Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  Then Pina added some interesting things: the victims, he said, were probably lured to their deaths by the promise of drugs. This was a seemingly slight but actually significant adjustment in the theory of the case.

  Previously, the idea had been that the murders were connected with the practice of prostitution: that the killer was a john who enticed women with money.

  But the supposition that the inducement was drugs instead of money reflected the work that had been done on the five identified victims as well as the missing. While some of the victims had no known links with prostitution, all had drug habits.

  And, Pina added, the method of killing appeared to be the same in all six cases. “In every situation they are identical, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. The positions of the bodies as discovered, he added, led him to believe “that some type of activity (such) as sexual assault may have occurred.”

  Years later, this question of whether some or all of the victims were sexually assaulted at the locations where the skeletons were recovered was to be one of the murkiest secrets of the Highway Murders.

  Alves, for example, remained convinced that the way Debra Medeiros’s skeleton was left by the side of Route 140 showed that she was sexually assaulted at that location. Pina believed the same about several other victims, as well. Years later, Jim Martin—who wasn’t an investigator but who had seen the photographs of the scenes—was certain that many of the victims had been raped on the spot.

  The chief reason for this belief was that several of the skeletons were recovered in fetal-like positions that appeared to indicate that the killer or killers had attacked the victims while they were in a vulnerable position. Additionally, investigators were able to recover articles of clothing showing the presence of semen. That was one reason investigators wanted to collect the hair, blood, and saliva of suspects—in order to see whether it might match the deposits found with the victims.

  But the truth was, determining whether a skeletonized victim had been sexually assaulted on the spot was far more difficult than merely observing the position of the skeleton. If some of the victims were found in folded or fetal-like condition, it was possible that they had been placed in their locations while already in that condition.

  It is known, for example, that some serial killers take particular pleasure in leaving the bodies of their victims in such vulnerable positions. This so-called staging often indicates, at least to the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Laboratory, a killer (or killers) desperate to demonstrate his total control of the victim, even after death.

  Another possible explanation for the position of the bodies, however, is far simpler. The folded or fetal condition of the skeletons may have been due to the phenomenon of rigor mortis, the postmortem condition that begins about six hours after death and continues for up to 72 hours, depending on the air temperature.

  If related to rigor mortis, what the fetal condition may have meant was that the killer or killers, immediately after the murder, may have placed the murder victim in an enclosed space—like a tool chest or an automobile trunk. There the body may have rested, folded in the fetal position for some hours after the murder. Later, because of rigor mortis, the victim would have remained in the folded position when the killer or killers removed the body from the trunk to be placed at the discovery location.

  And because investigators had recovered some critical pieces of trace evidence—mainly tiny nylon fibers, that appeared to come from an indoor carpet, as well as others from a vehicular carpet—it seemed to many that the murders had most likely taken place somewhere indoors, with the transporting of the body occurring later.

  Finally, while the locations where the skeletons were recovered were not as heavily trafficked as a major metropolitan expressway, there were cars passing by every few minutes, even late at night. It seemed unlikely that a killer or killers would drive a live victim five or ten miles out of town, pull her out of the car on the side of a major roadway, drag her away from the pavement, then rape and strangle her only a few feet from the traffic lanes.

  There were, in fact, literally thousands of much quieter, less risky places off the beaten track to do that sort of thing. On balance, it appeared that the victim locations were selected for one reason, and one reason only—to get rid of the victim and make a fast getaway.

  But on the other hand, roadside rape is exactly what Neil Anderson had been accused of only a few months before.

  On the last day of February 1989, the Smithsonian’s Ubelaker was finally able to make a positive identification of the sixth victim—the skeleton whose discovery along Route 140 in early December had so incensed Ron Pina.

  Deborah McConnell, 25, was originally from Rhode Island, and was the mother of a ten-year-old daughter. While there didn’t seem to be any evidence that Debroh, as she was known to her friends, had ever been arrested for prostitution, at least in New Bedford, investigators determined that she was well-known among people who frequented Weld Square. Like all the other victims, Debroh suffered from a drug addiction.

  With Debroh’s identification, more possible connections began falling into place, at least in the mind of Ron Pina.

  For one thing, it appeared that Debroh was friends with Nancy Paiva and probably Dawn Mendes, who were dead, and Mary Rose Santos, who was still missing. In 1985, in fact, Debroh had worked at the Town Tavern in New Bedford’s north end with Nancy, and later had frequented the Homeward Bound tavern on the edge of Weld Square, along with Dawn and Mary Rose. Both taverns were owned by the same person, Faith Alameida—who also owned the Quarterdeck Lounge, where Mary Rose had last been seen on July 14, 1988.

  And detectives also discovered that Debroh was friendly with Robin Rhodes, who was also still missing. Rhodes, it appeared, had once worked with Mary Rose and her husband Donald Santos in a fish-processing plant. Robin Rhodes in turn was friends with Nancy Paiva, and Sandy Botelho, who had lived next door to Christine Monteiro.

  But were all these interrelationships meaningful? After all, New Bedford was a small city, and the victims were all part of a distinct subculture—people who used drugs. It didn’t have to be an unusual coincidence for the victims to have known one another.

  For the state troopers, the additional fact that some of the victims—Dawn Mendes, Deborah DeMello, Debbie Medeiros, and the missing Christine Monteiro and Sandy Botelho—had arrest records for prostitution was a powerful suggestion that the killer was a prostitution customer who had merely happened to unwittingly select victims known to each other. Just because the victims had known each other didn’t mean the killer knew them.

  Serial murder experts agreed with the troopers: serial killers almost always selected people they didn’t know as victims. That was part of the thrill of the game, for the murderer, the experts pointed out. And, the troopers argued, there was no way to know for sure that the other victims hadn’t occasionally practiced prostitution when money was tight, and so thereby subject themselves to the killer.

  But because Nancy Paiva, Mary Rose Santos, Robin Rhodes, Marilyn Roberts, and Debroh were not known, at least officially, to practice prostitution, something else might be afoot, at least in Pina’s mind.

  Throughout February, in intense discussions, the state police continued to press the prostitution customer idea. But Pina, doubting the competency as well as the loyalty of the state police, was almost sure that the close connections among the victims and their consistent involvement in the drug use meant something far different—something, in fact, that Pina was increasingly convinced had to do with Kenny Ponte, who seemed to be one of the people known to most of the victims, prostitutes or not.

  Then, in late February, even before Debroh McConnell’s skeleton was identified, Pina’s theory of the murders was given a boost by what initially appeared to be an unrelated matter. Two New Bedford detectives assigned to Pina’s controversial Bristol County Drug Task Force made a major cocaine-dealing arrest in the city’s south end.

  The proprietor of the Whisp
ers Pub was taken into custody by Detectives Paul Boudreau and Bruce Machado, and charged with running a cocaine ring that allegedly did nearly $5.2 million a year in sales. It was another striking coincidence: Nancy Paiva, Robin Rhodes, and Sandy Botelho were frequent patrons of Whispers. Indeed, it had been just after leaving Whispers that Nancy had last been seen on the afternoon of her disappearance the previous July. Was this the cocaine connection that tied the victims together?

  Moreover, Mary Rose, now known to be a cocaine user, lived only a few short blocks from the establishment, as did Dawn Mendes, also a known cocaine user.

  All of these possible links gave Pina a working hypothesis: that the women were all known to one another, and that they had come into contact with the killer or killers in one of four places: Whispers, the Quarterdeck, the Homeward Bound, or the Town Tavern. Although it appeared, according to Faith Almeida, that the Town Tavern and the Homeward Bound had been closed from March to September of 1988—that was yet another coincidence: that was, of course, the exact period the murders were taking place. Was the killer somehow part of the tavern milieu? And—was Kenny Ponte known to frequent Whispers or the Quarterdeck?

  On the surface, it didn’t look that way; Kenny wasn’t much of a drinker. But one of Kenny’s friends was familiar with the four taverns and their clientele, and that was enough for Pina.

  In any event, as Pina prepared to convene the special grand jury to look into the murders, he and his investigators were already working along diametrically different paths. The troopers thought Pina was about to go off on a wild-goose chase, in a fruitless search for some rational motive for the murders; meanwhile Pina was growing more and more frustrated by what he saw as a lack of cooperation from the troopers in investigating matters he thought were most important.

  To head Pina off, the troopers conceived of a plan to heal the breach between Kenny Ponte and the D.A., an effort to put Ponte behind them, once and for all.

  Indeed, as February drew to a close, the state police were deeply involved in negotiations with Kenny’s lawyers as part of an effort to convince him to cooperate with the district attorney. Everyone except Pina and the Saint agreed that Ponte had been badly handled, especially with the leak that had made Ponte’s name so public. The troopers believed that if only Kenny would agree to tell Pina what he knew about the victims, then Pina would agree that Kenny was a dry hole, and agree to move on to more promising suspects.

  In the troopers’ view, a deal was possible: if Pina would agree to drop the indictment against Kenny relating to the Roger Swire assault charge, Kenny would in return agree to testify in front of the special jury about the Highway Murder victims he knew. It seemed simple, but it wasn’t. Kenny wanted more than just a dismissal of the gun charge. He wanted Pina to agree not to prosecute him for anything, short of murder.

  Apparently some in the state police thought Pina had agreed to that, which would get Kenny off the hook for any drug allegations that might be brought against him, and allow the investigation to move forward.

  But the negotiations foundered at the eleventh hour, and a lawyer negotiating for Kenny wound up tape-recording state police detective Jose Gonsalves in a conversation that made Pina look deceitful. The tape survived the next 18 months, and was ultimately broadcast in New Bedford at a critical time in Ron Pina’s life.

  The negotiations were conducted by Ponte’s lawyer Joe Harrington and Pina, with the assistance of Norman McCarthy (the New Bedford lawyer who had earlier bought Kenny’s house) and Gonsalves. Gonsalves and McCarthy thought Pina had agreed to the deal, but for some reason Pina had rebuffed Harrington. This was news to Gonsalves, which shows that communications between Pina and the state police were already at low ebb.

  “Boy, I’ll tell you,” McCarthy told Gonsalves, “I’m just amazed. There is really a breakdown in communication here or there’s a lot of deception going throughout your office, Jose. And I don’t mean to cast any aspersions at you, I don’t know what is going on. Absolutely not. Joe (Harrington) talked to him (Pina). ‘Absolutely no deal. Never has been, never will be.’

  “Never will be?” Gonsalves asked, disbelieving.

  “Right,” said McCarthy. “Well, not ‘never will be.’ I won’t …”

  McCarthy didn’t want to slam the door completely.

  “Well,” Gonsalves said, “he (Pina) definitely wants something face to face … but did he (Pina) indicate to him (Harrington) what he was going to agree to?”

  “What happened was, according to what Joe told me, he talked to (Pina) … and Ron knows this, and it’s just terrible that, you know, it’s almost like a license to deceive people. You know, I’m trying to help everybody …”

  “Yeah …”

  “… and people are putting me … and trying to make me look like a fool. According to what Joe had to say, is that he talked about the gun charge, he mentioned that. He also mentioned the … this thing about no prosecution for anything … and Ron Pina says, ‘Absolutely not, no one’s ever talked to me … no one ever …’”

  “No one ever what?”

  “‘No one’s ever even approached me about that.’”

  “That’s what Ron said?”

  “That’s what Ron said to Joe.”

  “Well, that’s not true,” Gonsalves told McCarthy. “I mean, there were enough people here when I asked (Pina) about it. The Sergeant (Gale Stevens) was here, and Mary Ann (Dill) was here, when I made that representation to (Pina).”

  “I don’t know what type of games are going on here,” McCarthy said, “but I don’t like them. I’ll be honest with you—”

  “Well,” Gonsalves interrupted, “I’ll go talk to him … well, I won’t be here in the morning to speak to … I wish I knew this this morning because we just had a meeting early this afternoon. I would have brought it up in front of about eight people.” Gonsalves was referring to one of the so-called group therapy sessions.

  “Nothing,” McCarthy said. “Nothing at all.”

  “So, that’s what Joe said that Ron said?” Gonsalves still didn’t believe it. “Or did he say, ‘that can’t be finalized until he is up here in person’?”

  “No.”

  “That isn’t what he is saying?”

  “No.”

  McCarthy went on to say that he believed Harrington was telling the truth, and that Pina had made a complete turnaround on a deal to get Ponte’s testimony.

  “And then he mentioned your name,” McCarthy added. “Joe mentioned your name. (He said) ‘Well, Mr. Gonsalves sort of worked this out behind the scenes, subject to my clearance and your clearance, this deal.’ (And Pina’s response was) ‘Absolutely not, I’ve never talked to Mr. Gonsalves about it at all.’”

  Gonsalves was now dumbfounded. “Oh, wow,” Gonsalves said. “That’s totally untrue. I mean, I have enough people who are here who … Maryann, Sergeant Stevens, I think St. Jean was here in the doorway when I mentioned it … Well, I’m very surprised.”

  “So am I,” McCarthy said.

  Pina had decided that Ponte would be his target, no matter what the troopers believed.

  31

  Present No Man

  The special grand jury that convened on March 2, 1989, was comprised of 23 people, drawn from all the communities of Bristol County. The law required Pina to ask the state attorney general to authorize the special jury.

  Once the presiding judge signed an authorizing certificate, the court’s clerk obtained the names of 45 people, placed them in a box, and then drew the names of 23 at random. It turned out that only seven people from New Bedford were chosen for the jury. All the rest were from outlying townships or smaller cities like Fall River or Taunton. Nine of the 23 were women.

  Late in February, as they were sworn in, the special jurors took an oath to “diligently inquire … (and) present no man for envy, hatred or malice … but … present things truly, as they come to your knowledge, according to the best of your understanding, so help you God.” Every member of th
e jury was legally obligated to keep the proceedings secret. That was a stricture that did not apply, however, to either Pina or the police, according to several legal cases that had already made their way through the Massachusetts courts in previous years.

  On March 2, 1989, the 23 special jurors assembled behind closed doors in the ancient, two-story, red-brick Bristol County Courthouse—the former high school—and readied themselves to hear the first of 21 witnesses who had been subpoenaed by Pina to testify. The jurors did not know it then, but the session was to be only the first in a series that would occupy their lives for almost 18 months. That things didn’t quite turn out the way Pina hoped was in part due to the testimony that was presented, and also due to Kenny Ponte’s own maneuvers.

  While it isn’t possible to know precisely what was said by the witnesses in the four days of what Pina subsequently referred to as “phase one” of the jury’s investigation—the records remain sealed—enough leaked out either then or later to approximate the subjects covered in the sworn testimony.

  Essentially, Pina wanted to present enough information about Weld Square and its subculture to give the grand jurors some idea of what was to come.

  By this time, Pina and his investigators had narrowed their focus to “three, possibly four” area men, as Pina and Martin readily admitted. No one knew for sure which of the three or four men might be responsible for the crimes, if any indeed were involved; as a result, Pina, the Saint, and Sergeant Stevens decided to place their bets across the board by assigning different investigating teams to each man.

  One suspect, naturally, was Tony DeGrazia, and as February unfolded, State Troopers Kevin Butler and Lorraine Forrest interviewed a steady progression of women who claimed that a man with a flat nose who drove a pickup truck had beaten and raped them. As Butler and Forrest displayed photographs of Tony, victims told them over and over again, “That’s him, that’s him.”