Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  As 1985 turned into 1986, Nancy often went to stay with Judy to keep away from Frankie. Nancy told Judy that Frankie was stealing her money and her food stamps. Judy began giving Nancy money to help her out. Soon relations between Frankie and Judy went into the deep freeze, especially after Judy tried to convince Nancy to dump Frankie. But for some reason, Nancy always went back to Frankie, and the cycle began again.

  Meanwhile, Jill and Jolene went back and forth between Nancy’s house and Judy’s, bringing tales of Frankie’s brutal behavior. By that time Frankie’s beatings of Nancy had also gained the attention of the New Bedford Police, who were frequently called to Nancy’s house to keep Frankie away from Nancy. Still, Nancy would never file any complaints against Frankie, and allowed the police to think of her as Frankie’s wife, “Nancy Pina.” It wasn’t until later that Judy understood why.

  That day came in early November 1987, when Nancy sold her microwave oven to Judy for $150. Judy knew the microwave had cost Nancy $500; she figured that Frankie had been stealing from Nancy again, and that Nancy needed the money to pay pressing bills.

  “So I said, ‘All right,’ and I gave her eighty, because that was all I had. I told her I’d go to the bank in the morning, and I’d give her the rest of the money. But what happened was, in the morning, no microwave. But I got a call from Frankie …”

  “You gave Nancy money for that microwave?” Frankie asked Judy.

  “Yeah,” said Judy, “and now I want the microwave.”

  “Well, you’re not getting the damn microwave,” Frankie told Judy, “you’re not getting it, you hear me? Do you want to know why she’s selling it? Do you wanna know?”

  In the background Judy could hear Nancy crying, begging Frankie: “Don’t tell her, please don’t tell her, don’t, don’t, don’t tell her …”

  “Your sister is doin’ heroin,” Frankie told Judy. He laughed. “That’s where your money went, for heroin!”

  Judy sat at the table, numb. “I had a cup of coffee and I was shaking,” she remembered later. “I started telling Frank I was gonna kill him. Then my husband took the phone, because he didn’t know what was going on. He started saying, ‘Leave my wife alone’ and that sort of thing. I told him, ‘I’m going over there, I’m gonna kill the sonofabitch, I don’t care, I’m gonna kill him.’” But Judy didn’t kill anyone. Instead, she convinced her sister to go into a drug treatment center.

  “I said, ‘Nancy, you need help. Let me help you, I’ll take the kids. You gotta get rid of Frankie.’ Now, I think, that’s probably a mistake that I made.” Someone reported Nancy to the state’s Department of Social Services, which threatened to take Jill and Jolene away from Nancy if she didn’t get the drug treatment. A goal of the treatment was to help Nancy get away from Frankie, Judy said.

  “But I think we did it wrong. You know, I kept saying, ‘You gotta get away from him, you gotta get away from him. It’s him.’ And everybody kept saying the same thing. But I think sometimes the more you say it, the worse you make it.

  “Now, I can see that. They threatened to take her children away from her, so that’s why she entered the treatment center, which is a wrong thing to do. You don’t say ‘We’re gonna take the one thing you love, the only thing in life that you have,’ and use that against someone. So she really didn’t get the help. In two weeks, she was out and, Frankie was back.”

  Afterward, Nancy rarely talked to Judy; while Judy, for her part, was convinced that when Nancy did call, it was only because Nancy wanted something from her, and Judy had resolved to force her sister to confront her problems with so-called tough love, and if that meant denying Nancy money or other forms of support, so be it. Later, Judy found out that Frankie beat Nancy to keep her away from her sister. For the better part of eight months, the two sisters, once so close, barely spoke to each other.

  Thus, on July 7, 1988, Judy resolutely ignored Nancy as she and the kids made their way up the street. But that was the last time Judy ever saw her sister.

  9

  Whispers

  Nancy Paiva’s descent into the hell of heroin came to an end sometime that same evening.

  The exact circumstances of Nancy’s disappearance remain obscure. What is known is that sometime during the afternoon, Nancy was sitting in a south end New Bedford bar called Whispers, along with Frankie Pina, and several other people.

  According to some of those present, an argument between Nancy and Frankie ensued, with Frankie ordering Nancy to leave the bar. Nancy left. An acquaintance later told Judy DeSantos that she saw Nancy walking up the street toward her house around 7 P.M., with tears in her eyes. It was raining. That was the last time anyone saw Nancy Paiva alive.

  The Whispers Pub was a notorious hangout in New Bedford’s south end. Later, it would be alleged in federal court that the establishment was the center of a cocaine ring that handled sales of nearly $5.2 million each year.

  Almost all of these sales went to New Bedford residents—including, it would later be learned—to many of the victims of the Highway Killer. Cocaine was so easy to procure in the bar that a line of would-be buyers often formed, heading down the stairs to the basement to wait their turn to purchase the drug. It was just after leaving Whispers that Nancy was last seen.

  Two days later, after the afternoon Nancy left Whispers, Sergeant John Dextradeur of the New Bedford Police Department was on his way back to the detectives’ squad room, when he saw something that disturbed him. Dextradeur dropped what he was doing and walked over to the front desk to eavesdrop.

  The man at the counter was Frankie Pina, and Dextradeur knew him well. In fact Dextradeur had once arrested Frankie for armed robbery, and those charges were still pending.

  Now Frankie wanted to file a complaint with the police, and Dextradeur was really bothered.

  “I don’t know why,” he said later. “I just felt that it was out of character for Mr. Pina to be casually standing at the front desk of the police lobby speaking to an officer. Usually when Mr. Pina was at the desk in the lobby, he was there in handcuffs, against his wishes.”

  Learning that Frankie was reporting “Nancy Pina” as a missing person made Dextradeur feel even more uncomfortable.

  The last time the detective had seen Frankie—in April 1988—Frankie had been with another woman, who appeared to have gone missing as well. Twenty-six-year-old Rochelle Clifford had been with Frankie on April 27, 1988, but had seemingly vanished shortly thereafter.

  That earlier disappearance was irritating to Dextradeur, because Rochelle Clifford was a key witness in two open cases Detective Dextradeur had in his files, one a rape, and the other an assault; if Dextradeur could only find Clifford, he might be able to resolve those two cases and get busy on something else. But for two months Rochelle Clifford had been nowhere to be found, and here again was Frankie Pina, now talking about a second woman connected to him, who was also missing—the woman he lived with, in fact. To Dextradeur, that seemed to make Frankie two for two. It was enough to make a detective think.

  Even as Frankie was known to the cops in New Bedford, so was Nancy Paiva—actually, of course, as “Nancy Pina,” although Nancy and Frankie had never been married. The way the police knew Nancy was as Frankie’s regular victim: countless times police had been called to “Nancy Pina’s” Morgan Street apartment to keep Frankie from beating Nancy, or at least rescue her after he’d already started.

  Now, with Frankie reporting the woman he beat so often as newly missing, as well as Frankie’s earlier connection to Rochelle Clifford, Dextradeur was immediately suspicious of Frankie. Dextradeur wanted to know more, so he told Frankie he would personally investigate Nancy’s disappearance, even though handling missing persons cases was not his job. Actually, what Dextradeur had in mind was investigating Frankie.

  Dextradeur and Frankie moved out to the front steps of the police station, and talked for more than an hour about Nancy, Rochelle Clifford, and Frankie’s most recent criminal activities. Frankie, in fact, was ab
out to go to jail again on yet another assault charge.

  As Dextradeur put it later, “I just felt uncomfortable with the whole thing … It was really strange. It was just that I was sitting there talking to a guy that I can’t gather any respect for, knowing his background. And he’s showing me this great love and concern for this girl that he used to beat the hell out of so regularly.”

  Why was Frankie suddenly worrying about Nancy? Had Frankie done something to Nancy, and was he now trying to cover it up by acting worried? Had he likewise done something to Rochelle Clifford? Dextradeur assured Frankie that he would give Nancy’s disappearance an all-out effort.

  The next day, Judy DeSantos learned of Nancy’s disappearance for the first time. She found out from Nancy’s daughter Jill, who heard from Jolene. “Jolene says Mom hasn’t been home for three days,” Jill told Judy. “Do you know where she is?”

  It wasn’t unusual for Nancy to stay away from Frankie, Judy knew, but almost always before, she had gone to stay with Judy, or sometimes with friends. Judy called around to see if anyone had seen Nancy, but no one had. She waited for two more days, thinking Nancy might turn up, but Nancy didn’t. By this time Judy was really worried about her sister.

  She thought about calling the police, but was intimidated by the idea of talking to the authorities. She thought the police might think she was being hysterical. But through a friend, Judy learned the name of a detective in the department. Judy called and reported that her sister, Nancy Paiva, was missing. Judy also told the police that her sister was addicted to heroin. That was a mistake, Judy decided later, because then the detective told her that Judy just had to understand that “junkies disappear all the time.”

  Judy knew that wasn’t true about Nancy, however. No matter how badly addicted Nancy was, she always made an effort to maintain contact with her children, or with Judy herself. It just wasn’t in Nancy’s nature to disappear without leaving word with someone. But because Judy was intimidated by the confident attitude of the police, and secretly ashamed of Nancy’s addiction, she at first meekly accepted the department’s cavalier verdict about her sister. She sat down by the telephone and waited for Nancy to call.

  10

  Missing

  On the evening of July 15, 1988, Donald Santos drove his wife Mary Rose into the downtown core of New Bedford from their apartment in the south end, and dropped her off at a tavern across the street from the Greyhound bus station.

  Mary Rose Santos was 26 years old, a somewhat heavy young woman with a pleasant, smiling face. The tavern, called the Quarterdeck Lounge, was a rough place of low ceilings, grime, music, and cheap beer. It was one of three taverns in New Bedford owned by a woman named Faith Alameida, and as matters unfolded, would be one of the four or five places that linked the 11 victims of the so-called Highway Killer to each other.

  For one thing, Mary Rose Santos was well known to Nancy Paiva and Frankie Pina, who had been frequent patrons of all three of the Alameida taverns, along with many of the other victims; Nancy Paiva, in fact, had once worked for Faith Alameida’s Town Tavern, a place also frequented by Mary Rose Santos and her husband Donald.

  For another, Mary Rose had a drug habit, just as each of the other victims also suffered from drug addictions. But it would be months before these and still other interconnections between the 11 known Highway Murder victims would become fully understood.

  Just why Donald Santos dropped his wife of eight years off at the tavern remains unclear. Investigators later determined that sometime around 1 A.M. Mary Rose left the tavern to visit a friend who lived nearby. A short time after that, Mary Rose, the mother of two young sons, simply vanished. Police later determined that Mary Rose had supposedly been headed toward the city’s red-light district when she was last seen.

  A day or so later, Donald Santos reported Mary Rose missing to the New Bedford police. The report went into the department’s missing persons unit, where it was promptly filed and forgotten—for the moment.

  The day after Mary Rose disappeared, Frankie Pina was back in court, this time appealing an earlier assault conviction. The case was assigned to a court in Fall River, Massachusetts, a small city lying about midway between New Bedford and Providence, Rhode Island. While awaiting his hearing, Frankie was booked into the Bristol County House of Corrections. From the jail, Frankie maintained daily telephone contact with Detective John Dextradeur, who kept assuring Frankie that he was doing everything he could to locate Nancy.

  Meanwhile, Judy DeSantos also continued looking for her sister. She called numerous people who knew Nancy, and asked them to tell Nancy to call her if they saw her. Soon Judy was getting reports from all over New Bedford from people who said they had seen Nancy at one place or another. Because she didn’t know how to drive, Judy prevailed upon friends to take her to those locations, or go themselves to see if Nancy was there. But none of the reports panned out.

  Donald Santos, however, took a slightly different tack in searching for his wife, Mary Rose. He went to the newspapers.

  In a story published about a week after Mary Rose Santos disappeared, Donald Santos told Maureen Boyle, a reporter for the New Bedford Standard-Times, that Mary Rose was missing.

  “I’m worried sick,” Donald Santos told Boyle. He said he’d spent hours driving around the streets of New Bedford looking for his wife. At night, he continued, he would fall asleep clutching Mary Rose’s photograph. Santos told Boyle he believed that his wife was dead. Their two sons, five and seven, missed their mother terribly, Donald Santos said. The five-year-old son, Donald Santos added, wanted to know whether he could die, too, so he could see his mother again.

  Boyle’s story was placed on an inside page of the newspaper, but it did not escape the attention of Judy DeSantos. Learning of another woman’s disappearance galvanized Judy. She called the police again, and this time was connected with John Dextradeur.

  Judy explained that her sister was missing, the same as Mary Rose Santos. Dextradeur wanted to know who Judy was, and Judy explained that she was Nancy Paiva’s sister. Dextradeur said he’d never heard of Nancy Paiva. After a few minutes, Dextradeur and Judy got the situation straightened out. The woman Dextradeur thought was Nancy Pina was really Nancy Paiva.

  Nancy had never been married to Frankie, Judy told the New Bedford detective. Her name was Paiva, not Pina. Well, Dextradeur demanded, why hadn’t Judy called sooner? Judy was embarrassed to admit that she had been afraid to talk again to the police, especially after the police had first told her that “junkies disappear all the time.”

  Now Dextradeur told Judy that Frankie had reported “Nancy Pina” missing almost a week earlier. Judy got mad at Frankie all over again for his failure to call her about Nancy’s disappearance—anyway, she thought, what made Frankie so sure Nancy wasn’t at Judy’s house?—and on his insistence that Nancy was his wife. But both Judy and Dextradeur were agreed on one thing: it seemed completely out of character for Frankie to have called the police to report Nancy’s disappearance.

  After all, Nancy had left Frankie for brief periods before, and Frankie hadn’t bothered to call the police on those occasions, even when he had no idea where she might have gone. Why was Frankie calling police this time? “Don’t you think that’s strange?” Dextradeur asked Judy. Judy thought it was strange. Judy thought Dextradeur was extremely suspicious of Frankie’s role, whatever it might have been, in Nancy’s disappearance.

  Judy arranged to meet with Dextradeur. The detective at first didn’t believe the two women were sisters because of their different appearance. And, Dextradeur explained, Frankie had told him that Nancy was from the Cape Verde Islands—meaning, Judy thought, that Frankie had implied to Dextradeur that Nancy was part black. Just why Frankie had given this misleading description of the woman he wanted Dextradeur to find was puzzling, to say the least.

  Judy, however, had an idea. She wanted to get into Nancy’s public housing project apartment to see if there were any indications there of Nancy’s wh
ereabouts. Now that Frankie was in jail, Judy thought she could get into Nancy’s apartment without interference. Maybe there would be some notes or letters that would shed light on Nancy’s disappearance. She met Dextradeur in front of Nancy’s apartment, and while Dextradeur stood on the sidewalk, Judy tried the apartment key she’d obtained from Jolene, who by now was living with other relatives. But the key didn’t work. Someone had tampered with the lock. Looking through the windows, Judy could see that somebody was living there; if it wasn’t Nancy, and Frankie was in jail, who was it?

  By this time, Dextradeur was in something of a quandary. He was, after all, a sergeant in the detective unit assigned to handle major crimes, like assault and rape. It wasn’t his job to deal with missing persons. That job belonged to the department’s juvenile division, whose efforts were confined to locating little kids, not adults.

  Still, Dextradeur had a bad feeling about these disappearances. First, Rochelle Clifford had vanished; then Nancy Paiva, followed by Mary Rose Santos. It seemed to Dextradeur that something more was going on than the usual transience of drug addicts.

  All of the women, for instance, had young children, while two of them had fixed abodes. At least two of the three were connected with Frankie Pina, and Mary Rose Santos at least knew who Frankie and Nancy were, Dextradeur discovered, and occasionally spent time in the three taverns owned by Faith Alameida, as well as in the Whispers bar, where Frankie and Nancy were seen on the afternoon of Nancy’s disappearance. But when Dextradeur tried to point out these connections to his superiors, he was told to get back to work on the tasks he was assigned to do, not add to his already heavy workload by trying to take on missing persons work as well.