Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  As Gonsalves had predicted, Nancy’s identification opened the floodgates of publicity. Soon reporters tracked down Nancy’s daughter Jolene. Jolene was furious with Pina for publicly linking their mother with Weld Square and thereby tarring her with the stigma of prostitution. Nancy Paiva had never spent any time in Weld Square, Jill and Jolene insisted. Nor had she ever been arrested for prostitution. But all the publicity about the murders, taken together, seemed to imply that Nancy had been both a hooker and an indifferent mother. Nothing was further from the truth, Jill and Jolene protested through angry tears.

  “It hurts,” Jolene told reporters. “My mother’s gone … I never thought that my mother would die like that. My mother wasn’t a prostitute, so Ron Pina should shut his mouth.”

  But the following day, Pina’s office identified Debra Medeiros as a prostitute who frequented Weld Square, and the focus returned to sex-for-sale. Soon, in scenes reminiscent of the Big Dan’s controversy, Jolene was being cruelly taunted in school by other children.

  With the identification of three of the five victims, investigators for the first time had something concrete to work with. Determining the last-known places and times for Debra Medeiros, Nancy Paiva, and Dawn Mendes was critical to seeing what, if any commonalities might be present in each of the murders. Commonalities, in turn, might be vital in determining who might have killed them.

  That the five murders were related and probably the work of a single man seemed obvious; Pina repeatedly stressed the similarities in the crimes. But for some reason, Pina seemed reluctant to use the phrase “serial killer” to describe the homicides. A reporter for The Boston Globe, John Ellement, buttonholed Pina in Boston one day in early December and tried to get Pina “to say the magic words,” as Pina later recalled.

  Ellement by this time had already talked to several experts who had assured him that the five known murders bore all the earmarks of a serial killer—victims drawn from a vulnerable population, all similar in age and stature, all found in roughly identical settings, apparently killed over a period of months for no apparent reason—but Pina steadfastly refused to utter the phrase. That didn’t stop Ellement from quoting the other experts, however, and in the space of less than a day, media coverage of the murders exploded.

  “Well,” Pina said later, “that was it. All hell broke loose from the Globe story on. What the Globe writes, so goes the rest of the world. The (Boston) Herald responds and then the camera crews follow The Boston Globe, and New York follows that … So they started descending on the place and at that point, it got crazy, because you really couldn’t think or work anymore. The press got in there, their hands were everywhere, they were calling everybody, people were giving interviews off the record, privately … and as you tried to collect information, you’d read it in the paper. And it really drove me up a wall because … when you’re trying to do an investigation, it’s not exactly something (you want to tell everyone about), it’s gotta remain secret …”

  But in addition to confounding the investigation with a barrage of rumors and confusion, the media coverage also generated a strong upsurge in information called into the investigators. To handle the volume and encourage more calls, Pina and the state police set up a special telephone line for tips. Pina also put out the word that investigators believed that the killer was someone who lived in the New Bedford area, was familiar with the highways around the city, and likely was a frequent visitor to Weld Square.

  Pina likewise announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would be asked to develop a psychological profile of the killer, based on the evidence found at the death scenes.

  What Pina didn’t say was that the evidence found at the scenes was so fragmentary, so limited, that it would never be possible to develop anything more than a generalized profile of a man who liked to kill women. That, unfortunately, might apply to so many men in the New Bedford area as to be almost useless. A spokesman for Pina said investigators were reviewing previous reports linking specific men to violence against prostitutes and female drug users in an effort to generate a list of possible suspects. Undercover policewomen were assigned to pose as prostitutes in the Weld Square area in the hope that the killer might reveal himself by acting strangely.

  Four days later, on December 10, 1988, a Saturday, two hunters making their way across an abandoned gravel quarry-turned-illegal-refuse-dump about half a mile north of the Reed Road exit from I-195 discovered a sixth skeleton under a small grove of trees. This skeleton was partly clothed. The hunters immediately called the state police, who arranged to have emergency lights brought to the scene. The weather was bitterly cold, with snow threatening.

  This time Trooper Kenneth Martin, the forensics expert, wanted to be absolutely sure if there was any trace evidence at the site that he would find it. Dogs were brought in to search the surrounding area, but no other remains were found. It was obvious that the latest victim had been strangled, but by this time police were learning to be cautious in what they said publicly. They declined to say just how the victim had died.

  But there were some subtle differences between the gravel-pit victim and the others. For one thing, the latest location was down a long, winding dirt road that led off Reed Road into the gravel quarry. That was a difference, because all the other victims had been found right next to the highways, not down two different lonely roads. If the killer of the other five felt most comfortable getting rid of the bodies quickly—ergo, why else would he have used areas right next to the highway?—was the killer of the latest victim someone completely different? Why the difference in setting? “They may be linked,” Gonsalves told Maureen Boyle, “and they may be not.”

  Three days later, police arrested Neil F. Anderson of Dartmouth and charged him with rape. The word spread like wildfire through the community and news media alike: Anderson was also a suspect in the murders.

  22

  “It’s Not the Right Guy”

  Anderson was a 35-year-old former truck driver, welder, and fish cutter, as well as the father of two children. As it happened, Maureen Boyle’s story in the Standard-Times ten days earlier—the one about the Weld Square woman who told of being attacked in the rain by the scarred, blond man with the knife—led directly to his arrest.

  After the story appeared, the woman who told the story to Boyle noticed a man glaring at her from inside his truck. With a shock she realized that the man was the same person who had attacked her! Doubtless he too had read the account of the rape by the side of the road; that was probably why he was glaring at her, the woman concluded. Quickly she made a note of his license plate before the man drove away. Within a few minutes she was on the line to the police, turning over the information and the plate number.

  When police checked the plate’s registration, the name returned was that of Anderson. When the woman identified Anderson from his photograph—he’d been arrested twice in earlier years for assault—police decided to pick him up for questioning. They also searched his house and his truck, looking for evidence that might tie him to the murders, and clothing described by the rape victim. Trooper Martin, the forensic expert, wanted to see whether Anderson’s house and truck might yield trace evidence, such as fibers or paint, that might link Anderson to the murders. During the search, the police seized knives, ammunition, brass knuckles, and a whip belonging to Anderson.

  While Pina declined to call Anderson a suspect in the killings, others in his office freely acknowledged that he was one of a number of men under investigation. The publication of Anderson’s photograph in the newspapers also clearly tied him to the investigation, and soon, several other women called police to say that they, too, had been raped by Anderson. To police, Anderson denied being the murderer, and in court, Anderson pleaded not guilty to the rapes.

  On the streets, meanwhile, the news of Anderson’s arrest did little to reduce the growing anxiety over the murders. Some people who spent time in Weld Square even flatly denied that Anderson was the killer.

/>   “It’s not the right guy,” a woman who identified herself as a prostitute told a reporter for The Globe. And another woman agreed, saying, “I don’t believe he did it.” That woman said she’d gone to elementary and junior high school with Anderson, and that Anderson just wasn’t capable of committing murder.

  Judy DeSantos also reacted with caution to Anderson’s arrest. “I don’t have any feelings either way,” Judy told The Globe. “I only found out a week ago my sister was killed. That hasn’t sunk in.”

  All the publicity about the murders and the rapes was meanwhile making New Bedford city officials cringe.

  “Murders Cast Harsh Light on City,” the Standard-Times’s Carlos Cunha reported. All the reporting about Weld Square, drug users, and prostitutes made it seem as though New Bedford was a hellhole of the worst order. It all depended on how you looked at it, Cunha reported.

  “It is a charming, easily reached waterfront city. It boasts a good quality of life, loads of history, dabs of culture, and an interesting ethnic mix—not to mention the richest fishing port in the U.S. and some of the best discount shopping to be found anywhere,” Cunha noted.

  “Then again, it’s a sleazy, seedy, rundown, working class, welfare-funded warren with a hopelessly polluted harbor and a metropolis-sized crime and drug problem—the likely setting for such sensational stories as the Big Dan’s gang rape and the ongoing saga of skeletal finds along the highways. The two possible faces of New Bedford.”

  Lately, Cunha continued, the second face seemed to be gaining ascendancy over the first, largely because of the reporting of outsiders drawn to the city because of the murders. Some city officials began to speak of Pina privately in caustic terms: it seemed to them that the district attorney was, once again, beating up the city to gain national publicity for himself.

  Amid this low-level grumbling, the Smithsonian’s Ubelaker continued to work trying to identify the three remaining skeletons. On December 19, Ubelaker was able to conclude that the skeleton found by the hunters in the gravel pit on December 10 was that of Rochelle Clifford. Rochelle’s identification in turn gave the investigators a couple of intriguing leads.

  It did not take long, for example, to check back through the New Bedford police records to unearth two important names: Frankie Pina and Kenny Ponte.

  Both men had been linked with Rochelle Clifford the previous April, when Dextradeur had tried to sort out the conflicting stories of rape and assault that had initially puzzled the New Bedford detective. Kenny had been with Rochelle the day of the supposed assault against Roger Swire. Frankie had been with Rochelle on April 27, 1988, when Dextradeur had questioned Rochelle about both incidents. Ubelaker’s best guess was that Rochelle had been murdered sometime the previous spring—about the time that Dextradeur had been investigating the parallel cases, and, obviously, shortly after Dextradeur had seen her with Frankie Pina.

  Then, further checking revealed another seemingly significant fact: Kenny Ponte had represented Nancy Paiva in a bankruptcy proceeding, and Nancy had actually worked part-time for the lawyer.

  Where were Frankie and Kenny? Frankie, at least, was easy to find: he was in jail again. He claimed to barely know Kenny Ponte, and again denied any romantic involvement with Rochelle. He described Rochelle as a street person, a friend of Nancy’s, who happened to use Nancy’s apartment to store her belongings and take showers. He said he’d last seen Rochelle sometime in May or June of 1988 after Rochelle had been released from a drug-treatment facility in Quincy, near Boston. He said he and Nancy believed that Rochelle had gone back to the Cape Cod area.

  When investigators began searching for Kenny, however, they discovered that he had shut down his law practice in late September, and had moved to Florida in October or November. For some of the investigators, the timing of Kenny’s move to Florida seemed important: after all, the spate of missings seemed to stop shortly before Kenny moved away. The investigators also noted that Kenny had been charged in district court with the alleged assault against Swire, and that he was due to appear in New Bedford District Court on the charge in January.

  Just why Kenny moved to Florida in the fall of 1988 remains a rather fuzzy matter. Kenny himself maintained that he’d long wanted to live in Florida, where his family had some modest property investments. Indeed, he’d been talking about moving south for more than a year before he actually did so. But just how Kenny proposed to earn a living in Florida was rather more obscure.

  It does appear that in moving out of New Bedford, Kenny was influenced by a relatively new friend. That friend was Paul F. Ryley, a former Massachusetts prison guard, a businessman, and like Kenny, an honorary deputy sheriff for Bristol County.

  Kenny, in fact, helped Ryley with some legal work in connection with a substantial estate—nearly $620,000, all in cash—in which Ryley was to be the executor for an elderly great aunt, Margaret Sundelin.

  Kenny had helped videotape Mrs. Sundelin’s last will and testament in January 1985, and as a result of the new will, Ryley’s share of the inheritance was increased by about $90,000. Ryley also had previously obtained power of attorney over Mrs. Sundelin’s ten different savings accounts, which gave him access to all of the money.

  When Mrs. Sundelin died in April 1987, Ryley’s efforts to probate the estate, with Ponte’s assistance, were almost immediately contested by some of Mrs. Sunderlin’s other relatives, who claimed cousin Paul had exerted undue influence on Mrs. Sundelin by keeping her a virtual prisoner in a house he owned in New Bedford.

  As 1987 turned into 1988, Ryley embarked on a series of business trips, of which more later. It appears that some of those trips were to the state of Florida, and it also appears that Kenny Ponte’s plans to move to Florida were made in conjunction with Ryley’s interests in the Sunshine State. Indeed, Ryley told others that he and Ponte intended to go into the real estate business in Florida together, with Ryley using Mrs. Sundelin’s capital, and Ponte providing the legal and management skills. But Ryley told a lot of people a lot of things, and not all of them were true.

  Two years later, in 1990, an attorney appointed by the court to investigate the handling of the estate discovered that virtually all of the money was missing; lawyer Michael A. Kehoe speculated that the money had all gone to Florida—with Paul Ryley. What wasn’t clear was whether any of the allegedly missing money made its way into Ponte’s hands, although there would be anecdotal testimony suggesting that some did.

  In any event, before leaving New Bedford in the fall of 1988, Kenny sold his house on Chestnut Street in the central part of the city. On paper, at least, the sale netted him about $26,000—just about exactly the amount Kenny owed in back debts to federal and state tax authorities, according to The Boston Globe. The man who bought Kenny’s house, a New Bedford lawyer named Norman McCarthy—a longtime friend of Kenny’s—promptly listed the same house at an asking price of $127,000, The Globe reported. Later, when reporters and others persisted in prying into Kenny’s financial affairs, it appeared that there were no reliable records to show just where Kenny got his money.

  For their part, the police contended that Kenny had no visible means of support while in Florida. There is little that inspires police suspicion as much as someone with no regular, visible income, but who still manages to prosper.

  Still, as far as Kenny was concerned, prosperity was hardly his condition, at least by the beginning of 1989. The deals with Ryley hadn’t materialized. Kenny found himself living in one side of a cinderblock duplex in a rather rundown section of the middle-class town of Port Richey. While the weather was wonderful, his shrinking bank account was cause for major anxiety.

  In the week before Christmas, news media attention turned to the families of the victims. In addition to the expected expressions of grief and loss, however, came a new undercurrent—complaints about the police. Several family members said they blamed police for not taking the disappearances seriously, and soon several community activists were openly suggesting that the lifest
yles of the victims—drugs and prostitution—had made authorities indifferent to their plight. A candlelight vigil was held in downtown New Bedford, during which several hundred people walked from the courthouse to District Attorney Pina’s office.

  To counter those charges, Pina granted an extensive interview to The Globe.

  “This is not the first time Pina has found himself a central character in a very public criminal case,” reporter Tom Coakley noted. “There was the Big Dan’s gang-rape case here five years ago. And in April, there was his controversial role in the wake of the reported kidnapping of his fiancée, now his wife.

  “The sordid nature of the latest crimes has intensified public interest and scrutiny,” Coakley added. “The young daughter of one of the dead women complained after Pina told reporters that at least three of the dead women frequented a New Bedford area known for drugs and prostitution. ‘My mother wasn’t a prostitute, so Ronald Pina should shut his mouth,’ the girl protested.

  “‘The press wants to know,’” Pina told Coakley, “‘and I didn’t want a mass population fear that there is someone out there that everybody should be afraid of—a mass hysteria. I feel in my heart for these people … particularly the little girl. We have our victim-witness people working with the family. She is just having a very, very tough time.

  “‘It gets very frustrating, when you think about the killings and the families,” Pina continued. “It isn’t fun (identifying) bodies … and you’ve got some nut or nuts out there you want to find.’”

  And in another story, Maureen Boyle reported that investigators were working hard on the case. None of them had taken a day off in seven weeks, Boyle reported. A day or so later, after activists again criticized the police for failing to react quickly enough to the disappearances of “throwaway people,” the state police shot back that they had spent more time and money on the murders than any case in the history of the county.