Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  One of the strongest odors given off by a decomposing corpse is ammonia, which is why dogs trained to sniff out compounds containing ammonia are able to find remains. It wasn’t very likely that a corpse had decomposed on Kenny’s office floor long enough to impart the odor of ammonia, however. It was possible that the carpet might have once been cleaned with ammonia. And as events later showed, there was even another possible explanation for the dog’s behavior.

  The lack of precision in the reporting aside, the story ignited a media firestorm that would rage for nearly two years, and in retrospect, was probably the single worst thing that could have happened to the Highway Murder investigation.

  With publication of the story, all hope of gaining Kenny’s cooperation died immediately; additionally, naming Kenny had the inevitable effect of shaping the accounts of future witnesses, of building in a bias against Kenny Ponte. As the next 18 months unfolded, both of these developments were to decimate the efforts to solve the case.

  Kenny heard about the Herald story from a friend in New Bedford. He immediately called Pina. St. Jean came on the line. According to Kenny, the Saint was laughing. Kenny accused St. Jean of planting the story in the paper. St. Jean, still laughing, denied it. Kenny cursed St. Jean, called him a badge-carrying moron, and hung up.

  Later, Pina claimed to have been as furious at the leak as Kenny Ponte. “It blew my mind,” Pina said, “because it just blew the whole thing up. It was done. I mean, any opportunity I would have had to at least have the guy (Kenny) in a room with me, to sit there and listen to him, was gone.”

  Pina knew the leak about Ponte had come from somewhere inside his office. The most logical suspect was of course the Saint, who after all had been having the conversations with Kenny, and who also had a long-standing relationship with the Herald reporter who wrote the story, Alan Levin. But St. Jean denied being the leak.

  “I asked him until I was blue in the face,” Pina said later. “I don’t think Bob would have blown the investigation … It came out of the office somewhere, a trooper. You know, Al Levin was the guy (who wrote the story). Al Levin is someone I’ve known for a long time, and if you ask him, it didn’t come from me.”

  That’s exactly what the state troopers thought, however: that it was Pina himself who had leaked. In any event, the leak became yet another incident of bad blood between Pina and his investigative forces, especially as the damage became apparent.

  It is interesting to note that, at the time, Pina took little action to pour cold water on the Ponte speculation. The day after Levin’s story appeared, Pina told Maureen Boyle of the Standard-Times that the number of suspects in the murders had been reduced to less than ten, and confirmed the searches of Ponte’s home and office, and the dog’s actions.

  “Highway Killing Probers Search Former Area Lawyer’s Office, Home,” read the page-one headline in the Standard-Times. A subhead gave even more damning information: “Ex-New Bedford Man Reportedly Frequented Weld Square.”

  Boyle continued: “Investigators probing the Highway Murders of six women have searched the home and office of an attorney who abruptly left the area two months ago.” The use of the word abruptly made Kenny’s move to Florida look like a guilty act.

  The other newspapers and television stations joined in. In an interview with John Ellement of The Boston Globe, Pina confirmed the searches, and added that it appeared that Kenny had “a personal relationship” with some of the victims.

  For its part, The Globe quickly had someone knocking on Kenny’s front door in Florida. “Ponte denied any knowledge of the investigation,” the paper reported. “Ponte said, ‘I have no knowledge of what you’re talking about and have no comment. Now, please get off the property.’”

  25

  Homework

  At his house in Port Richey, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, Kenny Ponte couldn’t believe what was happening to him. At first he thought it was some sort of horrible joke being played on him by St. Jean.

  One by one, Kenny’s friends called him to read the newspaper stories and tell him what the television was saying. As the calls mounted, the idea—or hope—that the whole thing was a joke began to fade. The tales his friends told began to add up to an ugly picture; worse, the more he found out, the more sure Kenny was, one way or another, somehow, that he would find himself in the middle of the frame. This was not at all how his retirement in the sun was supposed to be working out—not at all.

  How could St. Jean think he had anything to do with the killings? He was no murderer. He wasn’t even violent, Ponte protested to his friends, his voice rising in volume until he was shouting. Pina and St. Jean were out to ruin him!

  But the news media was just beginning with Kenny Ponte.

  Within a few days, the details about the Easter Sunday incident involving Rochelle and Roger Swire were in the papers. Swire looked like the hero in the retelling.

  “Lawyer Was Seen With Victim,” headlined the Standard-Times. Maureen Boyle had located Swire and got his side of the story. Swire made Ponte look guilty. He told Boyle that he had seen Ponte with Rochelle at least six times, including three times on one day.

  “Then I never saw her again,” Swire added, ominously. Swire added that Rochelle had apologized to him for accusing him of raping her; just how Rochelle had made this apology “about a week later,” when Swire was also claiming that the last time he’d seen Rochelle, she was with Ponte while the gun-toting Ponte was supposedly chastising Swire about the rape, wasn’t made clear. The obvious conclusion (apparently missed by Boyle) was that Swire had seen Rochelle by himself after previously seeing her with Ponte. Boyle, of course, knew nothing about the reported burglary at Ponte’s house, in which Swire and Rochelle were said to have stolen Kenny Ponte’s pistol.

  Again, Pina did little to clear up the confusion; after all, the police knew for sure from Detective Dextradeur that the last time anyone had seen Rochelle, she was with Frankie Pina on April 27, 1988, not Ponte, or even Swire, and that was more than two weeks after Rochelle supposedly apologized to the man she was then still accusing of raping her.

  Despite all the inconsistencies, Boyle apparently concluded that with Swire she was on to a good thing. The following day, Boyle published another tale from Swire. In a story headlined, “Ponte Seen With Three Highway Killing Victims, Witness Says,” Boyle quoted Swire as saying he had seen Ponte with two other victims of the Highway Killer, but didn’t name them.

  Swire now added that he had seen Rochelle with Kenny “four to six times a day.” Boyle failed to ask Swire, however, just why it was that he saw so much of Rochelle and Kenny; nor did it occur to Boyle to ask Swire how he knew three of the victims, a circumstance that at least superficially made him as much of a suspect as Ponte, to say nothing of Frankie Pina.

  But by this point, the bloodhounds of the news media were in full cry, and within a few short days, Kenny Ponte was most thoroughly spitted and roasted.

  Despite the omnipresent term news media, so often used as a catchall to roundly condemn, news gatherers/disseminators are hardly alike. Different readerships, viewerships, listening audiences, coupled with different formats and deadlines, create a multiplicity of presentations—and conflicts. But one thing news organizations have in common is their intense competition to get new facts, and eastern Massachusetts was a major news media center where this competition was fervent indeed.

  In addition to the Standard-Times in New Bedford, the city was also covered by the Herald, The Globe, and the Providence Journal, network television affiliates in both Providence and Boston, as well as a plethora of radio stations and weekly newspapers.

  The concentration of news outlets that generated such tremendous competition among the news organizations drove reporters to stick to Pina and the investigators as if they were presidential candidates. Indeed, the investigation began to have more and more of the earmarks of a political campaign—nowhere more than in the way Pina used spin control to direct the news coverage in his favor.<
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  As the man in charge of what was becoming such an intensely watched effort, Ron Pina had the duty of deciding what information should be released publicly, and what should be withheld.

  For police officials, there is always a fine balance to such decisions: say too much and run the risk of damaging an investigation; say too little and potential sources of information might never realize that what they know is valuable, and therefore not come forward.

  In Pina’s case, in the winter of 1988–89, the balance was affected by his natural political instincts. In effect, Pina wanted to say as much as he could to keep the news media happy and favorable toward him, but without getting caught. Thus, a charade of sorts unfolded, in which the reporters played a sort of 20 questions game with Pina, and Pina encouraged the reporters in the directions he wanted them to go by oblique suggestions, broad hints, and refusing to deny certain leaks that emanated from others in his office.

  But what was inexcusable was Pina’s use of the investigation’s inherent secrecy to withhold potentially exculpatory information that might have saved at least a part of Kenny Ponte’s reputation. Pina had facts that were contrary to the story being spread by Swire: Rochelle Clifford had hardly last been seen by Kenny Ponte on April 3, 1988, but rather, by Frankie Pina and Detective John Dextradeur, on April 27, 1988.

  Pina’s failure to make clear who last saw Rochelle—and when—served to put the spotlight squarely on Kenny, and helped feed a growing popular belief that the lawyer was a possible serial killer. Holding the critical date back allowed Pina to keep the reporters focused on Ponte, and prevented them from asking more troubling questions.

  At the same time, Pina also withheld another vital fact relating to Kenny Ponte. While confirming that the police dog searching Kenny’s office had alerted to a spot on the carpet, Pina failed to explain about the ammonia, or to provide the rest of the story: the dog, a Massachusetts State Police German shepherd named “Syros,” had been previously trained as a drug-sniffing dog. As it happened, dogs alerting to drugs gave exactly the same sort of excited signals when they smelled ammonia, or corpses.

  Syros’s new corpse-smelling assignment was recent, and his effectiveness in sniffing them out was doubtful. Throughout much of December, in fact, Syros searched both sides of Highway 140, and had found nothing—erroneously, as we will see.

  Thus, when Syros alerted at Kenny Ponte’s old office, it wasn’t possible to tell for sure whether the well-intentioned Syros had sniffed corpse smell—ammonia—or drug smell. But Pina said nothing of this uncertainty, leaving the distinct public impression that Ponte was a possible murderer, or at least a conniver in murder.

  As the first month of the year unfolded, an informal leak hierarchy developed in Pina’s office. For the most part, Pina handled the interactions with reporters for The Globe, while the Saint made use of his prior relationships with several reporters, including Levin from the Herald. In another move, Pina drew upon his wife Sheila’s longtime relationship with the Providence TV station WJAR to hire a news producer there, Jim Martin, to act as his official spokesman. Martin’s previous experience in the news business in Providence and southeastern Massachusetts qualified him to handle reporters from the Providence media and from the Standard-Times.

  With all of these sources operating on “background,” it wasn’t long before most of Kenny’s past was revealed, and in particularly lurid terms.

  First came Kenny’s honorary deputy sheriff connection. “Lawyer Did Nothing As Deputy Sheriff,” the Standard-Times headlined.

  The newspaper reported that Kenny’s appointment might have been a reward for his political support of the elected sheriff, David Nelson. Nelson quickly announced that an internal investigation into Kenny’s activities was underway. The subtext of the story, however, was Kenny’s possession of a deputy sheriff’s badge. That dovetailed nicely with earlier reports that a man posing as a policeman had been terrorizing women in the Weld Square area the previous summer.

  The next day, Kenny was indicted by a grand jury and charged with assaulting Roger Swire by menacing him with a gun.

  With a formal charge filed and a plethora of leaks making the link between Kenny and the murders, media restraint began to evaporate. A bench warrant was issued for Kenny’s arrest if he failed to return voluntarily to Massachusetts for arraignment on the assault charge.

  The following day, the Boston papers gave the full low-down on Kenny’s prior drug history.

  “Serial Probe Targets ‘Ex-Junkie,’” the Herald reported. Kenny, it appeared, had been arrested numerous times in the late 1960s and early 1970s for drug violations.

  Burrowing into Kenny’s records with the state’s Board of Pardons, the story claimed Kenny had been nabbed for using heroin, prescription pills, and marijuana, that he had been twice convicted of conspiracy to possess drugs, and that he had served three months in jail in 1971. He had been granted a pardon in 1975 by former Governor Francis Sargent after the intercession of a New Bedford-area state senator.

  Infuriated again, Kenny called New Bedford and this time demanded to speak with Pina. As usual, St. Jean came on the line. According to Kenny, the Saint was laughing again.

  “Boy, they sure did their homework on you,” the Saint told Kenny, at least in Kenny’s version. Kenny told the Saint he was sure that St. Jean had led the Herald by the nose. “Oh, we wouldn’t do that,” the Saint supposedly said. “We’d never do that.”

  Within the next 24 hours, all the other media had much the same story as each tried to outdo the others in finding new dirt on Ponte. In vain, several of Kenny’s friends and acquaintances protested.

  “He’s disappointed, surprised, outraged,” Thomas Hunt, a New Bedford lawyer, told the Standard-Times’s Boyle. “He can’t understand it, and frankly, neither can I. I am disappointed that a man who has not been indicted and has not been charged … in a series of heinous crimes … could have his personal life depicted in your paper.”

  And the state senator who had sponsored Kenny’s pardon in 1975 similarly complained, saying that the news media had assassinated Kenny’s character with innuendo, and that Kenny should instead be seen a shining example of rehabilitation, having served his time, recovered from his drug addiction, and gone on to become a practicing lawyer. Kenny’s former landlord joined in, saying that the move to Florida had hardly been “abrupt,” that in fact Kenny had been planning the move for months.

  But the protests had little effect, and Kenny was quickly perceived as a central figure in the unfolding drama of the Highway Murders.

  Almost unnoticed in the commotion was the apparently coincidental arrest of Roger Swire—the man Kenny Ponte had allegedly assaulted the previous April. Even as the entire town was talking about Kenny, Swire was being arrested and accused of breaking into an apartment and threatening a 20-year-old woman with a knife. Just what Swire wanted with the woman was never made clear.

  In Florida, Kenny was growing ever more horrified and frightened about this sudden cascading of events. His mother and sister back in New Bedford had been besieged by reporters seeking comments on Kenny’s possible involvement with the murders. They, too, were shocked and frightened. To Kenny, the whole affair was beginning to smell like a lynch mob in the making.

  As he searched his mind, trying to identify just what he had done to deserve this treatment, it did not take long for Kenny to decide that Pina was out to get him for personal reasons. But why? Kenny couldn’t understand it. Hadn’t he supported Pina in each of his reelection efforts? What had he ever done to Pina?

  As he ruminated on his past relationship with the district attorney, Kenny zeroed in on an old case he had handled—a case in which Pina’s office had failed to secure a prison term for an accused child rapist, whose wife was defended by Ponte. That had to be it, Kenny decided; he’d made Pina look bad in public, and now Pina was getting even. Pina, of course, denied any such motivation, and said he barely knew Kenny Ponte.

  Kenny and his family w
eren’t the only ones undergoing a news media siege. The families of the victims were also put under the microscope. Squads of reporters and photographers camped out in front of people’s houses, waiting for them to emerge to make statements. Judy DeSantos, for one, quickly grew to hate the newspeople. On one occasion she slammed a door in a reporter’s face almost as soon as the reporter identified himself.

  “I was tired of it,” she recalled. “They’re bombarding you, you’re thrown into a world that you never had to deal with before. And I was confused. I hated people being near me, and I didn’t want to have to deal with that. You know, there are some real rude reporters. I had someone follow me into the house, carrying my groceries … I put my groceries on the sidewalk and he followed me in the house, carrying my groceries. I never knew he was behind me until he started talking.” Judy adopted evasive maneuvers to keep away from the reporters, going in neighbors’ front doors and exiting out the rear to throw the news-people off the scent.

  To Judy, the intense pain of trying to accept Nancy’s death was made far worse by the public nature of the event. It was as if all these shallow people, the reporters, were trying to crowd in on top of her grief, to use Nancy for crass commercial purposes. Judy detested it, just as she hated being watched, observed, made to react by rude reporters for the benefit of the evening news. Eventually Judy bought a telephone answering machine to screen all of her calls; if it wasn’t someone she knew, Judy wouldn’t answer.

  At home, the pressures intensified. After learning that Nancy had been murdered, Judy’s 12-year-old son’s first reaction was to declare his intention to buy a gun and kill the murderer. Her daughter began having trouble in school, and woke up one night crying uncontrollably. When Judy asked what was wrong, her daughter explained that she’d had a vision of Nancy, who had appeared to urge Judy to fight for her. Judy herself was still so angry at Frankie Pina that when her daughter gave her a small key chain with a plastic figure attached to it—telling her to just squeeze the plastic figure every time she got mad at Frankie—Judy squeezed the stuffing out of it almost immediately.