Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  As he pressed Rochelle for more information, Rochelle grew more and more nervous. Dextradeur told Rochelle he wanted to see her at police headquarters the following day, and while Rochelle agreed to come, that afternoon—April 27, 1988—was the last time anyone definitely saw Rochelle Clifford alive; and the date would later become of critical importance in the Highway Murder investigation.

  A few weeks after both Rochelle and Kenny Ponte had promised to come see him, but did not, Dextradeur heard new information about Ponte, Swire, and Rochelle. It appeared that someone had burglarized Ponte’s downtown New Bedford house, taking several items, including, possibly, a handgun.

  Was this the same pistol Ponte had allegedly used to threaten Swire? If so, why was it taken? To blackmail Ponte, perhaps? Or had the burglary actually taken place before the supposed Easter Sunday threats? Was that the real reason Ponte had accosted Swire? Dextradeur didn’t know, but the word on the street was, Ponte was claiming that the burglars had been Swire, Rochelle, and possibly Swire’s girlfriend. Maybe that was why Rochelle was so nervous about Ponte when Dextradeur had quizzed her on April 27—Rochelle was afraid that if the truth about the encounter emerged, she would be implicated in a burglary.

  The only way to clear up the matter was to find Rochelle Clifford, and talk to her again. But Dextradeur did not know in late April and early May of 1988 that Rochelle was probably no longer capable of talking. By late May, her body was almost certainly freshly dead, lying in a gravel pit some ten miles west of New Bedford, where it would not be discovered until nearly six months later—when Detective Sergeant John Dextradeur was retired from the New Bedford Police Department.

  Although Dextradeur’s information about the movements of Rochelle Clifford and Kenny Ponte in the spring of 1988 was later to be crucial in Pina’s effort to investigate the Highway Murders, in retrospect, the true relevance of the information has to remain uncertain.

  If one assumes that the Highway Murderer was someone who knew the victims personally, as Pina and others eventually concluded, then Dextradeur’s information was important, and did point toward Ponte, among others; but if, as the troopers believed, the killer was someone unknown to the victims, Dextradeur’s information had relatively little value.

  What difference did it really make if Kenny Ponte, Roger Swire, or Frankie Pina was seen with Rochelle Clifford, or Nancy Paiva, or anyone else, for that matter, if the killer was a prostitution customer who had picked up the missing women at random? None, of course. Indeed, trying to resolve all the riddles of these relationships would be a giant wild-goose chase, productive of froth and foam, but little else. That was largely the attitude of the state troopers at this, the true beginning of the Highway Murder investigation; and in that, it was an attitude almost completely rejected by Pina himself, as we shall see.

  19

  “I Think We Got One …”

  The day after the big police meeting, on December 1, 1988, Josie the dog and her friends were busy again, this time along the east side of Route 140—the northbound highway where the skeleton with the broken jaw had been found the previous July 2. Just before 3 in the afternoon Josie alerted once more, just over the Freetown-New Bedford line, about two miles south of the July 2 discovery. District Attorney Pina himself came to the scene. Returning from a meeting in Boston, he saw the police activity by the side of the road and stopped.

  “I see all the cars there and I saw our troopers,” Pina recalled later. Pina drove across the grassy center divider of Route 140 and pulled up to the state police standing on the side of the road.

  “What’s up?” Pina asked.

  “I think we got one,” the trooper told Pina. Pina got out of his car.

  “The dogs are going back and forth and then they’re showing me how the dog is keying in on an area,” Pina remembered. “Well, I went over there and I saw her …”

  The latest victim was fully clothed. She lay in the brush and weeds, an article of consumption to a killer, a human being reduced to a thing. A sack of spare clothes lay nearby.

  Viewing the victim in the posture where her killer had left her affected Pina deeply. It was one thing to sit in an office, Pina thought, hearing about murders, another thing entirely to see the actual result of such violence. Robbed of life, a murder victim, found by the side of an isolated road miles away from friends and family, far from the normal pathways of living, has a pathetic, vulnerable quality, no matter what their living past. The victim—clearly another woman, according to the experts—spoke to Pina in an emotional way.

  “I saw the condition she was in,” Pina said later. “I saw the position she was in and I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”

  For ten years Ron Pina had been district attorney in Bristol County. He’d attended autopsies, and learned that it wasn’t really necessary—at least not for his part of the job. But seeing the skeletonized remains of the unknown woman off the east side of Route 140 on December 1, 1988, somehow ignited Ron Pina. It was more than his job; it was more than politics. What was he good for, if it wasn’t to catch the person who would do such a thing?

  Hey, what am I doing here? Pina thought to himself. I mean, if this, if this is what I’m supposed to do and this is my job, I’m gonna do it. It was at that point, Pina later recalled, that he became committed; others, however, later came to see Pina as obsessed.

  Just how much of Pina’s fervent desire to catch the dead woman’s killer had to do with his anger and shock at the killer’s actions, and how much had to do with Pina’s by-now nearly reflexive penchant for publicity would remain in dispute for years after that first day of December in 1988. While it might be uncharitable, some of those intimately familiar with Pina’s previous posturing concluded that, at that exact moment, Pina realized that the Highway Murders might be his ticket to national fame and fortune, and possibly, higher political office. Whatever his motivation, it didn’t take Ronnie long to talk again to the news media.

  “It’s just crazy,” Pina told Maureen Boyle later that afternoon. “It’s the same thing, a body off the road. It would seem to be a pattern. It looks like it’s one person or persons.”

  What sort of pattern? Boyle asked. The highways, Pina noted: all of the five victims had been found off the side of the major highways going into and out of New Bedford.

  Boyle pressed Pina further. What’s being done? she asked. Pina told her that investigators had reviewed 14 unsolved homicides in Bristol County, as well as several in Rhode Island. And, Pina said, he intended to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation to do face reconstructions. Face reconstructions? Pina explained that sometimes experts could examine a skull and attempt to reconstruct what the flesh on such a skull might have looked like in order to help identify the victim—just as in the movie Gorky Park. “We want a face to put on these women,” he said.

  The state police told Boyle that the latest victim might have been dead about a year, but that an autopsy would be necessary to know for sure. There was, the troopers told Boyle, no obvious cause of death—unlike the earlier victim on July 2, when a brassiere around the neck had obviously been used to strangle the victim.

  Indeed, the presence of clothing on the victim’s body was a significant difference from the four earlier victims. Did the fact that the latest woman was still dressed mean a different killer from the first four? Did it mean anything at all?

  Or was it possible that a single killer—by now so into his hate frenzy—couldn’t care less that clothing found with his victim might help with her identification?

  The assessment of that issue, Gonsalves knew, depended on who the victim was, as well as when she had been killed. Serial killers, he knew, often proceeded through dimensions of control of their victims. Taking control of clothing was an indication of such control. Sometimes removal, or even theft, of the clothes indicated a victim who had been killed by someone experienced in killing; in other cases, leaving the clothes could be construed as an oversight by a killer, showing that the
killer had less experience in killing.

  But alternatively, leaving a dressed victim might show contempt for the police—an indication that the killer had so little belief in the efficacy of the police that it was safe to leave the clothes behind. That in turn could mean that the killer was quite proficient at murder. To Gonsalves, Pina, Joe Delaney, and Maryann Dill, that was an unnerving thought. No one communicated any of these possibilities to Boyle.

  At that point, however, events were about to accelerate.

  20

  Not the General Public

  On the same day she reported on the latest discovered skeleton, Boyle talked to a Weld Square woman who told her a horrifying story.

  Several months before all the skeletons began turning up, the woman told Boyle, she’d been picked up by a man who drove her to the same general area on I-195 where the skeletons were later found. The night was dark and rainy, the woman recalled. The man drove his white pickup truck into a wooded area, then suddenly produced a knife and demanded that she take off her clothes.

  After removing some of her clothes, the woman took a chance and jumped out of the truck, running for the trees. The man started the truck and tried to run her over. The woman hid in the brush until the man drove off, then tried to pick her way through the trees to I-195. Just as she reached the roadway, the man leaped out of the drainage ditch with his knife, tackled her, and threw her to the ground. Burying the knife in the mud next to her head, the man succeeded in raping her. The woman was sure she was about to die. But for some reason, the man retrieved his knife and ran back to his truck and drove off. “I never came so close to death in my life,” the woman told Boyle.

  Here, then, was a real lead on the possible killer: a man in a white truck, described as being in his thirties with dirty blond hair and scars on his face, driving a white pickup truck, wielding a knife, raping a woman from Weld Square in the same area where the skeletons were later found. Boyle’s report created a new sensation; it also helped link the skeletons to the Weld Square subculture irreversibly, at least in the public mind.

  That was a link almost immediately strengthened by District Attorney Pina.

  “DA Probes Weld Square Links to Killings,” read the headline in the Standard-Times. In an interview with Boyle, Pina said the deaths appeared to be connected to drugs or prostitution as practiced in the Weld Square area. Pina added that police had recovered a fingerprint from one of the victims, and the print had been tentatively linked to a woman who had a history of drug use and prostitution activity in the Weld Square neighborhood.

  The subtext of Pina’s remark, however, was a message to the rest of New Bedford that the murders were the natural outcome of lives of vice. “There is no cause for the general public to be alarmed for their safety,” Pina added.

  Pina’s attempt to narrow the focus of concern about the murder to those associated with Weld Square had two immediate effects. First, it relieved the “general public” of anxiety that a mad killer might get them; after all, according to the district attorney, to avoid being murdered all one had to do was stay away from drugs, prostitution, and Weld Square.

  Second, it sent out an alarm to those women who were still to be found in the Weld Square area, and helped lay the groundwork for better cooperation between the habitués of Weld Square and the police. Telling a potential murder victim they are a target does wonders for communications.

  But Pina’s constriction of the danger zone to Weld Square also had a secondary consequence: once the “general public” realized the murders had little to do with them, it became a sort of sideshow—something to be observed, or commented on, for the average person, not their affair, but instead the inevitable result of succumbing to sin and degradation, a sort of divine retribution for doing bad.

  The same day Pina was tying the murders to Weld Square, medical experts in Boston succeeded in identifying the first of the five victims—the skeleton found on November 29 under the trees off to the north side of the westbound on-ramp to I-195 from Reed Road, the fourth actually discovered. A partial fingerprint led investigators to police records for Dawn Mendes—the woman reported missing to the New Bedford Police Department in September, while Dextradeur was on his earlier medical leave. The identification of Dawn Mendes empirically validated for the first time Dextradeur’s fears for the missing women.

  “I-195 Body is City Prostitute’s,” the Standard-Times headlined. Boyle went on to document the prostitution connection: Mendes, 25, and the mother of a five-year-old, had an arrest record for prostituting, and was possibly last seen in the Weld Square area. Dawn had last been seen by her family on September 4, 1988, when she left to go to a baby shower at a relative’s nearby apartment. To get there, however, Dawn would likely have passed through Weld Square, and police concluded that it was in that area that Dawn had somehow met the killer.

  The following day, Boyle tried to soften the portrayal of Dawn Mendes by interviewing Dawn’s mother, Charlotte Mendes, and trying to cast a softer light on Dawn and her life.

  “Maybe I’m one of the lucky ones,” Charlotte told Boyle. “At least I know what happened.” Dawn’s mother described her as devoted to her five-year-old and close to her family—a much different portrait than that called to mind with the unadorned prostitute label.

  “I’m not happy that she’s gone,” Charlotte continued, “but now she won’t have to walk the streets, she won’t be beaten and abused. She’s at peace now, and hopefully they’ll find who did it.”

  Over the next several days, Josie the dog and her cohorts were back out on the highways leading from New Bedford. By this time, the Highway Murders had gained wide regional notoriety. News media from Boston, Providence, and other places streamed into New Bedford, setting up cameras to record the dogs as they continued their search. Relations between the media and the police grew tense as the reporters and cameramen crowded into the search areas. At one point a dog got a whiff of a reporter and alerted, bounding into the traffic lane on I-195, where it was barely missed by a passing truck. The police said they would arrest anyone who ignored warnings to stay back from the search area.

  Meanwhile, Gonsalves and Dill began rounding up more dental records for Dextradeur’s remaining missing five, and sending them to Dr. Douglas Ubelaker, an expert on skeletons at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who often did consulting work on forensic pathology for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  On December 7, 1988, Ubelaker was able to make positive identification of two more skeletons—the July 2 remains, and those discovered July 30. Judy DeSantos had been right after all. The victim she had been sure was her sister Nancy Paiva was Nancy Paiva.

  The July 2 victim, the first to have been discovered, turned out to have been Debra Medeiros, a drug user and occasional prostitute last seen in New Bedford in late May 1988.

  When he heard about the Medeiros identification, Sergeant Alan Alves of Freetown was shocked. Medeiros, he knew, had been one of his most reliable informants. Now Alves, the area’s expert on both Satanism and Santeria (sometimes practiced by a few residents in the New Bedford community) began to wonder whether the murders were the work of devil worshippers. Stranger things had happened in New Bedford, he knew.

  As if to give Alves’s ruminations credibility, the day after Debbie Medeiros’s remains were identified, the Standard-Times reported that more satanic markings and artifacts had been found in the Freetown State Forest just north of I-195. The story didn’t quote Alves, but noted that a 1979 triple murder case involving satanic symbols in the forest had involved New Bedford prostitutes …

  21

  “Ron Pina Should Shut His Mouth”

  Ever since the discovery of the Election Day remains, Judy DeSantos had been waiting to hear the dreaded news that her sister was dead. First days passed, then weeks. Despite the dental charts she had given to Dextradeur, who had assured her they had been passed on to the state police, there was no news. Later, Gonsalves was to tell Maureen Boy
le that the dental charts for Nancy found by Judy were out of date, so that it was impossible to determine whether the charts matched any of the victims.

  The enduring puzzle, however, was why Nancy Paiva’s clothes and jewelry were found near a skeleton that her dental charts did not match. In other words, how did Nancy’s clothes and jewelry come to be near a body, the Election Day remains, that wasn’t hers?

  But when the July 30 skeleton was eventually identified as that of Nancy, it appeared, at least initially, that Nancy’s killer had taken Nancy’s clothes from the earlier I-195 place, and put them at the Election Day site at Reed Road, possibly in an effort to confuse the police as to each victim’s true identity.

  But why? Why was it so important for the killer to shift the clothing with Nancy Paiva’s remains and the Election Day skeleton, when he hadn’t bothered to do the same with Debbie Medeiros or Dawn Mendes, or with the latest discovery, the fully clothed body just found on Route 140? It didn’t make much sense. What was so important about Nancy?

  Judy learned of Nancy’s identification on December 6, when Gonsalves and Dill called her to tell her that a positive identification had at last been made. After four months of having her hopes repeatedly raised and dashed, of chasing all around New Bedford to check out putative sightings of her lost sister, Judy at first didn’t know what to think. After a few minutes, however, she knew: she was plenty mad—all over again.

  Why hadn’t the identification come far sooner? Hadn’t she tracked down Nancy’s dental charts, just as Dextradeur had suggested? Didn’t the New Bedford police ever talk to the state police? Wasn’t this just more evidence of police indifference to drug addicts? Gonsalves warned her that Nancy’s identification would be released to the news media. Judy might want to be prepared for an onslaught of reporters, perhaps even make herself scarce, Gonsalves suggested.