Shallow Graves Read online

  Maureen Boyle

  The Hunt for the New Bedford Highway Serial Killer

  ForeEdge

  ForeEdge

  An imprint of University Press of New England

  www.upne.com

  © 2017 Maureen Boyle

  All rights reserved

  For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Boyle, Maureen, 1956– author.

  Title: Shallow graves: the hunt for the New Bedford Highway serial killer / Maureen Boyle.

  Description: Lebanon NH : ForeEdge, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017013544 (print) | LCCN 2017027368 (ebook) | ISBN 9781512601275 (epub, mobi, & pdf) | ISBN 9781512600742 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ponte, Kenneth, 1949–2010. | Serial murders—Massachusetts—New Bedford—Case studies. | Serial murder investigation—Massachusetts—New Bedford—Case studies. | Serial murderers—Massachusetts—New Bedford—Case studies.

  Classification: LCC HV6534.N33 (ebook) | LCC HV6534.N33 B68 2017 (print) | DDC 364.152/320974485—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013544

  TO KEVIN who said the story must be told, and to the families of the lost still looking for an answer

  CONTENTS

  Timeline

  Prologue

  1 Missing

  2 Bodies

  3 Searching

  4 The Streets

  5 The Investigation Expands

  6 In the Crosshairs

  7 “Catch This Guy”

  8 New Suspect

  9 Looking in Other Corners

  10 The Circle Tightens

  11 Florida Follies

  12 The Indictment

  13 The Campaign

  14 Old Suspect Back

  15 Unanswered Questions

  16 Moving On

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  TIMELINE

  1988

  April 3 Kenneth Ponte, an attorney, allegedly threatens a man with a gun.

  July 3 Debra Medeiros found on Route 140 north in Freetown by a woman who stopped to relieve herself. Debra went missing May 27, 1988, and was identified in December 1988.

  July 30 Nancy Lee Paiva found on the westbound side of Interstate 195 in Dartmouth, about one and a half miles east of the Reed Road exit by two men on motorcycles. She went missing July 7, 1988, and was identified in December 1988.

  September New Bedford detective John Dextradeur notices a number of drug-addicted women are missing and contacts the district attorney’s office to set up a meeting to discuss the cases.

  October 10 Kenneth Ponte moves to Florida.

  November 8 Debra Greenlaw DeMello found off the eastbound Reed Road ramp of Interstate 195 by a state highway crew. She walked away from a prison work-release program in Rhode Island on June 18, 1988, and was identified in December of 1988.

  November 29 Dawn Mendes found on the westbound Reed Road ramp off Interstate 195 by a search dog. She went missing September 4, 1988, and was identified days later.

  December 1 Debroh Lynn McConnell found off Route 140 northbound in Freetown by a search dog. She was last seen by her family in May of 1988 and was identified in March of 1989.

  December 10 Rochelle Clifford Dopierala found in a gravel pit along Reed Road, about two miles from Interstate 195, by people riding ATVs. She was last seen in late April of 1988 and was identified in December of 1988.

  1989

  January 18 Kenneth Ponte is arraigned in New Bedford Superior Court; a grand jury handed up an indictment on the April 1988 gun charges.

  March 28 Robbin L. Rhodes found along Route 140 southbound in Freetown by a search dog. She was believed to have gone missing sometime in March or April of 1988. She was identified soon after being found.

  March 31 Mary Rose Santos found along Route 88 in Westport by two boys. She was last seen July 16, 1988. She was identified soon after she was found.

  April 24 Sandra Botelho found along Interstate 195 in Marion by a state highway crew. She went missing August 11, 1988, and was identified soon after she was found.

  1990

  August 17 Ponte is arraigned on a single count of murder.

  1991

  July 29 The murder charge against Ponte is dropped.

  PROLOGUE

  IT WOULD HAPPEN FAST. She would reach up, clawing at the fingers—or maybe it was a piece of clothing—tightening around her neck. She might try to kick at the attacker, struggling to get free. She might try to hit him as the pressure on her carotid arteries intensified. She might try to bite him on the forearm or bicep. She would wonder why this was happening.

  She would struggle to breathe, grabbing at her neck and gasping for air. If only she could loosen the grip. She might even succeed for a brief second, giving her hope of escape; getting free, she would run fast and not look back. But then the pressure would intensify, and the air, and the hope, would be squeezed from her once again. She would hear ringing in her ears, or maybe it was a muffled or gurgling sound as the pressure on her neck increased. Her vision would blur. She would feel everything around her closing in—like being in a tunnel. Things would go black. She would feel a tingling sensation in her lips, arms, and legs. Her head would be hot. Her pulse would be weak.

  The pressure on the jugular vein would stop the blood going to her heart. The pressure on the carotid arteries, the major vessels in the neck and deeper than the jugular vein, would stop blood to the brain. The hyoid bone in her neck might fracture. She would do everything in her power to stay conscious, to hang on. She was a fighter, a survivor.

  It would take only minutes for the darkness to take over. It would seem much longer.

  She does not want to die.1

  1MISSING

  NANCY PAIVA passed beneath the signs of the two neighborhood bars, tears in her eyes, and walked quickly up the street. It was a hot and drizzly July night, and a few people were standing outside, close to the buildings, catching a smoke and a cool breeze.

  Her boyfriend stayed behind, bouncing between the street and the bars; it was near closing time. The two parted just before one o’clock in the morning from a County Street bar in the South End of New Bedford, Massachusetts, down the street from two stone churches, one Catholic, one Episcopal.

  This is not how the thirty-six-year-old Nancy envisioned her life would turn out: walking home drunk and high on heroin, penniless and jobless, past inebriated men and noisy bars. Growing up, she dreamed of becoming a nurse, of traveling the country, of having a beautiful home and family. And she had started down that path. She learned the importance of hard work from her father, who labored in local factories to support his wife and kids. She learned the importance of family from her mother, who opened their home to foster babies. She knew education was important and took college-track courses in high school and, later, when college seemed out of reach, enrolled in a local secretarial school, then took courses to become a certified nursing assistant. She grew up in a two-story, single-family home, where food was always cooking, in a quiet middle-class neighborhood in New Bedford, far from the city’s noisy tenements and wolf-whistling drunks.

  She tried to grasp the American Dream by marrying, working in tidy offices, having a beautiful baby. Then, somehow, it slipped away. Slowly at first. So slowly she didn’t realize it was happening until it was gone. First it was a divorce, then the deaths of her parents, both in their fifties, then a failed long-term relationship. She worked in a s
eries of jobs, but the good ones, the high-paying ones, seemed to elude her. The bright spot in her life were her two daughters, one by her former husband, the second by her longtime common-law partner. She loved her girls: loved taking them on trips, loved staying home with them, loved cooking nightly dinners for them, loved hosting birthday parties. Now, as she walked up the street in New Bedford alone, she felt she was failing at even that part of her life.

  Others could pinpoint when Nancy’s life turned, even when she couldn’t. It happened when she met a guy. Then she met his drugs. Then her life unraveled to this point, walking up County Street in the South End in the early morning hours, looking for someone to give her the sixty dollars she needed to pay a fine on bad-check charges at the courthouse forty-five minutes away in Stoughton later that day, money she didn’t have. Her boyfriend would later say she was “hitchhiking to go and see if she could get some money.” A friend thought Nancy got into a truck parked near a corner that night.

  And then Nancy was gone.

  It was as if she had vanished into the night air.

  Less than forty-eight hours later, her boyfriend, Frankie Pina, nervously walked into the century-old downtown New Bedford police station and tried to get the desk officer’s attention. Frankie had a record for drugs, robbery, and street scams. He had done some jail time and, in his world, talking to the police was to be avoided at all costs. But now, with Nancy gone without a word, he didn’t care about street code or cred. It had been two days since he saw Nancy walking north, toward the apartment they shared. She never got home and she never called. He had been looking for her ever since.

  Frankie was trying to tell the desk officer he was now worried. Nancy wouldn’t just disappear without telling someone, without taking her children.

  Detective John Dextradeur was passing the front desk and paused when he saw Frankie. His first thought was: What the hell is Frankie Pina doing here?

  Frankie, at five feet five, was a muscular guy with a reputation as a tough, streetwise con man. Originally from the Boston area, he was a little rougher, maybe a little tougher, than the others arrested on the streets of this historic waterfront city; but he still blended into the social underbelly the police saw every day.

  The detective flipped through the paperwork on a clipboard behind the lobby desk, listening to the conversation, trying to figure out why this guy—of all guys—would be at the station, insisting on talking to a police officer.

  He listened as Frankie said his girlfriend didn’t come home, that something was wrong, that he needed to report her missing. She didn’t take off, he kept repeating. Something happened.

  John turned around and nodded to the desk officer—I got it.1

  The New Bedford police missing-person report at the time was a single-page form: name, age, height, weight, eye color, race, when last seen, address, person making the report. One copy would hang in the outer office of the police department records room on a clipboard. Another copy would remain at the front desk. It was 1988, the days of typewriters, payphones, Bic Wite-Out typing-correction fluid and steel-gray file cabinets.

  The missing-person report for Nancy Paiva listed the basics. Age: thirty-six; Hair color: brown; Eye color: brown; Height: five feet three; Weight: one hundred and twenty pounds. Eventually, a small family photo of Nancy smiling would be attached to the report. It was one of the dozens of missing-person reports filed that year in this fishing port known as the Whaling City, where Moby-Dick, fishing boats, Frederick Douglass, textile mills, and heroin dealing were diverse threads in the community fabric.

  It would take months before the public would see the significance of that single-page report.

  By then it was too late.

  But on that July day in 1988, John Dextradeur didn’t know the report of this missing woman would launch the area’s largest murder investigation. He just knew something didn’t sit right. The veteran detective had investigated just about every type of crime during his seven years in the detective bureau’s olive-drab second-floor office. He could tell when something was wrong. And this was wrong. He could tell by the way Frankie was talking, the way he was moving.

  But what was it? Was Frankie, in some clumsy way, trying to cover his tracks by reporting this woman missing? Did she rip him off? Did he rip someone off and did she pay the price? Or was it something else? There appeared to be genuine concern in Frankie’s voice as he stood in the police department lobby, even a touch of fear.

  For three years John Dextradeur had been tracking what he thought was a growing—and troubling—series of crimes against women in the city. Some of the women were addicts. Some were prostitutes. Some were living on the rougher edges of the city. A few were just enjoying a night out. Three women last seen leaving one of the city’s shot-and-beer bars were found dead. A well-known prostitute needed seventeen stitches after she was stabbed in the head, shoulder, and knee, and the attacker told her he did the same thing to other women. Another prostitute was raped so brutally she left a yards-long blood trail as she desperately looked for help. Yet another was taken to a nearby town and attacked. One female addict was stabbed to death and left in a snow bank in 1987; a Cuban who came over on the Mariel boatlift was later charged with the murder. And then there was Dorothy “Darcy” Danelson, the nineteen-year-old woman found raped and strangled alongside railroad tracks by a Sunbeam Bread Baking Company driver starting his shift on July 16, 1986. Her body was so brutalized that even hardened detectives, years later, were still haunted by what they had seen. Her head was covered in blood. Her skull was fractured. She had been beaten with a railroad tie. She had been raped anally and vaginally with a stick and a beer bottle. There was an animal rage in that attack, an anger of the wild.

  The detectives tracked the last hours of Darcy’s life in minute detail.2 She made the rounds of four bars known for cheap booze and drugs with a guy she met that night. She shot pool at the Lucky Star on North Front Street and Coffin Avenue. She stopped for an egg sandwich as they waited for a cab because the guy didn’t have a car—only a bicycle. She went to the Fisherman Lounge in Fairhaven but the bouncer wouldn’t let her in because she didn’t have an ID. They went to Paul’s Sports Corner about 100 yards away near the New Bedford line where she drank gin and tonics. She danced to jukebox music at another bar—called Alfie’s Place—in the city’s North End then abruptly left the guy on the dance floor and plunked herself down at the bar. The two exchanged phone numbers. He kept drinking beer; she kept drinking gin and tonic. The guy left to use the bathroom, and when he returned, he said her seat was empty. She was gone. He ordered another beer. No one in the bar remembered Darcy leaving. But that wasn’t unusual. Everyone at Alfie’s was pretty drunk at the time. Some people outside the bar did remember the guy with a cane who cracked his head on the sidewalk around one o’clock in the morning and went off in an ambulance. The commotion—the cruiser and the ambulance lights—made it hard to miss. Someone saw a woman walking down the street right around that time and get into what looked like a Ford Bronco. It looked like she was wearing a floral shirt. Her hair may have been shoulder length. The person wasn’t sure. It was dark, after all. No one could say for certain if it was Darcy. Some people at the bar, though, did remember seeing her inside earlier dancing and drinking. A few “kind of” remembered what she was wearing. Dextradeur’s colleagues, Detectives Gardner Greany, Gary Baron, and State Trooper Jeff Gonsalves, tracked down cars, trucks, and drivers who might have been in the area. They interviewed Darcy’s family, her ex-boyfriend in jail, her current boyfriend, the guy she was dancing with, bartenders, bouncers, cab drivers. They talked with prostitutes and drug dealers who were on the street that night. They asked people to take polygraph tests. They sent evidence to the FBI. They detailed nearly every minute of Darcy’s last day alive. There was just one gap: from the time she left the bar until roughly five hours later when she was found dead. There were at least three possible suspects in the slaying at the time. There was no evidence to
arrest any of them.

  One prostitute later told police a strange guy driving a green Cadillac tried to pick her up that night. She spotted a knife on the seat, yelled, and he took off. Another woman told Detective Gardner Greany she saw a “spaced out” man driving a Pinto between two and two forty-five that morning trying to pick up a prostitute. The car was loaded with beer bottles, the same brand used to assault Darcy. The driver was never found.

  And then there was the phone call to police. One of the prostitutes out on the street that night was brought to the station to listen to the recording to see if she recognized the voice. “We got the girl on Purchase Street and now we’re going to get another,” the caller reportedly said.3 She didn’t recognize the man’s voice. No one did.

  That vicious murder fueled John Dextradeur’s determination to learn more about the men in his hometown preying on the women who lived or partied on the edge, some of the most vulnerable, and sometimes the toughest, in the city. He wondered if the killer of Darcy would strike again. A year later, when another woman known to walk the Purchase Street area, Margaret Nunes, was found stabbed to death in a snowbank, Dextradeur wondered how many people were stalking vulnerable women on the streets. He found himself talking with the city’s prostitutes and drug addicts more often, learning their backstories. One woman came from a wealthy family with ties to Nantucket. Another grew up near Cape Cod. Yet another was lured into the heroin world by a boyfriend who later overdosed. Most of the women were white, from the suburbs, and caught in the cycle of addiction. In his chats with them, he learned about other, unreported and disturbing attacks: women punched, choked, robbed, stabbed. He learned of the men who cruised the streets day and night, looking for sex. Some were factory workers, fishermen, and day laborers, looking for oral sex. Others were lawyers and doctors. Some were in law enforcement. While drug addiction crossed socioeconomic lines, so did the johns who picked up these women. Quick sex for a quick fix.