Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  Then Heidi pointed the troopers in an entirely new direction.

  “(Heidi) suggested we check out another male who drives a red or black pickup truck, and owns a business in Fairhaven. (She) stated the male is an ex-boxer who has raped several girls in the past … She described the male as 25 or 30, with short brown hair, a flat nose which had been broken in the past.…”

  She’d once gone out with Flat Nose during the daytime, Heidi told the detectives, and on that occasion the man had not assaulted her, but had paid her $40. It was another time, some months later, that the man, seeming drunk, had attacked her, punched her, and tried to choke her while threatening her with a knife. She had seen the man driving around Weld Square several other times after that, she added.

  But now she remembered the man’s name, because on the first date Flat Nose had gone to a bank to cash a check to get the $40. She’d seen the check, Heidi said, and the name at the top was spelled Degracia … or something like that.

  Flat Nose finally had a name.

  27

  Group Therapy

  If Pina was being successful in orchestrating news media coverage of the investigation into the murders, a far different situation was developing inside of his own office. By early February 1989, in fact, communications between Pina’s staff, the local police, and the state police were already breaking down.

  Detective Alves, from Freetown, was one of the first who noticed that the state police and the district attorney did not always seem to be on the same page. Moreover, Alves also noticed that the state police seemed less than forthcoming with just about everyone else.

  Pina, of course, had already announced that the city and township police departments would be part of a joint state-local task force to investigate the murders. But Alves noticed that when he attended meetings of the task force, very little was accomplished or decided. Later, Pina’s spokesman Jim Martin would refer to the meetings as “group therapy sessions.”

  A large part of the wheel-spinning had to do with the conflicting lines of authority between Pina, the state police, and the local police departments, like Alves’s. Pina had envisioned some sort of cooperative effort between all the agencies; the state police saw things quite differently. The troopers were glad to have the assistance of local detectives, who often were the people best suited to locating witnesses and filling in their background. But the troopers were sometimes far less forthcoming in providing their own information to the locals, which naturally bred resentment. Pina tried to work through the jurisdictional obstacles by convening the all-agency meetings every Tuesday, but candid exchanges became the exception rather than the rule.

  “I think two things happened,” Pina later recalled. “I think that some of them, I don’t know if they didn’t like me, (but) … I like to get results, I’m a bottom-line guy and I can probably drive you nuts, but I don’t like bullshit. I hate to sit in a meeting and spend a whole afternoon, someone starts to tell you a story … okay, I’ve heard the story once, okay, let’s move on and let’s get down to basics.

  “And I think that part of the problem I had is that because of the (troopers’) lack of training and background, you get people with all kinds of theories and hypotheticals that didn’t deal with the evidence. And I’m a trained lawyer and my background is, click, click, click, now let’s either go this way or this way or this way. Don’t start fudging the line. And I can be abrasive, I’m sure. When someone’s in a room and you cut ’em off and you say, look, can we keep going down this road, I really don’t want to hear the history of this thing. And I say history, I really mean bullshit.”

  As a result of Pina’s impatience, the long-simmering, incipient problems between the district attorney and the state police began bubbling to the surface. The troopers resented Pina’s arrogance and his constant pushing. Some troopers began to grumble privately that Pina intended to use the murders to get more publicity for himself—how else could all of the leaks be explained? For his part, Pina, never very trusting of the state police to begin with, suspected that the troopers were out to sabotage him by dragging their heels.

  A major bone of contention was the troopers’ overtime. As Boyle had noted, some of the troopers had been working nonstop on the case for nearly two months. As a result, the CPAC overtime fund of $170,000 was almost exhausted. Most of the overtime had gone to Jose Gonsalves and Maryann Dill; much of it was rung up when Gonsalves and Dill worked late at night trying to locate and interview Weld Square habitués. Gonsalves and Dill were working as much as 90 hours a week.

  Well, thought Pina, if the troopers need to talk to people who stay up all night, why didn’t they come in and work a night shift at regular pay? The way things were, Gonsalves and Dill came in for their regular morning shift (that was one of the perks of being in the CPAC) and stayed late on overtime to interview people.

  Pina went to Gale Stevens, the sergeant in charge of the CPAC unit and asked him about that. Stevens, a hale and hearty fellow with a disconcerting conversational habit of blinking his eyes—his nickname was “Blinky” although he kept telling everyone to “Call me Pat”—could only shrug. It was the regulations, Stevens told Pina. It was in the union contract. There would be a grievance, a lot of paperwork, people would get mad.

  Well, that’s fine, said Pina, but we’re running out of money here. Do you have any suggestions? Stevens shrugged again.

  Pina went back to his own office and sorted through his account books. Eventually he took $25,000 from the office’s seized drug money account and used it to pay the overtime bill. That put a crimp in drug enforcement, but it was necessary, Pina reasoned. In the meantime, Pina decided to pull a few political strings. He called Governor Michael Dukakis, then finishing the last two years of his second term, and prevailed upon his old friend to somehow find the money to pay for the investigation’s overtime.

  Meanwhile, Alves and two detectives from neighboring Dartmouth were beginning to sour on Pina and the investigation. While their respective chiefs had authorized them to participate in Pina’s task force, to the three township detectives, it seemed like it was all take and no give. Alves was asked to go down to Weld Square, but wasn’t given any instructions on what to look for. Alves began to suspect that the troopers—or Pina—weren’t really interested in his assistance.

  Alves had his own ideas about the murders. Because he was familiar with satanism, Alves still wondered whether the crimes were connected with devil worship. A man once called Alves to suggest that every place that skeletons were found, a wooden cross was to be found nearby. Alves went out to see for himself, and it appeared to him that the man was right—although sometimes the crosses were some distance away from where the victims were discovered.

  Alves tried to interest the other investigators in his theory, but everyone rolled their eyes as if to say, well, that’s Alan, he sees Satan everywhere. Alves denied being the source of the newspaper story suggesting that the Highway Murders were somehow connected to satanism, but few believed him.

  Then, when the leak to the Herald about Ponte surfaced, suspicion fell for a time on Alves. Alves recalled that Pina called up Alves’s chief and accused the Freetown detective of having been the source of the information. Alves indignantly denied it.

  “I didn’t even know what he was talking about,” Alves said. According to Alves, Pina said he wanted Alves off the task force. That was it, as far as Alves was concerned. He didn’t want any part of Pina after that. He quit attending the meetings. Later, Alves conjectured that the reason Pina did not want him on the task force was that Alves did not believe that Kenny Ponte was in any way involved in the murders, and that Pina was concerned that Alves would go public with his doubts. That seems a little unlikely, but there is no question that Pina and Alves did not see eye-to-eye. “We had a lot of trouble with Alan Alves,” Pina’s spokesman Jim Martin said later.

  In any event, by the end of January, the three detectives from Freetown and Dartmouth were out of the investigatin
g pool. Detectives from New Bedford, however, remained in place, except for John Dextradeur, who by this time had retired.

  The city detectives—Richard Ferreira, Victor Morgado, Gary Baron, and Gardner Greany—were actually ideal for the investigation. All four men, because of their long experience in the city, were intimately familiar with the criminal class in New Bedford—who lived where, who knew whom, who had what sort of problems. The four city detectives were also known to the Weld Square people, and therefore were able to introduce the troopers to the witnesses and establish trust that probably would never have been reached if the troopers had acted by themselves.

  By the first two weeks in February, in fact, the teams of city-state detectives had contacted a great number of people, in prison, on the street, and in court, and had begun to zero in on two major suspects—Kenny Ponte, and the man called Flat Nose, who was almost instantly identified by Alan Alves, among others, as Tony DeGrazia.

  28

  My Girl

  By late winter 1989, Tony was in bad shape. He kept trying to forget Kathy, but it wasn’t any use. In October, right after the breakup, he’d gone scallop fishing with a friend, and talked about Kathy the whole time. He was miserable. He blamed himself. The breakup only proved what Tony had always suspected: that he just wasn’t good enough for “my girl,” as he kept referring to her.

  When he thought about it, which was quite often lately, Tony couldn’t help but feel his whole life had been one problem after another. At five feet seven inches, weighing around 160 pounds, Tony was a strong, powerfully built man who kept himself in good shape with a lot of physical labor. But Tony was particularly self-conscious of his appearance. It was the nose, he knew. People stared at him and asked him what had happened. Tony’s nose lay flat against his face, as if it had once been crushed by some tremendous force. The truth was far different.

  Sometimes Tony told people that he was a boxer, and that his nose had been damaged in the combat of athletic competition. And Tony’s left arm was slightly impaired. Those disabilities had marked Tony deeply; every time he looked in the mirror he was reminded of how different he was. And Tony hated it when people asked him about his nose, because it only reminded him of that hole in his soul, the one thing he craved but would never believe he had, at least on this earth: his own mother’s love. So, in his misery and to blot out the searing pain of rejection, Tony took refuge in the bottle.

  The truth was, Tony had long had a drinking problem, and the departure of his dream girl made the drinking much worse. Night after night Tony made the rounds of the bars and taverns north of New Bedford—a roadhouse on Route 18, the Eagles Club in Lakeview, the VFW in Freetown. Usually Tony drank beer, but when he was depressed—which was much of the time now—Tony escalated to Jack Daniels and Coke. On Jack and Coke Tony tended to get obnoxious and mean, as well as grabby with women. If he drank a lot, Tony tended to have blackouts; the following morning he rarely had a complete recollection of what he had done the night before.

  As January turned into February, Tony continued struggling with his life. He missed Kathy terribly; it was particularly bad when he ran into her from time to time with her new boyfriend. The pressures kept mounting, and Tony kept on drinking. There was something inside of him that made him do bad things, Tony realized, but he couldn’t get control of it, and it seemed to be getting bigger and bigger.

  29

  Hear, Consider, and Report

  In the third week of January, legal action on the gun charge against Kenny Ponte was delayed for the foreseeable future when Kenny’s lawyer, Joe Harrington, filed a motion for an indefinite continuance. The publicity against Ponte was so massive, so pervasive, that it was unlikely Kenny could get a fair trial anytime soon, Harrington argued.

  The judge refused to rule on that request, but did allow a continuance for another reason: after thinking it over as promised, the judge ruled that Pina had no legal right to take any hair, saliva, or blood samples from Ponte, and could only take photographs that would allow Pina to prove whether Ponte was the person who had threatened Swire with a gun; the continuance would be granted to allow Pina to appeal that decision to a higher court. The judge also ordered the public release of the transcripts and motions from the closed-door hearing.

  Thus, for the first time the public learned that one of the victims, Rochelle Clifford, was allegedly living with Kenny Ponte at the time of her disappearance, even though, as we have seen, that simply wasn’t true. No one outside of Pina and the police, however, had access to any information to the contrary.

  Undaunted by these developments, Pina considered a new strategy. By late January, the investigators had talked to enough people who said that Kenny was a drug user himself that it seemed possible to get a new charge against Kenny, one involving drug use or possession. Of course, all of this information was coming from people who used or sold drugs themselves, so it wasn’t necessarily true.

  But now Pina came up with a new twist: he would use a special grand jury to investigate the homicides. That way, he reasoned, he could work around Kenny’s refusal to cooperate. And if he could get an indictment for a lesser charge, who knew—maybe that might persuade Kenny to come in for that little talk St. Jean wanted to have.

  In Massachusetts there are two types of grand juries. A regular grand jury is empaneled every six months; it meets to vote on indictments requested by prosecutors as part of the normal course of business, as when Kenny Ponte had been indicted in early January in connection with the gun incident.

  A second type of grand jury, however, is far more powerful because it may be called to focus on one specific area of inquiry; its job is to “hear, consider, and report.” Such a jury is also more powerful because its term may be extended as needed. The special grand jury may thus sit continuously, and in effect, act as an investigative body—under the control, to some extent, of the district attorney.

  The use of a special grand jury was, along with the leak of Kenny Ponte’s name to the news media, one of the critical developments in the investigation of the Highway Murders. Years later, many who investigated the case agreed that using a special jury might have been a bad mistake. At the time, Pina’s chief deputy, Ray Veary, tried to dissuade Pina from using a special jury to investigate the murders.

  “Personally speaking, I would have preferred to see it done without a grand jury,” Veary later recalled. “It had always been an issue between Ron and me, among other matters, about using the grand jury.” Using a special grand jury frequently had a political significance, in part because of the intense publicity it always attracted. That’s one reason Veary didn’t like using them, he said.

  Pina had asked a special grand jury to investigate the Big Dan’s case; the secret deliberations of the jury on the sensational pool table rape case had cranked up the public attention in a way no ordinary indictment would have done, which Veary thought was bad. Years later he still shuddered at the recollection of the hatred let loose in the city because of the highly publicized nature of the Big Dan’s investigation and indictments.

  But Veary also acknowledged that Pina’s use of the special grand jury in the Big Dan’s case was extraordinarily effective.

  “That was one case where he was right and I was wrong,” Veary said. “Ron Pina’s most significant contribution to the Big Dan’s case was in going right to a grand jury. Without that grand jury testimony, we could not have successfully prosecuted that case. Because, in the period of time between the indictment and the trial, there was tremendous backtracking on the part of witnesses. Had we not had their testimony under oath in front of a grand jury, we would never have been able to bring those people back to admitting what they said during the course of the investigation.”

  In effect, by bringing witnesses before the special grand jury, Pina could use the threat of perjury to sort through all the wild stories about the murders, the victims, the suspects, the drugs, the snuff films, all of it—and come up with some sort of theory of the ca
se that would fit the facts. Or vice versa, as some of the detectives grumbled.

  The downside, however, was that a special grand jury, sitting for months to investigate a complex, sensational story like the Highway Murders, would instantly become a magnet for every news organization in two states. In the frenzied climate that already existed, it was hardly likely that pulling in witnesses to testify in secret was going to go unnoticed. The whole case thus had the potential of mushrooming into a huge circus, and that’s exactly what happened.

  Pina’s decision to call for a special grand jury was made in the second week of February 1989. While some of the state troopers sourly noted that the special jury would once again tend to put Pina in the publicity spotlight, there was another dimension to the maneuver.

  Now, for the first time, he could tell the investigators who he wanted them to talk to, and when, and the troopers had to comply. All Pina had to do to effectively control the direction of the investigation was issue subpoenas. That would circumvent the state police bosses in Boston. If he was going to rise or fall on the outcome of the Highway Murder case, Pina decided, at least he’d be able to do it his way.

  30

  Linkages

  On February 10, Pina and his media spokesman, Jim Martin, dropped in on Martin’s old employer, WJAR-TV in Providence, and agreed to be interviewed. The other reporters were allowed in to watch the show.

  The news: the list of suspects had been narrowed to three or four people, one of whom might be in jail. That, of course, included by inference Neil Anderson, who was still in jail awaiting trial on the rape allegations from December. Pina refused to name anyone a suspect, telling the world that the list was down to “three or four,” which hardly helped make Kenny Ponte look innocent.