Newtown detectives Harry Noroian and Robert Tvardzik drafted a search warrant for Block Island in September 1989, more than two years after Regina Brown’s disappearance. The probable cause listed in the search warrant included the map turned over by Margaret Brown’s son six months earlier.
It also detailed the recent revelation of a house trailer rental by Willis Brown, Jr., in the days after Regina vanished, which he hid from police. Willis, Jr., his father and stepmother lived on the property in the trailer in the summer of 1987. The trailer was located on 6.6 acres on lot 24-0 owned by David Gobern on Beacon Hill Road.
The search warrant also mentioned that Willis was “concerned” about the publicity surrounding his missing wife and how it might be detrimental to himself. This was the first comment he made when he was interviewed at the Newtown police station one week after Regina vanished.
Search warrant reveals accusations
Harry Noroian spoke with Margaret Brown’s sister Beverly Cullen who lived in New Hampshire after the map surfaced in March 1989. Margaret’s son Randy Locke had found it among her personal papers and turned it over to Newtown police immediately.
After spending the summer of 1987 on Block Island, Willis Brown’s step-mother Margaret Brown started spending more time with her sister rather than staying in Albany, New York, with her husband Willis Brown, Sr. According to the search warrant, Beverly told the detective that her sister told her, “ You don’t know what’s going on there, strange things happened there. Willis Brown, Jr. murdered his wife.”
The search warrant also mentioned that Willis Brown agreed to take a polygraph test after his child custody hearing in 1987, but by June 1988 had decided against it because it “would do him no good” and at the same time told police he would not consent to any more interviews. His comment about the polygraph was in response to the fact that Richard Crafts passed his polygraph test but was arrested for the Woodchipper murder anyway.
Newtown Detective Harry Noroian told me years later he remembers that June 1988 interview.
“Yea, Willis didn’t like me at all,” Harry said. “And he was just like his father. A clone of Senior, with those big hands.”
According to the search warrant, Newtown police believed Willis brought Regina’s body to Block Island in the days following her disappearance to dispose of it.
On the ground on Block Island
On September 27, 1989, Newtown detectives, along with Block Island police and a cadaver dog from the Massachusetts State Police, began a three-day search of the Gobern property.
During a break in the search, Newtown Police Chief Michael DeJoseph addressed the media, who had descended on the small island. DeJoseph had been promoted to police chief nearly two years earlier.
“I think Mr. Brown knows more about the disappearance of his wife than he’s letting on,” DeJoseph told the TV news crews.
The search covered thirty-seven acres across three undeveloped plots of land off Beacon Hill Road. At this point, according to news reports, Newtown police said, “Willis Brown is their only suspect” and the German Shepherd Syros, “sniffed and probed at several areas, prompting searchers to dig several holes that yielded no evidence.” Chief DeJoseph said he believed Regina Brown “is the victim of foul play.”
Block Island Police Chief Richard Lemoi told reporters the search included an old foundation and a cistern, as well as “an abandoned root cellar located in a sunken area” which he described as a “bowl.” News outlets from Connecticut and Rhode Island were held behind yellow police crime scene tape watching the search. At one point, “a helicopter transporting a camera operator and a reporter swooped to within 900 feet of the site, scaring the police dog.”
By Thursday, Sept. 28, 1989, the island was swarming with press and television crews waiting for the dog to find something. Block Islanders read in the local paper that Willis declared bankruptcy a year earlier due to the heavy debts he had from legal fees connected with his divorce from Regina Brown. The article also mentioned his civil rights case against the town, the settlement of which helped him get a license to run his moped business.
Prior discrimination on Block Island
Block Island tried banning mopeds on the island for years, but in 1985 the Rhode Island Supreme Court gave regulatory powers to the New Shoreham Town Council.
New Shoreham is the town that encompasses Block Island. When the town council denied Willis three different licenses, he claimed he was promised a license if he reduced the number of mopeds to fifty and moved to another location. When the town gave only two licenses to other companies and put The Moped Man at the bottom of a waiting list, Willis sued.
A federal district court ruled in 1986 that town officials discriminated against Willis because he was Black. His company, The Moped Man, Inc., won $46,000 in compensatory damages, although he had sought $1.5 million.
Town officials knew that since the lawsuit Brown had kept his mopeds in two large metal containers downtown, strictly in defiance of zoning regulations. Intimidated by Brown’s success in the courts, the town refrained from calling him out on the violations.
A spooked cadaver dog
Police started their search on the last day without the dog for about one hour, because he had been spooked by the helicopter from a Connecticut television station. According to the dog’s handler, as long as a buried torso is intact, even after two and half years, the dog would locate it.
But why would police believe the torso would be on the island? Most criminals, or anyone who watches a lot of TV crime shows, know teeth and fingerprints are used for identification of the deceased, especially in the days before DNA identification. Looking back at the Woodchipper murder case, only the victim’s head and limbs were sent through the Woodchipper, the torso never found.
Newtown Detective Harry Noroian, onsite during the Block Island search, told me years later, “we found a head in Rhode Island many years after the search and thought that Regina might have been decapitated.” It reminded me of the picture Bobby T once shared with me of a human skull, minus the lower jaw, resting on a corrugated metal warehouse roof. Body parts can turn up in the strangest places.
The search focuses on two areas about 500 to 600 yards from the house trailer that Willis Brown rented. They could only pursue this search so far, however, because the judge who signed the search warrant did not allow them to search inside the trailer.
The search team also investigates another area about 100 yards north of another abandoned square foundation. Chief Lemoi confirmed the foundations have been on the property for decades. They searched a third area as well as a cistern before they called off the search.
Once again, there is no sign of Regina Brown’s body. In early October 1989, after the search the warrant affidavit was filed in court, the alleged grave site map was made public.
Handwriting on the map
New Shoreham Police Chief Richard Lemoi seemed fond of the spotlight and liked talking about the case with reporters. Though the case was not in his jurisdiction, he eagerly told reporters the map had too few words to identify the author’s handwriting with scientific certainty, according to the FBI.
This information could only have been shared by Newtown detectives to Lemoi. Maybe he hoped someone might recognize the handwriting since the map was published in the local Block Island Times newspaper. Maybe he just liked the media attention.
After the search, Detective Noroian told the press he and Bobby T drove to Albany to question Willis Brown Sr. about the map. Harry said Willis Brown Sr. told him he didn’t draw the map and that the handwriting on it was not his deceased wife’s. He also claimed he didn’t know how the map got into his apartment, adding that his wife had mental problems, too.
By late October 1989, Newtown police were out of leads. What seemed to be a promising break in the search for justice for Regina Brown had come up empty.
“We were so sure we would find her body,” Newtown Police Chief Michael DeJoseph told me decades later.