A man was charged with killing a girl decades after she went missing. The case fell apart, and the accusation cost him everything.

Over the previous seven and a half weeks, the local news had been filled with stories about a girl missing from the city of Pawtucket, about 15 miles north.

Christine Cole, who’d just turned 10, had left home on an errand and vanished into the freezing January night. Police launched a massive search. Her mother pleaded for her return.

The girl was last seen about a half-mile from the Blackstone River before she disappeared.

Now, it appeared she was here, a small body in a gray parka and purple pants, downstream from where the Blackstone and Seekonk rivers spill into the Providence River and Upper Narragansett Bay.

Guzewicz called the police.

Christine had drowned, the medical examiner would rule, but how she wound up in the water was undetermined. There was no sign of trauma. Police had no evidence of foul play.

The Pawtucket Police Department nonetheless investigated Christine’s death as a homicide. They didn’t make an arrest until 30 years later, when the head of the department’s new cold-case unit announced that she knew who killed Christine.

In July 2019, Detective Susan Cormier charged Joao Monteiro, a Cape Verdean immigrant, with murder. She said Monteiro lived above a market where Christine was last seen. She said his DNA matched a stain on the child’s pants. She said the pants were fastened “haphazardly” on the girl’s body and not “in a normal fashion.”

None of that was true.

Even though the murder charge was dropped six months later, Monteiro said the accusation cost him everything: his home, his job, and his community.

“I just want people to know that I didn’t do it,” he said, speaking publicly for the first time.

Monteiro filed a lawsuit in January 2021 against the city of Pawtucket, Cormier, her police chief and major, another detective, and a state forensic scientist, alleging they framed him for murder. The trial was set for Dec. 2 in US District Court but on Tuesday, less than a week before the trial, the parties reached a $1 million settlement, according to Providence lawyer William V. Devine, one of the attorneys representing Monteiro.

The city of Pawtucket is not admitting to wrongdoing, said Boston civil-rights lawyer Mark Loevy-Reyes, also representing Monteiro.

Pawtucket police remain adamant, even now, that they got the right man.

But there’s one thing still missing: evidence that Monteiro — or anyone at all — murdered Christine Cole.

The winter of 1988 was so cold that the Blackstone River, which snakes through northern Rhode Island, froze over.

A few days into the new year, three children in Woonsocket ventured onto the ice and plunged into the frigid water. One little boy was unconscious when he was rescued.

Days later, on Jan. 6, 1988, temperatures plummeted near zero when Christine left her home on West Avenue in Pawtucket.

The third-grader had come home from school wanting candy. Instead, her mother gave her $10 in food stamps to buy clams and milk at nearby markets. Christine pulled on a hooded parka and two pairs of socks for warmth, but didn’t have a hat or gloves.

A clerk at Red’s Seafood later told police that Christine arrived between 4:15 and 4:30 p.m. and bought 3 pounds of clams and a bag of potato chips. Around 5 p.m., Christine visited a girl who lived a few blocks away to play with dolls. She stayed until 6:30 p.m., then told the girl’s mother that she had to go home. A couple later told police that they saw Christine walking alone, empty-handed.

At around 7 p.m., Christine arrived at Saints Market to buy a gallon of milk. The store owner, Nely Saraiva, gave her change for the gumball machine and a discarded glove for her cold hands. Saraiva knew Christine, and told police and local reporters that the girl was crestfallen because her necklace was broken, so Saraiva put her necklace and gumballs into a bag.

Meanwhile, Margaret Cole was wondering why her daughter hadn’t come home. Her boyfriend, Oscar Waldron, went out to look for Christine, while Cole stayed home with their three young sons.

Waldron checked several stores, missing Christine at Saints Market by about 45 minutes, and returned without her.

Around 9:30 or 10 p.m., Christine was seen with an older girl at the local Star Market. The clerks suspected the girls were shoplifting. A girl who resembled Christine was seen leaving the market with another girl, heading toward the railroad tracks.

By then, Cole had called the police and reported her daughter was missing.

News articles from local media at the time and investigative reports uncovered in the federal lawsuit laid out the details of Christine’s lonely life.

Her teacher at Baldwin Elementary School told police Christine was a good student, though quiet and sometimes absent. Christine’s mother told the police the girl often ran away, sometimes for hours.

One woman called Christine a “wanderer,” who occasionally stole from a local market or hid food outside to sustain herself. Several people told police that Christine confided that she was unhappy at home.

The police thought that Christine might seek shelter in an unlocked car or basement. With a massive snowstorm bearing down, they were afraid she wouldn’t survive.

The police and FBI sought out anyone who knew Christine or saw her that night. They questioned child molesters and a man who’d been previously considered in the murder of two little boys. They canvassed the neighborhood, searching basements and vacant buildings, dumpsters, a church, cemetery, and parked vehicles. They used bloodhounds to track her scent and scanned overhead from a helicopter.

Trash haulers dumped their loads so investigators could comb through garbage for the child’s body. They searched landfills, homeless encampments, the railroad tracks, an old tower, and a mill.

“We didn’t have any idea. Was she kidnapped and taken out of state? There’s all kinds of theories you can make,” John Haberle, who was a detective lieutenant in Pawtucket and the lead investigator, told the Globe. “She was a missing person, but we had no idea what happened to her.”

Cole said her daughter was afraid of water, but a Narragansett woman who claimed to be psychic told police that Christine’s body was in the Blackstone River.

Snow and ice prevented a thorough search of the Blackstone and Seekonk rivers for weeks. When the rivers thawed in late February, Haberle boarded a Coast Guard boat to search, but found nothing.

Two days later, Christine’s body washed up on the north side of Conimicut Point, miles downstream.

Police surmised she had been trapped under the ice all that time.

Sand, shells, and vegetable material filled Christine’s clothing, according to an autopsy report.

Her gray winter parka was zipped in the middle, the hood tied in a bow under her skeletonized face. Her purple pants were zipped up and tightly buckled twice around her waist. She still had food stamp coupons, a wrapped pink gumball, and a pastel bead necklace.

Her body had no significant external or internal injuries, no broken bones, no sign of trauma or sexual assault. Dr. Kristin G. Sweeney, deputy chief state medical examiner, ruled that Christine’s cause of death was “asphyxia with submersion” — drowning. She listed Christine’s manner of death as “undetermined,” telling local media she wouldn’t rule the death as a homicide unless the police provided evidence of foul play.

The day of Christine’s funeral, Haberle told a Pawtucket Times reporter that there was no evidence the death was anything but an accident.

The man who’d found Christine’s body still remembers what he heard.

“Based on what they were saying to me, she slipped on the ice,” said Guzewicz, now 85 and still living on Conimicut Point. “Nobody killed her. The water was just flowing fast.”

Even so, police continued to investigate Christine’s death as a homicide, in case new evidence arose, Haberle later told the Globe.

“The bottom line is, we had no evidence, because of the condition of the body,” he said.

At the time, police investigations relied on witnesses and collected evidence but “DNA wasn’t in our vocabulary,” Haberle said.

Then-police chief Theodore King sent several items from Christine’s case to the FBI lab in April 1988 to be examined and preserved for future comparisons.

Experts would eventually realize that the way evidence was collected and stored in the 1980s didn’t meet today’s rigorous requirements for obtaining DNA evidence. Over the years, as analysts tested the evidence, the results were limited.

In 1998, 10 years after Christine’s death, an analyst in the FBI DNA unit examined Christine’s pants for the presence of semen and blood. None was found.

In 2008, 20 years after Christine’s death, Pawtucket detectives wanted to compare the evidence with dried blood samples from a Massachusetts man serving time for sexually assaulting two girls in the late 1980s, according to a police report.

Police submitted Christine’s pants, her hair, and part of her jacket that appeared to be stained with blood to the Rhode Island Health Department’s forensic biology unit, the report said. An analyst noticed a red-brown stain on the “inner crotch” of Christine’s pants and a test indicated it might be blood. However, the confirmatory test was negative, according to court records.

Ultimately, the lab reported it couldn’t develop a DNA profile due to the condition of the evidence.

Haberle served 35 years and retired as a captain. No one had asked him about the Christine Cole case in many years, not until a Globe reporter called him this summer.

“The evidence, in my opinion, doesn’t show murder,” said Haberle, now 84. “My opinion, without further evidence, is that she fell through the ice and drowned. Not on purpose. No suicide. Just a horrible accident that happened to this young girl.”

But another Pawtucket detective had a different view.

Susan Cormier was a high school dropout, who earned her GED and applied to be a Pawtucket police officer.

Her lowest scores at the police academy were in criminal investigations. She joined the department in 1993 and, after a few years on patrol, took the promotional test to be a detective. She scored well enough to become a detective in 2005.

Within five years, her supervisors were complaining about Cormier’s work, according to an internal affairs report.

In June 2010, a detective lieutenant and sergeant told Cormier that she wasn’t completing her investigations in a timely or proper manner. That fall, the sergeant and a detective captain found more than 40 cases in October and November that Cormier failed to complete properly.

Cormier went out on extended sick leave. She returned in the spring of 2011 and told the captain that she’d had problems that affected her work performance. She received a written reprimand.

Lawyer Marc DeSisto, who represents Cormier and the city, told the Globe that she “was directed to report to a supervisor for about a month and she did so.”

In a deposition, however, Cormier said she wasn’t required to do any training and blamed the matter on “an issue with a certain supervisor ... [who] wrote me up, stating I had cases that didn’t have any follow-up or a narrative.”

Her supervisor was Sergeant Rob Winsor, who’d told his boss that Cormier accused him of “having it out” for her because he’d written her up for an “unacceptable work ethic,” according to an internal affairs report.

Winsor, now a police officer in Jamestown, R.I., declined to comment to the Globe. Arthur Martins, the major who recommended strict monitoring of Cormier’s work, didn’t recall the matter. “If it was something really serious, discipline would have been higher,” he said.

In June 2023, the Globe requested the reports of 82 cases that Cormier was assigned when she was reprimanded. The city refused, citing privacy interests. In February 2024,the attorney general’s office told the city that it was violating state public records law and ordered the reports released.

The heavily redacted reports released to the Globe in March and April show Cormier made little or no effort to conduct investigations. She closed most cases without any resolution.

But Cormier remained a detective. In 2018, Chief Tina Goncalves and Major Daniel Mullen put her in charge of cold cases.

Cormier got a private office in City Hall. She founded the Rhode Island Cold Case Task Force and had regular segments on WPRI-TV. She spoke publicly about investigating cold cases and created decks of playing cards with photos of victims to elicit tips.

She put Christine Cole on the “Queen of Hearts” card.

In an interview in 2019, Cormier told the Globe that she felt like she cared more about Christine than anyone else. The girl’s half-brothers were too young to remember her. Her mother had mental health issues. Her stepfather was dead.

“There’s not a lot of people in her corner right now,” Cormier said. “It’s me.”

With advances in forensic science in the 30 years since Christine’s death, Cormier wanted the evidence retested.

Forensic scientist Tamara Wong tested a stain on the pants, according to court records, and obtained an extract of a partial Y-STR, a profile for the male Y-chromosome.

The Y-STR profile is a DNA profile shared among all the males in the paternal line — brothers, uncles, cousins, male cousins of uncles, sons, fathers, grandfathers — and repeated among male relatives. A partial Y-STR could also connect with multiple paternal lines.

This kind of match can help to narrow down possible suspects, but cannot pinpoint an individual.

The state Health Department found a connection to a man who was born in 1993, five years after Christine died. So, Cormier looked at the man’s father: Joao Monteiro.

Part of a large Cape Verdean family, Monteiro had legally immigrated to the United States in 1982. When Christine disappeared in January 1988, Monteiro was married and raising his wife’s three young daughters, living in Central Falls, R.I., and working third-shift in Providence in metalworks, according to his lawyer.

Monteiro had drawn police attention before. In 1989, he pleaded no contest to assault with a dangerous weapon, after he sped at a Central Falls police officer. He was charged with domestic assault in 1996 and twice in 2003. A drunk driving charge was dismissed in 2009, as were charges of reckless driving and refusing to submit to a chemical test for alcohol in 2011.

In 2019, when Cormier zeroed in on Monteiro, he was 59, living in an apartment in Central Falls, and working at Cintas in Cumberland unloading trucks, a job he’d held for 15 years.

Monteiro’s federal lawsuit has uncovered documents, depositions, and text messages that show how Cormier said she built her case.

She used databases to determine where Monteiro had lived over the last 30 years. She found 19 addresses, including an apartment above Saints Market, the one Christine had visited the night she went missing.

After the Central Falls police helped Cormier figure out which apartment Monteiro was living in, she collected his trash to retrieve his DNA. Nothing came up.

“I swear I am just going to punch this guy in the mouth to obtain his blood,” Cormier texted the forensic scientist, Tamara Wong, who responded: “LMFAO.”

Cormier drove by Cintas and saw Monteiro’s vehicle parked between delivery trucks. When he was home, she noticed that he parked his car in the lot next to his apartment building. She wrote in an affidavit that Monteiro was “living his life in a covert manner.”

She got a search warrant to obtain a swab from Monteiro’s cheek to compare his DNA with the partial sample from Christine’s clothing. On July 17, 2019, Monteiro was brought into the police station. Cormier and Detective Trevor Lefebvre questioned him for nearly four hours, according to court records.

Monteiro, who speaks Cape Verdean Creole and struggles with English, asked for an interpreter, but Cormier said in a deposition that his request “slipped her mind.” She and Lefebvre interrogated him in English. Court records show that Monteiro appeared confused, asking if they needed the swab because they thought he was sick.

A state police detective conducted a polygraph test in English and reported that Monteiro had failed. Cormier confronted Monteiro about being evasive and “making excuses,” she later wrote in her report. Monteiro protested that she had the wrong guy, she wrote, and that he didn’t know Christine.

Afterward, a detective captain who is Cape Verdean and speaks Creole learned that Monteiro had been interrogated without an interpreter. Captain Napoleon Gonsalves went to Major Mullen and insisted that he or another Cape Verdean detective be allowed to translate.

Mullen turned him down. This was Cormier’s case.

Monteiro was still at the police station when Cormier texted Wong, the state forensic scientist, about the comparison between his DNA sample and the sample from Christine’s clothing: “Is it a match???”

Cormier texted Wong again: “We are all on the edge of our seat waiting for your reply. My chief major and FBI.”

Monteiro was released, and a few hours later, Wong texted back: “It’s a match. … Nice detective work Sue!!! Congrats!”

But when Wong sent her official report, Cormier was confused: “So, there is no ‘1 in 10 billion’ match type of stats… just 95 percent confident?”

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

Cormier asked to talk. “I need you to translate this into my language,” she texted.

Wong said in a deposition that she told Cormier this type of DNA evaluation is used to eliminate potential suspects from consideration — not to pinpoint a suspect: “Y-STRs are paternal lines linked through the paternal lineage, and that it’s not individualized like she is used to seeing… no 1 in 10 billion.”

However, Cormier texted Magistrate J. Patrick O’Neill that she had a DNA match. “That’s pretty f–king awesome,” responded O’Neill, who signed the arrest warrant.

Monteiro was leaving work when the police arrested him. Mullen called a press conference the next day.

Standing next to a poster-sized Christine Cole “Queen of Hearts” card, Cormier and Chief Goncalves announced they’d made an arrest in the cold case.

Monteiro was arraigned at Providence District Court in his work uniform and held without bail for three days. Then, the prosecutors asked the judge to release him on low bail.

They had started reviewing Cormier’s investigation — and found many problems.

Multiple documents from Monteiro’s lawsuit revealed that the affidavits Cormier wrote contained falsehoods and misleading statements.

There was no DNA “match.” Rather, Monteiro’s DNA profile, a term that refers to a DNA pattern specific to him, was merely “consistent” with the partial Y-STR DNA profile obtained from Christine’s pants.

Wong explained in a deposition that she was only able to obtain a partial profile because the DNA evidence from Christine’s pants was so degraded.

Any of Monteiro’s male relatives in his paternal line — father, sons, grandsons, uncles, cousins, brothers — would share the same Y-STR profile. Wong said it was also possible that other families outside of Monteiro’s male line could match the partial profile.

Therefore, the forensic testing identified the presence of DNA from all male individuals in Monteiro’s paternal line — as well as roughly one in every 1,909 paternal lines of other families.

In a deposition, Wong said she’d told Cormier that the partial Y-STR DNA could not pinpoint any individual. It could only be used to eliminate people from suspicion. Cormier admitted that she didn’t seek DNA testing of anyone else.

Cormier also admitted the databases she used to look up Monteiro’s addresses were not accurate. He had not moved 19 times in 30 years. He did not live above Saints Market, where Christine shopped, until 13 years after the girl had died.

What Cormier described as “extensive surveillance” were infrequent drive-bys, and the “covert” lifestyle she claimed Monteiro was living did not exist. Monteiro had a public Facebook page. He had a driver’s license and a steady job. Monteiro told Cormier that he parked between the delivery trucks to eat his lunch, and that his landlord had asked him to park in the next-door lot.

For six months, Cormier and prosecutors looked for evidence tying Monteiro to Christine’s death, so they could bring the case to a grand jury. They found nothing.

In January 2020, the attorney general’s office dismissed the murder charge against Monteiro, citing “insufficient evidence.”

Publicly, the police department and attorney general’s office continued to call Christine’s death a homicide — and Cormier continued insisting that Monteiro was guilty.

“I 150 percent believe that I have the right person, the person responsible for this crime, and I am never going to stop,” Cormier said on the podcast “Dealing Justice” that aired in May 2020. “I will never let this go until we are able to prove this and get some justice for Christine and her family and make sure this man is held responsible for what he did.”

In January 2021, Monteiro filed a federal civil lawsuit against the city of Pawtucket, Cormier, Chief Goncalves, Mullen, Wong, and Detective Trevor Lefebvre, who’d assisted Cormier, accusing them of framing him for murder.

Boston civil rights attorney Mark Loevy-Reyes, who is representing Monteiro, was aghast when he delved into Cormier’s investigation.

“What I saw was just blatant fabricated evidence,” he told the Globe. “Virtually every piece of alleged evidence to obtain the arrest warrant, when you dig deeper into it, you realize it’s fabricated.”

The department was responsible for training and supervising Cormier, and yet, “she was basically operating on her own with very little oversight,” Loevy-Reyes said. “It was astounding that they would have someone like that.”

In depositions for Monteiro’s lawsuit, Goncalves and Mullen denied knowing about Cormier’s internal affairs reprimand. Goncalves acknowledged that Cormier hadn’t been trained in drafting applications for warrants and that there were no policies requiring a review by supervisors before seeking a warrant.

Goncalves did not respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

Cormier conceded in a deposition that there was no evidence Christine’s death was murder. The detective retired in 2022 and began collecting a $4,700 monthly pension.

In October 2023, US District Court Judge Mary McElroy found sufficient evidence for a trial and cleared the way for Monteiro’s lawsuit to go forward. After the parties reached a settlement Tuesday, the trial was canceled and the lawsuit will be dismissed.

“I’m a little disappointed we’re not going to court, but I don’t think they want to go to court either because they know they made a mistake,” Monteiro told the Globe, as his sister, Rita Correia, translated from the Cape Verdean Creole. “What I wish they could do is apologize, which they’re not going to do, but I want to clear my name.”

Still, the day before the settlement, a spokeswoman for Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien said Christine’s death was “an active homicide case and Mr. Monteiro is still the primary suspect.”

Loevy-Reyes said one big question remains: “Why was there ever an arrest for something where there’s no evidence it was even a crime, and there’s a lack of anything that would tie Mr. Monteiro to it?”

The murder charge was dismissed, and the lawsuit was settled, but Monteiro doesn’t feel free.

He feels as if the police are waiting to put handcuffs on him again.

After his arrest, Monteiro lost his job and his apartment. He moved in with Correia in Massachusetts. He rarely goes out. He knows that people whisper that he must have killed that girl, because the police said so.

When a Globe reporter first told Monteiro in 2023 that he remained the primary suspect, he began to cry.

“Why? They didn’t find nothing,” he asked, as Correia interpreted. “I didn’t think this would happen to me. They didn’t believe me.”

Monteiro hoped his lawsuit would make a difference. “They will see that they made a mistake,” he said. “They are not going to hurt anybody else, the way they did to me.”

Monteiro said he prays for Christine. He said he doesn’t know why she died.

Nearly 37 years later, neither does anyone else.

Amanda Milkovits can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @AmandaMilkovits.