Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  It was a good try, but it didn’t stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, the first victim was, according to Pina’s theory, probably Rochelle Clifford, and her skeleton had been found not only west of Route 140 and New Bedford via I-95, but down two lonely roads as well.

  That, of course, meant the killer had already finished his “pattern,” even before any of the victims were discovered. And why would the killer have returned to I-95 with Dawn Mendes’s body in early September 1988 after Nancy Paiva᾿s skeleton was discovered on July 30, if he was so concerned about the possibility of detection of his “pattern”?

  But Pina’s reference to a local reader only lent support to his previously expressed opinion that the killer was a local person—someone like Kenny Ponte, for example.

  33

  Dealing Days

  As Pina and his investigators prepped for the next session of the grand jury, a steady stream of female convicts paraded out of MCIs Framingham and Lancaster on the pilgrimage to the Bristol district attorney’s office. The word spread throughout the prison dormitories that the Bristol D.A.’s shop window was open for business, and soon the authorities were bombarded with tales of drugs, sex, perversion, and violence, at least some of it true.

  Among the most popular targets in the hit parade was Tony DeGrazia. By late March, nearly everyone in the two prisons and many of the people on the street had heard of the police interest in Tony, also known as the guy with the Flat Nose. The word spread quickly that if you wanted to make a deal with the district attorney, all you had to do was give a little. Flat Nose was a safe bet; after all, when the cops asked who had attacked you, all you had to do is look for the picture of the guy with the smashed-in nose, and you won the prize. It helped when Tony’s picture was the only person in the photo spread with a flat nose.

  In truth, while it isn’t possible at this point to say with accuracy just how many people Flat Nose had attacked during the years 1986 through 1989, what was striking was how similar all the attacks seemed.

  In almost every case, the man with the Flat Nose had been driving a dark pickup truck, had been drinking, and came around late at night. After getting a woman into his truck, he asked for fellatio. The woman almost always demanded money first, at which point Flat Nose usually went berserk, screaming, swearing, choking, hitting, threatening with his knife as he proceeded on to vaginal rape. In a few cases Flat Nose cut women with his knife, and in one case knocked out several of his victim’s teeth.

  Also noticeable was that the level of violence by Flat Nose seemed in direct proportion to the amount of resistance offered by the victim. Those women who were quickly terrorized suffered less than those who struggled. And finally, part of Flat Nose’s m.o. (detective talk for modus operandi) seemed to include a frantic haste to get away as soon as the rape was over. “Get out of the truck, bitch!” Flat Nose would shout, and then open the door and literally give his victims the boot before zooming off.

  But were these stories real? Or were they shared lore, passed from prisoner to prisoner for use by all, once the word circulated that the Bristol D.A. was willing to deal? The very similarities made some of the stories suspect. Worse, from a legal point of view, only two of the attacks had been reported contemporaneously with the events, and in no case was any physical evidence taken—no samples of semen, fingernail scrapings, or blood, for example. In most cases, the physical injuries reported had long healed by the time the victims reported the attacks to the city detectives and the troopers.

  The cases thus all hinged on eyewitness identification in darkened locations—by victims who were often tired, under the influence of drugs, and who had rather impeachable credibility to begin with. Despite the sheer volume of cases, any charges against Tony DeGrazia as Flat Nose would be difficult to prove.

  But as women rode the circuit between MCIs Framingham and Lancaster, and New Bedford, the stories that circulated grew ever more wild. It wasn’t long before some prisoners with nothing to sell but their own desire to make a deal began working their way in on the action.

  One of these was a 36-year-old blond woman named Diane Doherty. Years later, trying to piece Diane Doherty’s story together remains an exercise in frustration—simply because Diane said so many different things to so many different people, and then had trouble remembering what she’d said, and where and when and to whom, that it’s virtually impossible to make all the parts fit together coherently. In literal truth, Diane Doherty was a dizzy blonde.

  For one thing, Diane claimed she suffered from narcolepsy, the nervous ailment that literally puts its sufferers to sleep when least expected. For another, Diane claimed—at times—to be the recipient of dreams and visions. For a third, Diane couldn’t tell the truth about the Highway Murders because she wasn’t anywhere near New Bedford when they were taking place, and she knew nothing about either the victims or the suspects.

  Diane and her daughter spent most of 1988 in Arizona along the banks of the Colorado River. On their return to Massachusetts in late 1988, the Highway Murders were just beginning to gain publicity. In early 1989, Diane was sent to jail for some sort of minor offense; she once claimed it was parking tickets, but it appears she was involved in collecting rent on property she did not own.

  In any event, by February or so of 1989, Diane was securely lodged in MCI Framingham, listening goggle-eyed as women returned from New Bedford and the relay teams of cops and lawyers talking about murder most foul. Gradually, as February turned into March, some of what the other prisoners were saying about the murders and the police began to seep into Diane’s consciousness. The other prisoners were talking about somebody with a flat nose, and about a lawyer—somebody named Kenny Ponte.

  Initially, at least, Diane envisioned Kenny Ponte as some sort of blond mastodon, standing over his pathetically if romantically broken victims; it was like a scene from a gothic romance, even if it was about murder. The handsome blond figure of her imagination fascinated Diane, and it wasn’t until much later that Diane realized the real Kenny Ponte was neither exceptionally tall, nor blond, nor handsome, but was a real person. But by then it was too late, at least for Kenny.

  In mid-March, Diane was released from Framingham, and that’s when her part of the Highway Murder story really begins, although it was a part that would shift constantly throughout the next year and a half as other events intervened.

  34

  Triggers

  On April 4, a second gaggle of witnesses was flushed before the grand jury, and as before, Pina tried to apply coverage across the board on his three remaining suspects.

  Seven witnesses who knew Kenny Ponte were called, including the dentist who had treated Rochelle Clifford. The taxi driver Goldblatt was recalled. Four women who claimed to know Kenny or who had been assaulted by the man with the Flat Nose were brought before the jury as well. Two of the women, in fact, claimed to know both Kenny and Flat Nose; like others before them, they swore that they had consumed cocaine with Kenny, and that on entirely separate occasions, Flat Nose had raped them.

  One of these women was Adele Leeks, who was one of the few women who knew both Kenny Ponte and Tony DeGrazia.

  What the jurors weren’t told was that Adele had been located at MCI Framingham, and that within a week after telling investigators about her relationship with Kenny, she was in a halfway house. Later, at the end of the summer, when investigators returned to Adele to get more information, Adele’s memory suddenly went south. Troopers were convinced that Adele, having finished her time at the halfway house, recovered from her drug addiction and about to be released, had simply lost interest in cooperating with the investigators.

  Whether that was true or not isn’t certain; what is true, however, is that when Pina finally decided to indict Kenny for conspiring to possess drugs, in the spring of 1990, he also indicted Adele, along with Jeanne Kaloshis and Goldblatt.

  Among the other witnesses were three friends of Kenny. One, John Rebello, testified that he had once sold cocaine to
Kenny. Two others said they saw no evidence of hard drug use on Kenny’s part, although one of the pair, Daniel Branco, was himself a convicted drug dealer who had once been represented by Ponte.

  Branco, in fact, provided what amounted to comic relief as the second day of testimony concluded. As Branco completed his testimony and rose to exit the jury room, a juror thought he heard a clicking sound coming from Branco’s pocket.

  “Frisk him,” Pina ordered a trooper as Branco left. “Make sure he doesn’t have a tape recorder. One of the jurors heard something clicking as he went by.”

  “This is ridiculous, Branco said as he was led away by officers for a check of his pockets. No recorder was found. “Clicking Witness Frisked,” the Standard-Times reported. Just as Branco said, it all seemed a little ridiculous.

  Outside the jury room, late at night or in the early morning hours, Flat Nose was still marauding the streets. While by day grand jurors heard of his depredations, by night Flat Nose remained unencumbered. Two days before the jury took testimony, Flat Nose attacked two women less than an hour apart. A week later, Flat Nose got yet another woman.

  State Troopers Kevin Butler and Lorraine Forrest felt that Flat Nose was in some sort of rape frenzy. To them, Flat Nose appeared to be a very viable suspect in the Highway Murders. After all, he’d threatened numerous women with death; one had told the troopers that Flat Nose had a pair of handcuffs, while another said that Flat Nose had reached for a black rope after he’d attacked her.

  Some serial killers, both troopers knew, began taking larger and larger risks just before being caught, as Flat Nose appeared to be doing. Similarly, some serial killers nearing the end of their depredations occasionally descended into a frenzy of increasing violence; judging from the more recent attacks, Flat Nose’s violence appeared to be getting worse.

  Both troopers believed that Flat Nose had to be Tony DeGrazia. There were simply too many consistencies between the facts of Tony’s life as the detectives had developed them, and the string of rapes. Besides, witness after witness had identified Tony from his photograph as the man who had attacked them. The big question was whether Tony was the Highway Murderer, and as the troopers considered that possibility, they were well aware of aspects about Tony’s life that seemed to eminently qualify him as the long-sought killer. Forrest was particularly convinced.

  In mid-April of 1989, Tony was stopped while driving drunk in Raynham, a small town northwest of New Bedford. He took a poke at the cop and ran off, leaving his truck behind. The truck’s registration yielded Tony’s name and address. The Raynham police ran his name through the computer and discovered that Tony had three times been arrested in the early 1980s on sexual assault charges—once in 1982 when he was accused of picking up two female hitchhikers in downtown New Bedford and raping one of them in the Freetown forest. At his arraignment that year the mother of one of the girls rushed across the courtroom and slugged Tony in the face—in the nose, of all places. Six months later Tony was acquitted of the rape charge when Kathy Scanlon testified that he had been with her just before the attack.

  On the drunk driving night in April 1989, the police brought a search dog to the area, and several hours later Tony was found hiding in the woods nearby. The Raynham police told Tony that with his track record, he looked like he’d be a good candidate as the Highway Murderer, which by then had received massive publicity. The Raynham police were unaware of the information that had already been collected on Tony by the state troopers and their assisting detectives in New Bedford.

  Tony denied any knowledge of prostitutes or the Highway Murders, and the following day bailed out of jail on the drunk driving and assault charges. But the talk with the police stuck with Tony. A few days later, Tony was visiting with his mother, who had taken possession of his truck to prevent Tony from driving drunk again.

  “You know, Mom,” Tony said, “they’re looking at me as a suspect in the Highway murders.”

  “Come on, Tony,” said his mother. She thought Tony was being melodramatic. He wasn’t.

  In investigating Tony, the two state troopers learned what had long been common knowledge in Freetown, where Tony lived. Tony, it appeared, had told his closest friends that as a child he had been physically abused by his mother. His mother hated him, for some reason, Tony told the Scanlons and others. While still a toddler, she habitually reached into Tony’s crib to grab him painfully by the nose. That was one reason why Tony’s nose was so disfigured. Tony also said that his mother often reached into the crib to pull his arm, twisting it so badly that its development was arrested. When he wet the bed, his mother hung the bedsheet out the window, thus advertising Tony’s embarrassment to the world at large. Tony’s mother and father had divorced over issues of sexual fidelity, and a nasty court case ensued in which Tony’s father accused Tony’s mother of vicious abuse of Tony.

  From the outside, then, it appeared to the troopers that Tony might have had deep-seated psychological reasons for killing women. From others in Freetown, namely at the bars and taverns Tony frequented, it appeared that Tony had occasionally expressed hostility toward prostitutes.

  As Butler and Forrest assembled more and more information about Tony’s recent history, still other potential homicidal triggers popped up: Tony had apparently been fired from a job in April 1988, when the murders first began; Kathy Scanlon had first been introduced to her new boyfriend in that same month; Tony’s birthday was in late May, just about the time that victims Christine Monteiro and Debbie Medeiros had last been seen; Tony had become engaged to Kathy on July 3 (Kathy’s birthday) just four days before Nancy Paiva was last seen; Tony had allegedly started using cocaine in late July or August of 1988; Kathy spent every other weekend that summer working at a nearby hospital; Tony broke up with Kathy just about the time that Dawn Mendes had disappeared. And hadn’t one woman told detectives that the last time she’d seen Dawn, she was getting into a pickup truck? Hadn’t Tony owned a succession of pickup trucks? And finally, the detectives knew that Tony had written a check to Sandra Botelho. That clearly put Tony in contact with Sandy, who was still missing.

  There was only one thing to do, the detectives decided: Tony had to be confronted. Plans were made to search Tony’s house and trucks for evidence that might tie him to the crimes. Meanwhile, Tony would be brought in for questioning.

  On the afternoon of April 19, 1989, Butler and Forrest drove to Tony’s small house on Long Pond in Freetown and asked him to accompany them to the district attorney’s office to answer questions about the Highway Murders. Tony agreed to go voluntarily. He had nothing to hide, he claimed. On the way into the office, Tony insisted that he had never picked up a prostitute.

  35

  Admissions

  Shortly after 6 P.M., while Trooper Kenneth Martin was collecting most of Tony’s clothes and samples from his carpets, Tony began answering questions from Forrest and Butler.

  This interview was extraordinary in that it apparently was not tape-recorded—virtually a requirement for suspects in serial murders, according to experts. It appears that Butler took extensive notes, however, notes that contain lengthy verbatim statements attributed to Tony. Later, however, Tony was to deny that he had said some of the things Butler claimed he said, which is one of the reasons why it’s advisable to record such statements.

  After agreeing to waive his rights to a lawyer, Tony was asked again whether he had ever picked up a prostitute. Now Tony backtracked: he had picked one up once, he said, a long time ago.

  But after Butler and Forrest told him that they’d received information from at least 17 women that Tony had assaulted them while they were working as prostitutes, Tony backtracked a bit further and admitted that he had picked up several women more than a year earlier. Sometimes women in Weld Square told him he looked familiar, and accused him of assaulting them in the past, Tony said, but it was a case of mistaken identity. When Butler and Forrest suggested that Tony sometimes suffered blackouts while drinking, Tony denied it.<
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  Now the two detectives began dealing photographs in Tony’s direction. Tony looked at the first three pictures and said the women didn’t look familiar to him. He seemed defensive about being accused of consorting with prostitutes.

  “I know nothing about these whores on the street,” Tony said, according to Butler’s report. “I don’t want to have anything to do with these girls. These girls have come up to me and said, ‘You’re the guy, you’re the guy,’ and I have to physically put them out of the truck.” Then Tony put the blame on the police.

  “Why don’t the police get these girls off the streets?” he asked. “They are hurting people. Now everyone thinks I killed them and I didn’t. These girls are the scum of the earth. I go out with other girls all the time and they don’t accuse me of things. I’m never in New Bedford. I’m never in Weld Square.”

  Tony did not explain why “everyone” thought he had killed the Highway Murder victims, and Butler didn’t ask. Instead Butler wanted to know, if Tony never went to Weld Square, why did so many women there keep identifying him? It was, Tony again insisted, because someone else who looked like him was often in Weld Square.

  Butler kept dealing Tony photographs. As he looked at each one, Tony retreated a bit on his story. “I could have picked them up, but I don’t remember them,” he said. “I have picked up girls I don’t remember. These girls are such scumbags that I don’t want anything to do with them.” When several of the rape allegations were read to Tony, he remarked that “it seems like the same story over and over again.”

  After more discussion, Tony admitted picking up prostitutes and taking them to parking lots and other places. But Tony tried to explain: sometimes he felt the urge to pick up a woman, but after looking more closely at her, thought better of it. Then Tony wanted them to leave his truck, but the woman wanted money for her time. Tony refused to pay, and a fight ensued. Or, he admitted, on some occasions, the women took his money and bolted from the truck; thus Tony felt that not paying others but having sex with them was fair play. Usually he had been drinking when he picked up women, Tony admitted.