Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  57

  Over the Line

  On the following Monday, Ponte appeared in court with Reddington as the indictment was unsealed. Just as Boyle had predicted, the charge was for the murder of Rochelle Clifford, “on or about April 27, 1988”—the same day Rochelle had been seen by Detective Dextradeur and Frankie Pina. As hard as he’d tried over the past year, Pina had been unable to authoritatively put Rochelle Clifford in Ponte’s company at any time after Dextradeur had last seen her.

  The courtroom was packed with relatives of the victims, including Judy DeSantos. Pina had arrived at the courtroom with the relatives, after the entire group walked about five blocks from Pina’s office to the courthouse—a trek that did not go unrecorded by the television cameras.

  Kenny, Pina now told the court, was an intravenous drug user who had stalked street women in New Bedford in order to use them to buy drugs for him.

  Pina said Kenny “crossed the line from the legal community and became a member of the drug community. He used these women because he was an attorney and afraid to go buy the drugs himself. He recruited different women at different times. He brought them to his home,” Pina continued. “He did not want it to be discovered by the police that he was buying drugs.”

  That was why he’d killed Rochelle, Pina said: because Rochelle was a threat to tell the police that Kenny had been using drugs. That danger became real the day the police discovered that Kenny had pulled a gun on Roger Swire, the district attorney added, and then wanted to interview Rochelle Clifford.

  “She made comments to police officers that she was going to come forward and be a witness against attorney Ponte,” Pina said. “The case will show a long pursuit by Mr. Ponte, trying to get this witness not to testify and to find her and threaten to kill her.”

  Boyle reported that Ponte’s eyes bulged out in apparent disbelief when Pina said he was an intravenous drug user.

  Pina sat down, and the judge asked Kenny how he would plead.

  “Absolutely not guilty, Your Honor,” he said. Gasps of disbelief rose from several of the victims’ relatives.

  The judge set Kenny’s bail at $50,000 in cash, and Kenny was led away to be booked.

  But Judy DeSantos was troubled. Months earlier, State Troopers Gonsalves and Dill, with whom she had now grown quite close, had promised her they would be in court when an indictment was returned if they truly thought the person charged was guilty. Now here was Kenny Ponte, after all these months, pleading innocent, and Jose and Maryann were nowhere to be seen.

  After Kenny was taken away and the prosecutors and family members spilled out of the courthouse, there was another news media melee. The family members were the prime target.

  Many said they believed that Ponte was guilty of not only Rochelle’s murder, but the others as well. Most told reporters that Ponte had known or otherwise been involved with the victim each was related to, far beyond the three or four Kenny claimed. And when it was learned that Ponte would make the $50,000 bail by pledging his mother’s house, some family members reacted with bitterness.

  “They’re going to let him out,” said Chandra Greenlaw, the 17-year-old daughter of Deborah DeMello. “But what about us? That (expletive) can still visit his mother. But what about us? I want him hung.”

  Later that night Ponte was profiled on the TV show, Inside Edition. “It’s just amazing to me that this could have happened to someone in America,” he said.

  58

  No Punctures

  In the aftermath of the indictment, the focus of the case turned to the campaign between Pina and Walsh. After all, Walsh had criticized Pina for manipulating the grand jury process, and Pina utterly rejected that. It seemed to some that the vote for district attorney was tantamount to a community-wide decision on whom to believe.

  As Walsh and Pina shadowboxed over their respective legal qualifications, experience, administrative skills amid the usual sounds and furies of electoral combat, Ponte was taking another step to show up Pina. He went to a drug-testing doctor in Fall River and subjected himself to an examination. Ponte wanted the doctor to clear him of Pina’s allegation that he had been an intravenous drug user.

  “Mr. Kenneth Ponte was seen by me on 8/22/90 at 11:20 A.M.,” the doctor wrote in his report. “He had requested to be examined for needle marks and to have a urine drug screen for detection of heroin/opiate metabolics and cocaine.

  “Mr. Ponte was fully stripped and examined. There was no evidence of any puncture wounds anywhere on his body.”

  The drug screen was completely negative.

  59

  Abandoned

  On Tuesday, September 18, Ron Pina was defeated in his attempt to win reelection as Bristol County District Attorney. He lost by 24 percent of the vote—in politics, a huge, crushing margin.

  The reason: the Highway Murder investigation. Or so said scores of voters as they left the polling places. Many voters criticized Pina severely for politicizing the grand jury, for indicting Ponte on what some had already concluded was flimsy evidence, for playing to the news media. The trek through the streets with the families of the victims was particularly distasteful to many. Still others were offended by Pina’s campaign theme: the cartoon-character Crime Fighter D.A. that Pina’s campaign advertising had widely circulated; many thought that sort of approach to the voters was an insult.

  All of those perceptions hurt; what hurt Pina even more was the defection of two of his longtime allies in the Democratic party. State Senator Biff McLean had promised to remain neutral, but that hadn’t stopped most of McLean’s supporters from flocking over to Walsh’s camp. Walsh’s father, after all, was the very good friend of the powerful state senator. And one of Pina’s closest friends—indeed, the best man at his wedding to Sheila Martines, Fall River Mayor Carlton Viveiros had been named a judge by the outgoing Governor Dukakis, and therefore withdrew from partisan politics; that was a double blow, made even more painful when State Senator McLean publicly speculated just before the election that none of Viveiros’s supporters would turn out for Pina.

  Pina had been abandoned.

  Later, he looked back and considered it all. He would have done the same things, he said. The murder case wasn’t the only reason he lost, Pina said, but it was painful. Still, he believed that he had done the right thing, and that’s what mattered.

  Sometimes, when he sailed his boat, Cyrano, he considered what might have been. What would have happened had he won, and he had been able to bring Kenny Ponte to trial? What would have happened had he continued to use the special jury to “rake” through the debris of New Bedford’s underside? No one could tell, but there was nothing for it but to hold his course.

  “I sail,” he said later. “One of the things you learn in sailing is that winds come and hurricanes go and you gotta move the boat. The worst thing you can do is let the wheel go, ’cause then you’re out of control and so, I take that in life. I held. Feeling the wind will stop. You know, even a hurricane stops eventually. I’m holding, I haven’t hit a reef, I’m holding …”

  Across town, Ponte and Reddington held a news conference celebrating the defeat of Pina.

  “Unusual as it may be for a defendant in a Superior Court matter to extend congratulations to a district attorney, nonetheless we obviously look forward to dealing with Mr. Walsh,” Reddington said.

  SUMMER 1991

  “In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why is it that a universal proverb says of them, that they shall tell no tales … why are all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.

  “But faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.”

  —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  60

  No Evidence

  While Paul Walsh had pledged himself to vigorously pursue the Highway Murder case, onc
e the votes were in, he began to have some second thoughts.

  One of the biggest problems was Ponte. After all, Ponte had endorsed Walsh. How would it look for the new district attorney to prosecute—or worse, not prosecute—a man who had told everyone to vote for him?

  Obviously, he would have to find someone else to make the decisions in the case, whatever they would be. But Walsh also had a gnawing feeling that it was too late to solve the Highway Murders. Too much time had passed, too many wild stories had circulated. The trail, other than the one that had led to Ponte, was completely cold. The last thing Walsh wanted to do was wind up like Pina—obsessed, some said, or at the very least the victim of enormous expectations, mostly of his own making, because of promises and pledges. It was far better in the absence of hot new information, to let the whole thing slide back to the level of a normal crime problem, if it could be done.

  But how?

  By now, everyone would be watching to see what he did with Kenny Ponte. Not only that, all of the victims’ families were organized—and vocal. The most persistent was Judy DeSantos. She kept calling Walsh’s office to prod him. Finally Walsh stopped returning her telephone calls. Judy sent him letters instead.

  Judy kept pressing Walsh to meet with the families.

  “I wanted to touch base with him,” she recalled, “because it’s important that the district attorney, no matter who it is, realize that they are elected by the people, and that victims are a big, important part of their work. And I wanted to say, hey, my sister can’t stand up for her rights. When they drew that chalk outline, she could not stand up for her rights anymore, so I’m going to have to do it. And he would never return my calls, we played telephone tag for a long time and finally he did, and he agreed to meet with the families after the election. Which he did and he made some promises, but he never kept them.

  “I went in with a list of questions,” Judy said. “How come the FBI (Behavioral Sciences Laboratory) in Quantico, Virginia, was never called in? Or, if an FBI profile was done, what happened to it? And whatever happened to the blood samples that were taken from Ponte? And the hair samples? He told me he’d have them answered in a month and he never did. He never answered me and then he said, and a favorite line—this must be a standard district attorney’s line number three—‘Judy DeSantos must have misunderstood me.’

  “And I was so—you know, Pina used us, (and) he (Walsh) was using us, too. The families always ‘misunderstand.’ Blame it on the victim. Re-victimize the victim. What a nice thing to do.”

  The next time Judy met with Walsh she brought a tape recorder “because I wasn’t going to misunderstand him anymore.”

  In early March of 1991, Walsh announced that he had appointed a special prosecutor to review the evidence in the Ponte case. Paul Buckley, a Boston-area lawyer, had worked as a deputy district attorney with Walsh years before. Walsh trusted his judgment.

  In announcing the appointment, Walsh suggested that the murder case might never be solved. That indeed sounded as if Walsh, in his own judgment, had decided the case against Ponte was meritless. “It is a difficult case and we do not make the promise or a guarantee that we will come up with a conviction in this matter,” Walsh told The Globe’s Coakley and Ellement. “To do so, would raise false hopes and I just won’t do that.”

  For months, Buckley closeted himself with all the paperwork from the investigation. The more he read, the more perturbed he became. It seemed to Buckley, at least, that there just wasn’t any coherent thread to Pina’s investigation of the murders. The leads, if one could call them that, went all over the place, and most went nowhere. There was ample indication that many witnesses had committed perjury.

  Worse—far worse—there was very little usable information in all the testimony because of the rules of evidence. The rules generally forbade hearsay—what one person says another told him—and certainly frowned upon double hearsay, or what one person says that a second person was told. Hearsay is not evidence. But almost everything the grand jury had considered was hearsay if not double hearsay. It would be child’s play for almost any competent defense lawyer to keep this unverifiable material off the witness stand.

  Finally, in late July 1991, almost a year to the day after Diane Doherty told the jury about Whispers Wildies, Buckley announced the obvious: the murder indictment against Kenny Ponte would not be prosecuted.

  “It would get to the judge,” Buckley told The Globe, “and he would rule as a matter of law that there is no evidence.”

  For Tony DeGrazia, out on bail still awaiting his trial on the rape and assault charges, the news of the decision not to prosecute Ponte was disturbing. Tony thought the dismissal against Ponte probably meant the police would start in on him again. He dreaded it, and it made him mad.

  The day of Buckley’s decision had been a bad day for Tony, anyway. Ever since January 1991—after he’d been arrested once more and accused of trying to rape still another prostitute, which he denied—Tony had been taking Antabuse to help control his drinking. A doctor had prescribed a special prescription medicine to help him with his bouts of depression.

  Father Harrison and the church had rallied around Tony, helping him get started in a new business, giving him a place to feel connected to. Friends had raised money to help repair his nose with plastic surgery. He was planning to attend college in the fall, and hoped to get an engineering degree. He was still unhappy about Kathy Scanlon, but was trying to get over it.

  The night after he heard about Kenny, Tony called Father Harrison to talk, but the priest couldn’t come to the phone. He called his sister Jennifer next. To Jennifer he seemed angry and bitter about the dismissal against Ponte, but assured her he intended to keep on fighting until he was found innocent of all charges.

  Next he called Kathy Scanlon. To help him get over Kathy, Ray and Lorraine Scanlon had made their East Freetown house temporarily off-limits to Tony, which he accepted.

  In talking to Kathy, Tony seemed a little down, but not too bad. Kathy told Tony that while she loved him, it was important for Tony to go on with the rest of his life and find somebody else to love.

  “I guess you’re very happy,” Tony told Kathy. “Well, I’m going to college, and by the time I get back, I guess you’ll be married and have the children we wanted.”

  “Well,” Kathy said, “rather than have somebody else tell you, I’ll tell you. Yes, we are getting married, and yes, I am pregnant.”

  Tony’s movements the rest of the night were easy to determine later. Shortly after talking to Kathy, he called Father Harrison again, but the priest was still busy. Next he called Kathy’s sister, Kelly. He was weeping. He told Kelly that he probably wouldn’t be seeing her for a while, and then he talked to Kelly’s children, told them he was going away, and to behave themselves.

  Tony hung up the phone and walked around the corner, then up the rural street to Ray and Lorraine Scanlon’s house. The Scanlons were out for the evening. Tony went around to the rear of the house and sat on a picnic table for a while. He drank some ginger ale, then walked down to the grave of his old dog—the Labrador he had enjoyed so much with Kathy. He walked back to the picnic table and sat down again. It began to rain, just as it had so many years earlier when Lorraine Scanlon had found him asleep in the woods.

  Tony got up and went into the trailer he used to live in during the happiest summer of his life. He removed some tissues and cried some more. It was raining harder, followed by thunder, then lightning. The thunder came closer and closer. He left the trailer and sat on a picnic bench outside, oblivious of the rain. Tony removed the bottle of antidepressant medicine he’d been taking for months. He drank some more ginger ale. He opened the bottle and swallowed its contents. He drank some more.

  After perhaps half an hour, Tony passed out. He fell directly forward off the picnic bench, his hands pinned directly under his waist. Within a few hours he was dead.

  61

  The Real Killer

  On the followin
g Monday afternoon, July 29, 1991, the single murder charge against Kenny Ponte was formally withdrawn by the Bristol County prosecutor’s office. In a short press conference, Ponte expressed his relief. But Buckley now raised a new possibility: perhaps Tony DeGrazia had been the killer all along.

  Tony, Buckley said in his own press conference, had to be considered “a strong suspect” in the murders. Tony’s suicide, the special prosecutor suggested, may have happened because of the announcement that charges against Ponte were being dropped.

  “To me,” Buckley said, “the timing is related.” Tony’s suicide, coming on the heels of the decision about Ponte, was bizarre, Buckley said, and it “should open a lot of minds.” The fact that Tony might have encountered some of the victims, and the fact that he had been identified as a serial rapist of prostitutes made him a logical suspect for the serial killings, Buckley insisted. Of course, if Walsh, via Buckley, could successfully convince everyone that Tony had been the real killer, the pressure on Walsh to continue the investigation would subside, and criticism of the Ponte decision would be muted.

  But Tony’s new lawyer, Robert George of Boston, rejected the notion that Tony might have been the killer. George instead suggested that Tony might have killed himself because he feared that the police would turn once more in his direction, but that didn’t mean he was the killer.