Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  Eventually, of course, Pina realized that he simply couldn’t function as district attorney without the troopers, even if he didn’t trust them. Pina backed down and invited the troopers to return; but one result of the fracas was legislation granting district attorneys more power over who would and would not be allowed to work as investigators.

  Pina’s offices were on the fifth floor of the Times Building in downtown New Bedford, and were connected to a nearby wing of rooms that housed the local branch of the Massachusetts State Police. A person going from Pina’s wing to the troopers’ wing had to walk down a corridor, up a short flight of stairs, and make a right turn to another corridor on another level; the separation of elevation seems to stand as a metaphor for the nature of the troubles between Pina and his investigators.

  The way things worked in Massachusetts, each district attorney—there were 12 of them statewide—was assisted in his prosecutorial endeavors by officers assigned to him by the state police headquarters in Boston. The troopers were assigned to investigative groups called Crime Prevention and Control Units, or CPACs. Troopers went from patrolling the highways to the CPACs based primarily on seniority. There were no other special qualifications required, such as advanced training in investigative techniques; most troopers learned on the job. Almost as soon as the CPACs were started, the jobs in each unit became highly sought after by the troopers.

  Why? Because the average salary of a state trooper assigned to patrol the highways was around $40,000, and members of CPAC teams could earn, with overtime, as much as $70,000.

  As this system of dual control—between police headquarters in Boston and the local district attorneys—developed, district attorneys gradually became empowered to select individuals from the list of state troopers qualified to fill the available investigative jobs. As a result, it isn’t surprising that many of those state troopers who held CPAC jobs were also political supporters of their appointing district attorney, who had the power to make or renew their appointment. All of this made the district attorneys acutely sensitive to the troopers’ job performance, and the troopers acutely sensitive to the district attorneys’ political needs.

  In an ideal world, making the troopers’ job security contingent on their pleasing the district attorney who selected them might seem a good way to get both sides to work together.

  But on the other hand, the detectives assigned to a CPAC unit tended to follow the directions given to them by their district attorney, few questions asked, whatever their own professional judgment might have otherwise told them. In a state with a long history of organized crime infestation, this is not a good situation, as many thoughtful troopers will attest.

  Moreover, the dissonance between the troopers’ professional judgment and their personal financial interest was one of the most glaring inadequacies of the Massachusetts system for investigating major crimes such as homicide; inevitably, it led to jealousies, frictions, and resentments that would prove to be a major drawback as the next few years unfolded.

  But Pina’s relationship with the state police assigned to him was different than most other Massachusetts D.A.’s. For one thing, Pina was paranoid about his troopers; he could never quite convince himself that the troopers in his office really had Ron Pina’s interests at heart. Pina never asked the troopers to support him during election campaigns; for him, it was enough if they would only keep quiet and remain neutral. He knew in his heart that the troopers didn’t like him.

  Pina believed that if the troopers wanted to do him in politically, all they had to do was deliberately botch an important investigation, and thus make him look bad. To Pina, the troopers’ union was his mortal enemy, and had been ever since his days in the legislature as an ally of Michael Dukakis. For evidence, Pina cited Dukakis’s experience in 1978, when the state police union had backed Edward J. King’s candidacy for governor, in the process making Dukakis look like he was soft on crime. As a result, Pina was extraordinarily sensitive to any signs that the state police weren’t doing their job exactly the way Pina thought it should be done.

  Pina also believed that the state police were not competent, at least as investigators. He didn’t blame the individual troopers so much as the state police organization; most of all, he blamed the troopers’ union. The union, Pina believed, was so powerful in the hallways of the State House of Representatives that it could get pretty much anything it wanted. Dukakis’s loss to King proved that, Pina believed.

  One of the things the union wanted was a scrupulous adherence to a seniority system. The seniority system in turn kept the investigative CPAC positions reserved for those who had risen high enough on the seniority list to qualify for the jobs—regardless of training, ability, or experience. The “staties,” as some referred to them, were in Pina’s mind good for writing traffic tickets, but that was about it.

  “They’re poorly trained, they are not investigatively trained,” Pina said later, after he was out of office. “I’m not knocking people. This is part of my speech on wanting more training. I know I’m probably gonna get in trouble here, but let me pull that rock back.

  “The state police are basically individuals who are highway patrol. They’re on the highway. Their prime directive is speed traps and things like that, and to maintain the Commonwealth highways. When you reach a certain seniority level, you can then say, ‘I want to be a detective,’ and put in for the district attorney’s office. Now this was more of a promotion, but you weren’t trained to do anything. I mean, you didn’t get a special course to be a detective.

  “So if you were a regular trooper and you did well, and now you got some seniority, for example, you could get on the list and come into my office. You’d be there for a while, then you’d take the corporal’s exam.” If a trooper passed the corporal’s test, they’d be transferred back out to the highway, going back down to the bottom of the seniority list of corporals.

  “You know how many corporals move in and out of the D.A.’s office?” Pina asked. “So, spending any extra money on you to train you or to teach you things, like at the FBI school, well, it’s gonna be a waste of time. Because as soon as you take the corporal’s exam, now you’re back on the highway.” Eventually, after other corporals had moved up, or retired, and seniority was regained, a corporal might return to investigative work. But then the whole thing started all over again, according to Pina, when a corporal took the sergeant’s test.

  “You take the next test, you’re a sergeant now, you can try to transfer back in,” Pina said, “but it’s not gonna happen tomorrow. You’re talking a year or two years … So it’s all this weaving back and forth.” As a result, investigations lost a lot of continuity and experience, at least in Pina’s view.

  Worse, as far as Pina was concerned, was what he felt was the unresponsiveness of the investigators to his requests. Some of this was personal, Pina knew, but much of it was institutional because of the dual control over the troopers.

  This was one of the fundamental problems in the investigation of the Highway Murders: while Pina, as district attorney, was charged under the state law with the responsibility of investigating murder, the detective work was the job of the troopers—who responded to a completely different set of bosses in Boston. The bosses in Boston had 12 district attorneys to worry about, not just Ronnie Pina, who wasn’t one of their favorite people to begin with.

  When Pina attempted to go around the bosses, and talk directly to the investigators, the sergeant in charge of Pina’s CPAC would chastise the troopers, at least according to Pina. The military structure of the state police emphasized the formal chain of command. That meant all communications and written reports had to be sent to the higher-ups in Boston before they were routed back to Pina—if they ever came back. Sometimes, he recalled, it took months for reports to make the round-trip journey, and even then, no one in the district attorney’s office was sure that there wasn’t additional information that simply hadn’t been passed on.

  And there were e
ven deeper, more personal reasons for the antipathy between Pina and his investigators. One of them involved Sheila Martines, the district attorney’s bride-to-be.

  7

  The Trunk Case

  Only a few months before the skeleton was found on Route 140, there had been another embarrassing public flap between Pina and the police, this one over Pina’s fiancée, Sheila Martines.

  Sheila was a well-known television personality in Providence, Rhode Island, where she hosted an afternoon magazine show. Beautiful, witty, a high-energy personality, Sheila had parlayed an earlier journalism career on radio and in newspapers to the television business. Over the years she had become quite well connected in the broadcast industry. She and Pina had begun dating each other in 1987, and most of those around Pina—who had a reputation for skipping from relationship to relationship—were struck by how serious the district attorney was about the attractive, 34-year-old broadcaster.

  Then, one morning in April 1988, Sheila disappeared while driving to work on I-195.

  The following day, a distraught and disheveled Sheila was discovered in an isolated, rural area of Bristol County. She claimed she had been kidnapped by a knife-wielding man while stopped on the side of the highway, driven around all night, molested, and then locked in the trunk of her own car.

  But the investigating troopers noticed that there were only three sets of footprints around Sheila’s trunk: Sheila’s, those of the man who first heard her cries for help and released her, and those of the cop who had first come to the scene. Some troopers speculated that Sheila had locked herself in the trunk, for some reason. They made jokes about spirit abductions.

  When the troopers asked to interview Sheila a second time to clarify matters, Pina had refused to let them. While many in New Bedford gleefully seized on the incident and Pina’s reaction as evidence he was covering up for Sheila, others saw a deeper motive: Pina loved Sheila, and wanted to protect her from the troopers, whose motives and integrity he deeply distrusted.

  Under Pina’s prodding, a hue and cry was raised across the county, composite sketches of the kidnapper were distributed, and squads of troopers began scouring the highways in search of a criminal most thought existed only in Sheila’s mind.

  This touchy situation almost immediately grew worse when someone in the state police leaked the three-foot-print facts to the news media, apparently in an effort to make Pina look foolish. The so-called Trunk Case, as the affair quickly became known, was merely the latest development in the long-running feud between the D.A. and the state police.

  Suggestions were made that Sheila had simply partied too much, and was too embarrassed to give that as the reason she never made it to work. Both Pina and Sheila denied that rumor, of course, and asserted that the three-footprint story was bogus. But Sheila quit her job shortly after the incident, and entered a hospital for treatment. Pina’s closest advisers, meanwhile, urged him to distance himself from Sheila, but Pina refused. No way, he said. I love her.

  Very few realized it at the time, but others in New Bedford and Bristol County were also losing patience with Pina in that summer of 1988.

  One was James Ragsdale, the editor of the local newspaper, the Standard-Times. Although the newspaper had supported Pina for district attorney three times, both Ragsdale and the paper’s publisher were having doubts about Pina. Most of those doubts had to do with the seeming inability of the police and the district attorney to do anything to stop the flood of drugs which was threatening to drown the city in crime.

  In the aftermath of the “Trunk Case,” an anonymous caller had telephoned Ragsdale, offering to provide him with medical information about Sheila Martines. Ragsdale suspected a setup, but nevertheless expressed cautious interest in learning more. Rumors were then flying that Sheila had been using cocaine the night before her reported kidnapping, and Ragsdale thought the newspaper should check the stories out.

  Within a few days, however, Ragsdale was telephoned by a furious Pina, who accused Ragsdale of being scum and invading Sheila’s privacy. Ragsdale defended the paper and himself by observing that since drug abuse was one of New Bedford’s worst problems, the newspaper needed to follow tips wherever they led—just as he expected Pina’s office to do the same. Ragsdale was well aware that drugs were no respecter of income or social station in New Bedford; his own son had been convicted of possession of cocaine.

  But Pina wasn’t buying Ragsdale’s explanation.

  “You don’t want me to follow cocaine, wherever it leads,” Pina told Ragsdale, according to the editor.

  “Yes, I do,” said Ragsdale.

  “No, you don’t,” said Pina, who then suggested that the trail would head directly into the Standard-Times’ newsroom.

  Ragsdale said he didn’t care where the trail headed. He hung up the telephone and went to talk to the paper’s publisher. Ragsdale recounted the conversation he’d just had with Pina.

  “Do you have a problem with that?” Ragsdale asked. “Not me,” said the publisher.

  “Me neither,” said Ragsdale, and the stage was set for a confrontation between the local newspaper and Pina that would affect the course of the Highway Murder investigation over the following two years, as Pina indeed attempted to follow cocaine wherever it led—even if that path was nowhere near the real killer.

  8

  Judy and Nancy

  Five days after the skeleton was first discovered along the side of Route 140, a 33-year-old New Bedford woman was walking through the city’s south end with two of her children. One of Judy DeSantos’s kids looked up and remarked to her mother: “Oh, look, there’s Auntie Nancy.”

  Judy DeSantos glanced over at the low-income apartment on Morgan Street, not far from the city jail. Sure enough, there was her older sister, Nancy Paiva, sitting on her front porch, wearing her robe and drinking a cup of coffee. Judy didn’t say anything, and neither did Nancy.

  The two sisters, once so close, were feuding. They had barely talked to each other for nearly eight months—not since Judy had played a part in seeing Nancy’s two children taken away from her and placed with other relatives.

  Unlike Nancy, Judy, her children, and her husband Tony lived quietly in New Bedford’s north end. Tony was a factory assembler, while Judy worked part-time for the city’s election office. So closely was she tied to hearth and home, Judy didn’t even know how to drive. That, along with many other things in Judy DeSantos’s life, would soon change.

  Nancy was three years older than Judy. The two sisters were about as different as one could imagine. Where Judy was heavy for her size, Nancy was short and skinny; where Judy tended to hang back because of her shyness, Nancy was outgoing, entertaining, assertive, and “quite pretty,” as Judy would later describe her. When they were little girls growing up in New Bedford, Nancy always took the lead, cajoling Judy into taking chances.

  “She was the optimist, I was the pessimist. I still am a pessimist,” Judy said later, after Nancy was dead. “She would trust everyone and I would trust no one. I was shy. If you yelled at me, I would cry.” Nancy would yell right back.

  “Well, we played the normal kids’ games. We went roller skating, things like that,” Judy recalled. “Growing up, we played with the dolls and normal girl stuff that you do. It was a loving household, it was a two-parent family. I remember the time when she made me climb a tree. And then wouldn’t help me get out of the tree. That always has stuck with me, because I was afraid. But she was never afraid. She did well in school, went on from school, she married right away when she got out of high school.”

  Unlike Judy, Nancy “made friends easily.” Nancy was Judy’s idol, in some ways; “She was who I wanted to be,” Judy said.

  But while most of Nancy’s twenties were normal—“Nancy was the woman who made the cookies for the bake sales at the schools, and Nancy would load up her car and bring the kids to apple picking or whatever, there were always kids at the house and she would have slumber parties,” Judy recalled—by Nancy
’s early thirties, things started going wrong.

  A divorce was followed by a boyfriend who first fathered one of her two children, and then left her for another woman. One day, Nancy accompanied a friend to see someone at the Bristol County House of Corrections—the county jail—and there met a smooth-talking, dominating man named Frankie Pina.

  Frankie was no relation to Ron Pina. In fact, they were about as far apart socially, psychologically, and economically as possible. Frankie was from the Boston area, and had a long arrest record for petty crime—burglary, robbery, assault, fraud. He was a prisoner in the jail when Nancy Paiva first met him. Nancy fell for him.

  At first Judy thought Frankie might be all right. He often called Judy’s house to talk to Nancy, who sometimes stayed at Judy’s overnight. Frankie told Judy that he’d had some troubles, but after he got out of jail he was going to straighten his life out. He really loved Nancy, Frankie said, and he wanted to help take care of Nancy’s kids. Judy believed him. It seemed to her that Nancy was happy with Frankie’s attentions.

  Frankie got out of jail in mid-1985, and almost immediately moved in with Nancy and her two daughters, Jill, then 14, and Jolene, then 10. Judy didn’t see as much of Nancy after that. At one point Nancy declared bankruptcy; Kenny Ponte became her attorney. Later Nancy worked for Kenny as a part-time secretary, and after that, Nancy got a job in a video-rental store.

  But then the relationship between Nancy and Frankie started going downhill. It was some time after Frankie moved in that Jill told Judy an attorney from Boston had driven down to visit Frankie, and that Frankie had beaten Nancy up in front of the lawyer; the lawyer, who was not Kenny Ponte, hadn’t done a thing to stop it. Nancy hinted to Judy that Frankie was up to something illegal or possibly dangerous with the Boston lawyer, whoever he was. Judy later came to believe that the mysterious lawyer might have had something to do with Kenny Ponte, although there was never any evidence of that.