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Dark Downeast
The Murder of Debra Stone (Rhode Island)
00:40:03
For more than forty years, Debra Stone’s murder lingered in the uneasy space between knowing and proving. An informant came forward early on with a story that, in hindsight, mapped almost every detail of what happened to her, yet the case drifted through the decades, weighed down by doubt, fear, and a single failed polygraph that stalled momentum. When investigators finally reopened the file in the 21st century, it wasn’t modern DNA science that brought clarity. The evidence had already been there. What the case needed was the will to look again and confront the truth that should have been acted on long ago.
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For more than 40 years, Deborah Stone's murder lingered in the uneasy space between knowing and proving. An informant came forward early on with a story that, in hindsight, mapped almost every detail of what happened to her. Yet the case drifted through the decades, weighed down by doubt, fear, and a single failed polygraph that stood stalled momentum. When investigators finally reopened the File in the 21st century, it wasn't modern DNA science that brought clarity. The evidence had already been there. What the case needed was the will to look again and confront the truth that should have been acted on long ago. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Deborah Stone on Dark Down East. It was Sunday, September 2, 1984, Labor Day weekend, the unofficial closing chapter of summer in New England, and a group of teenage boys were spending the afternoon on a small boat on the narrow river in Narragansett, Rhode island, just north of the Middlebridge Road Bridge. They noticed something drifting in the water that didn't belong. It was an indistinct shape at first, heavy and wrong against the current, the kind of thing the eye resists naming. Out of curiosity, they maneuvered closer and decided to tow it to shore near Mitchell Avenue. What they pulled from the river was a soaked sleeping bag bound with rope and a cement cinder block, tied at the far end in an apparently failed attempt to keep it from surfacing. Inside was a sight those teenagers have likely tried to forget ever since. It was the nearly nude body of a woman. Narragansett police responded and confirmed the discovery. As officers and investigators worked the shoreline, they began to notice unsettling details. The woman had been placed into the sleeping bag headfirst. She was nude except for an unhooked bra. There was a white colored glove tangled in the ropes around the body. The cinder block also had a few muscles attached to it, suggesting that it had been in the water long enough for the mollusks to stake their claim. On the concrete surface at the scene, investigators cataloged what little evidence the river had not yet claimed. The tan sleeping bag with floral designs snapped shut at the bottom. Near the victim's head, a length of rope believed to be an ordinary household clothesline. That white glove and the cinder block itself. One distinguishing mark stood out on the woman's body, a tattoo of a cannabis leaf on her right wrist. But with no identification on her, she was transported to the Rhode Island Medical Examiner's Office. During the autopsy, the medical examiner documented a suspicious mark on the right side of the woman's neck, roughly an inch long and a quarter inch wide, along with four Small abrasions and contusions beneath the skin. There was hemorrhaging in the strap muscles and subcutaneous tissue of the neck. Her hyoid bone was fractured with hemorrhage at the fracture site. Both injuries consistent with strangulation. Her body showed a moderate degree of decomposition, Likely related to her time in the water. Based on the condition of the remains, the examiner estimated she had been submerged for anywhere from 24 hours to as long as two or three days. There were no signs of drowning. She was already dead when she entered the river. Toxicology testing revealed no drugs in her system at the time of discovery. The cause of the woman's death was listed as asphyxia due to strangulation. And the manner of death, homicide. Finally, fingerprint records gave the woman her name back. She was 24 year old. Deborah a. Stone. Deborah had grown up in Providence in Warwick. And though cities remained the backdrop of her short life, by her early 20s, she was working nights at a nightclub called Roosters in Providence, A job that kept her in the margins of the after hours world and in close contact with the kinds of people who thrived there. It was in the early 1980s that she began using drugs, A shift that pulled her into a circle of friends who not only used substances themselves, but also sold them. Debra had a boyfriend for a while, but in the months before her death, that long term relationship unraveled with witnesses later described the breakup as tense and volatile. Some recalled seeing bruises on her body during the course of the relationship, and they believed her boyfriend may have been physically abusive. After the breakup. And by late summer of 1984, Debra was living at 200 Hoffman Avenue in Cranston. She had only recently moved into the apartment with a man who by all accounts was still something of a stranger in her life. The names of witnesses in the publicly released records are redacted for privacy, but for the sake of this story, I'll refer to this roommate by the pseudonym Marty. Debra's life was complicated and often unsettled, which left behind a loose web of people, but very few clear answers. Investigators began to piece together the physical evidence and the memories of those who had crossed paths with her in her final days. The rope used to bind Deborah's body was sent to the FBI. But this was an era before DNA analysis reshaped homicide work. Instead of identifying genetic material, Examiners focused on the knots themselves. Their conclusion was blunt. The knots showed no sign of professional skill. They were not intricate, not distinctive, Simply the work of someone ordinary and untrained who failed to leave a signature behind. A local biologist examined the cinderblock and the mussels that had attached to it, hoping the river might offer a timeline. The answer was frustratingly imprecise. Based on the lack of algae, the biologists could only say that the block and Deborah Withett had been in the water a relatively short time. It was like a scientific shrug in the face of a murder. The clearer clues came not from the riverbed, but but from the last night Debra was seen alive. A friend of Debra's told police that on August 29, 1984, she received a phone call from Debra. Debra said she was heading to someone's house in the Johnston area to, quote, unquote, get high, and the man had sent a cab to pick her up. During that call, Debra made plans to meet her friend later that evening around 11pm at the friend's mother's apartment. But she never arrived. Her friend began asking questions almost immediately, trying to learn who this man was who had summoned Debra by taxi. The name that came back was Bobby Myers, who was said to live in an apartment complex on Simmonsville Avenue in Johnston. Police followed the very same trail. After calling around to local cab companies, they reached a driver with Laurel Sweeney Cab, who remembered the fare. He had picked up a woman at 200 Hoffman Avenue on the night of Aug. 29, sometime between 9:30 and 10pm shown a photo array, the driver identified Debra without hesitation. He said he dropped her off at the Simmons Village apartment complex, building number 349, the name that emerged from Debra's final cab ride. Bobby Myers quickly became the next fragile bridge between her last known movements and whoever had ended her life. When Narragansett police reached out to Johnston authorities to learn more about the man Debra was believed to have visited, they discovered that Bobby Myers was not his real name at all. It was an alias. His legal name was Robert Jeremiah. Robert was already familiar to Johnston police. His history included arrests for drug possession and distribution with a criminal record dating back to 1971. Investigators would later confirm that he also had documented ties to organized crime. At the time Deborah disappeared, Robert was living between apartments belonging to his mother and his sister in the Simmons Village complex, the same place the cab company remembered dropping Debra off on August 29th. Narragansett detectives interviewed Robert Jeremiah on September 6th, 1984, was forthcoming about having seen Debra on the night of August 29th. According to his account, she arrived by taxi at the apartment complex outside his mother's apartment, unit 349. But they went to his sister's place in building 351, unit 314. Debra was carrying a black wristwatch that night. He said Robert told police that Debra wanted to trade or sell the watch for drugs. He claimed he believed the watch had been stolen from one of her friends and and that when she asked him for drugs in exchange, he told her he didn't have any. Robert said his mother did not want Debra hanging around. So he got dressed and drove her back towards Cranston in his own vehicle. He stated that Debra asked to be dropped off a short distance from her home and that he last saw her getting out of his bronze Monte Garlo at around 11pm he added that given his knowledge of her drug use, she likely would have continued trying to find drugs after he left her. There was, according to a transcript from this interview. Robert also mentioned that Debra seemed tensed up about being dropped off near her home. It was strange to him. The detective asked Robert if someone could have been waiting at the apartment for her. Perhaps the new roommate, who the detective described as Debra's boyfriend. But Robert wasn't sure. Robert agreed to give the detective a call if he heard anything about Debra in the coming days. In the meantime, police followed up on their own suspicions about several individuals in Debra's life. Debra's housemate, identified in a recently released report only as Witness 1, whom I've been calling Marty. He lived and worked outside Rhode island but had allowed Debra to stay at his apartment in Cranston and even use his car while he was away. He cooperated fully with investigators and and maintained that he had nothing to do with her murder. Police were unable to place him in the state around the time of Debra's disappearance or the discovery of her body. And with no evidence tying him to the crime, he was cleared. The next possible suspect to face scrutiny was Debra's former boyfriend. Witness two, whom I'll call Reggie. Now Reggie managed the nightclub Roosters where Debra worked and friends had described their relationship as rocky. Still, they had broken up months earlier and no one reported any incidents between them in the time since. As a side story, Roosters itself is a glimpse into the environment Debra had been navigating. The club, located on India street in Providence, had been raided just months before her murder amid investigations into liquor law violations and reports of alleged assaults, according to reporting by Mike Boehm for the Providence Journal in March of 1984. Among the allegations were claims that the company's vice president had committed second degree assault on a 19 year old woman during a job interview. Other incidents involved serving minors Alcohol, sometimes to the point of disorderly conduct. In one case, a teenager was charged with attacking his own mother after a night of drinking at the club. Shady reputation of the bar notwithstanding, Reggie my like Marty, was cooperative. He directed police to other potential witnesses, helping investigators piece together a timeline of Debra's final days. And nothing connected him to her death. So he too was eliminated as a suspect. Now, at the same time, investigators were able to corroborate parts of Robert Jeremiah's story. They confirmed that Debra had indeed taken a cab to his apartment complex that night and that she was in possession of a stolen watch. Those details gave his account a measure of credibility. On top of that, another friend of Debra's, who I'll call Gordon, told police he believed he had seen Debra driving her car either on August 23rd or 24th. But several of Gordon's friends said they thought he was mistaken and that the sighting more likely occurred on Aug. 31, suggesting Debra was alive after Aug. 29 when Robert said he dropped her off in Cranston. The discrepancy did little to clarify what happened after August 29, and it complicated the already fragile timeline. Police were left with few reasons to doubt Robert and more pressure to look elsewhere for whoever was responsible for Debra's murder. But the exploration of possible suspects in Debra's case ultimately came full circle when an informant surfaced, telling a highly detailed, highly disturbing story.
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- [13:57]
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When police interviewed Gordon on September 17, 1984, he offered a detail that shifted the investigation's center of gravity. He said that on the morning of August 30, he had gone with a friend, whom I'll call Isaac, to Robert Jeremiah's apartment. Gordon said he waited in the car while Isaac went inside. When Isaac came back out, he teased Gordon, saying that Deborah Stone had spent the night with Bobby Jeremiah, a barb meant to sting. As Gordon explained it, he had worked with Debra's brother for several years and had known Debra nearly as long as. He admitted that he found her attractive, but that the two had never dated or had a relationship. It was a casual joke, but it carried explosive implications. If Debra had truly been inside Robert's apartment on the morning of August 30th. Then Robert's story that he had dropped her off near her Cranston apartment around 11pm the night before could not be true. Police tried to locate Isaac immediately to confirm the account, but when they found him, he was in an inpatient substance treatment program and unavailable to be interviewed. More than a year passed before investigators got another chance. In January of 1986, Lizaac was in custody on unrelated charges, and this time he was available to talk, though not without fear. He told detectives he was scared of Robert, Jeremiah and his mob ties. But he began to open up anyway. Isaac said that he and Robert were both involved in drug distribution. On the night of August 29, Isaac said he went to Robert's apartment around midnight to pick up heroin, and he saw Debra there. When he returned that next morning, Debra was lying in Robert's bed. Isaac told police that when he later learned that Debra's body had been pulled from the narrow river, his immediate thought was that Robert was responsible. He also claimed that he knew another person had helped Robert dispose of her body and that this person had told him fluid leaked onto the carpet as Debra was being moved out of the apartment. Isaac refused to name the supposed accomplice, saying only that the person was now dead. Isaac also pointed to Robert's mother, alleging she helped clean out the trunk of his Monte Carlo and that the trunk carpeting had been removed in the days after Debra's death. He also added that he had seen Robert throw a purse into the east river in New York shortly after Debra disappeared, and that he had watched him sell a watch consistent with the one Debra was last seen carrying to someone in New York. Pressed further, Isaac said he had heard Robert killed Debra after catching her stealing. But when Isaac asked him directly, Robert told him Debra had overdosed. That was as far as Isaac would go at the time. Later that year, after Isaac was arrested in Scituate, Massachusetts, Narragansett police interviewed him again. Each conversation seemed to loosen another layer of his story. He repeated that he had seen Debra in Robert's apartment on Aug. 29 and again the next morning. This time, he provided a name of the supposed accomplice who helped dispose of her body and clean the apartment. But he stopped short of full disclosure, saying he was afraid. Robert, he claimed, had recently asked whether police had approached him or if he had ever spoken to detectives. Isaac told him he had not. A few weeks later, Isaac agreed to a third interview. Now free on bail and hoping to reduce potential sentences on unrelated breaking and entering charges, he again confirmed seeing Debra on the 29th and 30th. And on that morning, she was motionless. He hinted that he knew where the cinder block tied to Debra's body had come from and how she was disposed of, but said he would only reveal those details later with an attorney present. Less than two weeks after that, Isaac was back in custody on new charges. Police asked him if he wanted to talk now. Despite his lingering fear for his family's safety, he made a stunning admission. The friend who helped Robert dispose of Debra's body was not someone else. It was him. Isaac said that when he saw Debra in Robert's apartment on the 29th, she appeared to be choking or gagging and looked like she had, quote, unquote, nodded out. He said he urged Robert to help her, but Robert brushed him off, insisting she would be fine. The next morning, Isaac returned. He knocked on Robert's door, but was turned away and told to pick up drugs from Robert's mother's apartment instead. Isaac said he did as instructed and left, only to be visited by Robert about an hour later. There was a problem, Robert told him. Back at the apartment, Isaac claimed that Robert directed him to the bathroom. When Isaac pulled back the shower curtain, he said he saw Debra lying in the tub, lifeless. Robert told him that Isaac was responsible, too, because Deborah had overdosed on the drugs they sold. According to Isaac, the two then gathered what they needed to get rid of her body. They placed Debra into a sleeping bag, loaded her into the trunk of Robert's car, and drove out into the fog before dumping her over the Middlebridge Road bridge. Isaac said he later confronted Robert after hearing in the newspaper that Debra had died from strangulation. But he again insisted she had overdosed. On September 29, 1986, more than two years after Debra was found, Isaac returned with an attorney and waived his Miranda rights. This time, he told the rest of the story. Isaac said he had come up with the idea himself to put Deborah's body in the river after seeing something similar on tv. Believing it would make forensic testing more difficult. They initially had to pause the plan because someone was fishing near the bridge. But once the area was clear, they dumped her body, weighted with a cinder block, and watched as the south to north current carried her a short distance away and down to the riverbed. Isaac described watching Debra struggle the night before, her breathing uneven, lips turning blue, breaths slowing. But he said he convinced himself she was simply nodding out, as he claimed he had seen her do before. Then he added something new. As they prepared to dispose of her body, he had gone back to his own apartment and asked his girlfriend to call the police, hoping to stop what was about to happen. He left believing she was making the call, while also taking clothesline with him that would later be used to bind the sleeping bag to the cinderblock. Isaac said that Robert obtained the sleeping bag while Isaac himself bought two pairs of gardening gloves from a hardware store. He described the gloves in detail and explained that his hand became tangled in the ropes while they were tying everything together. When he pulled free, one of the gloves was left caught in the bindings, and they simply abandoned it there. They took a cinder block from outside a local business on the way to the narrow river. By the time Isaac gave his formal statement on October 24, 1986, he had handed police what amounted to a confession of his own role in disposing of Deborah Stone's body. It was the most complete narrative investigators had ever received, but it was only the beginning. Following Isaac's detailed account of what he said happened to Debra and who he said was involved, Rhode Island State Police finally obtained a search warrant for the apartment where Robert had been staying on the presumed night of her death. By then, a new tenant had moved into unit 314, but apartment management had not renovated the unit between occupants. The carpet was the same, though it had clearly been cleaned. Isaac had told investigators that he recommended Robert clean a stain from the floor resulting from fluid that had leaked when they were moving Debra's body. When the detectives inspected the apartment, they found no visible discoloration on the surface of the carpet, but when they peeled it back, the underside told a different story. There, in the exact area Isaac had described, the carpet backing was visibly stained. Police also secured a warrant for the car Isaac said they used to Transport Deborah, a 1975 Chevrolet Monte Carlo registered to Robert's mother. Investigators seized the front and rear floor carpets, along with all floor mats. The carpeting in the trunk was missing. From the records available, it does not appear that police were ever able to locate that missing piece of trunk carpeting. However, a person identified only as a confidential informant in police files offered a troubling detail. On the night of Sept. 2, 1984, around 10:30pm the informant said they personally witnessed Robert's mother washing out the trunk of a large brown vehicle with temporary plates. The description aligned with the Monte Carlo, which had been purchased earlier that summer and was still burying temporary tags at the time of Debra's death. All of the recovered carpeting was sent to the FBI in 1987. DNA analysis was not yet part of forensic science and so the bureau searched for blood, hair fibers or debris that might link the car or apartment to Debra's murder. The results were discouraging. Examiners found no blood on any of the carpets and no hairs that could be attributed to Debra. They looked for concrete residue that might tie the materials to the cinder block used to weigh down her body or. But the samples were essentially clean. The mysterious fluid Isaac had described was never identified as blood. So without so much as blood typing, the analysis stalled. Even without physical proof, Isaac's statements continued to ripple outward. His girlfriend corroborated much of what he had told police, including the timeline and his plea that she called the authorities in the hope they would intervene. She later admitted she never made the call, explaining she was afraid of retaliation. She also recounted a chilling encounter with Robert sometime after Debra's death. According to her, Debra came up in conversation, and Robert told her that Debra had been stealing my dope, end quote. She further told police that many people were afraid of Robert, describing him as violent, particularly when using drugs. With that fear in the driver's seat, she tried to brush it off, saying, you gotta do what you gotta do. Robert replied, well, I had to. She told investigators. She immediately ended the conversation and left, never wanting to speak about Debra again. If her account was accurate, it carried the weight of a secondhand confession. It was all amounting to a strengthening case against Robert. But the investigation soon faced a setback from which it would never quite recover. Isaac agreed to take a polygraph, and he failed. Isaac offered to take another polygraph, but no subsequent test was administered. There were a few scattered developments in the early 1990s as investigators continued to speak with witnesses and revisit the evidence. But the momentum was gone. The case stalled, leaving Deborah Stone's homicide suspended between confession and proof. Robert Jeremiah died in 1995. With him went the possibility of again confronting the man who, in so many witness accounts, hovered at the center of Deborah Stone's last hours. As the years passed, rumors began to fill the silence left by the stalled investigation. In the Greater Providence area, there had been other young women killed by strangulation. It was a detail that, on its own, was not enough to prove a pattern, but enough to spark uneasy speculation about a possible serial killer.
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- [26:46]
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Talk of a serial killer in the greater Providence area may have been spurred by an inquiry from the Providence Journal newspaper. The paper requested that area police agencies check their records for homicides that shared common threads in recent years, according to reporting by Paul Duggan, with reports from Tim Murphy, George Trafford, George R. House III and Karen Zeiner. On May 20, 1984, just months before Deborah Stone was pulled from The Narrow River, 28 year old Kathy Luongo was found strangled in the back of her car. Four years earlier, in June of 1980, 17 year old Roseanne Robinson had been discovered in the woods near Albion Road behind the Lincoln Mall. She too had been strangled. And on March 22nd of that same year, the body of 19 year old Diane Drake was found on Easton's beach in Newport. The cause of death again listed as strangulation. The through line was narrow but haunting. Homicide by strangulation. Now it was not enough to build a firm theory of a serial killer, but it was enough to keep the rumor alive, repeated in the community and carried forward in the absence of answers. Deborah Stone's case, meanwhile, languished. Decades slipped by with no resolution, only a file thick with statements, missed chances and a single voice that had once claimed to know exactly what happened, fading into the past along with the man he accused. For more than three decades, Deborah Stone's case remained dormant until something remarkable came from routine maintenance at Narragansett Police Department. According to reporting by Bill Seymour for the Independent, Detective James Wass didn't reopen Deborah Stone's case because of a tip or a breakthrough. He reopened it because he found it sitting there unfinished. And he couldn't ignore it. Detective Wass was auditing the Narragansett police evidence room when he came across old boxes and reports tied to Debra's murder. It was kind of a lightning bolt moment. Someone doing routine work, finding a file that time forgot and deciding it still mattered. He started digging in 2018, reading everything, organizing brittle paperwork and rebuilding the story in a modern way. He typed up synopses, memorializing statements and narratives, and got the case into the computer so the original materials wouldn't be destroyed or lost to deterioration. As he worked through the records, one detail kept landing with the case had never actually been closed. Before he could chase new leads, he needed to know what he had. Detective Wass confirmed that the physical evidence from 1984 was still intact. The sleeping bag, rope, glove, cinderblock, and still in decent testable condition too, at least as far as preservation goes. With modern technology available, he made the obvious next move and pushed for retesting through the Rhode Island Department of Health. Hoping to pull DNA from the rope, glove or sleeping bag. The Rhode Island Department of Health tested the white glove tangled in the rope, but no usable DNA profile could be obtained. The sleeping bag and rope segments were also examined, and no human DNA was detected there either. Even Deborah's fingernail clippings yielded insufficient genetic material. In a 2025 Attorney General's report summarizing the effort, it says plainly all relevant items have have been evaluated and tested and that there's no further evidence where testing for serology or DNA would likely be productive. Cold case forensics has its own cruel math. The evidence had been submerged in water for days, then sat for decades. Instead of delivering answers, the lab work reinforced a hard truth. Science had not failed the case science so much as it had arrived too late. But it wasn't the end. In 2023, the Rhode Island Attorney General's Office Cold Case Unit formally joined the investigation. What ultimately reshaped the case was not a sudden forensic breakthrough, but a careful re examination of everything that had already been collected. All of the reports, the witness statements, the memos that had qualified quietly shaped the direction of the case. Early on, as the new team worked through the original materials, they were struck by one glaring reality. By as early as 1991, there appeared to be ample probable cause to arrest Robert Jeremiah. Yet no charges were ever filed. When the Cold Case Unit prosecutors and detectives interviewed the original investigators, even those conversations failed to produce a satisfying explanation. The only clear rationale they uncovered was an internal Narragansett Police Department memo identifying Isaac's failed polygraph as the primary reason. Investigators and prosecutors concluded they lacked sufficient grounds to proceed. In 2024, Rhode Island Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Alexander Herkhoff was asked to re examine the informant Isaac's long standing description of Debra's final moments the gagging, choking, labored breathing he described in early interviews. Dr. Shirkov concluded that both overdosing and dying from strangulation can look similar from the outside. But in the cold case unit's 2025 report, he drew a sharp line verbatim from the report. Choking or gagging can be a response to both an overdose and a fractured hyoid bone due to the resulting edema and ultimate asphyxiation. While they may produce similar symptoms, a broken hyoid bone can only be attributable to the application of significant force. Most Often through a squeezing motion, which conclusively indicates strangulation and more specifically suggests manual strangulation. Debra did in fact have a fractured hyoid bone, which was a textbook indicator of manual strangulation. Toxicology showed no drugs in her system, aside from low ethanol levels likely attributable to decomposition. Dr. Shirkoff did acknowledge, however, that heroin and cocaine metabolized quickly and could have vanished before testing, meaning Debra may have used those substances that night. But he was unequivocal on one point. Drugs do not fracture the hyoid bone. That injury requires force, most often delivered by human hands. Investigators also revisited the apartment carpet Isaac said was stained when Debra's body was moved. That carpet was still preserved in evidence. The Cold Case Unit sent it to BODE Technology, where analysts obtained a partial DNA profile consistent with at least two contributors, one male. The second profile was too degraded to interpret, though years of storage and earlier cleaning had stripped the carpet of any remaining clarity. Important to note again, the fluid was never described as blood. The medical examiner said it was consistent with decomposition related fluids. In 2024, as part of the reopened investigation, Isaac, the informant himself, was interviewed yet again. Nearly 40 years had passed, but his account remained steady. He continued to insist that Robert killed Debra and that he only agreed to help dispose of her body because he believed Robert at the time when he said she had overdosed. In the end, reopening Deborah Stone's case did not yield a smoking gun hidden in a lab freezer. What it revealed instead was something quieter and perhaps more unsettling. The answers had been there all along in the statements, injuries, decisions, and missed opportunities of investigators waiting for someone to look at them differently. After reviewing the totality of the evidence, the Rhode Island Attorney General's Cold Case Unit reached a definitive conclusion. In 2025, Robert Jeremiah murdered Deborah Stone. In a comprehensive report of the case closure, the current investigators even stated, quote, after contacting all available members of law enforcement involved in this investigation, the RIAGCCU cannot satisfactorily explain why Jeremiah was not charged with Debra's murder By the end of 1991, end quote. The Cold Case Unit determined that Debra was strangled and that the facts supported a charge of first degree murder. Their reasoning rested on three central findings. First, the medical examiner ruled Debra's death a homicide caused by asphyxia due to strangulation, most likely manual strangulation, based on the presence of a fractured hyoid bone. Second, the informant provided a detailed account of how he and Robert disposed of Debra's body and Those details were consistent with what investigators found at the scene. And third, Robert himself effectively admitted to the killing when he told Isaac's girlfriend that he had to kill Deborah because she was supposedly stealing from him. The CCU further explained that even if premeditation could not be established, the evidence still supported a charge of second degree murder. Robert acted with malice and could have formed the intent to kill. In the heat of the moment, multiple witnesses described him as violent, angry and paranoid, often fueled by drug use. Under Rhode island law, even a killing committed in rage meets the standard for second degree murder. Isaac the informant's account held together over time from the 1980s through his 2024 interview. The core of his story never materially changed, and it was repeatedly corroborated from independent sources. Plus, Robert admitted that Debra was with him the last night she was heard from a cab driver confirmed bringing her to Simmons Village, where he was staying. The witness, Gordon, corroborated Isaac's presence at Robert's apartment. The following morning. Isaac's girlfriend recounted Robert's confession. Years later, a neighbor reported seeing Robert's mother washing out the trunk of the car shortly after Debra's body was found. And the sleeping bag, rope, glove and cinderblock recovered with Debra's remains all matched Isaac's descriptions, including details that had never been released publicly. Isaac may have failed that polygraph examination in the 1980s, which was given significant weight enough to essentially tank the progress of the case up until that point. But the polygraph examiner reportedly concluded that the deception centered on whether Isaac actually witnessed Debra's death. With the labored breathing and other symptoms he was seeing, he was likely understandably confused over what he was witnessing. With Robert deceased and no living suspect left to prosecute, the Rhode Island Attorney General's office formally closed Deborah stone's case in 2025 and for the first time identified it as solved. The CCU emphasized that much of what Isaac told police was against his own legal interests and could have resulted in charges against him, a factor they believed strengthened the credibility of his account. But Isaac cannot be charged for his admitted role in disposing of Debra's body because the offense carried a three year statute of limitations, which expired decades ago. What lingers most heavily in Debra's case is not just the brutality of her murder, but the knowledge that it did not have to remain a mystery for decades. By 1991, investigators had what the Cold Case Unit would later describe as probable cause to arrest Robert. Yet for reasons that remain undocumented and unexplained, he was never charged while he was alive. That vacuum leaves room for uncomfortable questions. Did the circumstances of Debra's life, her substance use, her proximity to people dealing in illegal substances, possibly make her a lower priority in the eyes of law enforcement? It would not be the first time. A retired police officer once told me that in Rhode island during the 1980s, murders of women who used drugs or the those who were involved in sex work were sometimes referred to within law enforcement as misdemeanor homicides. He was ashamed to say it. I was aghast to hear it. Or was there another factor at play? Robert's known ties to organized crime raise a darker possibility that his connections may have insulated him from consequences when the evidence was already pointing his way. There is no way to know now. What remains is Debra, the life she lived, the violence she endured, and the justice she was denied while the man responsible still walked free. Her case may finally be labeled solved, but the questions it leaves behind refuse to stay buried. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case@darkdowneast.com Be sure to follow the show on Instagram arkdowneast. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe and this is Dark Down East. Dark down east is a production of Kylie Media and Audio Check. I think Chuck would approve.
- [40:54]
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If you thought the snack wrap was good before, wait until you get your hands on the all new Hot Honey Snack Wrap. All the sweetness and heat you can handle. Just one bite will have you falling in love all over it again. Juicy, sweet and now with a little kick to bring it all together. If they ask who we do it for, it's for you, so look no further. Hot Honey Sauce is here.
- [41:20]
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If you love stories where the truth hides just beneath the surface, then you need to listen to Chameleon. Hosted by journalist Josh Dean, Chameleon unravels unbelievable true stories about about people who deceive, lie, and sometimes get away with it. From elaborate cons to flat out imposters, Chameleon pieces together the identities that were built and ultimately broken to uncover what's real and what's not. Listen to Chameleon wherever you get your podcasts.