What bothered Judy most was the seeming indifference of most people to the fate of the dead.
“Nobody cared,” Judy said later, speaking of the town as a whole. “And they don’t care because these women weren’t Chamber of Commerce material. I’ve always contended that if Nancy or any one of them, if they had been little college coeds, we might have had a different reaction from the public.”
Slowly, as the anger in Judy built, she began to change. The shyness and diffidence of the old, deferential Judy fell away, and a new Judy emerged—someone who was increasingly assertive, verbal, and occasionally, even caustic. Her children marveled at her transformation.
“Well, I think Auntie Nancy jumped in my body and said, ‘Girl, you just better get going here … if you’re going to fight for Nancy, you can’t keep your mouth shut,’” Judy said. “I always worried they would perceive me as being the bitch—‘Uh-oh, here she comes again.’ Then I said, Hey, they work for me. They may say that Nancy belongs to the state now, that it’s a crime against the state.
“But it was a crime against her family. Now, you have, and not only Nancy, but all of them, you have motherless children; they’re all growing up without the parent. And most of them were single parents.”
So Judy began to channel her anger toward the police and the prosecutors, prodding, pushing, demanding action for her sister. “When they drew that chalk outline, she could not stand up for her rights anymore, so I’m going to have to do it,” Judy decided. By June 1989, Judy would actually take driving lessons, and then obtain her license. One reason: Judy wanted to be able to drive out to the place on I-195 where Nancy’s skeleton had been found. Judy would never be exactly sure why she wanted to do this; but it was as if being there somehow put her in contact with Nancy, giving her the strength and the power to keep on pushing.
But all the publicity had at least some positive aspects. Soon several other people in New Bedford had called the police to report their loved ones missing. By mid-January, in fact, the list of missing and possibly dead had risen to five, including Mary Rose Santos, Sandra Botelho, and Robin Rhodes, who had been reported during the summer and fall, in addition to six known dead.
The new missings included Marilyn Cardoza Roberts, 36. Marilyn was also a drug addict, but there was no evidence she had ever been involved in prostitution. The daughter of a retired New Bedford police officer, she’d first been reported missing in April 1988, then was said to have been seen in the city in June. But because no one had seen her after that date, the investigators decided to include her on the possible Highway Murder list.
The case of a second missing person was particularly suggestive. Christine Monteiro, 19, also had a drug addiction, along with an arrest record for prostitution. She had last been seen in late May 1988. But what grabbed the investigators’ attention was Monteiro’s address: she had lived next door to Sandy Botelho, also missing, and certainly knew Sandy very well.
What were the odds of two women who lived next door to one another both being killed, possibly two months apart, by a random killer? To some, it seemed far more likely that the killer had to be someone who knew both women—and likely, the others as well. That scenario, of course, promised to derail the theory that the murders were the work of a typical serial killer, as the state troopers continued to believe.
Troopers like Gonsalves knew that it was almost unheard-of for a serial killer to prey upon people he knew, rather than selecting victims entirely at random. Gonsalves and the others were intrigued by the connections between the victims, but thought the connections showed more about the social group the killer had preyed upon than anything else.
But Pina and the Saint thought differently. To them, the connections between the victims suggested strongly that something more than typical serial murder was going on in New Bedford; indeed, that was one reason why Pina refused to use “the magic words” about a serial killer with Globe reporter John Ellement. Essentially, Pina did not believe that the person responsible for the murders was a true serial killer. There had to be another motive for the killings, Pina concluded.
But what? What was the connection between the victims and the killer, if it wasn’t a random encounter during the act of prostitution? Was there anything going on that tied the victims and the killer together in some sort of hidden way? Pina was sure there was, and he intended to find out.
26
A Reasonable Hunch
While most of the public attention was centered on Kenny Ponte in January of 1989, the investigators of the Massachusetts State Police were busy sorting through the Weld Square subculture in search of facts. For this, the troopers went to prison.
Massachusetts Correctional Institutes at Framingham and Lancaster housed a large number of women who had spent time in New Bedford. While many were serving terms for drug violations, many also had backgrounds in prostitution, and were familiar with the Weld Square subculture. Troopers from Pina’s office began interviewing these women.
Interviewing witnesses who are in jail is a fine art. The largest difficulty is separating demonstrable facts from rumor and speculation. The problem of sifting the real from the fantastic is compounded by the closed society inside prison walls. In a confined setting, stories circulate like hothouse viruses; one prisoner may borrow details known originally by another to augment her own veracity.
This is particularly true when witnesses have strong motives to cooperate with the authorities. Repeated psychological studies have shown that prisoners frequently identify with the goals and objectives of their captors as their captivity lengthens.
Psychologists call this phenomenon the Stockholm syndrome, after a lengthy hostage situation in that city. Moreover, in interviewing women under sentence for drug and prostitution violations, the state troopers were already dealing with a population that was predisposed, by their own inherent lowered self-esteem, to cooperate with those holding power.
Such prisoners are often quite suggestible, and under most circumstances, great care must be taken by the interviewer not to inadvertently supply the witness with the information being sought. Finally, incarcerated witnesses often seek—and gain—favors from law enforcement in return for cooperation, even if the cooperation is based on perjury. For all of these reasons, the credibility of jailhouse informants is usually suspect.
On the other hand, the state troopers conducting the investigation felt they had nowhere else to go if they hoped to understand what was happening in the Highway Murders.
If the five known victims of the killer weren’t exactly like the women in Framingham or Lancaster, the prisoners were close enough in lifestyle and the places where the victims lived and worked to have possibly been victims themselves if they hadn’t been in jail. The troopers’ task was to find out from the imprisoned women what they knew about the victims, and learn what they had observed about men who frequented the Weld Square area.
But by the time the troopers got to both prisons, rumors and speculation about the murders had spread so widely through the inmate populations that there were real questions as to the validity of any information that might be learned.
Many of the news media reports about Neil Anderson and Kenny Ponte had been read, viewed, and discussed among the inmates. It is therefore not surprising the troopers quickly began to hear unsubstantiated stories, some of them wild beyond belief, about the murders, and about Ponte, Anderson—and several others—as January of 1989 came to a close.
On Wednesday, January 18, 1989, Kenny Ponte returned from Florida to appear in court on the indictment charging him with the assault of Roger Swire. If anyone at that point thought that real reason for Kenny’s appearance had anything to do with threatening Roger Swire with a gun, they had probably just dropped in from the moon. There was little doubt that Pina and the police were using the indictment to force Kenny to return to the state.
A huge crowd of reporters and camera people camped out in the hallway outside the judge’s chambers, waiting for b
oth sides to emerge from the closed hearing. At one point the noise was so loud the judge had to order a court officer into the hall to clear the corridor.
Pina’s first assistant, Ray Veary, had already filed a motion to compel Kenny to turn over samples of hair and saliva, as well as pose for photographs. Kenny at first agreed to turn over the hair and the saliva, but when the investigators wanted him to remove his clothes so they could take pictures, Kenny refused.
Pina and Veary could hardly contend that the hair, saliva, and photographs were necessary to identify Kenny as the person who allegedly assaulted Swire; after all, it wasn’t as if Kenny had spit on Swire or had showered him with clumps of his hair!
Actually, the hair and saliva samples were to be used by a forensic laboratory to compare with similar samples found with some of the murder victims, as everyone including Ponte himself well knew. Just why Kenny was willing to cooperate until it came time for the photographs was known only to Kenny and Harrington, his lawyer, but his reticence about posing for the police cameras later gave rise to all manner of guessing, little of it favorable to Ponte. Kenny contended that the police wanted him to remove all of his clothes, which was an indignity he simply refused to submit to. Not so, said the police; they only wanted Kenny to roll up his sleeve so they could photograph a tattoo they believed was on his arm.
In any event, at that point, Ponte’s lawyer, Joe Harrington, asked that the hair and saliva samples be impounded because Kenny had withdrawn his consent. And a judge agreed with Harrington: Kenny had been charged with assault on Swire, not on the murder victims. There was no legal basis to collect the samples from Kenny if the district attorney only intended to charge Kenny with the assault on Swire. To get the samples from Ponte, the judge said, the district attorney had to show there was some reason to believe—even a “reasonable hunch,” as the judge put it—that Ponte was involved in the murders.
Veary said the investigators were still working, but as far as a connection was concerned, they’d already been able to establish that one victim had lived with Kenny shortly before she disappeared. The victim: Rochelle Clifford.
At this point, for whatever reason, Veary and Pina provided what now appears to be false information to the judge to justify their taking of the samples.
We can only trace her back to about the time of this very encounter on April 3, 1988,” Veary told the judge. “We have no reliable information placing her anywhere at any time beyond that—or at least much beyond that … I think it’s fair to say, based on our investigation, that Miss Clifford became a missing person to all who were concerned about her welfare on or about the time of this assault (on Swire), making Mr. Ponte, at the very least, one of the last persons to see her alive … We’re not saying he was the last one, but certainly was one of the last ones.”
Veary’s remarks were directly contradicted by Detective Dextradeur’s information that he had seen Rochelle with Frankie Pina on April 27, 1988—more than three weeks later—but either Veary was unaware of this information or he simply chose to ignore it as unreliable. But then Pina himself added the kicker:
“Our office,” Pina now told the judge, “also has information from Miss Clifford’s mother … Her indication to the state police and the district attorney’s office was that, when in fact she tried to contact her daughter here in New Bedford, her daughter gave her Mr. Ponte’s home as the location where she was staying and Mr. Ponte’s personal phone number as to how her mother could reach her, and that was where she was living …”
Actually, investigators had found Kenny’s phone number on dental records for Rochelle Clifford, and the date on the charts indicated that Rochelle had provided that number to the dentist about the time she was seen with Kenny. But providing a number where someone can leave messages is not the same as living with someone. Later, Rochelle’s mother was to deny that she had ever told the police that Rochelle was living at Ponte’s house.
The judge did not seem convinced by Veary and Pina’s arguments, but agreed to impound the hair and saliva while he thought the matter over. He said he’d rule on the issue later. The judge also ordered that all the motions and transcripts of the closed hearing be impounded, or withheld from the public.
Meanwhile, Kenny pleaded innocent to the assault charge, and was released on his own recognizance into a storm of questions from reporters. He declined all comment.
But Pina lost little time in putting the popular onus back on Ponte.
“He refused to help us,” Pina told the assembled reporters after the hearing, which was held behind closed doors. “He had nothing to say. We were hopeful we would be talking with him today.”
Asked if it were really true that Ponte knew one of the victims, Pina responded, “It’s not just one. It’s not just two. It’s not just three. It could be four.” And, said Pina, the relationship between Ponte and the victims was personal, not a lawyer-client relationship. “He’s important, without a doubt,” said Pina, who added that Kenny might have vital information about the crimes.
“I don’t give up,” Pina continued. “I can do a lot of things.” To Ponte, that sounded like a threat, and he was right. The following day, January 19, 1989, Pina’s spokesman, Jim Martin, suggested that a grand jury might take another look at Kenny Ponte in connection with still other charges—but not, said Martin, in connection with the murders. That, of course, was difficult for anyone to believe, even if it later turned out to be absolutely accurate.
On the following Monday, January 23, 1989, State Trooper Kevin Butler and city detective Gardner Greany were working way down the list of New Bedford women at MCI Framingham. That afternoon, the two officer’s met with a 30-year-old woman named Heidi Caton, who claimed to know some of the Highway victims. Heidi also said she knew Kenny Ponte. Kenny, Heidi told the investigators, was a user of cocaine. Heidi claimed Kenny liked to have Heidi inject him with the drug.
This was not the first time the troopers had heard that Kenny Ponte was a drug user. That was one reason the troopers had asked him to show them his arms. As early as January 7, 1989—two days after Kenny’s name had first surfaced publicly—a self-admitted drug dealer named Stephen Bobola told Trooper Butler and Detective Greany that he’d sold cocaine to Kenny for four years prior to 1988. Still others in the drug community said the same.
But how true was any of this? The stories about Kenny’s heroin-using past had been reported in all the newspapers and on television; meanwhile, almost all of the people being interviewed by detectives were quite familiar with drugs, and a lot of them were anxious to get on the good side of the Bristol County district attorney and his police. How far of a reach would it be for them to say that Kenny was a drug user, too, even if he wasn’t?
And once one person told the tale—and was taken seriously—the word would spread quickly that tales of Kenny and drugs were exactly what the cops wanted to hear.
Heidi, like many of the others, was pretty specific, however. She said she’d known Kenny for about six years. When Kenny used cocaine, Heidi said, he tended to become very paranoid, which usually made Heidi afraid of him. When she was over at his house, Kenny liked to get high and watch pornographic movies, Heidi added.
The pornography claim was also interesting to the troopers. While it was difficult to say where the story had originated, a theory about the murders was beginning to gain some credibility—at least among the inmates of MCI Framingham. That was the belief that the murders were in some way connected with the pornography business. Naturally, from that guess it was only a small jump to conclude that the murders had to do with so-called snuff films.
Snuff films are something of an urban myth—something akin to tales about pet alligators loose in the sewers of New York. A snuff film is defined as pornography that ends with one of the actors actually being murdered on camera. Those who claim such films exist—including some police officers—point to other, equally bizarre behavior throughout society as proof of the films’ possibility.
&nb
sp; Yet, few claim to have actually seen such a film, or are able to authoritatively point to the existence of any such thing. There have been some rare cases in which murderers have videotaped their crimes, but the idea of such films being made for commercial distribution is ludicrous.
For one thing, such a film would be powerful evidence of murder—obviously dangerous to make and to possess. For another, such a film would be exceedingly difficult to distribute for profit. Put into cold business terms, how could enough buyers be found to assure a worthwhile return on investment, without also having the film wind up in the hands of police, sooner or later? Those who subscribe to the snuff-film belief contend that the buyers are rich men in Mexico or South America, or some other such place, conveniently far away, willing to pay huge sums for this sort of thing.
That, of course, doesn’t explain why such an unusual, almost unique-in-number pervert would bother to come all the way to the United States for victims when his own country already had plenty of people to choose from, to say nothing of less efficient police.
Still, the rumors and speculation about the so-called snuff films circulated widely through the prison, and the troopers were bound to ask. Heidi said she had once been asked to participate in a pornographic film, but she wasn’t interested; she threw the man’s business card away, she told the troopers. In any event, it certainly wasn’t Kenny Ponte who had asked her to make any movies, contrary to rumors that were to begin much later, when all of these stories began to get garbled together on the prison grapevine.
Now Heidi told the troopers a few other interesting things: she identified photographs of Debbie Medeiros, Christine Monteiro, Robin Rhodes, and Mary Santos. And she claimed that all of them knew Ponte, and that Kenny knew them.
What about Neil Anderson? “(Heidi) recognized a photo of Neil Anderson,” Butler wrote three weeks later in his report, “and stated that she used to go on (motorcycle) runs with Anderson, and knew him well. She stated Anderson never hurt her, and she would be surprised if he murdered these girls.”
Killing Season Page 13
