Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  Because, as Judy later recounted, the reports of Nancy’s whereabouts continued. Judy found herself sitting near Weld Square on the off-chance that she might see her sister; once, she thought she recognized Nancy at a telephone booth. She ran over to the booth and turned the woman around, but it wasn’t Nancy. It was embarrassing, Judy said later; the strange woman thought Judy was attacking her.

  On another occasion, Jill Paiva called Judy, weeping hysterically. Jill told Judy that someone had telephoned to say that the police had just found Nancy dead in a tenement hallway, with a needle still in her arm. The report was completely false.

  But Judy spent far more time in the south end of New Bedford than by Weld Square; she knew Nancy rarely went into the Weld Square area, because she wasn’t a prostitute.

  “I knew she was hanging around down at Whispers,” Judy said later, “down in that area. I approached people who knew Nancy, and asked them to keep a lookout for her.” As August and September unfolded, then October, the calls kept coming in.

  “Oh, I just saw your sister getting into a car heading north on Purchase Street,” the caller would start out, and then Judy would either drop everything herself or ask a friend to go check out the report. Judy tried to cling to the hope that her sister’s heroin habit had suddenly grown insurmountable, and that she was living on the streets somewhere, ashamed to contact any of her family or friends, while she rode the snake of her addiction. But deep down, Judy was sure Nancy was dead. Nancy would have called her by now, Judy was sure. Almost.

  13

  Summer’s End

  Throughout the rest of August and into early September, Judy made several new attempts to get into Nancy’s apartment on Morgan Street. She was becoming more and more certain that the answer to Nancy’s disappearance was to be found inside. Several times she went to the apartment with Dextradeur, but, as before, the key wouldn’t work. Still, Judy was sure someone was living inside. It appeared that someone was rifling Nancy’s mail, and stealing her welfare checks.

  Late in August, Frankie was released from jail. Somehow, Frankie at least could get in and out of Nancy’s apartment. One afternoon late in the summer Frankie stopped at a house in the south end where Jill Paiva was living. Jill was still worried about her mother’s disappearance, but Frankie told her that Nancy was fine, that she’d checked herself into a drug treatment facility.

  When Jill doubted Frankie, he picked up the telephone and dialed a number.

  “Hello,” he said into the telephone, “I want to speak to Nancy Paiva.” Then Frankie told Jill that her mother was in a recreation session and couldn’t come to the telephone just then. As Jill reached for the phone, Frankie hung up. Frankie wouldn’t tell Jill the number he had dialed.

  Soon Judy was calling every drug treatment facility and halfway house in two states, looking for her sister.

  Later, Judy told this story to John Dextradeur, who told her that Frankie had made the story up, and that he had done so to give Jill some hope. Judy was furious once more with Frankie.

  Meanwhile, Dextradeur was becoming more and more frustrated with his own police department. No one, it seemed, took his suspicions about the missing women very seriously, not even the state police. That was when Dextradeur took his leave; he didn’t want to die of frustration.

  Dextradeur would be out of the picture for about a month. Just after he took his leave, Judy finally managed to get into Nancy’s apartment. She got in with Jolene, who found a way to get in through a window.

  “Me and Jolene,” Judy recalled later. “By this time, John Dextradeur’s had his heart (illness), nobody else cares, so I get into the house and, you know … I find a telephone with some blood spots, splatterings, and a shoe-box, my father’s shoebox, full of hypodermic needles.” The discovery of the beloved shoebox jammed with syringes made Judy want to weep.

  The apartment was filled with other people’s clothes. It was obvious that someone had been living in the apartment during Nancy’s absence. The blood-splattered telephone unnerved Judy. She was sure this was evidence that something horrible had befallen her sister. She immediately left the apartment and called a friend, who told her to notify the police right away.

  Soon two police cruisers drew up in front of the apartment, and officers went in to search. A few minutes later they emerged to tell Judy they couldn’t find anything that she had just described.

  “What do you mean?” Judy asked. She was furious. She went back into the apartment and showed the officers the shoebox.

  “What do you call that?” she asked. Judy believed that the police wanted her to tell them exactly where it was, and that somehow the police were suspicious of her.

  Later, the public housing authority managing the apartment complex protested the police inspection, saying that the police had entered the apartment without legal authority. That made Judy mad; after all, it was her sister who was the legal tenant of the apartment, and her sister was missing, for Pete’s sake.

  Next Judy discovered some of Nancy’s mail scattered in a park across the street. She went to the welfare office to get Nancy’s checks stopped. It was clear that someone was stealing the checks and forging them. Once the checks stopped, the housing authority ordered Frankie evicted from the apartment. Judy went back with Jolene and Jill, forced the door open, and carted out all of Nancy’s belongings. Judy felt that if she took all of Nancy’s things, Nancy would be forced to seek her out, if she was still alive.

  As they carried things out, Judy discovered a Polaroid photograph of her sister, naked from the waist up, grinning at the camera. Her upper torso was literally covered with black-and-blue bruises. Judy quietly slipped the photograph into her purse. She decided to keep it forever to remind herself of the hell Nancy’s life had become. Now, Judy felt, she had hard evidence for her hatred of Frankie.

  Later, Judy, Jill, and Jolene went through all the things they had removed from Nancy’s apartment. Much was strange to Jill and Jolene. There was a great deal of clothing they’d never seen before. Judy packed up everything that didn’t belong to Nancy and threw it away. But that one innocent act by Judy, preventable had the police taken Dextradeur’s warnings seriously, or Judy’s contribution of Nancy’s dental charts, might have made solving the Highway Murders far more difficult.

  Without knowing who the clothing and other articles actually belonged to, the possibility exists that some items found in Nancy Paiva’s apartment might have belonged to other victims of the Highway Killer.

  Certainly, there is evidence that at least two other victims of the killer had been in Nancy’s apartment just before their deaths.

  The failure to identify Nancy Paiva from the dental records provided by Judy DeSantos in August 1988 thus effectively prevented investigators from conducting the timely, thorough examination of Nancy’s apartment that was required. That search, in turn, might have been crucial in solving the case.

  In the years to come, the missed opportunity was recognized as a devastating breakdown of the investigation, and would be one of the main things the police fervently wished they had the opportunity to do over again.

  14

  Misery

  For Tony DeGrazia, the dream was ending: Kathy was leaving, the marriage was off.

  He and Kathy had spent the summer together in the little house on Long Pond. One of their friends owned a boat, and they spent the afternoons waterskiing and partying. It seemed like an idyllic summer, but Tony wasn’t happy. His fears had been right, after all. For the first time, Kathy was seeing him up close, every day, and he could tell she didn’t like what she was seeing.

  It was the nightmares, Tony guessed. Kathy knew the whole story, and kept saying she understood, but he could see that she was—well, frightened. It was the nightmares, or the sleepwalking. Tony cried, and Kathy was sympathetic; but sympathy wasn’t love. Near the end of September, Kathy moved out. Within a month she was involved with another man, and Tony was almost as miserable as he’d ever been in his li
fe.

  FALL 1988

  “What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is, the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt …”

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  15

  Lost

  By the fall of 1988, the discovery of the two skeletons along the highways leading out of New Bedford had long faded from the news. Most of the state had its attention focused on presidential politics. Massachusetts’ governor, Michael Dukakis, was the democratic nominee for president.

  District Attorney Ron Pina was squarely behind his old ally, even going so far as to hold a press conference with other Democratic district attorneys in which wanted posters of Republican nominee George Bush were passed around, posters holding that Bush was “wanted” for failing to stop crime. Two years later, Pina would try in his own reelection campaign to portray himself as a Batmanesque “Crime Fighter,” a tack that subjected him to wide ridicule among the voters, given what had happened by then. But politics, as always, was a bully pulpit for someone like Ron Pina who enjoyed being out front, leading the way.

  By early October, John Dextradeur was back from his medical leave. By now Dextradeur was utterly convinced that something was going on, relating to missing women. On his return to duty, Dextradeur discovered two new reports of missing women that seemed almost identical to the earlier cases.

  One, Sandra Botelho, had last been seen on the night of August 11 when she left her north end apartment to get “bread.” Checking further, Dextradeur learned that Botelho had an arrest record for prostitution—in fact, she’d been in court on such a charge just a week before her disappearance; additionally, Sandy was known to have a cocaine habit.

  Then, while Dextradeur had been out of action with his heart attack, 25-year-old Dawn Mendes had likewise disappeared. Like Botelho, Dawn had a prostitution background and a cocaine addiction.

  Even more striking, it appeared to Dextradeur that Botelho and Mendes had known one another, and that both women had probably known Nancy Paiva.

  That made six women missing: Rochelle Clifford, Nancy Paiva, Mary Rose Santos, Robin Rhodes, Sandra Botelho, and Dawn Mendes. And the striking thing was: all of the women appeared to have known one another, and had spent time in many of the same taverns, bars, and housing projects. All were drug users, and all but Nancy Paiva favored cocaine.

  Nevertheless, Dextradeur was still unable to interest his superiors in the possible links. Even the dental records on Nancy Paiva that Dextradeur had given to the state police carried no weight. The state police were fairly sure that the skeleton found on I-195, the one Judy DeSantos seemed convinced was her sister, had been off the side of the road far too long to be Nancy Paiva. Dextradeur wasn’t sure whether anyone had even checked the records, so sure were the troopers of their judgment.

  The more Dextradeur thought about the situation, the more distressed he became. For a man with a heart condition, being distressed was not good. Finally Dextradeur decided to do something about it. Contacted by reporter Maureen Boyle of the New Bedford newspaper, the Standard-Times, Dextradeur confided his concerns.

  “Fears Build for Missing Women,” Boyle’s story read on October 3. Boyle went on to name Sandy Botelho, Mary Santos, Dawn Mendes, and Nancy Paiva as women missing from New Bedford.

  “All lived, frequented, or were last seen in the Purchase and Pleasant Street areas,” Boyle noted, thus implicitly linking the four she named to the Weld Square subculture. “Three are known drug users or addicts. Mrs. Santos was visiting a drug-using friend the night she disappeared.”

  Boyle backhandedly revealed her source for the story when she quoted Dextradeur, who said that no evidence had surfaced “yet” to link the four cases.

  “News of the missing women has sent chills through those frequenting Purchase Street,” Boyle continued, “raising fears that one of the men circling the area known for prostitutes may be a killer.

  “One woman said two others were missing, but police have not been officially notified yet.

  “‘It’s scary,’ said one woman, a heroin addict. ‘No one knows what’s going on.’”

  One of those who also did not know what was going on was District Attorney Ronald Pina. Years later, Pina would say he had only the vaguest awareness that anything was wrong, at least at first. As a general rule, he pointed out, the state police rarely consulted with their counterparts in the city department just four blocks away. Just because the city had a problem didn’t mean it was anything the state police needed to know about; if the state police didn’t know about it, then he wasn’t likely to know, either, Pina said.

  Pina recalled attending a meeting in his office sometime in October, in which the two skeletons and the four missing women were briefly discussed. The state police told him, Pina recalled, that the two dead women were probably victims of drug overdoses. It doesn’t seem very likely that the troopers really believed a woman with a brassiere tied around her neck was a likely candidate for a drug overdose, but that’s the way Pina chose to remember events much later. But then, Pina had other things on his mind that fall.

  For one, he’d just married Sheila Martines. The ceremony, attended by nearly 200 well-wishers who represented the range of Bristol County’s social and economic elite, was held in the Seaman’s Bethel in New Bedford’s historic old town—the same church described in Moby Dick, in which a character named Father Mapple mounts a prow-like pulpit to relate the story of the stubbornness of Jonah, and thereby foreshadows mad Ahab’s tragic end. One of Pina’s closest friends and political pals, Fall River Mayor Carlton Viveiros, was Pina’s best man.

  16

  The Trees

  November 8, 1988, was Election Day, and about 2 P.M., as Ron Pina’s longtime ally Michael Dukakis was going down to defeat at the hands of George Bush, a state public works crew pulled to a stop along the shoulder of a highway cloverleaf interchange at I-195 and Reed Road, about six miles west of New Bedford.

  Like many of the interchanges on I-195, the space between the on-ramp from southbound Reed Road onto eastbound I-195 enclosed a heavily wooded circle—mostly short, thin pines, grass, and thick brush. The bank of the curved roadway was designed to ease vehicles around the tight turn, and also provide for drainage into the circle’s interior. That in turn meant that much of the trash and garbage thrown out by thoughtless motorists found its inevitable way into the wooded circle area. The garbage was one reason public works crews made regular stops—to clean up the mess.

  The crew began working its way into the circle’s trees when one of its members was brought up short by a grisly sight. There, just inside the tree line, were the remnants of a human being.

  Within a very few minutes of the discovery of the skeleton, Massachusetts State Police Corporal Jose Gonsalves knew he was probably looking at the handiwork of a serial murderer. After all, Gonsalves reasoned, the new remains made three such finds in the preceding four months—all off to the side of major highways leading into and out of New Bedford. One victim—well, Gonsalves thought, that could happen anywhere. Two was suspicious, but not conclusive. At three, the odds were quite strong that police were looking for a repeat killer.

  That the latest victim had been murdered could not be seriously disputed. The evidence was in the trees.

  There among the branches was one of the strangest sights Gonsalves had ever seen. Strewn through the pines and brush were articles of clothing—everything from a tank top to panties, from jackets to jeans. One thing was for sure—it was highly unlikely that the dead person had first taken off her clothes, tossed them high into the tree branches, and then lay down to die alone. Gonsalves had a sudden vision: after having dragged the victim into the trees, Gonsalves imagined the killer returning to his vehicle, retrieving the victim’s clothing, then throwing the clothes into the trees and brush in some sort of frenzied outburs
t. How else could the various clothing articles have gotten so high up, and so far apart?

  What did the disposal of the clothes say about the killer? Was this apparent outburst due to a suddenly acute sense of self-loathing? Was it evidence of remorse? Or was it disgust with the victim, some sort of psychological clue to how the killer saw his prey? Did it mean he hated the victims, hated everything about them, including, even, their clothes?

  As certain as he was that the latest skeleton was related to the July discoveries, Gonsalves also knew there were some differences: where the first victim had only minimal clothing, and the second none at all, in this latest scene there was practically a whole wardrobe. Gonsalves knew that the clothes might be quite helpful in identifying the newest victim. And in that he was wrong, but in another way, still accidentally right, much to nearly everyone’s later surprise.

  Several years later Judy DeSantos could still remember that particular Election Day. After all, Judy worked in the city’s election office, so voting days were always hectic, never mind when the state’s governor was a nominee for president. But all of the turmoil of the office immediately faded from her mind when she received a call from her niece Jill, saying that the state police had called and wanted Judy, Jill, and Jolene to come into their office and look at some things to see whether they could identify them.

  The following day Judy and her two nieces found themselves in the state police portion of District Attorney Ron Pina’s suite of offices in downtown New Bedford. Corporal Gonsalves and his detective partner, Trooper Maryann Dill, showed them several articles of clothing. Nancy’s two daughters immediately identified a striped tank top and a pair of panties as having belonged to their mother. Two jackets (why would Nancy have been wearing two jackets, and in the heat of July?) both daughters also identified as having been Nancy’s. Judy looked at several small pieces of gold jewelry and recognized them as having been in Judy’s and Nancy’s family. All of the clothing, Gonsalves and Dill told Judy and her nieces, had been found at the scene discovered the day before at I-195 and Reed Road.