Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  As Kenny walked down the road, the police followed him in their unmarked cruisers at a walking pace.

  “Having a nice day, counselor?” one trooper asked with a smirk. “Are those bags heavy, counselor? Is there a problem?”

  Ponte came to a pay telephone and dialed Reddington.

  “Kevin, this is Ken,” Ponte told Reddington. “I’m at a pay phone. I’m being followed by the police.”

  “Whaddaya mean, followed by the police?” Reddington didn’t get it.

  “I don’t know, they followed me. I’m with a guy, they arrested the guy for operating on a suspended license.”

  “Are they there now?” Reddington asked.

  “Yeah,” Ponte said, “they’re standing up the street, one on the sidewalk, two across the street, two in the car, and they’re looking at me … do you want to talk to them?”

  “Yeah,” Reddington said, “I want to talk to them.”

  “Hold on for a minute.” Ponte called to one of the officers. “Excuse me, Officer, would you speak to my attorney? I’d like you to speak to my lawyer.”

  Reddington heard some mumbling in the background. Ponte came back on the line. “He basically told you to go fuck yourself,” Ponte told Reddington. Reddington now gave some equally specific instructions to Ponte.

  Ponte next called his older brother Joe, and asked him to come pick him up. Joe Ponte arrived, Kenny got in Joe’s car, and the two brothers drove off, the troopers following. Meanwhile, Reddington was working the phones.

  Forty minutes later, Reddington’s phone rang again. It was Kenny.

  “Where are they now?” Reddington asked.

  Right behind me, Ponte told him. “Beautiful,” Reddington said.

  A few minutes after that, Joe Ponte drove his car into the parking lot at Reddington’s office building, trailed by one car, with one or two other police shadowers still on the street. Reddington’s secretary Jean jumped into her own car, and drove to block the parking lot exit. The lead car trailing Ponte was trapped.

  Reddington advanced on the captured police vehicle.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, “I’m Kevin Reddington, Mr. Ponte’s attorney … can I ask who you are?” Reddington was surrounded by people with notepads and cameras. In the intervening minutes after first hearing from Ponte, he’d called the news media to come witness the entire event in his parking lot. Now the newspeople were taking pictures and writing down everything that was being said. This was using the news in the same way Pina used it, Reddington thought.

  The woman trooper trapped in the parking lot was very embarrassed. She admitted that she was a state police officer.

  “What are you doing?” Reddington asked.

  “I don’t believe this has happened,” the trooper said, flushing. “I’m just doing my job.”

  “That’s what got a lot of people in Germany in trouble,” Reddington retorted. He told the police to back off and gave a signal to Jean, his secretary. The police left, but they never did that again.

  Late in April, Ponte won yet another round, when a judge ordered his special grand jury subpoena quashed. Reddington contended the summons was nothing more than harassment. Pina, however, was undeterred.

  “The goal of the Commonwealth and the grand jury has not been affected by the quashing of this subpoena,” Pina said. “I think we can do what we want to do in a different way.”

  So, near the end of April, the special grand jury began again. This time Pina brought Ryley back, together with two women investigators said were associated with Ponte and his friend, the preppie former jail guard—including Elsa Johnson, who Boudreau was convinced had once lived with Ryley, and not far from the place where the alleged pornography (or even snuff films) was being produced. Pina also called Ponte’s friend Daniel Branco. Elsa told the jurors an earful.

  Afterward, Pina spoke to the reporters once more. Two new witnesses, he said, had provided some very specific information, and the hour of an indictment was growing closer.

  “We don’t have a smoking gun,” he said, “that one piece of glue that takes us over the top.” But Pina confirmed earlier reports that the investigators and the grand jury were now concentrating on one suspect—obviously Ponte—and one victim, about whom the investigators had the greatest amount of evidence. The victim, of course, was Rochelle Clifford, who was more closely tied by time and location to Kenny than any other victim.

  Finding “the one victim’s” murderer, Pina added, would help solve all of the other cases. “I think she has enough in common with them—how she died,” Pina told everyone. “She would be a key. The disappearances and deaths are similar.”

  But if Pina was talking, so was Kenny’s friend, Danny Branco, the same man who’d once been accused of trying to tape the special grand jury as the “clicking witness. Branco told the assembled reporters that the district attorney had asked him whether he’d ever brought drugs to Kenny; about the attorney’s sex life; about Kenny’s relationships with various women; and about the layout of Kenny’s old house on Chestnut Street, which turned out to be only a few blocks away from the house of—guess who—Neil Anderson!

  Branco, to reporters, now denied that he had told investigators, earlier, that Ponte couldn’t be the killer, because he, Branco, knew who the real killer was!

  Thus, Branco denied a statement that no one had yet officially had said he’d ever made! That’s what came of investigative leaks. Things were getting crazy, all right, which was therefore probably the perfect time for Diane Doherty to make her latest reappearance.

  49

  Diane

  Ever since the trouble over Kenny Ponte’s supposed confession at Leslie Mello’s kitchen table, Diane Doherty said later, the private eye who had lived next door to her had been harassing her, to put pressure on her to reiterate the information.

  She’d gone to the FBI, the state attorney general, had called the Bristol County CPAC, complaining that the private eye would give her no rest. Along the way, Diane denied she’d ever said anything about Kenny Ponte. Finally, in April, Diane found her way to Kevin Reddington.

  There she poured out the whole tale: how this mean, unscrupulous private eye was trying to force her to commit perjury. The man was so devious, Diane told Reddington, that he’d even arranged to have her arrested for drunken driving. And worse than that, he’d—get this—arranged for her cat to be hung by the neck until dead!

  Reddington nodded sympathetically. Behind his pleasant mask of listening he was thinking: whoa!

  Diane wanted Reddington to tell her how to get in touch with Kenny. It was important, she said, because she felt sorry for him.

  But Reddington, sensing that Diane was trouble for Kenny, refused to tell her where Kenny was.

  That didn’t deter Diane, however. She knew how to find out. She later said she called John Ellement at The Boston Globe, who provided Diane with Kenny’s address in Port Richey. Ellement later denied he’d ever given Diane Kenny’s address or phone number, and it seems highly unlikely. Just how Diane actually got Kenny’s address remains a mystery. In any event, the next-to-last act of the Highway Murders was about to unfold.

  Sorting through all the threads of the Diane Doherty connection, despite the passage of years, continues to be an exercise in convolution. One of the major problems with Diane is that it was extraordinarily difficult to figure out which side she was on. It’s likely that Diane herself did not know.

  Later, Pina’s spokesman Jim Martin was to emphatically reject the notion that Diane had anything to do with Kenny’s later indictment. “I can tell you that in my estimation, the indictment against Ponte was based on evidence and on testimony that had absolutely nothing to do with Diane Doherty,” Martin said later. “She had nothing to do with it whatsoever.”

  Yet a grand juror, just hours before Kenny was indicted for murder, called Diane a witness with more “crucial testimony than any other witness we’ve had in this courtroom in the past 20 months.”

 
Reddington, Ponte’s new lawyer, said of Diane just after Ponte was indicted, “I wouldn’t walk across the street to present anything Diane Doherty said. If that’s the Commonwealth’s case, the Commonwealth is in trouble.”

  And Ponte himself came to believe that Diane was an agent provacateuress, a sort of guided Ms. hurled in his direction by a scheming Ron Pina.

  But Diane was a cipher; she was the kind of person who collected information the way a ball of felt collects lint. There were all sorts of interesting things attached to Diane’s memory; the problem was figuring out where they had come from, and when. Careful extraction and analysis of those bits and pieces might prove instructive, some people later thought; at least it might be a mirror into what Kenny himself knew—and whether he should have known those things, if indeed he was innocent. Conversely, however, the way Pina handled Diane shows much about the case Pina wanted to bring against Kenny, and its shortcomings.

  According to her later testimony, Diane’s reappearance in the Highway Murders investigation began some time in April or perhaps May of 1990, when she decided to call the private eye with whom she’d been feuding, to patch things up. The private eye warned Diane that he intended to tape-record their conversation, and he apparently did just that.

  After telling the private investigator that she wished their relationship hadn’t gotten so stinky, Diane began asking him questions about asphyxiation, and an old Massachusetts murder case involving corpus delicti: could murder charges be brought against someone even if the authorities had never found the body?

  Subsequently—or perhaps before, depending on which interpretation one favors—Diane talked to Reddington, as noted earlier. Diane said that Reddington had told her that the Rochelle Clifford case—and maybe one other—were the only cases the prosecutors had a prayer of tying to Kenny Ponte.

  This claim doesn’t seem very credible; it’s unlikely that a lawyer would tell someone he’d never met before such damaging information about his own client.

  The issue here is one of motivation. If Diane talked first to the private investigator, there is reason to wonder whether Diane’s subsequent personal involvement with Kenny Ponte was arranged to develop evidence against him. On the other side of the same coin, Pina and the grand jurors suspected that it had been Ponte who first told Diane about asphyxiation and the old murder case. That dovetailed with their notion that Kenny was hinting to Diane that he was guilty.

  There is no doubt that Kenny later cajoled Diane into making inquiries for him about evidence in the case, as we will see.

  But after talking with Reddington, Diane set her cap for Kenny; on April 28, a few days after she talked to Reddington, Diane sent an eight-page letter to Kenny in Florida via Federal Express. In the letter Diane expressed sympathy for Ponte, and told him that if he ever needed financial or moral support, he could count on her.

  Kenny then called Reddington, according to the lawyer, and Reddington advised him in the strongest possible terms to stay away from Diane. But Kenny apparently couldn’t resist.

  On May 5, 1990, Kenny called Diane collect. It was the first of many telephone calls between the two during the month. Kenny always called collect, and later Diane said the month’s telephone bill was nearly $500. Almost from the beginning, according to Diane, Kenny wanted her to come to see him in Florida. Diane later claimed she’d sent him nearly a thousand dollars in cash over the month, which raises the question of where Diane got this money.

  As the talks between the two would-be lovers continued throughout the month, Kenny occasionally veered into angry denunciations of Pina, contending that Pina was bent on framing him for political purposes. Sometimes the murders were discussed, but Diane later said that she didn’t like talking about the subject with Kenny because the topic made him so mad.

  But sometime during the month of May, Diane learned two things: that Rochelle Clifford’s mother had supposedly said her daughter had once lived with Kenny Ponte, which Kenny had denied; and that Rochelle had allegedly been involved in a burglary at Kenny’s house, in which a gun had been taken.

  At this point, unfortunately, things become extremely murky.

  It appears that Pina and the grand jury were intensely interested in just how Kenny had known that Rochelle had taken the gun. In Pina’s theory of the case, this was information Kenny should not have known unless he’d been with Rochelle after April 3, 1988—and Kenny, of course, claimed he had not seen Rochelle since that date.

  In any event, during the last week in May, Diane called Rochelle Clifford’s mother for a chat.

  The accounts of Mrs. Clifford and Diane diverge, naturally; little with Diane was ever straightforward. Diane’s story was that she wanted to find out from Mrs. Clifford just how dangerous Kenny was, before going down to visit him; from a different perspective, however—one adopted by the grand jury—Diane’s call seemed a bit like she was fishing at Ponte’s instigation to see whether Mrs. Clifford knew anything crucial about Ponte that might foreshadow his indictment.

  Mrs. Clifford’s version was significantly different. She said Diane called her to offer information about Rochelle. Diane didn’t want to discuss it over the telephone, Mrs. Clifford said, so Mrs. Clifford drove to Lynn to meet with Diane. Mrs. Clifford brought a tape recorder with her.

  But Diane didn’t want to be taped. Instead, according to Mrs. Clifford, Diane wanted her to sign a statement claiming that she’d never said that Rochelle had ever lived with Kenny Ponte. Such a statement would have been very helpful to Kenny, because Pina had already told the court that Mrs. Clifford had said that very thing. That might show misconduct on Pina’s part, possibly useful in case Kenny was indicted. Mrs. Clifford refused to sign anything. Diane later said that Mrs. Clifford agreed that she’d never told Pina that Rochelle had lived with Kenny, however.

  The more critical issue was the gun. Although this was hardly the “smoking pistol” Pina had yearned for, Diane’s knowledge about the gun seemed to indicate to Pina that Kenny was, for some reason, concealing the date, place, and time he’d last seen Rochelle. That was inculpatory—an inference that might help lead a jury toward a finding that Kenny was guilty of Rochelle’s murder. Why else would Kenny lie about such a thing?

  Diane later said Mrs. Clifford told her about the gun. She said Mrs. Clifford told her that Rochelle had admitted to her that she’d taken the gun during the burglary.

  Mrs. Clifford later told Pina that Diane was wrong; she’d never said a word about the gun, Mrs. Clifford insisted. The question was, therefore: where had Diane Doherty first heard about the pistol—from Kenny, who supposedly shouldn’t have known about it, or from Mrs. Clifford?

  “Diane,” Pina later said, when Diane was testifying before the grand jury, “Mrs. Clifford came here, and I’m going to tell you that she said she never told you anything about a gun, that Rochelle had taken a gun from Ken Ponte.”

  “She most certainly did,” Diane said.

  “She said she didn’t tell you that,” Pina continued. “I mean, she knew about it; but she says she didn’t tell you about that, because that was something that was important for her and not to just tell you about that, is what she said.”

  “How else would I have known if she didn’t tell me?”

  “I’m asking you,” said Pina. “How else would you know?”

  The clear implication was that Pina believed that Kenny had told Diane about Rochelle’s theft of the gun, which in turn showed Kenny was lying about the last time he’d seen Rochelle.

  The conversation between Diane and Mrs. Clifford lasted until the early morning hours, according to Diane. And according to Diane’s daughter, Kenny called twice during the conversation, each time to ask whether Diane was talking to Mrs. Clifford. This seems to indicate that Kenny knew what Diane was up to when she called Rochelle’s mother.

  On June 3, 1990, Diane flew to Florida to meet Kenny Ponte for the first time. The plane was diverted from Tampa to Orlando because of bad weather, so Kenny drove
to Orlando to pick up Diane, a trip of about two hours.

  Later, much of what transpired between Diane and Kenny in Florida received a great amount of publicity. How much of what Diane said happened really happened can only be guessed at, however, because by the time it all came out, Diane had provided three different versions, all of them fundamentally contradictory. By then, Kenny was in jail, charged with trying to strangle Diane.

  SPRING 1990

  “His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect …”

  —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  50

  Diane’s Florida Vacation

  On Monday, June 11, 1990, Kenny got into an argument with the woman who rented the other side of his duplex in Port Richey. The way Kenny portrayed it, the woman had failed to pay him rent that was due; the woman said Kenny refused to return her $50 deposit. The argument unfolded in the driveway, and when Kenny, with Diane, got into his car and drove away, the renter claimed Kenny had tried to run her down. She called the police.

  By this time, the Port Richey Police Department was quite well informed about Kenny Ponte. They had already arrested Paul Ryley on the fraud charges, as requested by the Massachusetts authorities, and as noted, Boudreau had established a relationship with the Florida officers and had filled them in on the suspicions about Kenny.

  Within a few hours of the renter’s complaint, Kenny and Diane were in police custody. Kenny was booked for leaving the scene of an accident; Diane was arrested for violating her probation by traveling to Florida without notifying her probation officer.

  When Boudreau’s Florida contact, Sergeant William Sager of the Port Richey Police, talked to Diane the following day, he noticed bruises on Diane’s neck.