The whole life-threatening circumstance was a Pina reliable, Walsh added. “If you look at his track record, he’s done this before.” Once, said Walsh, Pina had claimed a Colombian hit squad and the mob were both after him at the same time. “I don’t know of any other district attorney who has done this,” Walsh said. “I really do believe it is a stunt that he uses from time to time.”
“This is far from a political issue,” Martin shot back. “And anyone trying to make a political name for themselves because of this, shame on them.”
The next day Pina went to court to make the stay-away order permanent, but this time Ponte had Reddington there to represent him. This initial first confrontation between Pina and Reddington had all the atmospherics of two pit bulls meeting each other for the first time.
“We’re going to court,” Reddington later recalled, “and Pina’s there with his wife, Sheila, the former newsperson, and his daughter. They were sitting there, and of course the press interviewed them. Pina was the picture of stoicism. And of course, my guy (Ponte) is down in Florida.
“He had never come up to Massachusetts, had no intention of coming up to Massachusetts,” Reddington said. “And this whole thing was blown way out of proportion. I was getting calls from New York news reporters about the D.A., the ‘crime-fighting D.A.’ with the serial killer moving in next door to him.”
With camera lights and strobes flashing, Reddington, Pina, and Veary went into a side room to work out a permanent order. Pina wouldn’t look at him, Reddington remembered, or even shake his hand. That made Reddington mad, and Veary finally intervened to calm everyone down.
Eventually, both sides worked out an accommodation. Pina withdrew his request for the court order, and in return Ponte agreed to give the district attorney a day’s notice before coming back to New Bedford. The irony of Pina’s now wanting to keep Ponte away from town after all of the maneuvering the year before to bring him back wasn’t lost on anyone.
Afterward, Reddington told reporters that he’d offered Pina a deal: if Pina would give Kenny immunity on charges other than murder, Kenny would testify before the special grand jury. Even though he’d advised Kenny to say nothing, Reddington said, Kenny was eager to appear before the investigating panel.
“He feels he has nothing to lose and everything to gain,” Reddington told The Globe. “The man hasn’t done anything that would lead the grand jury to think that he is guilty, and he wants them to hear his side of the story.”
But Pina was adamant. “There will be no immunity offered by this office,” Jim Martin said. “We will not make deals to get to the truth.” Pina expanded on this.
“What I would like to know from Ken is … does he know any of the dead women? How many does he know? When did he last see them alive? And under what circumstances?” he told Boyle.
That was easy, Ponte said from Florida. He had known four of the victims, not seven as Pina kept suggesting: he’d known Nancy Paiva, Sandy Botelho, Mary Rose Santos, and he’d tried to help Rochelle Clifford. And although he might once have called police to have them remove Dawn Mendes from his porch, he wasn’t absolutely sure.
Later the same day, Pina announced that the special grand jury would resume taking testimony once more. Walsh accused Pina of using the jury to make political mileage. But Pina denied it. He was neither obsessed with the murders, nor was he grandstanding, he said. He intended to follow the leads wherever they headed.
52
Whispers Wildies
It was during all this uproar over Ponte’s intentions toward Pina that Diane Doherty, now safely back at Framingham, began “remembering” things.
When questioned about this later, Diane responded that the whole Florida trip had so badly freaked her out that she had mercifully blotted much of it from her memory. A psychiatrist and priest at the prison were helping her, she said, but it was hard. Still, flashes from the recent past kept creeping back into her mind unbidden. Soon she called a lawyer in Lynn and asked him to contact Troopers Gonsalves and Dill to let them know she had some things to tell them. Thus it was, on July 24, 1990, that Diane Doherty finally made her first appearance before Ron Pina’s special grand jury investigating the Highway Murders.
She’d never met Kenny until June, Diane said, no matter what the creepy private investigator had told the jury She’d only gotten involved with Kenny because of the private eye—after all, the investigator had been pressing her to sign the affidavit about the confession at Leslie Mello’s kitchen table, and Diane knew that had never happened. So she felt sorry for Kenny, and she’d made contact with him at his house in Florida.
She flew down to see Kenny on June 3, Diane said. Kenny had picked her up at the airport, and on the way back to his house in Port Richey, Kenny had made her give him oral sex the whole way—about two hours.
When she’d objected to this, Diane said, Kenny had told her, “It’s my way or the highway.” She didn’t get that at first, Diane said, but later realized that Kenny was saying that if she didn’t do whatever he wanted, he’d kill her and throw her body out along the highway, just like the other victims.
The whole week with Kenny was weird, Diane said. Kenny tied her up and had sex with her, Kenny had inserted a foreign object in her vagina, Kenny made one of his cats have sex with her—it went on and on. Kenny had ten cats, she said—named Rochelle, Robin, Christine, Debbie …
What about the murders?
Oh yes. The whole thing had to do with a movie, Diane said. A movie and drugs.
“He said they were, all these girls here, there were nine girls in this movie,” Diane said. Rochelle Clifford was not in the movie, Diane said. Kenny had told her she was “different” than the other victims. Kenny wanted Rochelle dead for his own reasons, she said, not someone else’s. Rochelle was going to testify against him in the gun case, and that’s why she was killed.
“Did he tell you why the others died?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Okay.”
“About the movies.”
“What did he tell you?”
“These girls were in the movie,” Diane said. “And all of them die at the end of sexual—you know, like after you have a movie and you splice it, and you had another part in. But I guess they owed money for cocaine and heroin, a lot of money. And they knew he was bringing it into New Bedford. And so Kenny had to kill most of them because he owed a lot of money for heroin. That’s part of it.”
“Who did he owe money to?” Pina asked. “Did he tell you? Did he tell you?”
“That’s when the name of Mr. (here Diane named the proprietor of Whispers Pub, the man who’d been accused by Boudreau of running the $5.2 million a year cocaine ring) came up.”
“And who’s he? Did he ever tell you anything about (him)?”
“No,” said Diane. “He told me he was dead, but I found out he wasn’t.”
“What did he tell you about that?”
“Mr. (The proprietor) put up the money mostly for the movie itself. And the movie was supposed to go to Canada and Mexico, but it never made it out of the country. And so, these girls that were in the movie were supposed to get a cut … from the profit from selling the movie.
“And so they started—they were getting lengthy into the time that they wanted their money. And so that’s part of the reason, another reason for it. I don’t think he had any intention of paying them that.”
The name of the movie, according to Diane, was Whispers Wildies.
53
“I Have Nothing to Fear”
In fairness, despite critics such as Walsh and Reddington, Ron Pina truly wanted to solve the Highway Murders. It wasn’t only for political reasons, although it was probably difficult for Pina to undertake anything without automatically calculating its political dimensions.
But whatever else he was, Pina was not an unfeeling man. He genuinely grieved for the families of the victims, and wanted to do what he could to ease their pain. He took his responsibility for inves
tigating the murders quite seriously. It was his misfortune to be handicapped by weak technical support, at least initially, in the pathology and forensic labs, so crucial to determining how and when someone was killed; by organizational obstacles that made it difficult for him to exert control over the investigation; by what he, at least, saw as inadequate training for the investigators; by jurisdictional frictions and petty jealousies; and most of all by witnesses whose reliability was the worst that can be imagined.
Yet Pina plunged ahead, just as he had done with the Big Dan’s case, because at least he was getting something to work with. With Jeanne Kaloshis, Elsa Johnson, Diane Doherty, and all the other assorted scrapings from the state’s jails and prisons, he was at least getting directions to follow; unfortunately, it appears that he was following the line of least resistance, which is not always the right thing to do.
So it was, that by early August, Pina told the grand jury that he and his investigators were done presenting testimony. It would be up to the 23 members of the jury to decide what to do by themselves.
While Pina was telling the jury that the next move was up to them, Kenny Ponte was returning to Massachusetts. A local television show had arranged to interview him live. By now, Kenny had learned to manipulate the media as well as Pina. He called the newspapers to tell them he’d be on the air.
“I intend to discuss the illegal and unethical and nightmarish occurrence of being tried in all forms of the media for a heinous crime I have nothing to do with,” Kenny told the Standard-Times.
“My only response from the beginning, and now, is that I be treated like a citizen of the United States and be afforded due process of law. It is very unfortunate for myself and the people of Bristol County that Ron Pina does not have the political courage to stand up and tell the truth—the truth being, he has absolutely no idea who committed this terrible crime.”
Kenny flew into Boston’s Logan Airport and was mobbed by newspeople. Reddington met him and was appalled to see his client wearing dark glasses that made him look like a hood.
Amid the television lights, ordinary people around Kenny were agog. Kenny couldn’t resist. One passerby approached Kenny and asked him who he was, since he obviously had to be somebody important. Kenny said he was the ambassador from Iraq, and had just arrived to negotiate a peace agreement for the Gulf crisis. “Stop it, Kenny,” Reddington whispered.
Another person, however, recognized him. “Say,” the person began, “aren’t you—?”
Kenny admitted it. “Yes, hi, I’m Ken Ponte, the famous serial killer,” laughing in such a way so that the person knew Ponte couldn’t possibly be the killer. Reddington was horrified. “Kenny, don’t say things like that,” Reddington told him, but Kenny persisted in shaking hands with people and making it clear that he wasn’t about to hide out.
That night on television Ponte told the show’s host that he’d never harmed anybody in his life.
“I have nothing to fear from Ron Pina,” Kenny said. “If he has something on me, why am I not indicted now? Ron Pina lacks the political courage to get up and tell the truth. The first rule of politics is to get elected. What does it matter if six months later I’m found innocent? He’ll blame it on the liberal judges. I’m sick of it. I want to get him off my back.” The television host, Jerry Williams, asked Kenny about the bloody sheets taken by the police in Florida. Matter-of-factly, Kenny said the bloodstains had occurred because Diane had been menstruating.
It was clear to him, Kenny continued, that the police were out to get him. He blamed the Saint, particularly. “At one point he said to me in a very soft voice, ‘Ken, why don’t you just tell me you killed those girls?’ I found the question so insulting and so incredulous. I just said, ‘No.’ Then he said, ‘Until and unless you come down and talk to us, you’re going to be screwed by the media.’”
When Williams asked whether he had any sexual hangups, Kenny said his only hang-up he had right then was a fear of dating anyone.
On the following day, Kenny drove to New Bedford, accompanied by a camera crew from a national television show. Kenny went to visit his mother in the house next door to the Pinas. Each house had a political lawn sign: one for Pina, one for Walsh. Pina and his wife weren’t home. The crew from the television show checked to be sure.
The next day Pina learned that the grand jury wasn’t happy. He’d left them alone to decide what to do. The room was piled high with testimonial transcripts. Veary recalled later that the jury asked whether they had to read all that material.
“And the grand jury says, ‘Let’s review this testimony,’ and we started saying, all right, here’s so-and-so’s testimony,” Veary recalled, indicating that as the jury asked for each portion, someone would point to the appropriate transcript. “And the response we got from some people in the room was, ‘Do you want us to read it?’ ‘Well, of course we want you to read it. We’re not gonna stand here and read it. We’re not gonna summarize it, because summarizing is unfair.’”
But Pina, Veary, and others in the district attorney’s office realized that they had dumped a huge load of information on the jurors, who after all, had full-time jobs, and who didn’t have the luxury (or curse) of thinking about the Highway Murders every minute of the day. So Pina and Veary asked Carol Starkey, an assistant district attorney, to put together the components of the case against Ponte on a chart.
“We developed these diagrams of who essentially said what about what and what time period, tracing the victims and tracing the witness statements, and trying to tie this all in together,” Veary said later. “I can remember her stopping in the office, it was like a Sunday morning or Sunday evening, there’s poor Carol on the floor, cutting and pasting this thing. We’ve reviewed it before, and decided how best to do it, but she’s doing the real work on the thing.
“The idea was, ‘Folks, if you want to know how so-and-so says that these two people were together two days after the second of these two people apparently disappeared, if you want to know about that, see line 12, page 18. Now you read here, we’re not gonna tell you about it, you read it.’” The diagrams essentially provided a road map to the testimony the jurors had been hearing for the previous 18 months, a visual index. So the jury dug into the transcripts and started to talk about the case.
Pretty soon, they had questions.
54
Speechless
On August 17, 1990, Pina’s political future and the murder investigation were prominently linked together in The Boston Globe in a story written by reporters Tom Coakley and John Ellement.
In “Bristol D.A. Race Seen Linked to Murders Probe,” the two reporters suggested that an indictment would clearly help Pina retain his job in the forthcoming election against Walsh. Several politicians and political experts guessed that an indictment would restore Pina’s credibility among some voters. And they noted that Walsh wasn’t at all adverse to suggesting that Pina had manipulated the whole thing for his own aggrandizement.
Walsh even gave an impromptu press conference on the courthouse steps as the grand jury was meeting.
“I’m very concerned about the timing of all this,” Walsh told the reporters. “The reviewing of all the evidence and pushing the grand jury for an indictment 30 days before a tough election … It has to (raise) one question: Why now?”
Hearing of Walsh’s remark infuriated Pina.
“There is nothing political about this case,” Pina said. “Why is he trying to make it political? The grand jury proceeds on its own. A political agenda is not going to set its timetable.”
The truth was, Pina felt he was in an impossible position. If an indictment were voted, he’d be accused of pushing for the charge to help him in the election; if the jury failed to return an indictment, he ran the risk of voters concluding that he was a failure. One political adviser, Pina later said, urged him to head off the grand jury so that no decision would be made before the voting. But Pina rejected that; he’d already said the jurors had the power
to decide what to do, and if he took that power away at the eleventh hour, it would be political.
A second thread ran through the political speculation, however. Pina’s election campaign had conducted an opinion poll, and rumors were spreading that one question in the poll was whether an indictment in the Highway Murders would make a voter more likely to vote for Pina.
Pina later said the rumor was untrue: no question was asked about any indictment. The poll did indicate, however, that the murder case was a high priority issue among the voters.
The day The Globe story appeared, Pina was cornered by reporters as he left the courthouse. He again rejected claims that he was using the investigation and the jury for political purposes. A reporter asked Pina how an indictment would affect his chances of reelection. Furious, Pina walked away without saying another word—probably a first for him.
55
Very Crucial Testimony
On the same afternoon, Diane Doherty returned to testify before the grand jury by popular demand—at least, by a demand popular among the grand jurors themselves. The truth was, the jurors weren’t sure exactly what to make of Diane, either personally, or of her testimony.
“I wasn’t prepared for this at all,” Diane said. “Truthfully.”
“That’s it,” said the jury’s foreman, putting his finger exactly on the trouble with Diane.
The jurors wanted to test Diane’s credibility. By this time, the jurors were telling Pina what they wanted to know, not just what Pina thought they should know.
“They’re not little people who sit there,” Pina said of the jurors, later. “In fact, what you’re getting in an investigative grand jury are people who suddenly become detectives … because once the district attorney or assistant district attorney does what they are supposed to do, a grand juror now can raise their hand and inquire.
Killing Season Page 26
