The Murder of Diane Drake

Mar 11

Diane Drake (Jean Fucile, digitized by Murder, She Told)

Background on Diane Drake

Diane Ruth Drake was born to Captain John Drake and Frances Drake (who went by ‘Fran’) on May 3, 1960. Diane was the couple’s seventh child, Jean was the eighth, and there would be one more after her—for a total of nine children in all—7 girls and 2 boys.

Though Diane was born in Virginia, the family sooner moved to Rhode Island, where Diane and Jean would spend most of her childhood in Portsmouth—a town of about 10,000 people, south of Providence, on Aquidneck Island. Their suburban neighborhood was called Redwood Farms.

John Drake was an officer in the Navy and for the first ten years of their lives, they saw little of him—he was constantly deployed. While he was away, mom and the herd of children lived in a 4-bedroom house, and Diane and her sister, Jean, always shared a room.

When they kids were inside, they were generally playing in the basement, but this was the firmly in the era of “be home by dark.” Diane’s sister, Jean told us, “There was a whole gaggle of kids that we’d play outside with. We’d play red rover... stick ball... we were imaginative...”

It was a wholesome idyllic childhood. Jean remembers the television set, which in those days was like a piece of furniture, and sitting down as a family on Sunday nights to watch the Lawrence Welk variety show.

Almost all of the Drake kids were quite bright—school came easily to Diane and Jean. Jean lovingly remembers her father as a brilliant guy and said that they got his smarts. Diane liked school. She took French. She got straight-As. She was always reading something.

But Diane wasn’t just a bookworm, she was had good coordination and was somewhat athletic. Jean remembers that Diane made the cheerleading squad in middle school. She would practice tumbling and trained in gymnastics.

She was laid back, a deep thinker, definitely a hippie. She never wore dresses and never wore makeup. Though everyone in the Drake family went to Catholic church every week, Diane was more spiritual than religious. She was friendly, easy to get along with, something of a peacemaker. She liked singer-songwriters, and soft rock—artists like James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and Fleetwood Mac. Jean recalled that Diane particularly liked the song ‘Opus Insert’ by Kansas.

Diane was well-grounded and quietly confident. She moved through life on her own terms.

Jean: “Kathy called her the peacemaker. She had a basic understanding of human nature. She got along [with everyone] and people liked her. They were drawn to her.”

Starting life out as a young adult

Following high school, in the fall of 1978, Diane enrolled at Roger Williams University, a private four-year school in Bristol, Rhode Island, about 15 minutes north of her family’s home in Portsmouth. Diane began classes, working towards a major in “administration of justice,” which is similar to a criminal justice program. She wanted to be a social worker, a juvenile probation officer, or a youth counselor when she graduated. She wanted to help others; John said his daughter was “motivated by higher ideals.” Jean remembered Diane wanting to be a forest ranger.

When she wasn’t at school, she could often be found at work, at Photo Patio in the K-Mart shopping center in Middletown, RI. It’s where she’d been working since high school. Photo Patio was a chain of drive-up film-developing kiosks that were popular at the time. The kiosks were just little sheds plopped down in the parking lots of shopping plazas.

I imagine working by yourself as a young college coed in a shack in a parking lot could be a little uncomfortable. Most of her customers were probably very pleasant, but the men who would linger and monopolize her time probably had an outsized impact.

In September of 1979, at the beginning of her sophomore year in college, she sold her Volkswagen—a car that she conceded was a lemon—and began to rely on others for transportation to school and to work.

In November, she and her friend, Elaine, went in together on a small rental cottage in Middletown. They moved into 9 Easton Terrace—Diane, Elaine, and Elaine’s dog. The cottage was nestled in a quiet neighborhood, and was quaint in comparison to the sprawling seaside estates that overlooked rocky cliffs and grassy seaside knolls. The rent was cheap, Diane paid just $135 a month, which would be about $585 today.

Living with Elaine was very convenient—their lives were almost a mirror image of one another. Elaine also went to Roger Williams University and worked at Photo Patio. Elaine’s location was just up the road a few hundred feet from Diane’s kiosk. The two girls would often call each other from their respective booths when they didn’t have customers. Diane was very close to her job, but school was about a 30-minute ride north.

The morning of Diane’s murder

On the morning of Friday, March 21, 1980, Diane overslept and missed her 9:00AM class. Elaine had a class that day at 1:00PM at Roger Williams. The girls routinely travelled to campus together, and returned to Middletown in time for their respective shifts at 2:30PM. That day, Elaine went to campus alone, arriving a few minutes late for her afternoon class. Elaine would later drive straight to work from Roger Williams—she assumed that Diane would get a ride to work from her boyfriend Billy.

Back at their cottage, Diane sat hemming a robe when the phone rang. She answered and her sister Laura relayed the happy news—they were proud aunts to a newborn niece. Diane listened as Laura explained that Cathy was still recovering at the hospital following the birth. Diane promised that she’d try and trade her Saturday work shift away to make time to visit.

At approximately 2:15PM, Diane called Billy for a ride to work, but he wasn’t home. It had been raining and snowing over the past day and it was supposed to be getting a lot worse. According to reporting by the Providence Journal, Billy’s mother offered Diane a ride, which she declined, but according to Jean, they had a fraught relationship, and she doubts that Virginia would have made this offer. This call was a crucial link in the chain of events of Friday, March 21st because Virginia was the last known person to have spoken to Diane.

The events that followed are merely speculation. Diane was due to work in just fifteen minutes, and police later said that they believed that she set out on foot to make the nearly three-mile trek to work. A reconstruction of the route shows that this journey would take a little over an hour, less if you were really hurrying along.

Elaine would later say, “it was the first time Diane ever walked to work from the apartment.” Though she’d been known to hitchhike from time to time, if Elaine’s statement is accurate, Diane hadn’t ever left on foot from her apartment to work in the four months that she’d lived there. It was her first time—and tragically, it would be her last.

Diane Drake goes missing

Later eyewitness accounts help in reconstructing Diane’s movements that Friday afternoon. It’s difficult to have confidence in the timing of these sightings, but around 2:25PM she was spotted walking somewhere along Valley Road headed in the direction of Photo Patio.

2:30PM, the time her shift was scheduled to begin, came and went, with Diane perhaps braving the elements on foot. At 2:40PM, another eyewitness placed Diane on that same street, Valley Road, and claimed that she saw Diane getting into a vehicle—and it looked to her like Diane knew the vehicle’s driver.

We do know that by 2:45PM Elaine had arrived at her Photo Patio location up the road from Diane’s. She tried calling—first to Diane’s hut, and then to their apartment—but there was no answer. Elaine soon became worried.

Another eyewitness, an elderly woman on Forest Avenue, later claimed that around 3:00PM, through a window overlooking the street, she saw a woman and a man engaged in some sort of physical struggle in a vehicle that was parked in front of her house. The witness called the police, but the car was gone by the time officers arrived

Members of Diane’s family would later state that they believed it had been Diane in that vehicle, struggling against a man described as having a dark complexion and dressed in white—perhaps in the uniform of a chef, doctor, or painter. The vehicle has been reported as a green sedan.

Diane’s body discovered

Just a few blocks from Diane’s apartment, sits a sandy beach, ¾ of a mile long, called Easton’s Beach. Both Middletown, Rhode Island, and Newport, Rhode Island, lay claim to the beach—the border between the two jurisdictions could, quite literally, be drawn in the sand.

On the morning of Saturday, March 22, 1980, two highway workers spotted something on the beach. They saw a figure at the edge of the water. At first they believed they were looking at a mannequin, but as they approached, they soon realized it was the body of a woman. They clocked the time—it was 10:25AM—and they called for help.

Dr. William Sturner, Chief Medical Examiner for Rhode Island, was present at the scene. The woman was nude, and no clothes were found nearby. She wore only some jewelry—a wristwatch and a necklace.

That morning, Billy and a friend of Diane’s, Georgia May, were out searching for her when they heard on the radio that a woman’s body had been found. By 1:30PM, Georgia May was face-to-face with officers handling the case. They showed her a piece of jewelry which had been removed from the body, realizing her worst fears—she recognized the jewelry as belonging to Diane.

Around 5:00PM, an officer soon knocked at Drake household door. The officer told him to call the chief of police, and it was then that he learned that Diane was dead—she had been murdered—and her body had been found at Easton’s Beach that morning.

In the chaos of the day, no one had yet reached out to Cathy, still laid up in a hospital bed a state away. She flipped on the TV that night, and learned from the 11:00 news that her sister had been killed. Her newborn daughter, nestled against her chest, began to fuss as Cathy’s shock gave way to sobbing.

In the span of two days, the Drake family had welcomed new life, and suffered great loss.

Part 2 will be available on 3/18/2025.

If you have any information on the murder of Diane Drake, please contact the Rhode Island Cold Case Unit tip line at (401) 468-2233 or email them at riagcoldcase@riag.ri.gov. You can also call the anonymous tip line at the Newport Police Dept at (401) 846-2606.

Donate to the Diane Drake Memorial Scholarship Fund at Roger Williams University. Choose 'Make a Gift to RWU', select Other, and write in Diane Drake Memorial Scholarship. If you donate, please email your me at hello@murdershetold.com for a gift.

This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, The Murder of Diane Drake, Part One. To hear Diane’s full story and Jean’s interview, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform.

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Diane Drake, middle (Jean Fucile, digitized by Murder, She Told)

Drake house in Redwood Farms, Rhode Island (facebook.com)

Diane Drake wearing sash during parade (facebook.com)

“Redwood Farms Day,” 1971, (facebook.com)

Diane Drake with Kim Dreghorn (facebook.com)

Diane Drake, on the right, brother Bob and Judi (Jean Fucile, digitized by Murder, She Told)

Drake family, 1975, Diane second to left (facebook.com)

Diane Drake and family at Virginia Beach, 1976, Diane bottom left (facebook.com)

Diane Drake, driver's license (Jean Fucile, digitized by Murder, She Told)

Diane Drake, military ID (Jean Fucile, digitized by Murder, She Told)

Diane Drake, driver's license (Jean Fucile, digitized by Murder, She Told)

Diane Drake, military ID (Jean Fucile, digitized by Murder, She Told)

Diane Drake, right, with Cindy Thayer (Jean Fucile, digitized by Murder, She Told)

Fotomat, typical drive-up photo kiosk (wikipedia.org)

Diane Drake and her father dancing at a family wedding, 1978 (facebook.com)

Note from Diane to Jean (Jean, digitized by MST)

Map of relevant locations, Diane Drake case (Providence Journal)

Poem read at Diane's funeral (facebook.com)

Sources For This Episode

Newspaper articles

Various articles from Newport Daily News, Providence Journal, and The Quill, here.

Written by various authors including Anne Roketenetz, Cammy Bitel, Catherine Callahan, Gayle Gertler, Jim Gillis, Joanne Tiberio, Laura Damon, Lynne Sullivan, Margie Coloian, Pat Forte, Paul Duggan, Richard Salit, Savana Dunning, and Scott Barrett.

Online written sources

'Capt. John Francis Drake' (Memorial Funeral Home), 9/13/2006

'Newport, RI Area Cold Cases' (SpotCrime), 1/1/2007

'Obituary: Frances J. Drake, 86' (Patch), 11/10/2014, by Mark Shieldrop

'The Quill -- March 12, 1981' (Roger Williams University), 9/19/2015

'Richard E. Drake' (Legacy), http://legacy.com 6/11/2021

'Siblings push for renewed interest in 1980 Newport cold case' (WPRI), 3/21/2022, by Alexandra Lesli

'On 42nd anniversary of Diane Drake's murder, family asks for people to come forward' (Newport RI), 3/22/2022, by Laura Damon

'Diane Drake memorial' (Facebook), 4/20/2022

'‘She was a life that mattered,’ Diane Drake's family remembers 43 years on' (10 WJAR), 3/21/2023, by Cal Dymowski

'Murder victim's brother hopes to preserve her memory' (WPRI), 3/21/2023, by Allison Shinskey, Sarah Doiron

'Diane Drake's murder remains unsolved, her brother thinks it's time to honor her' (Newport RI), 3/22/2023, by Savana Dunning