The Murder of Nancy Ann Frenier (Rhode Island)

A young mother disappears just days before Christmas. More than a year later, another woman is murdered across the state line. The cases seem separate, different cities, different circumstances, but eventually they converge around the same teenage suspect. What follows is more complicated than a confession and a conviction. It's a case shaped by questions of mental competency, juvenile justice, changing constitutional protections, and what happens when one act of violence forces investigators to reconsider others that never made sense. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Nancy Ann Frenier on Dark Down East. It was Friday, December 22nd, 1961, just three days before Christmas, and in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and neighboring Massachusetts towns just over state lines, people were squeezing in the last errands of the holiday season. For 19-year-old Nancy Ann Frenier, the list was pretty simple. Laundry, a few gifts, and done in time to pick up her husband William and their six-month-old baby. This would be their child's first day of school. According to reporting in the Providence Journal, that December morning, Nancy drove William to work so she could keep their 1956 Oldsmobile for the day. Then she headed to her parents' house in South Attleboro, Massachusetts, to drop off the baby with her mother. Nancy left her parents' house at around 10.15. She stopped back at home in Pawtucket and was seen leaving again sometime between 11 and 11.15 a.m. By about 12.30 that afternoon, the Freniers' maroon Oldsmobile was parked outside Mammoth Mart on Newport Avenue in Rumford, a section of East Providence. After that, the timeline goes quiet. William was expecting Nancy to pick him up from work, but by 5.15 she still hadn't arrived. He called Nancy's mother to see if maybe she had been delayed there, but she hadn't come back for the baby either. William borrowed a truck from work and started looking for her himself, checking their house, and then his parents' home. There wasn't much reason to think Nancy had chosen to go anywhere unexpectedly. Her family was clear this wasn't like her. William reported Nancy missing by 8 p.m. that night. The first police bulletins described her as 5'1", about 140 pounds, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She had been wearing gray slacks, a white blouse, loafers, and an olive-colored coat with a fur collar. On her hand were her wedding band, and her class ring. For most of the next day, there was still no sign of Nancy or the Oldsmobile. Then, at about 5 o'clock Saturday afternoon, the car turned up in Rumford, stuck in sand off Ferris Avenue near Central Pond, adjacent to the James V. Turner Reservoir. It was a secluded area, known locally as a lover's lane. The Oldsmobile was locked. Inside, police could see the evidence of the day Nancy had been having before, or she vanished. Clean laundry was spread across the back seat. There were Christmas purchases, too: baby shoes, baby socks, and two men's shirts, the tags still attached. Nancy's pocketbook was inside with cosmetics and about a dollar and change, although her billfold was missing. There was one other detail that stood out. The passenger seat had been pushed farther back than usual, as though someone taller had been sitting there. Whatever Nancy had put in the bag, it was still in her pocket. The car had been parked in the back of her car. The car was parked in the back of her car. maker. After the knife point attack, Thomas was sent for court-ordered psychiatric evaluation and held for observation for a few weeks. He was eventually released and placed on probation through family court. Nothing at the time could have suggested that Nancy's suspicious disappearance was linked to the attempted abduction of the 17-year-old girl. Investigators were continuing to work through sightings, tips, and possible explanations. And then answers came when winter finally began to loosen its grip on the East Providence Reservoir. On March 19, 1962, with the ice thawing, investigators and searchers returned to the water and began dragging the reservoir for clues. During that search, a body was spotted floating near the shoreline in less than two feet of water. Searchers moved in and recovered the remains of a young woman. There were immediate signs that this was likely Nancy. On the body was a class ring from Attleboro High School engraved with the initials NAC, along with a hair clip bearing the name Nancy. Her family confirmed the identification later that day. She was found partially unclothed. Her pants, underwear, and shoes were recovered. The autopsy found no apparent evidence to support that theory. The medical examination found two blows to Nancy's head and a deep wound to her throat, which was believed to be the fatal injury. There was also evidence that some of the injuries to her abdomen and chest had been inflicted post-mortem. Police and firefighters went back into the reservoir looking for anything else that might help explain what happened. The autopsy found no evidence to support that theory. They were particularly interested in finding the murder weapon, believed to be a small knife, and crews continued dragging the water and searching the shoreline. The discovery brought investigators back to people and leads they had already considered during the months Nancy was missing. Her husband William was questioned again, this time with an attorney present, as police began working the case as a homicide rather than a disappearance. Detectives also looked beyond Rhode Island. They traveled to New Hampshire and Vermont to compare Nancy's injuries with other unsolved killings involving women who had been attacked with knives. One was the 1958 murder of Doris Baker in Barrie, Vermont, who had been slashed with a linoleum knife. Another was the 1960 murder of Sandra Valade in New Hampshire. Investigators studied both cases, but they did not find an obvious connection to Nancy's murder. Back in Rhode Island, police continued working through possible suspects, bringing several men in for questioning and lie detector tests over the next few weeks. None of those examinations gave investigators enough to hold anyone in Nancy's murder. William was questioned yet again in early April and held overnight at the state police barracks. He voluntarily took another polygraph, but police did not make the results public and described the process as just part of eliminating possible suspects. But there was, however, one more thing to note, and that was that there was no one else in charge of Nancy's murder. It was someone else police specifically wanted to take a closer look at, the teenager who had been arrested just weeks after Nancy disappeared for forcing a girl into a car at knife point. Thomas Knott, Jr. had already undergone psychiatric evaluation after that January attack and had since been released on probation. The similarities were difficult to ignore: a knife, a young woman in a secluded park. According to reporting by Al Sally and Bill Duncliffe for the Boston Record American, police brought Thomas in for questioning about Nancy's murder, and he refused to take a lie detector test, but investigators didn't have enough to arrest or charge him, and he was released. Through the rest of 1962, no one was charged with Nancy Ann Frenier's murder. The case remained unresolved until January of the following year, when a woman was killed inside her home just over the state line, in Attleboro, Massachusetts. On Friday, January 25th, 1963, 38-year-old Edith Martin was killed inside her home on Boardman Lane in South Attleboro, Massachusetts. Edith had been stabbed more than 30 times. Seven kitchen knives were found near her body, several of them bent or broken during the attack. Investigators immediately began working back and forth between the two of them, and the investigators immediately began backwards through the hours before Edith was found, talking with neighbors and looking for anything unusual around the house. One detail stood out. Witnesses remembered seeing a blue 1958 Chevrolet in Edith's driveway around the time she was believed to have been killed. Using motor vehicle records, investigators worked through registrations for over 1,100 blue 1958 Chevrolets and narrowed the number of cars that could be found in Edith's driveway. On Friday, January 26th, 1983, 38-year-old Edith Martin was killed inside her home on Boardman Lane in South Attleboro, Massachusetts. One of those cars belonged to the Knott family, as in Thomas Knott Jr., who was already known to police in Rhode Island. On the night of January 26th, police located the Knott's blue Chevrolet outside a movie theater and waited. Just before 11 o'clock that night, Thomas walked toward the car with his parents, and investigators moved in. They took him into custody and brought him to the hospital. To the Pawtucket Police Station for questioning about Edith Martin's murder. According to reporting by William R. Bibber for the Boston Herald, Thomas had noticeable scratches and bruises on his body, and police said his green jacket appeared to be smeared with blood. His shoes also appeared to have blood on them. Within minutes of Thomas Knott arriving at the station, he told the detectives, I don't want to do this again. Thomas began to lay out his movements on the day Edith was killed. He said he had gotten out of school early because of exams, so he went home and took the family car for a ride. He wasn't headed anywhere in particular when he noticed a woman in another car and began following her. That woman was Edith Martin. Thomas told police that as he followed her toward South Attleboro, he felt an urge to kill. He watched Edith pull into her driveway and followed her into the house through a side door. He said he demanded money, but Edith screamed and told him to leave. Thomas gave a detailed description of what he did next, which reflected Edith's injuries, but also said that at some point, everything went black. When he came back to himself, he panicked and laughed. Thomas said he had discarded some of the clothing he was wearing as he fled, and he told officers where to find it. In a wooded area in East Providence, police recovered a blood-stained, t-shirt, shorts, socks, and another shirt, right where Thomas said he had left them. But the murderer that brought Thomas into the station wasn't the only one he wanted to talk about. At some point during the questioning, Thomas suddenly brought up another woman. A woman whose disappearance and murder had consumed investigators for more than a year. He told police that he was the one who killed Nancy Ann Frenier. According to police, Thomas said he encountered Nancy at the shopping center in Rumford on December 22nd, 1961. He got into her Oldsmobile, put a knife to her neck, and forced her to drive away from the parking lot toward the secluded area near the East Providence Reservoir. The car became stuck near the water, so Thomas said he forced Nancy out and made her walk toward the reservoir. When she tried to get away, he struck her in the head with a piece of wood. He then broke through the ice near the shoreline and put Nancy in the car. He then broke through the ice near the shoreline and put Nancy into the water. But his account didn't end there. Thomas said that about a week later, while Nancy's family was still searching for her, and police still considered her a missing person, he went back to the reservoir. He told investigators he wanted to see what her body looked like. He pulled Nancy from beneath the ice, cut away some of her clothing with a knife, and then put her body back into the water. Investigators asked him why. Why, Nancy? Why, Edith? Thomas couldn't give them much of an answer beyond the urge he described. At one point, he reportedly told police, I'm glad I was caught because I would have done it again. After the questioning at Pawtucket Police Headquarters stopped, Thomas reportedly sat silent for hours. Around dawn, East Providence Detective Captain Theodore Hilton took custody of him and drove him to the state police barracks in Scituate, Rhode Island. According to Hilton, Hilton arrived, Thomas asked if he could speak with Hilton alone. Hilton said he agreed, and without being asked questions, Thomas again confessed to killing Nancy and described what happened in detail. Even though Thomas had been brought in for questioning because Massachusetts investigators believed he killed Edith Martin, he was physically in custody in Rhode Island, where Nancy was killed, and he ended up confessing to that murder too. So Rhode Island therefore moved while prosecutors in Massachusetts began preparing their own case in Edith's death. Thomas was still a juvenile, so before Rhode Island could prosecute him as an adult, the case had to pass through family court. In a brief and vague hearing, a judge agreed that family court should waive jurisdiction, and with that, Thomas was transferred into District Court in East Providence, where he pleaded not guilty to murdering Nancy Ann Frenier. Then on February 6th, 1963, a Rhode Island grand jury returned a secret indictment formally charging him with Nancy's murder. Thomas entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and the court ordered psychiatric evaluations to determine whether he was mentally competent to stand trial. For more than a year, Nancy's case had been defined by what investigators didn't know. Where she went, after Mammoth Mart, who had been with her, and how she had ended up beneath the ice in the reservoir. Now a 17-year-old boy who had been questioned and released more than once in her case was telling police he could answer all of it. With Thomas Knott Jr. now admitting to two killings, investigators in other departments began looking at their own unsolved cases. One of the cases investigators revisited after Thomas Knott's arrest was the unsolved 1962 murder of 60-year-old Daisy Hopwood in Newport, Rhode Island. According to a story published by the Newport Daily News, Daisy disappeared on the night of November 17th, 1962, about two months before Thomas was taken into custody. She was then taken to a hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, and was taken into custody. She left the home she shared with her sister at around eight o'clock that night to walk roughly a mile to her brother William's house. Daisy knew the route well and brought her dog with her. Around midnight, Daisy's loyal pup came home alone, dragging his leash. He had a cut on his throat and another on his paw. Daisy's sister reported her missing early the next morning and police began searching almost immediately. Monday morning, November 19th, Daisy was found dead in a wooded area near a park. She was lying face down behind brush, partially covered by snow, in an area that was not along her usual route to her brother's house. Her purse was missing, but her watch and costume jewelry were still with her. Daisy had been brutally attacked. Her throat had been slashed deeply enough to sever her vocal cords. She had been strangled and beaten in the face and her nose was broken. Daisy had been beaten in the face and her nose was broken. Investigators believed a large, heavy knife had been used. Scratches on her body suggested she had been dragged and there were indications that an attempted sexual assault may have been part of the attack. Police believed Daisy's dog may have tried to defend her and that whoever attacked her could have been bitten or scratched. Investigators also considered the possibility that Daisy had been killed somewhere else, possibly inside a car, and then brought to the place where her body was found. Police went door to door, searched the park and surrounding neighborhoods for the murder weapon, sent Daisy's clothing to the University of Rhode Island Crime Laboratory, and questioned hundreds of people. By late November, reports in the evening bulletin said more than 600 people had been interviewed, and the city eventually offered a reward for information. Still, by Christmas Eve, police had not identified a suspect. Then came Thomas Knott's arrest in January 1963. The fact that he had admitted to two violent killings involving women and knives naturally drew attention from investigators in Newport. Police questioned him about Daisy's murder, but Thomas denied any involvement and was never charged. Investigators reportedly believed there was only a remote possibility that he was connected to the case. Daisy's case wasn't the only investigation reignited after Thomas' arrest. Other departments across Rhode Island and Massachusetts began taking another look at violent attacks and unsolved disappearances that shared at least some of the same characteristics. One was the disappearance of Joan Risch from her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts in October 1961. My friends Ashley and Britt at Crime Junkie have covered her case, so I'll link it in the show notes for you. In Joan's case, investigators had recovered a bloody fingerprint from the scene. According to the case, Joan Risch was found dead in her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts in October 1961. According to Richard J. Connolly's reporting for the Boston Herald, after Thomas was arrested, his fingerprints were compared against that print, as police explored whether there could be any connection. Now, Joan's case is still unsolved, and it's unclear if the fingerprint comparison with Thomas Knott went anywhere. According to the source material I have access to, Massachusetts State Police said at the time that they could not place Thomas in Lincoln when Joan disappeared. Providence Police, also questioned Thomas about an attack on a 19-year-old Pembroke College student who had been stabbed 15 times while walking on Prospect Street in February 1961. The student survived, but at the time, her attacker hadn't been identified. Thomas was never arrested or charged in connection with Daisy Hopwood, Joan Risch, or the attack on the college student, and there's no established evidence tying him to any of those cases. But once he had admitted to two brutal, apparently random, killings, it was conceivable that he might be responsible for others he hadn't claimed. And in cases that had otherwise confounded investigators, any plausible connection was worth exploring or ruling out. All of that raised another question that would become central before Thomas could even be tried. What was happening in the mind of the 17-year-old at the center of these cases? Family court had waived jurisdiction, and allowed Rhode Island to prosecute him as an adult. But Thomas was still very much a child when he was arrested, interrogated, and accused of murder. Before a jury could decide whether he was guilty, the court first had to determine whether he was mentally competent to stand trial at all. Thomas was held in the maximum security section of the adult correctional institutions while psychiatrists evaluated him. In March 1960, Thomas was sentenced to three years in prison for murder. In June 1963, Dr. Herbert H. Myers, a psychiatrist consulting for the Rhode Island Mental Health Clinic at Howard, examined Thomas and concluded that he was suffering from what he called a schizophrenic reaction. According to reporting by the Providence Journal, Thomas reportedly told Dr. Myers that he had heard what he described as the voice of Jesus, telling him that a woman was evil and that he should kill her, then later telling him to go back and cut her. The account did not identify the woman by name or specify when these alleged commands occurred. In Dr. Myers' opinion, Thomas was not mentally competent to stand trial. A second psychiatrist, Dr. Erwin Bakris, superintendent of the Rhode Island Medical Center, evaluated Thomas on four separate occasions. Thomas reportedly told Dr. Bakris that he had once seen God surrounded by a halo of light and that he had never seen God again. By 1964, though, Dr. Bakris believed Thomas had improved enough to stand trial. The court's competency determination came later, in 1965. So the case finally reached a jury in February 1966. By that point, the teenager, who had been arrested at 17, was 20 years old and had spent most of the intervening years confined, while the legal and psychiatric questions surrounding him were sorted out. When the trial began in Rhode Island Superior Court, prosecutors laid out a case that started at the Mammoth Mart Shopping Center on the afternoon of December 22, 1961. Special Assistant Attorney General Irving Brodsky told the jury that Thomas had been lingering around the shopping center that day with the intention of committing violence against whatever woman he happened to encounter. According to the prosecution's theory, that woman became Nancy Ann Frenier. The state called the officers who had been there when Thomas confessed. Detectives testified that Thomas admitted killing Nancy while he was being questioned about what they referred to in court only as another matter. That other matter, of course, was the murder of Edith Martin, although the jury was not given the full details of that case in this portion of Thomas' trial. The defense centered heavily on Thomas' mental health. His mother testified that Thomas had been killed in the trial, and that Thomas had been killed in the trial. She testified that she had noticed changes in her son years before his arrest. She said that when Thomas was around 14 or 15, he became withdrawn and increasingly wanted to be left alone. She also testified that she had found what she described as filthy magazines in the house, and remembers that his behavior seemed particularly troubled after the football season ended. When Thomas was consumed with football or track practices and games, she believed he seemed better. The jury also heard from people who had known Thomas before his arrest, and much of that testimony described someone who didn't outwardly resemble Thomas. the person prosecutors were portraying. His high school principal described Thomas as a normal student, shy, bashful, quiet, and said he had never seemed like someone who needed psychiatric attention. His football and track coaches talked about an accomplished athlete who was even-tempered, responded well to criticism, and had been elected co-captain of the football team for the upcoming season. Now, the defense also called the two psychiatrists who had spent years evaluating him. Dr. Myers had initially found Thomas incompetent to stand trial in 1963, but his testimony about Thomas' mental state at the time Nancy was killed did not necessarily help the defense. He questioned Thomas' claims about hearing voices, noting that the alleged auditory hallucinations seemed to stop after Nancy's death. Thomas' claims about Thomas' hearing voices seemed to stop after Nancy's death. In his view, it would have been unusual for someone to experience two isolated hallucinations and then apparently have none afterward. Ultimately, Dr. Myers testified that he believed Thomas was responsible for his actions when Nancy was killed. Dr. Bakris was less definitive. He was the psychiatrist who eventually determined that Thomas had become competent enough to stand trial, but when asked whether Thomas had been suffering from a mental state, he said, that prevented him from understanding what he was doing, or knowing right from wrong at the time of the murder, Dr. Bakris said the information available to him was not enough to offer an opinion. The jurors deliberated for about 12 hours before finding Thomas Knott Jr. guilty of first degree murder on March 2nd, 1966. Thomas' attorney filed a motion for a new trial, but the conviction was upheld at that stage. On April 14th, 1966, Thomas Knott Jr. was sentenced to life in prison. After more than four years of uncertainty for Nancy's family, prosecutors secured a conviction, but the legal fight over how that conviction had been obtained was only beginning. The first major challenge centered on Thomas' age when he was arrested. He had only been 17 when Rhode Island Family Court transferred him to the adult system, and the state Supreme Court later found that the original waiver hearing had been too cursory. The transfer decision had to be reconsidered, but that was not what ultimately erased his conviction. The bigger problem involved Thomas' confessions. When Thomas was questioned in 1963, the Miranda warnings familiar today didn't exist yet. The law was changing, though. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Escobedo v. Illinois, expanding protections for suspects during custodial interrogation. Thomas' trial did not begin until 1966, so Escobedo applied, even though police had questioned him years earlier. Miranda would not be decided until later that same year. In 1969, the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled that the statement made to the Pawtucket officers who were actively interrogating him should never have been presented to the jury. He had not been advised of his right to remain silent, and because the protections established in Escobedo applied by the time his delayed trial began, his first-degree murder conviction was reversed, and he was granted a new trial. But the ruling did not throw out everything Thomas had said about Nancy. Remember, the ruling did not throw out everything Thomas had said about Nancy. Remember, several hours after the Pawtucket interrogation ended, Thomas had been turned over to East Providence Captain Theodore Hilton. At the state police barracks, Thomas asked to speak with Hilton alone, and then confessed again, without Hilton questioning him. When Thomas would eventually go back to trial, the Pawtucket confessions were off-limits. His later confession to Hilton was not. Before Rhode Island tried him again, though, Thomas was sent to Massachusetts to face the still-pending charge in Edith Martin's murder, but the case didn't go very far. His defense successfully challenged his confession there, too, and without that statement, or evidence derived from it, prosecutors concluded they could not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, and so the Massachusetts murder charge was dropped. As far as I can tell, Edith's case has never seen a jury verdict. With that, Thomas returned to Rhode Island for a second trial in April 1970, and while Thomas's statements to police about Nancy were still at issue, the trial judge ruled that Thomas's statement to Captain Hilton specifically was sufficiently separate from the earlier interrogation and could be admitted. During Captain Hilton's testimony about Thomas's account of Nancy's murder, Thomas suddenly protested from the defense table, shouting, that's a lie. When the judge demanded an explanation, Thomas replied, I admitted I killed her, but I didn't say those things. The jury apparently did not hear him clearly, so the court stenographer was asked to read his statement back aloud. Some members of the jury gasped, hearing Thomas's words echoed. On April 15, 1970, a second jury found Thomas guilty of first-degree murder in Nancy Frenjer's death. He was again sentenced to life in prison, with credit for the years he had already served. Thomas's remaining years in prison were turbulent. In February 1974, Thomas and two other inmates escaped from the ACI after obtaining a gun and stealing a correctional officer's car keys. He was eventually captured and returned to custody. According to reporting by Paul M. Giacobi for The Providence Journal, a little more than a year later, Thomas made another elaborate escape attempt, cutting through bars and screens and tunneling through parts of the prison before turning back from the final barrier, apparently exhausted. Before officers could reach him, Thomas died by suicide. A later examination of contraband problems at the ACI found indications that some correctional officers were probably contributing to the flow of prohibited items into the prison, although officials said they were not. Thomas was then taken to the hospital, believed most contraband entered through other channels. Thomas Knott Jr. died without ever standing trial for Edith Martin's murder, but in Rhode Island, despite the overturned first conviction and years of appeals, the second verdict in Nancy and Frenjer's case remained. I spend a lot of time in old newspaper archives, and one thing that happens over and over is that a case you're researching leads you into another one. A name appears in a related article, then another, and before long you realize there are stories sitting in these old pages that have largely fallen out of public view. I had actually started out looking into Daisy Hopwood's murder first, and that led me to Thomas Knott, which led me to Nancy Frenjer and Edith Martin. I haven't found Daisy's name on the cold case lists where I would expect to see her, and as far as I've been able to determine, no one was ever arrested for her murder. I'm still trying to obtain the underlying police records because I want to understand where that investigation stands now, and ultimately, I'd like to be able to tell Daisy's story in full, on its own, so let's hope those records still exist somewhere. While Nancy was still missing, her mother said something that, knowing what we know now, is especially difficult to read. Quote, She was just 19 years old, doing laundry and buying Christmas presents for her baby's first Christmas, when a random act of fatal violence stole her life. She deserved to see her baby's eyes light up at the sparkle of tinsel and ornaments. She deserved to put those new little socks and little shoes impossibly small on her baby's feet. Edith and her family were robbed of precious moments together, too, when violence entered her home. Those are the losses that stay with me in this case. Nancy's family spent that Christmas waiting for her to walk back through the door, and Edith's family lost their mother in a place that should have been safe. Decades later, we can't give either family those years back, but we can still say their names, remember the lives that were interrupted, and make sure Nancy Ann Frenier and her family are not reduced to what happened to them. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East. Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audiocheck. I think Chuck would approve.