By RUSS OLIVO

WOONSOCKET — The sad journey of Paul Demers and his family began along the banks of the Blackstone River more than 23 years ago. And it hasn’t stopped yet.

A few days ago, it brought them, once again, like birds doomed to repeat the same mournful peregrination, to the Rhode Island Parole Board, where they made their oft-voiced plea: Don’t let the man who murdered Kathy Demers go free.
“He didn’t murder just one family member,” says Demers, Kathy’s brother. “He murdered every damn one of us.”
The man Demers is talking about is Daniel L. Boucher, who is serving a life sentence at the Adult Correctional Institutions in the beating and strangulation death of 21-year-old Kathy Demers on Jan. 1, 1985. Boucher, 49, was denied parole for the fourth time on June 18 after the Parole Board listened to members of the Demers clan explain how the murder had affected them.
Nine members of the Demers family attended the hearing, including sons Christopher Demers and Daniel Peloquin, who were just toddlers when their mother was murdered. Paul Demers, of Blackstone, says he rounded up as many of Kathy’s relatives as he could, from as far away as Florida, to attend the hearing because Kathy’s mother, Terry, a vocal opponent of parole for Boucher, had died since the last hearing.
They even brought 2½-year-old Caiden Demers — a grandson that Kathy will never see — as a graphic illustration of family loss.
A killer’s conviction is sometimes seen among survivors as a starting point for healing, but Paul Demers says he yearns not for closure, but retribution.
See FIGHT, Page A-2
It killed Demers watching what his sister’s slaying did to his family, and he says that for Boucher, the next best thing to the death penalty, which doesn’t exist in Rhode Island, is being in a cage for the rest of his life.
“The day they hang him is the day we’ll be free,” says Demers, who makes no effort to hide his rancor.
The youngest of four siblings, Kathy Demers was a single mother in 1985 who was disillusioned with her prospects in the city, said Demers. She was anxious to make a new start elsewhere and had accepted another brother’s invitation to move in with him in the lush wine country of Santa Rosa, Calif.  Although she and Daniel Boucher had been dating for some time, Kathy decided she would break the news to him during a New Year’s toast on the banks of the Blackstone River.
That morning, she did not come home. Nor the next, or the next after that. Paul Demers’ father, the late Leo A. Demers, filed a missing person report with the police. They questioned Boucher, but he claimed to have dropped Kathy off at her mother’s house about 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day. With no obvious sign of foul play other than her disappearance, the police investigation seemed to go nowhere.
But the Demerses were always incredulous of Boucher’s story. Paul Demers recalls that his father, who had been particularly close to Kathy, seemed to have an uneasy feeling about what happened to his daughter. There is no way of telling what drew Leo Demers to the river, but during that winter of 1985, he began scouring the banks of the Blackstone, searching for his missing child.
“He walked the banks of that river daily,” recalled Demers.
 In the end, the elder Demers did not find his daughter so much as the Blackstone gave her up. Some two months after she disappeared, public works crews found her remains ensnared in an intake grate near the Thundermist Hydroelectric Plant in Market Square. Hours later, a medical examiner confirmed what the Demerses had always feared — she had been gruesomely dispatched at the hands of another.
Suspicions quickly focused on Boucher, whom the police found in Florida and charged with the crime.
But it wasn’t until the trial that the Demerses had the privilege of learning the full extent of the gory details. The story, as conveyed through a witness who had earlier been reluctant to come forward, was that Boucher was incapable of handling the prospects of life without Kathy Demers. As the rest of the world was hoisting New Year’s champagne and tooting noisemakers, Boucher had become unhinged. In a fit of anger, he beat and strangled Kathy Demers, then attempted to conceal the evidence by tossing her body into the murky depths of the Blackstone.
Boucher always denied the charges, but it took a Superior Court jury just 45 minutes to come back with a guilty verdict on a charge of second-degree murder.
All in all, his father may have taken it the hardest, says Demers. Even as the trial was under way, Leo Demers told anyone willing to listen — even a few high-ranking cops — that he would kill Boucher himself if the accused killer were exonerated. On the day of the verdict, Demers says, his father’s car was parked outside Providence Superior Court, the trunk heavy with a virtual arsenal of firepower.
When he died of heart failure some eight years later, the elder Demers’ deathbed plea to his children was to do everything in their power to see that Boucher stayed in jail forever.
“He died of a broken heart,” said Paul Demers. “Kathy was Daddy’s little girl, Daddy’s sweet little girl.”
Demers has never forgotten his father’s plea, and has made it his personal mission to corral the family for the periodic appearances before the parole board. This time, it was a little harder than usual, because Demers himself was nearly killed last November when the 18-wheeler he was driving crashed in Connecticut as he swerved to avoid a deer. The crash left him comatose for six weeks and nearly severed his left arm.
Doctors managed to rebuild what was left of the limb with muscle tissue scavenged from other parts of his body, but it is all but useless now, raw-looking and scarred, his hand hidden in a therapeutic glove. In the months before the parole hearing, Demers underwent numerous surgeries and months of physical rehabilitation, and he will likely face more. Probably, says Demers, 53, the crash will prevent him from working for the rest of his life.
He dreams of retiring to Barbados or Florida. But Demers say that no matter what happens or where he lives, he will never forget his sister, or ignore his father’s deathbed plea.
 “Her life ended brutally beaten — beaten to a pulp before she was strangled and thrown in the river,” he says. “Danny gets to have visitors in prison who sit at the same table as him, no partitions. Kathy can’t do that. She doesn’t have a parole date.”