Killing Season
The Unsolved Case of New England’s Deadliest Serial Killer
Carlton Smith
For Judy, Jill, and Jolene
“Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry which has come to me, and if not, I will know.”
—Genesis 18:21
“Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box on the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these the ashes of the destroyed city, Gomorrah?”
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick, 1851
Contents
Major Characters
Preface and Acknowledgments
SUMMER 1988
Remains
Wired
Four Men
Dextradeur
Pina
The Politician
The Trunk Case
Judy and Nancy
Whispers
Missing
“That’s My Sister”
The Weld Square Dance
Summer’s End
Misery
FALL 1988
Lost
The Trees
The Dogs
Memory Banks
“I Think We Got One …”
Not the General Public
“Ron Pina Should Shut His Mouth”
“It’s Not the Right Guy”
WINTER 1988–1989
The Saint
The Leak
Homework
A Reasonable Hunch
Group Therapy
My Girl
Hear, Consider, and Report
Linkages
Present No Man
SPRING 1989
A Letter
Dealing Days
Triggers
Admissions
Spies Like Us
Video Fun
“I Took Them”
SUMMER AND FALL 1989
Positive Thoughts
“He’ll Make It Up”
Two-Headed Machine
“She Did Die”
Making It Run
WINTER 1989–1990
Screen Test
Memories
Return of the Boston Strangler
Presumptions
SPRING 1990
No Smoking Gun
Diane
SUMMER 1990
Diane’s Florida Vacation
Neighbors
Whispers Wildies
“I Have Nothing to Fear”
Speechless
Very Crucial Testimony
Indicted
Over the Line
No Punctures
Abandoned
SUMMER 1991
No Evidence
The Real Killer
EPILOGUE
Outcomes
Image Gallery
About the Author
Major Characters
The Police
Ronald Pina, Bristol County District Attorney, 1978–1990
Raymond Veary, Ron Pina’s chief deputy
Robert St. Jean, chief investigator for Ron Pina
Paul Boudreau, detective, Bristol County Drug Task Force
John Dextradeur, detective, New Bedford Police Department
Jose Gonsalves, corporal, Massachusetts State Police, lead homicide investigator in the Highway Murders
Maryann Dill, trooper, Massachusetts State Police, and Gonsalves’s partner
The Victims
Robin Rhodes, 28, last seen in New Bedford, April 1988
Rochelle Clifford Dopierala, 28, last seen in New Bedford, late April 1988
Debroh McConnell, 25, last seen in New Bedford, May 1988
Debra Medeiros, 30, last seen in New Bedford, late May 1988
Christine Monteiro, 19, last seen in New Bedford, late May 1988
Marilyn Roberts, 34, last seen in New Bedford, June 1988
Nancy Paiva, 36, last seen in New Bedford, July 7, 1988
Deborah DeMello, 35, last seen in New Bedford, July 11, 1988
Mary Rose Santos, 26, last seen in New Bedford, July 16, 1988
Sandra Botelho, 24, last seen in New Bedford, August 11, 1988
Dawn Mendes, 25, last seen in New Bedford, September 4, 1988
The Families
Judy DeSantos, sister of Nancy Paiva
Joseph Botelho, father of Sandra Botelho
Diane Clifford, mother of Rochelle Clifford
James McConnell, father of Debroh McConnell
Charlotte Mendes, mother of Dawn Mendes
Madeleine Perry, mother of Deborah Greenlaw DeMello
Donald Santos, husband of Mary Rose Santos
The Suspects
Neil Anderson, Dartmouth, Mass., fishcutter, cleared January 1989
James Baker, Tiverton, R.I., diesel mechanic, cleared, June 1989
Tony DeGrazia, Freetown, Mass., stonemason, cleared, October 1989
Kenneth Ponte, New Bedford, Mass., attorney, cleared, August 1991
Paul Ryley, New Bedford, Mass., businessman, cleared, August 1991
The Others
Frankie Pina, Nancy Paiva’s boyfriend
Henry Carreiro, radio talk-show host
James Ragsdale, editor, New Bedford Standard-Times
Maureen Boyle, reporter, New Bedford Standard-Times
Tom Coakley and John Ellement, reporters, The Boston Globe
Diane Doherty, witness against Kenneth Ponte
Paul Walsh, Ron Pina’s election opponent in 1990
Paul Buckley, special prosecutor appointed by Walsh to review the case, 1991
Preface and Acknowledgments
Such dreary streets, Melville had written in 1850 of New Bedford, Massachusetts, at the height of the city’s century-long, whale-killing bonanza. Though nearly 140 years had passed since the time of Melville, and the whales were long gone, the streets of New Bedford remained dreary in the late 1980s, lost in a gloom that seemed as permanent a part of the city as its bumpy cobblestones.
In the town once made rich by oil from the largest mammal in the history of the world, there seemed to be as many cobblestones and historic buildings as there were tenements; and there were almost as many tenements as there were addicts—that is, drug addicts. The harpoon, at least, had survived, miniaturized perhaps, but still firmly lodged in the forearms of the unhappy, trapped people of what was once the richest city in the world.
A pedestrian on Purchase Street in the spring of 1988 could not avoid the evidence—indeed, it was loudly whispered, spoken, sometimes even shouted, advertised by sidewalk pitchmen called runners, or sometimes “clockers”:
“Power,” “Power Ninety-five,” “Master of Death”—these were the street names of the small packets of white or brown powder dispensed by shadowy figures down on Purchase Street in New Bedford in the spring of 1988. Crumpled, sweaty bills changed hands; a darkened space was sought, a spoon produced, a match was lit, a needle was filled and plunged.
Then came the explosion, or rather, implosion, as a human life shrank down to its lowest conscious level, a full retreat from the things that could no longer be suffered. And not just a few, either.
By the spring of 1988, nearly 1 out of 50 New Bedford citizens was an acknowledged heroin addict, while an equal or larger number were addict
ed to cocaine or its compulsive cousin, “crack.” It was not surprising that New Bedford, once known as the whaling capital of the world, was now known as one of the world’s biggest drug dens.
The new harpoon, the hypodermic, led directly to real-people crime—petty thefts, burglaries, muggings, shootings, indeed, untold wreckage in human lives. In time those crimes led to serial murder, and the destruction of the soul of a city.
There are three main highways into and out of New Bedford. Interstate 195 runs east from Providence, Rhode Island, slices through the northern half of New Bedford, then heads farther east in the direction of Cape Cod before fading out in a merger with another interstate headed south out of Boston.
A second freeway, State Route 140, heads north out of New Bedford on its way to Taunton, Mass., where it too joins another road to Boston. A third highway, U.S. 6, also known as the King’s Highway, once linked all of southeastern Massachusetts to Cape Cod and Boston, back in the days when coachmen drove with whips. All three of these roads figured prominently in the serial murder case with which this book is concerned.
I first came to New Bedford in the spring of 1989, when the hunt for an unknown murderer was in full cry. Nine women were dead and two others had disappeared. The newspapers and television stations were saturated with coverage about the crimes, and most of all, the suspects. A special grand jury was in session, taking secret testimony.
One man had just been charged with the rapes of nearly a dozen women, and one of those women went on national television to accuse the rapist of being the murderer. The district attorney, Ronald Pina, gave a smug and knowing press briefing on the steps of the county courthouse, saying nothing of consequence but with winks and smirks suggesting broadly that the case was almost solved.
I came back in 1992 and again the following year. Ronald Pina was no longer district attorney, one suspect was dead, another’s life in tatters, a key witness had died on the street, and the nine murders were still unsolved. The two missing women were still missing. But by that time, the killings were a thing of the past for most of New Bedford, a dark event receding into the shadows of the willfully forgotten. The crimes had started, were stopped after they were discovered, and then galvanized the city, and were then ignored as an aberration that somehow could never be explained, just as a controversial pool table rape case had convulsed the town a few years earlier. But the residue of bitterness lingered on.
Why hadn’t the case been solved? There was an ample amount of physical evidence; the pool of potential victims was relatively small, and quite close-knit; indeed, the victims even seemed to be closely interconnected, some living together, others living next door to one another, or having, at one time or another, been coworkers or close acquaintances.
The answer, as I hope this book demonstrates, was not so much an absence of evidence, but rather the result of an inability of police and political officials to set aside their own personal agendas and instead focus methodically on the facts. Manipulation of the news media became commonplace, while the media themselves failed to ask critical questions at critical times. The case gradually became a political mess, and eventually the investigation was torn apart in the maelstrom of competing interests. A Federal Bureau of Investigation expert who was familiar with some of the details of the case minced no words when he shook his head sorrowfully and offered his opinion that the investigation had been destroyed by a toxic combination of arrogance and ineptitude.
Meanwhile, the killer proceeded on his deadly course, doubtless continuing his depredations somewhere else in America.
New Bedford is a small city, long and narrow, running north-south along the west bank of the south-flowing Acushnet River, which widens into a large estuary before emptying into the aptly named Buzzard’s Bay.
Over the three centuries of its existence, the city’s off-river border has straggled loosely westward, edging up, away from the water, by the line of least resistance; year after year it has incorporated aimless courtyards and directionless alleys, most marked off by buildings composed of chip-slipping granite or rust-weeping brick, or later, by cheap, rough-hewn lumber. All together, these incarnations of investment represent the physicality of 300 years of hopes, betrayals, dreams, illusions, anticipations, lies, epiphanies, and misperceptions—a menagerie of petty evils and their complement of unrecognized virtues. We often speak of a city in terms of what it looks like; but the reality of a city lies in how it lives.
In truth, there have actually been four New Bedfords: the original version, the small wood-and-mud village founded by Quakers bent on escaping the dominance of their Puritan fellow colonists in the late 1600s; the whaling New Bedford, the bustling town of ropes, tar, miles of wharves stacked high with casks of boiled whale fat, where captains’ wives kept lonely vigils in magnificent mansions, and captains’ daughters were given anticipated whales as dowries; the third New Bedford, the textile town, where waterside mills churned cotton into fabric for the world; and fourth, the fishing New Bedford of today, whose trawlers scour the submerged slopes of the Grand Banks in search of bivalve mollusks known to the world as scallops.
Over the centuries, the people of New Bedford also changed even as their means of livelihood evolved. The first settlers were pious Friends, content to wrest their sustenance from the shallow offshore waters; most of them bore English surnames like Cooke, Allen, Waite, Howland, Hathaway, Potter, Rotch, or Russell, and had first names like Increase, Stalwart, Harmony, Faith, Charity, or Hope.
But later, as the hunting of whales began returning such magnificent profits, the Quakers were joined by others outside the Massachusetts Puritan mainstream, many of them Roman Catholic. The huge profits likewise attracted a wide assortment of world travelers to New Bedford, including harpooners from the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, from Scandinavia, and even from the South Pacific.
As a result, by 1850, Herman Melville was able to write of New Bedford, that for sheer variety of culture and costume, there was no more eye-popping city in the world.
“In these last mentioned haunts you see only sailors,” Melville wrote, “but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.” In Melville’s time, the rush for whale oil was on, and it was no different than in modern times, when black gushers in Texas spawned the wildest boom towns of an age.
By 1860, as the whaling industry began to decline, and the textile mills began to ascend, New Bedford’s population began to change again, this time with a large influx of French-Canadians who came to work in the newly created textile mills. Most of the new immigrants were people with names like Boudreau, LeRoux, Deschamps, or Michaud, or similar surnames. Large sections of the city, mostly in the middle-class north end—away from the dangers of possible hurricanes or tidal surges that frequently wiped out the south end—were dominated by French-Canadian food, language, and culture.
The textile mills were huge, noisy, dusty places where workers stood over dangerous machinery for hours on end, feeding cotton in and taking cloth out. It was low-paying, hard work that had none of the romance Melville found in chasing the whales. In almost every sense, New Bedford had joined the Industrial Revolution.
By the 1890s, the English, the Irish and the French-Canadians began to give way to the Portuguese, many of them relatives of harpooners, sailors, and navigators taken on by the whaling ships a generation earlier at the Azores. Twenty years later, by 1910, nearly two-thirds of the city’s population was foreign-born, a great majority of them from either the Portuguese-speaking Azores, or the Portuguese-speaking Cape Verde Islands off the northwest African coast. By the early 1960s, New Bedford was the second largest Portuguese-speaking city in the northern hemisphere, after Lisbon.
Like their earlier French-Canadian and Irish counterparts, the newest immigrants were hardworking, religiously devout, and intent on making their way upward in America. Many anglicized the pronunciation of their
names in the hope it might smooth the way.
Thus, names like Ponte were pronounced “Pont,” without the Romance “ay” at the end, or Jose, which became, for some, “JOEsey;” Mendes, changed to “MENdeez,” Alves, “Alvs”; or Gonsalves, which was transmuted into “Gone-Salves.” Sometimes, people even changed their names to the English translation of the name, such as Blanco to White or Verde to Green. Many, if not most, of the early twentieth-century immigrants were interrelated by both blood and marriage.
“Ironically, we all come from the same islands,” noted Henry Carreiro, a New Bedford radio personality. “So, we’re all cousins. I mean, if you live on an island for 500 years with less than 100,000 people, when your (last) name pops up, you know that person’s got to be in your family tree.” Later, when it appeared that virtually all of the victims were known to one another, a major dispute arose as to whether that fact had any real significance. In a town the size of New Bedford, just about everyone knew everyone else, at least by sight, especially in the same age and social groupings.
But as in many places where relationships are close, even interrelated and long-enduring, when feuds broke out in New Bedford, they were as vicious as they were difficult to end. Old grudges gained virulence, and were held for generations; and for many, revenge was a dish that was always appetizing, whether hot or cold. That still held true in the late 1980s, when the events that were to draw so much attention to the city were about to unfold.
The research preparation of this book took place in the city of New Bedford and the surrounding areas of Freetown, Lakeville, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Fall River, Taunton, and Marion. While there, I made the acquaintance of numerous residents, nearly all of them warm, friendly, gregarious people, who have suffered repeated, staggering blows, including a reduction of 30,000 jobs from 1988 to the present time, coupled with the stigma of having been the location of notorious criminal events. Yes, there is drug addiction in New Bedford—serious drug addiction. But there is also pride, and where there is pride, there is hope.
Many people in New Bedford generously provided me with their time and their insights in the preparation of this book. Prominent among them are James Ragsdale, editor of the New Bedford Standard-Times newspaper, who provided invaluable assistance; Maurice Lauzon, formerly of the Standard-Times library, who patiently assembled literally thousands of news clippings for my review; Maureen Boyle, reporter for the Standard Times; John Ellement, a reporter for The Boston Globe; Edward Harrington, a former mayor of New Bedford, who provided vital background; Judy DeSantos, the sister of Nancy Paiva, without whose assistance this book could not have been written; Bristol County District Attorneys Ronald Pina and Paul Walsh; and numerous police officers, both of the Massachusetts State Police and local Massachusetts departments, who cooperated with their time and opinions to explain what had gone wrong, and who therefore should best remain unidentified. Special thanks go to Helga Kahr for her valuable advice, to Michael Van Ackren for his support at a critical time, and to Michaela Hamilton of Dutton Signet for her steadfast belief in this project.
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