Solved cold cases in Rhode Island
1 documented case.
Debra A. Stone
Debra A. Stone, a 24-year-old Cranston woman, was strangled in a Johnston, Rhode Island apartment on the night of August 29, 1984, after taking a cab to the home of feared drug dealer Robert D. Geremia to buy narcotics. Her body was found on September 2, 1984, by teenagers boating on the Narrow River in Narragansett, wrapped in a floral sleeping bag, bound with clothesline, and weighted with a cinderblock. The case turned almost entirely on a criminal informant, a drug associate of Geremia who said he was summoned to help dispose of the body and who described details that matched the scene exactly. In the 1980s the informant failed a polygraph and the prosecution balked, and Geremia died of natural causes in 1995 before he was ever charged. In 2025, after the Rhode Island Attorney General's Cold Case Unit re-interviewed the informant and 31 other witnesses over eleven months, the office concluded the evidence proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Geremia murdered Stone and formally identified him as the killer.