Two days after Christmas, a Tufts University specialist made a fifth identification—the Election Day remains found with Nancy Paiva’s clothing on November 8, 1988. Deborah Greenlaw DeMello, 34, had walked away from a Rhode Island work release facility in June of 1988 while she was completing a sentence for a prostitution violation. Like Rochelle Clifford, Nancy Paiva, Dawn Mendes and Debra Medeiros, Deborah DeMello was a drug addict.
The latest identification answered one question, but posed a host of others. Did Deborah DeMello know Nancy Paiva? Was that how Nancy’s clothes and jewelry came to be in the place where Deborah’s skeleton was found? Frankie Pina now told the investigators that DeMello had never stayed at Nancy’s apartment. Jolene, however, thought Deborah’s picture seemed familiar. More checking seemed to show that acquaintances of Deborah DeMello saw her in New Bedford around July 11, 1988. By that time, of course, Frankie Pina was supposedly in jail—wasn’t he?—and Nancy had already disappeared.
But had Deborah DeMello somehow gained access to Nancy’s apartment? After all, Judy DeSantos was certain someone was living in the apartment after Nancy disappeared and Frankie was supposed to be in jail. Was that someone Deborah DeMello? Was that how Nancy’s clothes—and jewelry—found their way to the site of Deborah DeMello’ remains? Had Deborah been wearing Nancy’s clothes? Her jewelry? Or had the killer, as first supposed, actually gone back to Nancy’s site, reclaimed the clothes and jewelry, then taken the articles to the DeMello site for disposal? Would a killer have done that, even with jewelry?
Or, an even more disquieting possibility: perhaps the killer had been inside Nancy’s apartment in order to take the items to the DeMello site. Did that explain why there were two jackets at the DeMello scene? Why? To confuse the police? But at such risk of discovery? How would the killer know there was no one in the apartment?
Just about any way on the thought about the situation, the possibility existed that the killer was far more familiar with Nancy’s apartment than had previously been supposed. That in turn could help narrow the focus of suspects rather considerably.
Well, what about Frankie? Was Frankie really in jail, as everyone thought, during the middle of July 1988? The records weren’t clear; Dextrauder was sure Frankie had been locked up, because he recalled Frankie calling him from jail. But Dextrauder couldn’t be sure that Frankie wasn’t jailed sometime after July 11, 1988, when Debbie DeMello was last seen.
Frankie was known for his violent ways with women. Frankie knew Rochelle Clifford and as far as anyone knew for sure, was among the last to see her alive. Frankie lived with Nancy Paiva in the apartment, which Rochelle had stayed in, at least for a while, before she disappeared, just after she’d had an argument with Frankie. Deborah Greenlaw DeMello’s skeleton was found near Nancy’s clothes and jewelry, and it was therefore possible Deborah DeMello might have been at Nancy’s apartment; and it was also possible Frankie and Debbie had been in contact with each other.
But if it was truth that Deborah DeMello had been seen alive on July 11 and that Frankie had been in jail, Frankie couldn’t be the killer. And if one of the missings, Sandra Botelho, was also a victim of the Highway Killer, Frankie was supposed to have been in jail then, too. Most important, would Frankie have killed again—actually four more times—after having already attracted police interest by reporting Nancy’s disappearance? That seemed highly unlikely.
Finally, it did not appear that Frankie had a reliable means of transportation, and whoever the killer was, it seemed obvious that he had a working car or truck. All of this together seemed to let Frankie Pina out of the picture. Still, Trooper Delaney was given Frankie as a high priority for investigation. In every discussion with the police, however, it appeared that Frankie was both cooperative and candid. The police concluded that Frankie, despite his background, was probably not involved in the murders.
But was it someone who knew Frankie, and thereby knew the other women as well? That could pose a large problem for the police. Frankie was well-traveled throughout eastern Massachusetts; his voluminous criminal record was evidence of that. He knew hundreds of people all over the state—many of them shady characters, and therefore hard to find, and certainly not disposed to cooperate with police. What if the killer were someone who knew Frankie casually, someone who had used that connection to seem safe to the victims? That couldn’t be ruled out.
Then investigators discovered something new: in addition to knowing both Rochelle Clifford and Nancy Paiva, Kenny Ponte had been lawyer for Donald and Mary Rose Santos, and had also represented Sandra Botelho’s boyfriend, Craig Andrade. Were there other connections between the missing and dead women and Kenny Ponte? In a small city like New Bedford, it was certainly possible. Thus, at that point, just as Christmas approached, Kenny Ponte and Frankie Pina were running neck and neck for being the most likely to know something about the murders—whether they were aware of what they knew, or not.
Winter 1988–1989
“To this, in substance, he replied … he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of …”
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
23
The Saint
While Ron Pina and the state police were striving, with their various media interviews, to present a public image of dedicated, confident professionals wholly committed to finding the killer, the backstage reality was quite different.
Doubtless much of the problem dated back to the time six years earlier, when the brother of the man in charge of the state troopers ran against Pina for district attorney. Pina said then that he didn’t trust the troopers’ loyalty, and although things had been patched over, residual bitterness remained.
In the aftermath of the 1982 election fiasco, when Pina had effectively fired all of the troopers assigned to his office—after the fistfight with one of the troopers, in fact—Pina had hit on a new scheme to get more control over the investigative process. He decided to hire his own chief investigator. The man Pina picked for the job was a former state trooper and local politician named Robert St. Jean. St. Jean, inevitably, became known as “the Saint,” or sometimes, simply, “Saint.” However the troopers felt about him, Pina was sure that St. Jean was loyal to him.
The way Pina worked things out, the Saint was essentially one of the district attorney’s two main arms of the investigation. The other arm, the office’s attorney, was headed by Ray Veary, a longtime Pina political ally, and a man generally regarded throughout Bristol County as one of the brightest lawyers around. So, while Pina handled much of his office’s political and public relations, Veary and St. Jean had most of the day-to-day control over the office’s functions.
St. Jean’s major job was to try to manage the state troopers like Gonsalves, Maryann Dill, Joe Delaney, and the 20 or so others assigned by the state police to Pina’s office. To do this, the Saint had to work with the sergeant assigned to head the CPAC unit. The relationship between the Saint and his former colleagues, however, wasn’t always smooth. Sometimes, in fact, things became downright unfriendly.
In addition to the Saint, Pina had another investigative arrow in his quiver to call upon when the state police weren’t willing to satisfy him, and that was the Bristol County Drug Task Force. In one of his efforts to find alternatives to the troopers, Pina had formed the task force from officers drafted from each of the surrounding city and township police departments, including New Bedford.
While members of the task force primarily worked out of their own departments, Pina’s control of the group, exercised through the Saint, effectively allowed him the use of what amounted to a separate police force, and a completely separate intelligence unit.
While the task force approach brought its own political problems—the New Bedford department, for example, was forever trying to reclaim its two officers, for various reasons—the task force essentially gave Pina a limited capacity to circumvent the state po
lice if he needed to.
The task force members, however, were primarily trained to do one thing: track and arrest drug dealers. Just like dogs trained to sniff out drugs, and drugs only, the task force was of limited utility when it came to rooting out serial murder. The drug police were simply not trained to investigate random, psychopathically generated crime. In the world of drugs, behavior is normative; that is, causes and actions can be understood by the application of rationality: people commit crimes to get money to buy drugs, or people get money by selling drugs. That’s pretty much the whole story, and it applies to almost every event in the drug world. Not so with serial murder.
Inevitably, when the task force did become involved in the Highway Murders, it burrowed deep and produced, ta da!—drug connections. But then, in a city with the highest per capita heroin addiction rate in the country, a city where crack cocaine was endemic, in a murder case in which virtually all of the victims and many of the suspects were involved with drugs, that the task force in the end produced what appeared to be a drug conspiracy completely unrelated to the murders, was hardly a surprise. But all of this was to come later.
It was sometime in mid-December that Pina decided that the murder case needed the personal attention of the Saint. One result of that decision was that Bill Delaney, the trooper who had first started with the case after the discovery of Debra Medeiros’s remains on July 2, was transferred to another caseload. Delaney blamed Pina for his removal, creating still more friction between Pina and the troopers. The way Pina saw it, Delaney was angry because the transfer promised to cost him the extra pay that came with overtime.
As St. Jean worked his way into the case, the connections seen earlier by Dextradeur became apparent to him as well. The Saint was familiar with Kenny Ponte, because of Kenny’s juvenile arrest record, and because of his later work as a lawyer.
Later, the accounts of St. Jean and Ponte diverged substantially. Ponte claimed the first inkling that his name was being mentioned in connection with the Highway Murders came when a New Bedford lawyer, Joseph Harrington, called to tell him that the district attorney’s office wanted to talk to him.
Harrington advised him not to talk with the police, Ponte said later, but he decided to do it anyway. Kenny said he called the office and asked to speak with Pina himself. He figured that Pina was a fellow lawyer, and besides, Kenny had supported him in his political campaigns. They could have a friendly and informal lawyer-to-lawyer discussion, Kenny thought.
Instead, it was St. Jean who came to the phone.
Pina later claimed it was Kenny’s initiation of contact with St. Jean that provided an initial trigger for his investigation’s interest in the former New Bedford lawyer. That is probably not true, given the information that investigators had already developed on Kenny by the time the conversations occurred. Still, it seemed to some that Kenny was overly curious about what was happening. In any event, in mid-December, a series of telephone conversations between Kenny and the Saint ensued—usually with Kenny initiating the calls.
The Saint later told Pina that while some conversations with Kenny were calm and completely rational, others were wildly emotional, with Kenny often weeping and making nonsensical statements. The wild mood swings baffled St. Jean, and added to his suspicions. And Kenny was providing information about the victims—sometimes, weird information that seemed to come out of left field.
As telephone calls proceeded, St. Jean and Ponte discussed the lawyer’s relationship with Rochelle Clifford, Nancy Paiva, and several other possible victims. The matter of Roger Swire and the supposed assault was discussed, along with the burglary of Kenny’s house. Kenny’s representation of Nancy came up, as well as Nancy’s job in his office. Kenny confirmed that he had known Mary Rose Santos, and that he had also represented Sandra Botelho’s boyfriend. Further, Kenny himself thought that he might have once met Dawn Mendes.
Why was Kenny calling? St. Jean wasn’t sure, but was suspicious. It just seemed to St. Jean that Kenny Ponte knew too damn many of the dead and the missing. Certainly, he was evidencing an intense emotional reaction to the murders, perhaps beyond all proportion for someone who was not involved.
Carefully, St. Jean inquired as to when Kenny had left town, and why; and when would he be back?
But as St. Jean probed, Kenny continued to oscillate between cooperation and emotional indignation, because, as the discussions unfolded, Kenny began to sense that St. Jean was suspicious of him, Kenny became convinced St. Jean was taping the telephone calls, although Pina’s office later denied that.
As December faded, St. Jean became increasingly uneasy about Kenny. When it came down to specifics about Rochelle Clifford, for example, Kenny seemed evasive—just as Dextradeur had thought Kenny was being evasive earlier in the year. Finally, St. Jean decided to test Kenny by asking him a direct question. “Kenny,” said the Saint, “did you kill those girls?” Kenny indignantly denied it, but St. Jean wasn’t satisfied.
This isn’t working, the Saint told Kenny. I’ve got to be able to see you in person. He wanted Kenny to return to New Bedford so he could look him in the eye.
The way Kenny recalled it, St. Jean asked him when he planned to come back to New Bedford. Kenny said he jokingly told St. Jean that he was never coming back to New Bedford, meaning that because he’d spent his whole life trying to get out of New Bedford, why would he want to go back?
Well, said St. Jean, what about Christmas and New Year’s? He’d be coming back for the holidays to see his family, wouldn’t he? Kenny agreed that it was likely he would return for the holidays, and an interview was tentatively set for December 28.
But then Kenny decided to spend Christmas at the beach. Who was St. Jean, anyway, to cajole him to come back? Kenny was light on money, and air fare was expensive. The way Kenny figured it, if St. Jean wanted him back in town, the district attorney’s office could foot the bill. Otherwise, he was going to enjoy the sun.
On December 28, St. Jean called Kenny. I thought we were going to have a meeting today, St. Jean told him. Kenny said that if St. Jean wanted to send the plane fare, he’d come up. That was when, according to Kenny, St. Jean lost his temper.
“He said, and I quote exactly, ‘Ken, you’d better get your ass up here and talk with us, or I’m going to see that you’ll get screwed in the media.’” Whether St. Jean really said this, or Kenny later made it up, can’t be determined with accuracy, unless St. Jean did tape the discussions, as Ponte insisted he did. But if the Saint did say the words, it was a threat that was to prove as prophetic as it was disastrous.
24
The Leak
While St. Jean wasn’t sure that Kenny had anything to do with the murders, he was sure that Kenny had more to tell him about the victims. Because, by this time, St. Jean and other investigators had done still more checking on Kenny. One thing they discovered was that, in addition to the Easter Sunday incident involving Roger Swire, Kenny had been stopped by police a second time in New Bedford—on June 7, 1988.
In that second encounter with the New Bedford police, Kenny had been accompanied by another young woman, Jeanne Kaloshis, while both were in a parked car on New Bedford’s drug-infested South First Street—coincidentally, the same area of the city frequented by none other than Nancy Paiva, Rochelle Clifford, and Dawn Mendes—all victims tenuously linked to Kenny Ponte.
On that day in June 1988, the police had questioned Kenny about his activities while they arrested Jeanne on a charge of possessing drug paraphernalia—syringe needles. Kenny claimed that “this woman”—Jeanne—had “lured” him into the area; he seemed miffed at Jeanne for somehow involving him in something that was untoward.
When police asked to see Kenny’s permit for the gun, he told them he had left it at home. The police took his name, but let him go on his promise that he would drive home to get the permit, and return to show it to them. But Kenny never came back. The following day, the police charged Kenny with possession of an unlicensed weapon. The day a
fter that, a magistrate in New Bedford District Court ordered the complaint against Kenny dismissed.
This was certainly a curious incident, at least to St. Jean. Like Rochelle, Jeanne was a convicted drug user. In fact, she had been in a drug-treatment facility with Rochelle, and considered Rochelle one of her best friends.
The forensic experts were pretty sure that by June of 1988, Rochelle Clifford was already dead. Why was Kenny then hanging around with Jeanne? Indeed, why was he keeping company with either woman, each a convicted drug user, and why was he packing a pistol on both occasions?
An obvious key was Jeanne Kaloshis. Where was she, and what did she know about Kenny and her old friend Rochelle? And were there other women in the drug/prostitution community who might have things to say about Kenny Ponte? Investigators began pulling out the names of women arrested in New Bedford on prostitution charges. A list was compiled, and plans were made to interview them one by one to see what they might have to say about Kenny or Frankie or Neil Anderson or anyone else, for that matter. But at this point the investigation was about to come apart at the seams.
On January 6, 1989, the Boston Herald reported that investigators in Pina’s office had been talking to a New Bedford attorney in connection with the murders. The story named Ponte, and also reported that investigators had searched Kenny’s former home and office—and added that a dog trained to sniff out human remains had alerted to a spot on the office carpet.
Reported simplistically and without explanation, that was tantamount to a suggestion that a human being had died on the floor of Kenny’s office.
What wasn’t reported was that it was highly unlikely that a search dog could have detected the odor of a corpse on Kenny’s old carpet.
Killing Season Page 11
