Investigating her mother's death helped Lauren Lee Malloy find her calling and help others
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EAST PROVIDENCE — It was one of the more reliable observations that the first police officer on the scene could make: A baby girl appeared to be living with the 30-year-old woman who now lay still on the bathroom floor.
The toddler had her own room and her own bureau.
Her little yellow sweater rested on her mother's bed.
One of her tiny socks was near a doorway.
The little girl's name was Lauren. She would grow up to wear a prom dress in high school, graduate from college, and ride a bicycle 100 miles a week.
She would do all of these things and more. But she would do them without her mother seeing any of it.
Certain aspects of the death scene in the apartment concerned the East Providence officer. He cited these issues in his report, calling them "suspicious conditions."
Later on, though, the medical examiner ruled that Lauren's mother had died from natural causes, a heart disorder. Case closed.
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Decades passed, and Lauren Lee Malloy grew up without ever knowing about those suspicious conditions around her mother’s death.
Then, three years ago, a woman reached out to Malloy online, seemingly out of the blue, and suggested that someone had killed her mother.
That interaction with the stranger drew Malloy into her mother's case and pulled her into a domain of police reports, death certificates, medical examinations, investigations and threatening men. Her life turned sharply.
Last year, after receiving lots of persistent questions from Malloy, authorities told her that they would reexamine her mother's 1993 death and that they intended to exhume her mother's body.
Lori Lee Mariano, remembered by her daughter as Lori Lee Malloy, has been buried in East Providence's Olivet Memorial Park.
Time will tell if these recent developments will lead to a reclassification of the death as a homicide or yield some other even more significant outcome in the case.
When someone dies under questionable circumstances, it's not uncommon for loved ones to seek answers with a lot of energy. For some, the experience is transforming.
Malloy has some natural instincts and talent as well as some learned skills that help her efforts stand out. But what distinguishes her path the most is her willingness to serve others along the way — to embark on forays that draw her far outside the bounds of her mother's history.
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How her mother's case sparked a passion to help others
Take the situation involving a retired Air Force veteran in March 2022. Friends and family hadn't seen him for two weeks. The matter became a focus of Coventry police.
Malloy says she was tagged in an online post about the man's disappearance.
She and a volunteer contacted a police detective.
They created a poster with the man's picture and relevant information. The display was distributed online.
Malloy's network eventually heard from a friend of the missing man. He was aware of an odd phone call.
A person who was mute on the other end of the line had called from an out-of-state area code. They worked with that information to eventually determine the man had traveled to another state. He was OK.
In late 2021, during the holidays, Malloy rounded up a team, on the fly, to help search for a missing 11-year-old in Providence. The child was eventually found in a car after three nights on his own.
As that search unfolded, Malloy says she gathered information about the situation and briefed James Rawley, founder of Rhode Island Canine Search and Rescue. That way, his organization would be better prepared to spring into action if they were called to assist with the search. That relationship has only deepened since then.
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About a month ago, Rawley and his team were searching for an older man with dementia who was missing in North Smithfield.
Malloy employed online maps to plot out likely routes the man might have taken if he were trying to walk between his new home and his old home. She shared them in online posts to help guide volunteer searchers.
She created another poster, an online display, that she posted on Instagram, and the North Smithfield Police shared the poster.
Someone who was aware that the man was missing found him, Malloy said. He was safe. Later, his daughter thanked Malloy for her efforts.
Another Malloy project is UnsolvedRI.com. The website, which went live in September 2021, has set out to catalog cold cases and serve as a resource for people trying to find missing loved ones or seeking justice for victims.
"Unsolved RI seeks to provide support and help serve justice for cold case victims, missing/unidentified persons and their families across Rhode Island through awareness and advocacy efforts," says the website.
Unsolved's Facebook group now has 6,300 members.
The skills in Malloy's tool-box can be as traditional as an ability to gather information by knocking on doors and working the telephone. A prolific web-crawler, she also brings along significant skills in social media and information technology.
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Malloy declines to say anything about her professional job, saying she needs to keep her justice pursuits separate from her office work. Her LinkedIn profile identifies her as an internal communication specialist at IGT.
She won one of the Providence Business News' 40 Under Forty Awards in 2022.
She is helping to organize a local leg of the Ride For Missing Children later this year. The cycling-based fundraising campaign is part of a national effort with volunteers pedaling on the streets and also participating in a virtual setting online. Proceeds support the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children.
One of her many extracurricular activities, also related to her new passion, involves her pursuit of a private investigator license. She serves as a secretary of the Licensed Private Detectives Association of Rhode Island.
The association's president, Jennifer Dionne, has been in the business for about three decades.
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She marvels at Malloy's ability to track people down, comb through data, and pivot to overcome obstacles.
"She's a rock star," Dionne said. "She's given myself and my group the ability to do what we do more efficiently and more accurately."
Malloy said she came close to finding her passion in life at one point in her mid-20s.
In 2017, she had mastered some online genealogy tools and reunited her long-separated half-brothers.
That felt good, but it didn't measure up to the sense of direction she started to feel as she investigated her mother's death.
"Honestly, I felt like it made me more like myself," she said. "I didn't feel like I had a lot of confidence before. I feel like I kind of found my voice through all of this. By learning about who my mom was and how brave she was and how wild she was and how full of life she really was. That kind of encouraged me and empowered me …"
Like mother, like daughter: Always up for a challenge
It's likely that Malloy's mother would have appreciated her daughter's doggedness as an investigator.
Lori could exhibit some doggedness of her own. She once hitchhiked all the way to Washington state to get herself to Alaska, according to her daughter.
There, the lifelong animal lover learned how to drive dogsleds.
"Sled Dog" and “Sleddy” became her nicknames.
She also visited Florida's Everglades, where she marveled at alligators.
In a loving postcard to her sister, she acknowledged that she wasn't so devoted to tanning herself in Florida's sun.
"… you know me," she wrote, "can't sit still for anything …"
The 'suspicious conditions' of her mother's death
One of the "suspicious conditions" that East Providence police officer Antonio J. Britto observed at the scene involved the front door to the third-floor apartment on March 7, 1993.
"I noticed that it was slightly open," Britto said in a signed witness statement.
Another condition that he cited related to human hair. Small "tufts" of Lori's hair were all over the apartment.
Some "pieces of hair were wrapped around her left hand and around one foot," says Britto's statement.
Another officer observed that a large clump of light brown hair, inside a sneaker, looked like it "had been pulled out of someone's head."
Police collected hair samples from the bed, where they found a baby's sweater, and from the baby's sock.
In the bathroom, where Lori lay naked and bruised, they had found the faucet running.
Slices of bread lay on the floor around her.
Lori's sister, Alyson Lynn Malloy, had seen Lori when she visited Alyson at her home on March 1, according to her statement to police.
Lori had brought some additional clothes for her baby daughter, she told them.
Several days before that, Alyson had taken Lauren into her care at Lori's request, according to her statement.
Lori had told her she was feeling sick and the baby had been "acting up," she told police.
Alyson also told police that Lori was a cocaine user, and she was being treated with medication for depression.
The police reports aren't clear on exactly where Lori's baby was six days later, when police found her mother dead in her apartment. Malloy hasn't ruled out the possibility that she was inside the apartment in her crib.
Growing up on Nancy Drew as her family life stabilized
A custody battle mounted by child's father, ongoing at the time of her mother's death, loomed over her early years. When she was 5 years old, her aunt and her aunt's boyfriend adopted her. Her family life steadied to some degree.
A fan of Scooby-Doo and Nancy Drew books, she grew up in their custody, which they shared, even after they became estranged.
They didn't tell her too much about her mother's death, said Malloy. She doesn't fault them for it.
"They grappled with whether or not they should tell me," she said. "As the years went on, they didn't think it was really going to do anything for me either way."
Malloy was close to celebrating her 30th birthday one day in August 2020 when some striking messages on Facebook drew her attention. The messages came from a woman she didn't know — a woman who seemed quite familiar with her.
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Cast of characters in a real-life mystery
Malloy declines to identify this woman by name.
The older woman was among a small cast of interesting characters who would draw Malloy’s rapt attention as she learned more and more about her mother’s death.
One of the characters was her own biological father. Thomas Kelly, who could be abusive to Lori, had died in a car crash in 2009, Malloy said.
Another character, someone with an eye-catching name, was the man Lori had married in 1988.
Harry J. Mariano called himself Harry "Scary" Mariano. Mariano, who also went by “Johnny” and “The Gambler,” did some time at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston. He wrote some letters to Lori.
In one hand-written note, possibly penned at the ACI, he told her that "at times" he felt "like a lucky man" in her presence.
But in another passage, which wasn’t totally coherent, it seemed like he was trying to express a very different feeling. The words he chose included "… would like to punch you out."
In 1988, Lori accused Mariano of beating her. The Providence police charged him with assault.
Over the next 15 years, he was charged on multiple occasions with assaulting other women. He died in 2003.
His activities from March 1 through the discovery of Lori’s body on March 7, 1993, became a point of interest for Malloy.
At the request of The Providence Journal, the Rhode Island Department of Corrections looked at some of its records.
A spokesman, J.R. Ventura, confirmed that Mariano was at the ACI serving a three-year sentence during the period in question.
Another character — also deceased, but not to be ignored — was quite prominent in police reports.
This same man had directed East Providence police to Lori's apartment on March 7, 1993, saying he was concerned about Lori, based on his inability to make contact with her.
He told police that he and Lori had planned to marry at one point.
When he had last seen Lori, on March 1, the two of them had argued about her use of cocaine, he said. Her cocaine use drained her budget, his witness statement said.
The man also told police that as he left the Hull Street property on March 1, a person who had regularly sold cocaine to Lori rolled in and went into the house.
Enter yet another figure to draw Malloy’s focus.
Unlike the other men in the group, this man, accused of selling cocaine in the 1990s, was still alive in the early 2020s.
Malloy figured out that he was living less than a mile from her mother's old apartment. One day, she bravely stopped by to talk him into having a discussion.
He told her he recalled using cocaine with her mother the same weekend she was found dead, she said.
Malloy said he also told her that when he saw Lori for the last time, on that weekend in 1993, he had known she was due for an impending visit from someone else.
Who was the expected visitor? A woman, apparently. Malloy said the man identified the same woman who had contacted her, seemingly out of the blue, during the pandemic and ignited her own interest in her mother's death.
Contradictions uncovered in the medical examiner's report
Many of Malloy’s most burning questions involved various contradictions raised by the 1993 medical examiner's report on her mother's death.
The report says the examination, which included toxicology tests, did not detect any drugs in a routine screen of Lori’s blood, and other specific tests for several banned substances — including cocaine — did not detect those drugs.
Meanwhile, in March 2021, Rhode Island's acting medical examiner, Dr. Alex Chirkov, told Malloy that the medical description in the autopsy report did not support its own conclusion on the cause of her mother's death (the heart issue).
A year later, Malloy obtained a written review from Dr. Zhongxue Hua, a medical examiner for Bergen County, New Jersey, who also agreed that the cause of death was not supported by the description.
His 2022 email says the circumstances of the death should be "re-investigated by police."
Malloy said the chief of Attorney General Peter F. Neronha's criminal division, Stephen G. Dambruch, told her he would reexamine the case, and she later received notification that an exhumation was pending.
After that, Malloy visited the grave from time to time, hoping to see indications that investigators had removed her mother's remains for a new autopsy.
Early this month, she received word from Neronha's office: Her mother was no longer in the cemetery.
Malloy still has plenty of questions. But now, the woman whose tiny sock was found not far from her mother's body back in 1993 is getting closer to some real answers.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Rhode Island woman helps others while investigating mom's death
