In a conversation in July with Globe reporter Ellement, Anderson not only denied acting oddly while at the two rivers, denied murdering anyone, but also denied raping or assaulting anyone. At the time, he was still facing trial on three rape charges. But then Anderson went on to criticize Pina’s conduct of the murder investigation. The main problem, he said, was that Pina and the police were relying far too heavily on the credibility of unreliable witnesses.
“He’s got all these people here (in jail) who are junkies,” Anderson told Ellement, “(and) there’s a whole bunch of people who, instead of spending time in jail, (will) do a deal with the D.A.”
That was exactly what transpired a few weeks later, when a man named Ronald Ray Griffith, a 38-year-old Missouri man, confessed to committing one of the murders, and claimed to have information about several others. Griffith was in jail in Missouri. It appeared he had been in the New Bedford area during the summer of 1988 with his former wife. He was hauled back to New Bedford and grilled. Griffith claimed he could lead investigators to more bodies, but it turned out Griffith knew nothing. He had, it appeared, fabricated his entire story by weaving together news accounts and prison gossip.
“It all appeared to be very valid information that you had to take seriously,” Jim Martin told Ellement afterward. “All the information turned out to be false. He has, at least at this time, been eliminated as a suspect.”
Later, it turned out Griffith made his false confession to induce the authorities to bring him back to Massachusetts so he could see his former wife.
It went unreported at the time, but in early September, the FBI sent Pina’s office the results of their tests on all the hairs, fibers, saliva, and bloodstains found in Tony DeGrazia’s house and truck. Considering that the lab had received the materials in April, and that there was such a voluminous number of items to compare, the FBI’s turnaround time was amazing.
There was bad news and good news, Pina was informed: the bad news was, none of the samples had been matched to any of the materials found in connection with the nine murder victims. The good news: several hairs found in Tony’s truck matched those taken from some of the women who claimed Tony had raped or beaten them. That meant the prosecutors had physical evidence that could tie Tony to the rapes of the Weld Square women.
The absence of matches to the items found at the murder sites was not dispositive—in other words, Tony could not be completely eliminated as a murder suspect. But the likelihood was greatly reduced. One victim not having any hairs or fibers linked to those found with Tony could be a coincidence; but nine without a single link almost certainly meant, statistically speaking, that Tony wasn’t the killer.
Later, analysis of Tony’s blood and saliva, compared with similar samples found at the murder sites, seemed to confirm this assessment. Exactly why Pina did not announce this to the world is unclear, but as Pina later indicated, he had a general policy of refusing all comment on trace evidence, even when it tended to acquit.
Yet it did appear that Tony was responsible for at least some of the alleged rapes and assaults attributed to him, if not all of them. Pina resolved to bring Tony to trial on those charges, although he knew they might be hard to prove. After all, the best evidence against Tony was from the eyewitnesses, and their credibility was eminently assailable.
Meanwhile, Tony’s lawyer Ed Harrington, had similarly realized two things: if Tony came to trial too soon—say, before the murders were solved—he would be hard-pressed to gain an acquittal for Tony, even if the witnesses were wobbly, simply because of the urgent desire on the part of the public to find someone, anyone, to punish for the murders, even if that wasn’t what Tony was actually being tried for. And Harrington also realized that the longer the time between the crime and the courtroom, the more likely it was that the victim/witnesses would move away, forget what happened, or get caught up in other unrelated troubles. Time, Harrington knew, was on Tony’s side, so he was in no hurry to get to court.
Tony, of course, didn’t see things that way at all. As he kept protesting to his sister, his mother, the Scanlons, and his priest, he hadn’t raped anyone, and he certainly hadn’t murdered anyone. He wanted to have his trial as soon as possible, get it over with, and return to normalcy. He didn’t understand why Harrington wasn’t in the same rush.
On his return from the mental hospital, Tony was declared competent to stand trial. He was put back into the House of Corrections, in isolation, to prevent one or more of the other prisoners from trying to kill him. The isolation cell was a hellhole. Covered with urine stains and feces, with vomit on the walls, the normally fastidious Tony was nauseated and disgusted. When he asked that the cell be cleaned, he was told to clean it himself.
Later, Tony learned that some of his personal possessions had been stolen by someone in the jail while he had been at the hospital, including the earphones required of prisoners to watch television in their cells—a big loss for a man in solitary. But Tony at least had occasional visitors: Father Bob Harrison, his mother, the Scanlons, and occasionally, Kathy herself. As the summer turned into the fall, Tony settled into the jail routine and tried to think positive thoughts.
40
“He’ll Make It Up”
Pina’s decision to rely more and more on Louie Pacheco and the officers of the drug task force slipped by most of the news media in the summer of 1989, But what did not escape their attention was the impression that the investigation had reached a brick wall.
After the videotape embarrassment was followed by the fruitless search of the Weweantic River and Griffith’s false confession, Pina had to admit that his earlier optimism was unfounded. In early July, in a story headlined “Hope Wanes for Quick Indictment,” the Standard-Times’s Boyle reported that the district attorney was subdued. The information he had believed would solve the case had turned out to be groundless, he admitted.
Pina refused to discuss the videotape, but Boyle was able to learn some of the supposed details, and made the immediate link to the earlier rumors about the so-called snuff films. Thus, like a virus making the rounds to reinfect its original host, the yarns about videotapes, pornography, and on-camera murder were backhandedly validated, and reintroduced with the legitimacy of publicity to the prison population that by now believed them. That, of course, made it extraordinarily difficult for investigators to distinguish fact from fantasy. The rumor mill was further fueled when Jim Martin admitted that investigators were looking into the local pornography business to see if there were any links to the murders.
But there matters seemed to rest. No new information appeared to be forthcoming, and Pina made no moves to reconvene the special grand jury. Late in September, Boyle and others reported that the trail of the killer had gone completely cold. In October, Pina announced that the search dogs would return to work along the highways; there were still two missing women, he noted.
But after a week of searching by the dogs, including Josie from Connecticut, no new skeletons were discovered.
Relatives of the dead, however, weren’t about to give up. Judy DeSantos, for one, wasn’t about to let up on the pressure on Pina and the police.
Ever since Pina had convened the grand jury, Judy had been one of its most faithful observers. Each time the jury convened, there was Judy, waiting on a bench outside the jury room, scrutinizing the witnesses as they went in to testify. When rumors about the supposed snuff movie circulated, a reporter for the Providence newspaper approached her and asked what she thought.
Judy didn’t even know what a snuff film was. Before she could say anything, the reporter told her that some people had never heard the term.
“Now, I’m not going to admit that I don’t know what it is, so I stand there, nodding, ‘oh yeah, uh-huh, yeah …’” as if she knew all about it. The reporter filled in the particulars, adding that the victims were supposed to have been made to have sex with pigs and chickens before being murdered on camera. Judy gripped the table in front of her hard to mainta
in her composure. She thought for a minute that she was going to pass out as images of her sister Nancy with pigs and other animals passed before her eyes.
Was it possible? Would Nancy have participated in a pornographic film, never realizing she might be going to her death? When Judy thought about it, she realized that it was possible, given Nancy’s addiction. Judy briefly considered going to the local video store to rent some pornographic videos on the chance she might recognize her sister, and that the video might lead to Nancy’s killer. But Judy also realized that this was desperation on her part.
In the aftermath of the video episode, Judy decided that she needed to have some contact with the families of the other ten victims. There would be strength in numbers, she realized; and besides, Judy was tired of dealing with her feelings alone. With the help of Pina’s victim assistance office, Judy convened a meeting of the victim families at a church in Fairhaven, just across the river from New Bedford.
As the families shared their stories with each other, one name seemed to pop out: Kenny Ponte. Nearly everyone had some anecdote about Kenny—he’d represented the Santos couple, for example; or Sandy Botelho’s boyfriend; he’d even gone to high school with Deborah Greenlaw DeMello’s former husband. The stories shared by the victims’ families reached a critical mass, and soon, many family members were convinced that either Kenny had killed their loved ones, or at the very least, knew far more about the crimes than he was willing to tell.
To the families, most galling of all was Kenny’s steadfast refusal to cooperate with Pina and the police. Kenny had to be hiding something, they decided; why else wouldn’t he testify along with everyone else? To them, it seemed as though Kenny was denying any personal connection with any of the victims. But their hearts told them otherwise.
As the summer rolled on and the publicity receded, the families decided to redirect public attention at the murders. They allowed Maureen Boyle to attend one of their meetings, and eventually, the mother of Deborah DeMello went on television and pleaded for anyone with new information to come forward.
“Every night is a nightmare,” said Madeline Perry, “because I lie in my bed and wonder who did this and why. He’s still out there.”
In the vacuum of new information, Pina’s erstwhile allies in the news media began, for the first time, to turn on their benefactor. As long as Pina could endeavor to feed the machine, delivering new sensation upon sensation, the media was willing to stand back and allow Pina and his forces to set the pace.
But once the grand jury stopped meeting; once the leads seemed to peter out; once the information ceased to leak, the newspeople turned their attention to Pina himself, and his conduct of the investigation.
In mid-November, a Boston television station suggested, for the first time, that Pina had been manipulating both the news media and the investigation for political purposes. In a six-part series, the broadcasters from WCVB reviewed the Highway Murder events from beginning to end, and threw a roundhouse punch at Pina with the implication that Pina had leaked selective information about the investigation to make himself look good. The station used Tony DeGrazia as Exhibit A.
“Mr. Pina basically is involved in something that has turned from criminal to political,” Tony told the broadcasters from inside the jail. “There’s a difference between prosecution and persecution and I’ve been persecuted because of those murders I didn’t have anything to do with.”
Tony’s assertions were sloughed off by Pina’s office. “We do not comment on media reports,” Jim Martin said, which had hardly been the case in previous months.
Tony went on to castigate Pina for allowing his name to be made public by Peggy Medeiros on the steps of the courthouse.
“I had nothing to do with it,” he said. “You know? I wasn’t even given the benefit of the doubt. All of a sudden, just like that, I’m a serial killer.” Using clips of Tony in jail interspersed with Peggy’s comments on the courthouse steps, the station showed how Tony had been portrayed to the public as a serial murderer. Eddie Harrington was then shown saying that there was no doubt in his mind that Tony’s high bail was the direct result of the statements made by Peggy.
The station interviewed Pina:
“I’m not going to talk about Tony DeGrazia or anybody else,” Pina told the station. “I’m not saying he’s a suspect—”
The interviewer cut in: “Your people have, though.”
Pina stammered, “Uh, you know, if they have, then I, shame on them. I don’t think they have. One of the things I’ve found here is that a little bit of information to the media—it’s a competitive industry, so if one reporter has a little piece of information and he doesn’t have the rest, then he goes back to his editor (with that part of) the story, and he’ll make it up.”
The television reporter then came to the point:
“The fact is, it didn’t happen that way. Despite Pina’s efforts to maintain secrecy, information was given out. Secret grand jury witnesses were talking, and some of Pina’s investigators would give information to reporters. They desperately wanted to convince the public that they were out there working, (that) they were making progress. And often, we in the media played right along.
“Four different men would take their turns as suspects in the murders. Attorney Ken Ponte knew several of the dead women. He now lives and works in Florida. New Bedford handyman Neil Anderson is facing unrelated assault charges; he’s out on bail. Mechanic James Baker, who told investigators he tried to help some of the victims kick drugs, lives and works in Fall River. And, finally, Tony DeGrazia. Each man would be labeled a suspect in the mysterious murder of nine women over ten months.
“Whether Ron Pina knew it or liked it, suspects’ names were getting out.”
In early December, Harrington was finally able to get Tony’s bail lowered; for the first time in almost seven months, Tony had hope of getting out of jail. Harrington argued that Tony’s original $100,000 bail was solely the result of hysteria from the murders and all the publicity. There was no connection between DeGrazia and the murders, Harrington argued. By this time, Harrington had been given the results of the FBI’s testing, and officials of Pina’s office had acknowledged that they had no physical proof that Tony was involved in the murders.
Tony’s television counterattack wasn’t his only effort against the district attorney. In early December, Tony wrote to the Massachusetts bar’s disciplinary arm, complaining that Pina had violated professional ethics by causing Tony’s name to be publicly circulated as a suspect in the murders. Pina responded that he had nothing to do with Tony’s name having been made public, and pointed out that Tony was still awaiting trial on a number of felony rape counts. The bar group declined to investigate any further.
A few days after Tony made his complaint, the Standard-Times headlined, “Anthony DeGrazia Not Highway Murderer,” and went on to report that, according to Harrington, the FBI’s testing had shown that Tony was not the culprit. But Pina still refused to discuss any evidence tending to clear any of the four named suspects.
But if the reporters thought Pina was beaten, they had seriously misjudged him. Because, on December 6, 1989, a key witness was released from prison for the first time in more than a year. Jeanne Kaloshis was out, and she was now ready to tell everything she knew—or imagined she knew—about Kenny Ponte.
41
Two-Headed Machine
Jeanne had been in jail since late September 1988—since, in fact, just about the time that Kenny had left New Bedford for his Florida retirement. And while the police records seemed to put her with Kenny in June 1988—after all, she’d been arrested with him then—and while investigators had heard Jeanne say she had been doing drugs with Kenny, it wasn’t until the fall of 1989 that the various pieces of Jeanne’s version of events began to fall into anything approaching a theory for murder.
Jeanne’s tale, when it was finally told, was the most hair-raising yet about Kenny Ponte. But the juxtaposition of her story with h
er release from prison has to cast doubt on her complete veracity.
That Jeanne’s tale was taken seriously at all was mostly the doing of New Bedford Police detective Paul Boudreau—the drug task force member who had earlier in 1989 busted the drug ring at Whispers Pub, which was the same place that four or five of the victims had been known to frequent, including Nancy Paiva.
Boudreau was a native of New Bedford, and as such, was quite familiar with Kenny Ponte. Both men had grown up in the same town at the same time in the late 1960s. But where Kenny had migrated into the drug culture, Boudreau wound up with an appointment to the police department.
During the 1970s, when Kenny was going to jail, then recovering from his drug addiction, Boudreau was working his way up the ranks of the New Bedford Police Department. After Pina became district attorney, Boudreau was one of the first police officers invited to join the new drug task force. By that time Kenny had been pardoned, and had opened his practice as a lawyer. Occasionally Boudreau and Kenny crossed paths, particularly in cases in which Boudreau was the cop and Kenny the lawyer. But the two men had minimal contact until about January 1984, when Ponte called Boudreau to report that he’d seen something very strange on television.
By this time, Boudreau had developed an interest in video technology, and in fact, was about to open his own business as a renter of video movies. The way Boudreau recalled it later, Kenny called him to say that a video he had rented was filled with images of mutilations, impalings, torture, and bondage.
“It was very bizarre, to say the least,” Boudreau recounted. “He was seeing things into the tape, such as mutilation, raping, killing, torturing, heads cut off, you know, very descriptive things done with babies and women hanging upside down by a clothesline and cutting all their heads off and impaling children through their rectum, I mean, this guy was really off the wall with what he was telling me … but he was so sincere.”
Killing Season Page 20
