Show Notes
EPISODE: LOVE, DOREEN
Doreen Jane Vincent was twelve years old when she vanished from her father’s rented farmhouse in Wallingford, Connecticut in June of 1988. At almost that exact moment, in Wallingford’s neighboring town of Meriden, I was turning ten. I first heard Doreen’s name in December 2018, more than thirty years later, when Sarah Dimeo and Joe Aguiar, host and producer of the podcast Faded Out, asked me to be the lead investigator on her case. I thought it would be a simple story; a mystery we could report on, maybe crack, and move on from. I was wrong.
People ask me why Doreen has gotten under my skin. That’s a complicated question, but I can tell you 1988 was the year I learned the word bogeyman. That April, a classmate of mine was stabbed to death by her father, in her kitchen, after asking him to cut a chocolate Easter bunny. He’d had a psychotic break and he remains institutionalized in Whiting Forensic Hospital to this day. Later that spring, a little girl about my age, on her way home from school, was pulled into the bushes and raped at a park less than a mile from my house. Known to me only by his first name, Clarence, that man was allowed to slip through the system and get right back on the street to stalk and victimize children. And that fall, a cousin of mine revealed her stepfather had been beating and raping her. That man was prosecuted for his crimes and ended up drinking himself to death in a worn-out chair in his shitty house. Those stories haunted me – not only as a child, but to this day. What happened to those girls – girls whose air I breathed – was awful, but their stories had answers; some type of resolution, no matter how tragic.
This tale is different. As I turned ten, I was ten miles away from Doreen, but it might as well have been a million. Her father and stepmother failed to report her missing for three days. For almost a year, she was reduced to a runaway and an afterthought, despite pleas from her mother and her aunts that something was very wrong. And in the almost thirty-two years since, Doreen’s never been found and no one has been held accountable, no matter the countless red flags that would scream out for attention. When I started looking into Doreen, I was sure pieces of her story would be everywhere, passed down through word of mouth, and urban legend. That everyone would know her name. What I have found, in the last year, is that that just wasn’t true. For everyone but her family, Doreen’s been whitewashed from existence, faded into a dirty little secret. And the more I dug, the more obstacles were thrown up around me at every turn – by people with something to hide, by the local media, by religious groups, and by the Wallingford Police Department itself. As I record this, the case I’ve brought against the Police with Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission to obtain the full file remains unresolved, with our second hearing just having taken place on February 3. There, to my shock, something really bittersweet took place – something that just feeds my drive to solve this case. There, finally, after almost thirty two years of waiting, the police finally admitted something a lot of us have always known to be true – that Doreen’s case wasn’t just that of a missing child. An endangered runaway. Finally, finally, Doreen’s case has been classified a homicide. And, despite all my frustrations with the Wallingford PD, I want to say I’m happy steps are being made. And I continue to extend the olive branch. Because at the end of the day, even if we all put our heads together and crack this case, only the police have the power to hold the right person – or persons – responsible.
But when people ask what obsesses me about Doreen, I tell them: it’s not just my need to figure out what happened to a little girl. It’s also to give that little girl an opportunity to tell her story, to give her the voice she deserves. To give her answers. In “Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession,” Rachel Moore writes, “The word victim is rooted in the Latin victima, which means sacrificial animal. This feels apt, but in an awful way. Because she’s dead, the victim can become whatever we want her to be. Because she’s dead, we can say whatever we want about her, and she can’t talk back. For some people, she is more valuable this way: holy, symbolic, silent.” These days, more of you know about Doreen. I’m glad. I don’t want her to be holy, symbolic, or silent anymore. When Sarah Dimeo launched Faded Out just one year ago, in January 2019, she faced the unenviable task of breathing life into an ice cold case. When Sarah first came upon Doreen’s name on the Charley Project website, the case was already over three decades old and long dormant. In preparation for my first call with him in January 2019, Lt. Anthony DeMaio, tasked with handling our inquiries, told me he’d reviewed the internet and found nothing new. In a January 23, 2019 press release entitled “Doreen Vincent – Missing Since 1988” – which was sent to us, and only us, Lt. DeMaio calls her case “mysterious” and suspicious” and notes that Doreen is often on the mind of the department. He writes, “The dogged investigation has led investigators to many cities and towns throughout Connecticut, as well as other states. Doreen’s maternal grandparents even hired a private investigator to look into their granddaughter’s disappearance, to no avail.” The second to last paragraph of the release discusses what would appear to be the last substantial police work done on the case – a 2011 revisitation of the file to ensure that no new information had been overlooked. As a result of that fresh look, the police sent Doreen’s dental records to a forensic odontologist in the hope advances in technology could reveal something new and checked to ensure Doreen was properly entered in the national missing person websites. The release says “We would be remiss to relate specific and closely held information to the public. What we can say is that we are always accepting information concerning the investigation, and upon receipt will scrutinize, examine, and follow all leads until exhausted.” The release concludes, “The Wallingford Police Department will not close this case until it is solved, and either Doreen herself, or her remains, are reunited with her family.”
So when we started digging, confident in our knowledge that we could unearth something valuable that we could share with the police. Those of you who listened to Faded Out how hard we dug, and how much we learned. And in the almost six months since Faded Out wrapped last summer, I haven’t stopped working. The Followers of Faded Out and Sticky Beak Facebook groups have been a blessing, giving me access to passionate, intelligent people with great ideas. I’ve unearthed explosive information and have made contact with a host of new characters. Some of them have raised more questions for me than they have offered answers, and they have some explaining to do. This podcast will give them that opportunity. But so many others have reaffirmed my faith in how strongly Doreen and the people that knew her need answers. I’ve learned to stop being surprised when they all inevitably tell me that my call was such a coincidence; that they were just thinking of Doreen yesterday, or at breakfast, or at church, or when they heard a song play. I’m here to tell you: It’s not a coincidence. Many of them have their own stories to tell about how they carry Doreen’s disappearance, and the events of the summer of 1988, around with them, a trauma that never heals. Others, including one anonymous witness from the original investigation, have told me how this case consumed them, left them sleepless.
I know the feeling. And I bet you do too. Some of you are familiar with this story and have come here with sharp, honed theories, hoping to test them against what we’ve continued to learn. Some of you are new to Doreen’s story – there’s likely someone in your life telling you, exhorting you, to get intrigued and angry over a girl unable to rest for decades. Here’s what you all have in common: Just like me, you’re a Sticky Beak – Aussie and New Zealand slang for someone who sticks their nose where it’s not always wanted. I doubt you take well to the word “no.” And you all care very much, for your own reasons, about a little girl whose story deserves to be told. You’re in the right place. I’m Jessica Fritz Aguiar, and this is Sticky Beak. This is Episode One: Love, Doreen.
Cue: WALK SOFTLY CHILDREN
You just heard a piece of the song “Walk Softly Children,” by Georgia Louis. Georgia was a family friend of Doreen’s father, Mark Hunter Vincent, and a figure in our tale. She was also a famous gospel singer whom Louis Armstrong called his musical godchild, and the first woman, black or white, in the country to have her own nationally syndicated television show, “TV Gospel Time.” She performed at the Apollo, Lincoln Center, and on the Ed Sullivan and Tonight Shows, and once had a young Whitney Houston open for her. For “Walk Softly Children,” Georgia found her inspiration in “Wade in the Water,” a slave song inspired by the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. References are made to healing and the Book of John: “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” Shepherds along the Underground Railroad – one of the most famous being Harriet Tubman – used the song to instruct those fleeing to leave the trail and bathe themselves in the water, losing the scent in the noses of the slaveholders’ dogs. Every time I listen, it reminds me of Doreen, caught in a world she couldn’t escape until she was finally released. But she’s not free. So let’s spend our first episode talking about Doreen, because you can’t understand what happened to her without knowing who she was, and where she came from.
Donna Murad and Mark Vincent started casually dating in 1974, when she was fifteen and he was eighteen. It might be more accurate to say he was stalking her. Donna thought he was handsome, a Tom Cruise type dripping with charisma, and enjoyed his attention until he started showing up everywhere she was. She would be out with her friends and see him driving by, and duck down to hide. AUDIO. But by early January 1975, Donna was pregnant with Doreen. She was just turning 16, the age of consent in Connecticut. Donna and Mark were married on May 10, 1975. The only wedding photo I’ve found shows Donna in a blue dress, white flowers in her dark hair, hands joined lightly under her little burgeoning belly. Mark is in cream pants and a tan blazer with a dark tie and white corsage. They’re standing in front of a just-blooming forsythia bush. Both wear slight, unsure smiles.
Doreen was born on September 30, 1975 in Danbury Hospital, at
10:27 and weighing 6 pounds, 11 ounces. She was a beautiful baby with dark black hair and green eyes. Life wasn’t easy for the little family but they had support, with Donna’s family always making sure they had a place. Donna also found comfort in her sisters Carol and Debbie, who were twelve and eleven when their niece was born. Doreen’s aunts did what they could, keeping an eye on a baby who would get into everything she could, including her diaper.
But Donna’s patience with Mark was growing thin. Mark was highly skilled and self-employed as a carpenter. He mocked Donna for finding work where she could get it, like at McDonalds, or as a bus driver. When she got a position working for the state, he mocked that too. Mark also didn’t approve of the clothes that Donna wore. For Mark, who called himself a born-again Christian, modesty in a woman was the highest virtue. He insisted that Donna cover every part of her body, even her elbows and collarbone. Mark would later insist on that kind of modesty for all the women in his life, and for Doreen, too.
Donna bucked Mark’s control early and often, and the union burned out quickly. Mark filed for divorce on February 5, 1980, claiming the marriage had broken down irretrievably. Judge Louis George, not to be confused with Georgia Louis, signed the official order on May 30, 1980. Mark found work at the Southbury Training School, a large residential and habilitative facility for adults with intellectual disabilities. In one of this story’s many “truth is stranger than fiction” moments, he briefly became a friend and sometimes caretaker to Daniel Miller, a young man with Down’s Syndrome institutionalized at Southbury in 1970 at age four. Daniel’s father was the famous playwright Arthur Miller, who gave us Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and who wrote his son out of existence.
Donna married again and gave birth to Doreen’s half-sister, Stephanie, in September 1983. As for Mark, he married Sharon Rockwell in June 1984. It was Sharon’s second marriage, with her first, in 1980 to a man named Jeffrey, fizzling out. Mark claimed he knew he was destined to marry Sharon, a born-again Christian, when the devil appeared at the foot of his bed and told him to make his life right. Donna, finding herself a single mother again, saw in Mark and Sharon a more steady family life, and agreed to let Doreen move into their house on Cleveland Avenue in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Doreen would visit Donna and Stephanie on weekends at the apartment house where they lived, down the hall from Debbie and Carol.
In the fall of 1984, a few months after Sharon and Mark were married, Doreen entered fourth grade in the Naugatuck Public School System. She was withdrawn less than month later on September 29, 1984, one day before her ninth birthday. This appears to be the point where Sharon and Mark moved Doreen to Middletown, New York. There, Doreen felt cloistered and repressed, and would call her mother and aunts again and again to complain. In response, the women got in the car and drove to New York, checking each and every elementary school until they located Doreen and put her on a plane to her maternal grandparents, Joe and Jane, in Port St. Lucie, Florida. This enraged Mark, but he didn’t follow her – probably because, the family muses, he just didn’t have the resources. Doreen was in Florida for a short time before her mother was censured for an act of custodial interference, and Doreen returned to Connecticut. There, on Cleveland Avenue, Sharon gave birth to two children – Paul in March 1985 and Sarah in July 1986. Doreen shared a loving relationship with all three of her siblings, posing for photos with big grins and playing the doting big sister. Stephanie and Doreen battled over the typical sister stuff, like when Stephanie would try to eat Doreen’s fruity lip gloss. But Donna also proudly recalled how Doreen had helped Stephanie find the bravery to ride a big kids’ ride at the amusement park, and Stephanie remembered that Doreen always let her sleep in her bed. Doreen’s brother Paul shared similar memories, telling me that Doreen cradled him in his crib every night. “That was our thing,” he said. Paul also remembered Doreen taking over rooms to build him and Sarah whole cities made of Duplos and other toys, making sure to get the details just right before letting the two little ones crash into the room to knock them down.
In the fall of 1985, Doreen entered fifth grade at Carrington, a public school in Waterbury where she received excellent grades and displayed what her teacher, Tom Pannone, called outstanding conduct. She was there for just a few months before Mark withdrew her on December 20, 1985, claiming on Doreen’s withdrawal form that the family was moving. There is no evidence of that, and the family remained on Cleveland Avenue.
In January 1986, Doreen entered the Christian Heritage School in Trumbull, Connecticut. As of now, I have found no records for Christian Heritage. That’s probably because Doreen was there for less than a month before she entered the fourth school on our list, Norwalk’s Parkview Christian Academy, on February 10, 1986. The entrance form lists Mark and Sharon as her father and stepmother but makes no mention of Donna. Mark reports Doreen’s level of academic performance as “good,” although she will prove herself during her time at Parkview to be a skilled student in both secular and religious subjects. When asked why he had chosen Parkview, Mark wrote “Opposed to public school system.” Mark and Sharon both affirm their religion as Christians and note that yes, Doreen has made a profession of faith in Christ. The family’s pastor, and church in West Haven, are noted. Don’t worry, we will get to them.
Parkview Academy came with a Mission Statement. Parkview was honored, the Statement read, to be helping parents develop their children for Christian leadership, and to sharpen the students’ character both academically and spiritually. To do this, the Statement stressed, spiritual admonition was necessary to correct a child in violation of the rules. At Parkview, spiritual admonition came in the form of corporal punishment. If a child acted out, a staff member would discuss the offense with the child, suggesting “spiritual applications” and then praying with the child. A same sex staff member would then use a “simple, flat paddle” to give the child a reasonable number of firm strokes, with another same sex staff member there as a witness. After the paddling, the staff member would then pray with the student, “assuring him or her of their love.” Mark and Sharon signed off on the mission statement “agreeing to support the school in its policy of corporal punishment without reservation, and personally pledging their support to this spiritual approach to discipline.”
I was relieved to find no evidence of corporal punishment in Doreen’s Parkview file. She finished out the fifth grade there, and then the sixth. Her 1987 yearbook shows she was involved in music, loved strawberries and the color purple, and wanted to be a stewardess. She loved the fall and Christian singer Amy Grant. She didn’t list her real favorite, George Michael, of whom Mark disapproved, and who she listened to for hours when she spent time with Donna. Her favorite scripture verse was Romans Chapter 18. Interestingly, there are only sixteen chapters in Romans, is no such Chapter, and I can’t help but wonder if Doreen meant Romans Chapter 1, Verse 18: The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.
Are you familiar with the concept of a yearbook’s Last Will and Testament? That little piece of whimsy where graduating students leave something small to the underclassmen? The one in the 87 Parkview yearbook lists a senior, who I’ll call Tommy, leaving Doreen “all my advice.” I found Tommy and wrote to him, asking for some insight. His response reads: “I was an older classmate of Doreen. She was in the middle school and I was in high school. We were a small but close school. Doreen was a very out-going kid whom many in the high school kind of gave attention to and we enjoyed having her around. She was very outgoing and now that I am older I can see she was also very needy. The comment in the year book was an inside joke to her and my classmates, because I was always giving them some kind of advice. I was and still am a morally conservative person and I would make jokes with my classmates and their moral choices. Doreen just had a habit of being a little too loud and get in trouble for being loud in the hallway and breaks and would hang out with the high school kids and get in trouble for not being where she was supposed to be. We didn’t even know she was missing. Long story but the school pretty much closed in 1988) and we all went our separate ways. I found out when a friend of mine told me she saw her school picture on a missing persons poster. She had called the number and was told that they hadn’t found her. I kept trying to see if she was found but there was very limited information. Doreen and other students who had difficult situations had a pretty strong impact on my life and I have been working with children in need for most of my life.”
Other kids found Doreen needy too. A man named Michael, who was eleven or twelve when he formed part of a group of kids with Doreen on Cleveland Avenue in Bridgeport, got in touch with me to recall how the children used to play in the neighborhood, especially in the summertime. Michael remembered Doreen sitting with his Italian grandmother on her steps, talking with her as she surveyed the neighborhood. He remembered Sharon, always silent and dressed modestly, waving from the porch but never speaking. And he remembers Mark. We’ll get to that too.
In the summer of 1987, Doreen became suffocated in the strict born-again household, and ran away to Donna’s in Waterbury. Mark was enraged and followed here there, hot on her tail and showing up to claim his daughter minutes after she walked in Donna’s door. Doreen returned to Mark’s and, in the fall, returned to Parkview for seventh grade. She would not finish the year there. In the Will and Testament from 1988, a girl I’ll call Tanya wills Doreen her sunglasses. I’ve been in touch with Tanya but will wait to share more. Doreen’s progress report notes good work habits, social development, and personal development, with only one outlier, one area needing improvement – her need to not disturb others. Doreen tells us in the yearbook that her best friend is Angela, her favorite subject is English, and her worst is math. She loves watching TV and rollerskating. Her nickname is Dor, and her life ambition is still stewardess. And her deepest darkest secret? To be like Alyssa Milano.
Apart from her own personal entries in both the 87 and 88 Parkview yearbooks, Doreen makes prolific appearances. On some pages she appears multiple times. She’s in the Drama Club, the State History Club. Two girls pronounce her their best friend in their own profiles. There are multiple shots of her posing with big groups of friends, some younger, some older. They give her bunny ears, and she gives them bunny ears back. There are so many photos of Doreen and her friends with their arms around each other. They clutch each other close. She smiles broadly as she hoists a younger girl on her back. Other photos are more solemn. In one her friend smiles broadly for the camera while Doreen rests her chin on her hand, looking pensively off into space. Here she is in choir practice looking like she’d rather be anywhere else. One – the one that takes my breath away – she’s staring at the camera, head slightly tilted, as if she’s been caught off guard. It’s in black and white, and it haunts me. It haunts everyone who sees it.
When the 87 to 88 Parkview yearbook was issued, likely in May or June of 1988, Doreen wasn’t there. Her father had moved her to Westwoods Christian Academy in Hamden, Connecticut sometime during the fall or early winter of her seventh grade. She made a quick friend there, Kate, who remembers her well – with big hairsprayed hair that she wore piled on her head in banana clips, and red lipstick, and a loud voice. Kate remembered she was beautiful. Kate couldn’t recall when Doreen arrived at the school but she knew it was in the middle of the year, because Doreen didn’t make it for Picture Day. Her photo in the Westwoods yearbook is out of place; a quick, blurry shot in front of a wall, shoehorned in with the other professional photos. She’s got a deer in the headlights look. In striking contrast to the Parkview yearbook, Doreen makes no other appearances. When I visited Westwoods in February 2019, they had just closed down. They had no records to offer me because, if someone didn’t graduate from the school, their records were expunged. The theme of the yearbook is 1988 – A Good Year.
So that’s the history of Doreen’s formal education. But there was a darker side of Doreen’s exposure to a bigger universe to us. It came to me in the report of Richard Novia, which is just part of the Wallingford Police file I’ve been able to wrest from their grasp. Novia was a private investigator hired by Donna and Jane, Doreen’s mother and grandmother a couple of weeks after she disappeared, after it became clear they needed someone else in their corner. How I got Novia’s report, and all that I have learned from it, will be detailed in future episodes. But for now, let’s talk about the Simon Evans Center in Trumbull, Connecticut, where Mark and Sharon brought Doreen when she was 11 or 12, and when they decided she was too much to handle. The Center appears to have closed down long ago, and the information I do have on it is scant. What I do have is a blank entrance form. I assume a completed version exists somewhere, and it’s on my list. For now, what’s contained in the blank form is chilling enough. I guess I would call it an application form, but it’s not. It’s a contract the child would have to sign. It asks the child to turn herself over to the Center, and to release the Center from any claims of any harm or injury which she might suffer. Simon Evans also calls on the parents to grant it custody and control of the child so long as she resides there, and to surrender liability for any harm that might result. Keep in mind she’s asked if she’s pregnant, and, if so, to give her due date. The application also comes with a questionnaire which requires Doreen to confide any addictions with drugs or alcohol, and to list her court record and any stints in a mental institution. Doreen is asked whether she’s ever been a sex worker, or been involved in any lesbian relationships or sexual relationships with men outside of marriage. And now comes the part that I imagine appealed to Mark and Sharon: Are you a born-again Christian? Do you understand that you are coming to a program that is heavily Christian oriented? Have you decided to live your life as a Christian? What is your greatest fear about coming to the Simon Evans Center? Do you want to change the way you are living? Are you coming here because you want to come?” Now, here’s the finish, all in caps: You must realize that if you are accepted into the program that we require a 30-day commitment, and a sincere desire to change as well as progress in your behavior. You will not be able to smoke at all or take any medications other than antibiotics, etc. No barbituates, tranquilizers, mood elevators, stellazine, thorazine, prolixin, etc. Since this is a Christian program, no cursing, drinking, drugs, or fighting are allowed. You will not be able to have any contacts with boyfriends or girlfriends. No letters, phone calls, or visits. So, be prepared to – and this is underlined – MAKE THE BREAK.” The child is then asked to write a paragraph - 50 words minimum - explaining why she want to come to Simon Evans and for Jesus Christ to change her life.
So, if you’re counting, Doreen was in six elementary schools from the time she began fourth grade in the fall of 1984, not to mention the black hole of Simon Evans. And on June 5, 1988, when Mark and Sharon left Cleveland Avenue for 1316 Whirlwind Hill Road in Wallingford, Connecticut, they didn’t just make Doreen move schools. They made her move her entire life, taking her forty-three minutes and thirty-seven miles from the home she knew. The reason for that move remains a mystery that I will dig into in future episodes. One thing is certain, though: Doreen was not happy. We know this even though, before her body disappeared, Doreen’s entire voice was silenced.
According to Sharon, Doreen wrote letters to her friends before she vanished. She told the police about them after Doreen was gone, but she never turned them over, and they’ve never been found. We know Doreen also had a scrapbook. It’s one of the first things her mother and aunts told me about when I first spoke to them, in January 2019. Doreen’s diary is gone now, but what I have been able to piece together about what was in it plays a huge role in this story. But suffice it to say that some of Doreen’s last thoughts in this world, after being squirreled away in some shadowy fundamentalist juvenile detention center, after being kept shrouded in clothes no twelve-year old would have touched with a ten-foot pole in 1988, and after finding no peaceful landing place throughout her whole childhood, were not always happy ones.
I don’t want to remember Doreen as angry. I see a girl caught between worlds, unhappy, but fighting every day to live a normal life. She loved rollerskating and George Michael, and loved her friends and her siblings, and she loved her mother and her aunts. She took pleasure in the little things, like chatting with someone’s Italian grandmother on the city steps, and she made toast just the way she liked it, with butter covering every inch of the bread. And just days before she disappeared forever, she finished the seventh grade she wrote this in her friend Kate’s yearbook: “Have a great summer. See you around. Love, Doreen.”
Those words are the last mark I have as proof that Doreen was here, breathing the same air we did back in 1988. But today, we have more answers for her. She’s finally earned recognition as a homicide victim, and now there are hundreds of people listening to her story and fighting to get her justice. Listeners, this case is far from resolution, but it’s the closest it’s ever been to resolution. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s honor this kid. Let’s crack this case. Let’s get Justice for Dori.