Now the state police wanted to know who Nancy’s dentist had been, so that Nancy’s dental charts could be compared with the teeth found with the latest skeleton. Thus, Judy learned for the first time that the charts she had told Dextradeur about months earlier had never found their way to the state police; or if they had, they had never been examined. Judy was stunned.
To Judy, identification of the clothing meant only one thing—the skeleton discovered on Election Day was probably that of her sister, Nancy Paiva. Later, as detectives Gonsalves and Dill drove Judy and her nieces home, Jill and Jolene fell into an emotional dispute about some of the clothing, arguing whether it was really Nancy’s. Judy felt like bursting into tears, and Jill and Jolene’s squabble, as much a part of their own reaction to the trauma of seeing their mother’s clothes in a police station, nevertheless suddenly seemed unreal to Judy. Dill looked at Judy sitting in the backseat, smiled at her quietly, and told her that things would be all right. Judy knew they wouldn’t, but was grateful to Dill for trying to help.
Jose Gonsalves—known to nearly everyone in New Bedford as “Joe-sey Gone-Salves,” rather than the more traditional Jose—was a tall, rangy man in his early forties. Close-cropped, graying hair was slowly giving way to an emerging bald spot high on the back of his head, but Gonsalves was a man who looked like he had once been a terrific athlete, and whose still-lean frame packed a powerful build. Even in his neatly arranged office he still wore a large caliber semiautomatic pistol clipped to his belt. The walls of Gonsalves’s office were decorated with the usual interdepartmental memoranda, calendars, and the like, along with a child’s computer drawing of a smiling, uniformed trooper in the drill-instructor, Smokey-the-Bear hat worn by all those assigned to “the road,” as the troopers called highway duty; the computer printout was clearly labeled with an arrow: “Daddy,” it reported.
Gonsalves was not one of those police officers given to excitability. He preferred to work methodically, building fact upon fact. He innately distrusted quick bursts of sudden insight, and was suspicious of those who talked too much. He felt he understood Pina, or at least the circumstances that led Pina to mistrust the troopers; and he was clear enough about the events of the preceding years to see both the good things Pina had done, as well as some of the bad. He credited Pina with trying to run a professional office, and Pina’s attempts to keep politics and the police separate.
But he also saw Pina as someone who wasn’t particularly well trained in the techniques of investigation, especially interrogation. Pina’s quick mind and impatience too often worked against the district attorney, at least in Gonsalves’s view, and blinded Pina from possibilities that lay just beneath the surface. Nor was Pina as receptive as he should have been to others’ ideas, Gonsalves thought.
Beneath his poker face, and his phlegmatic approach, Gonsalves tried to keep a solid vein of sardonic humor well hidden, but it occasionally burst forth when absurdities couldn’t be denied. On those occasions, when something was manifestly ridiculous, Gonsalves’s eyes would crinkle and a wry grin would struggle through the controls. “Oh, wow,” Gonsalves would say, “oh, wow,” before looking away so that no one could see him laughing.
Gonsalves’s partner, Dill, was a woman in her early thirties, with short dark hair. Over the years she spent working with Gonsalves, she learned to understand how Gonsalves thought. When both officers were together, they often communicated with silent looks; later, both would sort out their impressions. Both officers were very good at developing information from sources, and by the time the Highway Murder investigation was well underway, Gonsalves and Dill would learn a great deal about the underbelly of one of the eastern seaboard’s toughest cities. Both would also conclude that the Highway Murderer, whoever he was, had picked up every one of his victims at random while they were practicing he trade of prostitution. That was a point of view, as tin e wore on, that would not be shared by Ron Pina.
Although Judy expected the identification of the Election Day skeleton to come quite quickly, a surprising problem soon developed: it appeared that the skeleton was not that of Nancy Paiva. For one thing, the Election Day skeleton had a partial dental plate, but Nancy’s dental charts showed nothing of the kind. But even more detailed examination of the teeth and their spacings—as unique an identifier as a fingerprint—likewise showed the Election Day skeleton was not Nancy.
Well, if it wasn’t Nancy, who was it? And how did Nancy’s clothes get into the trees? And where was Nancy? All of these were the big questions for Gonsalves and Dill as November neared an end.
Publicly, at least, Gonsalves refused to be drawn into speculation as to whether the three highway deaths were related; indeed, since he and Delaney and Dill were so far unable to identify any one of the three, it would be foolhardy to say anything substantive.
Already, Gonsalves knew, the news media was becoming intensely curious about what were soon being called the Highway Murders. Boyle’s report on the missing New Bedford women was adding to the curiosity. But still, Gonsalves worked hard to remain his usual phlegmatic self, keeping low key, trying to say little of significance.
Behind closed doors in the district attorney’s office, it was a different matter. Whatever he might tell the press, Gonsalves was convinced the cases were related; and he believed that there were yet more bodies to be discovered. In mid-November, after a two-hour discussion with Dextradeur, Gonsalves’s superior, Sergeant Gale Stevens, agreed with him. Arrangements were made to bring in three specially trained dogs from the Connecticut State Police to search among the woods along I-195. Gonsalves guessed that the killer, whoever he was, had a feeling for that roadway, and that a search would bring still more victims into the light.
17
The Dogs
Among the many talents possessed by dogs is an acute sense of smell. While other creatures have similar talents, millions of years of evolution have so developed the dog’s olfactory gift that it is possible for a dog to distinguish the most minute traces of a particular substance—particularly when the dog is trained to alert its human companion that a specific scent is present—but only that scent. Thus, using dogs required selection of a dog trained for the required task. Josie, a three-year-old German shepherd, was just such a specialist. She was trained to sniff out human corpses, which normally give off a strong odor of ammonia as they decompose.
The state police began their search on November 28, working westbound along the north side of I-195 between Faunce Corner Road and Reed Road—the area where the July 30 remains had been discovered. It by now seemed clear to Gonsalves that the killer had an affinity for dropping victims off the side of major highways leading out of New Bedford. Gonsalves had the idea that if there were more victims to be found, it was reasonable to assume that they might be found between the July 30 site and the Election Day remains at the interchange with Reed Road.
For nearly five hours on Monday, November 28, Josie and her handler, Connecticut State Trooper Andy Rebmann, worked in and out of the brush and trees along the north side of the highway. Two other similarly trained dogs wove in and out of the trees as well.
As talented as the dogs were, their handling required special sensitivities by their human partners. Because of their training and conditioning, dogs expect to be rewarded by their handlers when the required scent is detected. Working for too long without finding the requested scent frustrates the dogs, thereby making them harder to control. Five hours without finding anything was just about the dogs’ limit.
The following day, November 29, 1988, the search was begun again. A little after 2 P.M., as Rebmann and his dog were moving through the brush along the north side of the westbound I-195 on-ramp from Reed Road, Josie “alerted”—that is, indicated by her behavior that she had detected the required scent.
“Just show me where,” Rebmann said, and Josie led him into the brush, tail wagging furiously. There, concealed under a tree, lay the fourth set of skeletal remains found in the previous five mon
ths. The site was literally just across the highway from where the Election Day victim had been found only three weeks before.
The discovery of the new remains, so close to the skeleton found on Election Day, created a minor sensation in New Bedford. For the first time, District Attorney Pina publicly noted the killings.
“The fact that they’re all in the same area would lead you to believe that a person has done more than one killing,” he told the Standard-Times’ Boyle the day after the new skeleton was found. “I fell pretty confident that they are all connected somehow.” And, Pina added, “There may be more than just the four women.”
That same afternoon, November 30, 1988, state police met with New Bedford detectives to pool their information. They had little to pool, because none of the four skeletons so far discovered had been identified. It was hard to share information when nobody had much to share. The main topic was the six women reported missing from New Bedford—Rochelle Clifford, Nancy Paiva, Mary Rose Santos, Robin Rhodes, Sandy Botelho, and Dawn Mendes.
Gonsalves by now believed that Dextradeur’s fears for the missing women were exactly right. That was small comfort to Dextradeur, however. Late in October, Dextradeur took his retirement from the police department.
18
Memory Banks
Dextradeur’s involuntary absence from the police conclave of November 30, 1988, would later become a problem as the Highway Murder investigation proceeded, primarily because the information he held in his brain was not provided to all the investigators at one time, but instead dribbled in, piece by piece over the following year, as he remembered things and as bits of paper made their way into the hands of Ron Pina.
This gradual discovery of the ramifications of Dextradeur’s information, coming under circumstances of greater and greater pressure to solve the crimes as 1989 and 1990 unfolded, may in turn have given the Dextradeur information more weight than it would otherwise have deserved. Ultimately, Pina came to see Dextradeur’s information as far more important than did the state police.
Pina later asserted that as far as he could tell, in the beginning of the investigation, no one from the state police ever talked to Dextradeur. That wasn’t true, of course, but it does reveal something of the ineffective communications between the D.A. and his investigators. Pina believed no one talked to Dextradeur because the state troopers generally held the city police in low regard, and thereby automatically discounted the merits of Dextradeur’s information.
“Dextradeur had worked hard on the case,” Pina recalled, “and nobody had talked to Dextradeur.” It was only later, Pina insisted, when he and others took the investigation into their own hands, that the full dimensions of Dextradeur’s information were developed. The state police insist that Pina was wrong, that they did know what Dextradeur knew, although they acknowledge Dextradeur was not present for the information-sharing meeting of November 30, 1988. What is clear is that nobody at the meeting knew everything that Dextradeur knew, whatever its real importance.
In those days, the information-retrieval system of the New Bedford Police Department was still firmly rooted in the precomputer past, to the times of old when what police knew and believed about a possible crime was largely confined to the flesh-and-blood memory banks of individual detectives. Once the detective was gone, however, the memories tended to go with him.
Dextradeur, for example, knew several things about the missing women. He knew about Rochelle Clifford, for example, because Rochelle was both a victim and a witness in two separate cases he had been investigating—a rape, and an assault. He knew that Rochelle was missing under uncertain circumstances, just like Nancy Paiva, Mary Rose Santos, Sandy Botelho, Robin Rhodes, and Dawn Mendes.
But Dextradeur was probably the only person who had any real feel for what possibly linked the six cases together; he was certainly the only person who knew of a positive, clear link between Nancy Paiva, for example, and Rochelle Clifford.
Indeed, Dextradeur was aware that Rochelle Clifford had been living at Nancy Paiva’s apartment with Nancy and Frankie Pina just before her disappearance in late April 1988. Nancy didn’t like Rochelle, according to Jill and Jolene, Nancy’s daughters, but put up with Rochelle at Frankie’s insistence. In the end, however, Nancy threw Rochelle out of the apartment just before she was last seen. What wasn’t known was exactly when this happened.
Nevertheless, the case of Rochelle Clifford and her movements in the spring of 1988 would eventually lead Pina directly toward the man he remains convinced was deeply involved in the Highway Murders, Kenneth Ponte; but to understand how Pina reached this conclusion, it is necessary to understand what Dextradeur then knew about Rochelle Clifford—information that Dextradeur, because of his illness, was unable to provide to the assembled police that day on November 30, but which eventually came into Pina’s hands.
In the spring of 1988—at almost exactly the time the Highway Murders first began—Rochelle Clifford was a 28-year-old, pretty, diminutive young woman with dark expressive eyes and dark hair. Rochelle also had a serious drug problem, using both cocaine and heroin, according to her friends and acquaintances; she had a long record of arrests and failed attempts to make it through drug treatment programs.
Sometime in late 1987, Rochelle had delivered a baby, but the child was taken from her by authorities because of her drug habit. Later Rochelle had drifted into the New Bedford street scene. Rochelle’s mother in Falmouth, down on Cape Cod, had limited contact with her. At one point Rochelle moved into Nancy’s apartment to live with Nancy and Frankie, briefly, before Nancy ordered her out; on another occasion she stayed briefly with a doctor in nearby Dartmouth; and on a third occasion she’d left Ken Ponte’s home telephone number with a dentist. It thus appears that Rochelle, like many others in the fullness of addiction, slept where she could, as various places became available.
In any event, in the spring of 1988 a strange series of events unfolded that were ultimately to have a critical bearing on the investigation of the Highway Murder case, although Dextradeur had no way of knowing that, at the time the events were occurring.
The Clifford matter had begun on Easter Sunday, April 3, 1988, with a bizarre encounter between a New Bedford man named Roger Swire and a local lawyer—Kenneth Ponte.
As Swire related the story to police that day, he had been walking down the street with his girlfriend in the north end when another man—Ponte—had suddenly jumped out of a car and supposedly accosted him at gunpoint.
Ponte, Swire said, flashed a deputy sheriff’s badge in his face, pointed the gun at him, and accused him of raping Rochelle. Rochelle was sitting in Ponte’s car nearby, and Ponte had marched Swire over to the car and asked Rochelle if Swire had been the man who raped her. Swire said Rochelle agreed that Swire was the culprit, even though he wasn’t. That, at least, was Swire’s side of the story.
Later the same day, the police had returned to the same location, and found Ponte and Rochelle still present there. Ponte denied threatening Swire with a gun; Rochelle again said that Swire had raped her. Ponte asserted that he was a deputy sheriff, and therefore authorized to make arrests, so he hadn’t done anything wrong. The police officer merely took the report, shrugged, and passed it on to Detective Sergeant Dextradeur to sort out.
In some ways, the incident was typical of Dextradeur’s caseload: accusation and counteraccusation, probably seasoned by lies of omission if not commission.
The following day, April 4, 1988, Dextradeur had tried to get more information from Ponte, the lawyer.
Ponte told Dextradeur that he’d only been trying to help Rochelle Clifford, and that the two of them had been cruising the north end in Ponte’s car looking for the man who Rochelle said had raped her. They’d found Swire, and Ponte had told Swire to stay away from Rochelle. That was the whole story, said Ponte. But Dextradeur didn’t think it was the whole story, not by a long shot.
Dextradeur wanted Ponte to come to police headquarters for an interview, but somehow,
Ponte never got around to it. Meanwhile, the two cases—the alleged rape of Rochelle Clifford and the alleged assault (the threat at gunpoint) by Ponte against Roger Swire, remained unresolved in Dextradeur’s open-case files. Dextradeur realized in May of 1988 that he needed to talk to Rochelle Clifford if he were to make progress on either case.
But as the rest of April 1988, unfolded, Rochelle Clifford was nowhere to be found. Dextradeur kept after Ponte on Rochelle’s whereabouts, but Ponte wasn’t able to help him. Rochelle’s mother, Diane Clifford, of Falmouth, Massachusetts, also told Dextradeur that she didn’t know where Rochelle was. Diane told Dextradeur she hadn’t talked to Rochelle for several months.
Then, on April 27, 1988—three weeks after the Easter Sunday incident between Ponte and Swire—Dextradeur went to a possible trouble spot in the south end, where a man was seen with a shotgun. On the way back to the office, Dextradeur saw a woman who looked like Rochelle Clifford walking with a group of people. Dextradeur recognized one of the men in the group as Frankie Pina. He stopped his car and halted everyone for questioning.
After questioning Frankie briefly, Dextradeur pulled Rochelle aside and asked her about the two open cases, that is, about the reported rape as well as the reported assault by Ponte. Had Swire really raped her? Rochelle nodded. Yes. Had Ponte really threatened Swire with a pistol? Again, Rochelle said yes. Would Rochelle be willing to be a witness against both men? Rochelle told Dextradeur she would testify if it was necessary.
But Dextradeur was still suspicious about the whole thing. With all of his instincts, he seriously doubted that Ponte had threatened Swire with a gun merely because of Rochelle’s claims that she had been raped. He guessed there was something else going on between the two men, and that Rochelle was somehow involved—or, at least, knew what the truth was.
Killing Season Page 8
