood on the pants.

Cold case investigations need a break. All too often they break down.

The medical examiner who examined Christine’s body declared the cause of death was drowning. The manner of death was undetermined, but the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death led police to treat the case as a homicide. The autopsy noted the body had bruises on both upper arms and left thigh, but no signs of trauma or bone injury or sexual assault. 

Police knew that Christine had a history of wandering, including an incident three years earlier when her mother reported her missing, prompting a neighborhood search that lasted a few hours before Christine was found on a street corner. On the winter night Christine disappeared, a girl matching her description was seen leaving a supermarket a half-mile away from her home with another girl after the two were caught shoplifting between 9:30 and 10 p.m. Five days later, on Jan. 11, 1988, a bloodhound from the Connecticut State Police appeared to pick up Christine’s scent around the supermarket, then lost it. The Blackstone River was about a half-mile from the supermarket.

The sample of the stain was tested for autosomal DNA, which is contained in the 22 pairs of chromosomes not involved in determining a person’s sex and inherited from a person’s mother and father. Autosomal DNA is unique to each individual except identical siblings. The test produced results for the amelogenin gene that occurs on both the X- and male-specific Y-chromosome. The state health department sent the sample to an outside laboratory to conduct Y chromosome Short Tandem Repeat (Y-STR) DNA analysis, a test that would ensure that none of Christine’s DNA was mixed with the results. The Y chromosome is inherited by a son from his father, and all males in any paternal line have nearly identical Y chromosomes. The outside lab obtained results for only six of 17 specific locations, called alleles, on the Y chromosome.

Cormier requested more testing by the state health department laboratory, which used a kit that analyzed 23 locations on the Y chromosome. It identified results for 12 alleles for a partial DNA profile. Results were checked against an internal health department database. The closest match was a man briefly held at the Adult Correctional Institutions in 2014 who was born in 1993. He wasn’t even alive when Christine died, but his genetic profile pointed to a close male relative: his father, Monteiro.

Detectives rummaged through discarded trash from the curb outside Monteiro’s Central Falls apartment building but failed to find anything that produced a DNA sample or fingerprints. They followed Monteiro to work several times and watched him park in a rear lot between two large delivery trucks where his vehicle could not be seen from the street, even as all the other employees parked in the open in a front parking lot. Cormier observed Monteiro’s habit of parking his vehicle behind the building next door to where he lived. 

“It appears that Monteiro lives his life in a very covert manner,” Cormier wrote in a police narrative and again in an affidavit she later submitted to court. The affidavit noted that Monteiro had moved many times over the years and incorrectly said Monteiro confirmed he lived over a corner market where Christine bought milk the night she disappeared.

On July 17, 2019, after Cormier obtained a search warrant, Pawtucket police picked up  Monteiro and brought him into the police station. Cormier’s court affidavit described him as cooperative when he opened his mouth to allow another detective to swab his inner cheeks with a cotton swab to obtain samples to submit for DNA analysis. At 8:21 a.m., Cormier texted then-Rhode Island Department of Health forensic scientist Tamara Wong that Monteiro’s DNA samples were on their way. Cormier read Monteiro his Miranda rights in English. He asked for an interpreter, but Cormier and a colleague made no arrangements to have a Creole-speaking officer — the department had at least one — join them.

During his interview, Monteiro denied ever knowing or seeing Christine or being involved in her disappearance and death. The detectives wanted information on his family: He named his parents and his seven siblings from oldest to youngest, including four sisters and two half-brothers with whom he shared the same mother but not father. Monteiro spent several hours at the police station before detectives finally brought him home. One even called Monteiro’s employer to say that he was involved in a minor fender-bender and was fine but would be late to work. Meanwhile, the state health department lab wasted no time in processing Monteiro’s DNA sample. Results were ready within several hours for a test that typically takes two to four weeks.

At 5:53 p.m., Wong sent Cormier the text she had been waiting for all day: “It’s a match. Finalizing the report now.”

“Omg!!!” Cormier shot back.

Wong replied with four emojis: a blushing and anxious green and blue face; a green vomiting face; a grimacing face; and a big toothy smiley face. “Nice detective work Sue!!! Congrats!”

“I love you!!” Cormier replied.

Wong texted back a smirking face. “I’ll email the report as soon as it’s finished and official.”

An hour later, the report, which references Monteiro’s legal first name Joao, was sent: “The previously reported partial Y-STR DNA profiles obtained from the stain on the victim’s purple pants (Item #1.8) is consistent with the known reference profile from Joao Monteiro (Item #23).” 

Wong developed statistics to determine at a 95% confidence level how common that partial genetic profile would be in the general population. The answer: one in every 1,909 males. The population of Pawtucket in the 1990 census was 72,644, approximately half males. Theoretically, 19 males in the city that year could have had the same partial genetic profile as Monteiro. The potential number could be lowered to 13 if male residents under age 18 were excluded.

The results were hardly the kind of statistically damning evidence usually associated with forensic DNA analysis, in which the probability of two unrelated individuals sharing the exact same genetic variations could be one in several hundred quadrillions. Eight minutes after receiving the report, Cormier and Wong exchanged a series of text messages. 

“So, there is no ‘1 in 10 billion’ match type of stats…Just 95 % confident?” Cormier asked Wong.

“Unfortunately not with Y-STRs, because they are shared with family members, the stats are always low,” Wong replied.

They spoke on the phone too — Cormier used her personal cell phone so the calls were not recorded as they would have been had she used an official police line — but perhaps Cormier remained focused on the word “match.” She also appeared to have misinterpreted the meaning of confidence level, which is a way to assess the certainty that the answer calculated is not due to chance. Wong, a trained scientist with a master’s degree, could have explained the concept to Cormier, who earned her GED after dropping out of high school and had completed college courses at Roger Williams University but had yet to earn her bachelor’s degree.

An hour before she received Wong’s report, Cormier had texted “we got a MATCH!” to the district court magistrate judge who signed the arrest warrant for Monteiro. Cormier drove to his home in Narragansett with it later that night. She brought along a pack of cold case cards with her to give him. 

Cormier apparently never mentioned to the magistrate judge that the match involved Y-STR DNA, and it’s unclear if he reviewed Wong’s report. Cormier’s use of the term “match” ignored  the fact that Y-STR testing could not be used to identify a particular individual but only to exclude him. There had been no additional testing done for DNA on the pants or efforts to obtain DNA samples from Christine’s three younger brothers or her mother’s boyfriend — now deceased but whose brother is living — so there was no way to rule out that the DNA on the pants came from a male living in or frequenting Christine’s home. (It is possible for DNA from family members to innocently transfer to clothing during laundering.)

Monteiro’s arrest was announced the next day on July 18, at a noon press conference at Pawtucket City Hall. “This one had a particular meaning to me because she is a child, I am a mother,” Cormier, the mother of three teenage sons, told reporters then.

Cormier stood at a podium next to Goncavles, the police chief. Behind them on an easel stood the large poster depicting all 52 cards in the Rhode Island cold case deck. No one from the attorney general’s office attended the press conference.

Chilling effect

Loevy-Reyes said he had 82 pages of questions ready to ask Cormier if the case went to trial.  

“Mr. Monteiro has this fear that living his normal life can come to a crashing end any day now, that the police can come grab him, lock him up and say we’re going to keep you for the rest of your life,” Loevy Reyes said. “That’s a hard thing to live with.”

Cormier retired in July 2022 from her $71,177 a year detective job. She could not be reached for comment for this story. In a December 2019 interview, Cormier said believed arrests could soon happen in three or four other cases. But none have been made. 

Before the day Monteiro was arrested, no prosecutor from the attorney general’s office had been working with Cormier on the Cole investigation, according to testimony by Assistant Attorney General Timothy Healy in a deposition on Dec. 22, 2021. “With respect to a case where there’s been years kind of in the making… I think it would be advisable for somebody to reach out to us prior to that and to get a prosecutor involved in the case,” Healey said then.

Last year, the attorney general’s office launched a new cold case unit, staffed by prosecutors and investigators. Attorney General Peter Neronha told a legislative committee in May that the unit was close to “effectively solving” two cases and would make an announcement within six weeks. Timothy Rondeau, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office said Wednesday morning that an announcement involving one case is now likely in the first quarter of the new year.

Wong left her employment with the state health department in January 2023, said its spokesperson, Joseph Wendelken. 

Loevy-Reyes said a settlement was reached with Wong last week. A release and dismissal stipulation detailing how the city of Pawtucket and the state health department would share responsibility for paying the $1 million settlement has been drafted and executed, but had not yet been filed with the federal court as of Wednesday. The Rhode Island Department of Health deferred to the Rhode Island Office of Attorney General for comment on the settlement. Rondeau declined to comment as well.

Monteiro will spend Thanksgiving with family at his sister’s house in Massachusetts, where he now lives. He said he may take a trip to return to Cape Verde next year. He has not been back to his homeland since he came to America at the age of 22 in 1982. 

“Before I die, I have a promise to go to my country because I haven’t been there for 42 years,” he said through his sister interpreting. “I’m going to go to (the) cemetery and pray because I’ve been praying a lot.”