Still more pictures were produced, and Tony backtracked even more. “I’ve seen her before,” he said, when shown a picture of a woman who was friends with Dawn Mendes. “I may have picked her up.” But he had certainly never pulled a knife on anyone, he insisted. He claimed he didn’t even have any knives, except for kitchen knives.
When the detectives showed him a picture of Adele Leeks, Tony seemed to be getting tired of the game.
“I could have picked up any of these girls,” he said, “and not remembered them. The way I feel about them, I don’t know why they are there in the first place with the laws we have. I don’t remember them because I don’t respect them. They are not people I want to be associated with.
“You have a couple of drinks, you get horny, sometimes it happens. You just stop, get a blow job, and leave. Then I forget about them. As time goes on, I put them out of my mind. I don’t want to be associated with the scum of the earth. I know plenty of nice girls. I don’t want to get sick over doing something sick. It’s immoral. It’s not right. I’m disgusted I picked them up.”
Late in the interview, Tony was asked whether he had been abused as a child.
According to Butler, Tony became very emotional. “How do you think I got this?” he asked, pointing to his left arm. Butler followed this up.
“When asked if he has any hate for women as a result of his abuse,” Butler wrote, “DeGrazia stated that he has talked to a priest about his feelings, and the priest told him he has ‘pent up’ problems.
“When asked if he hated his mother, DeGrazia said he would rather not think about it because she is the only mother he has.”
Tony started crying. Finally he burst out, “Why don’t you guys just get rid of these people? I don’t want them near me. I always ask to be forgiven for doing something so low (as picking up prostitutes, Butler noted parenthetically). I think I’ve scared some of these girls when I’ve been drinking, but I didn’t rape them.”
More pictures followed, and Tony acknowledged that some of the women seemed familiar, and said that with one, he’d got into a fight with her in his truck.
Now Butler and Forrest moved in. Tony was shown pictures of each of the murder victims, but the detectives didn’t tell him the new photos were of women who were dead. They wanted to gauge his reactions to the photos. Asked if he’d ever picked up Dawn Mendes, Tony said, “I can’t say no, I can’t say yes.” Tony admitted it was possible, but couldn’t remember when.
Tony also thought that Debbie Medeiros looked familiar. Asked if it was true he had once chased Debbie DeMello down the street, Tony denied it. He’d never seen Mary Rose Santos, he said. The same was true with Rochelle Clifford, Nancy Paiva, and Robin Rhodes. He couldn’t remember Christine Monteiro, and said he didn’t think he would have picked up Debroh McConnell. “She would scare me,” he said. Sandy Botelho looked familiar, Tony said, but he didn’t know whether he’d ever picked her up.
Now the detectives told Tony that each of the last ten photos were of women who were dead. Tony insisted he had never killed anyone, but admitted that he might have assaulted some women, but only to get them out of his truck.
Well, said the detectives, wasn’t it possible that he had accidently killed someone during one of these fights? And wasn’t it possible that Tony had blacked out, and that’s why he couldn’t remember?
Tony now became concerned about being arrested and prosecuted. “Please don’t send me to court,” he said. “I’ll get help.” When Tony was asked what sort of help he needed, he got confused. “They’re the ones that need help,” he said, referring to the prostitutes. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve screwed up, but I didn’t go dragging anyone off into the woods.”
The detectives returned to Tony’s childhood abuse, but Tony was reluctant to talk about it. He explained that when he was little “his mother used to twist his nose, and twist his arm because he wet the bed,” Butler wrote. “He was reluctant to discuss the abuse in detail, and was more concerned about who might have told us that his mother abused him than with the abuse itself. He was extremely worried about who might know that he was abused by his mother.”
Tony again denied killing anyone. “If I killed one person,” he said, “the next person would be me. My guilt feelings would kill me.”
When he was asked why anyone might kill the women, Tony offered a suggestion: maybe, he said, someone had gotten AIDS from a prostitute. “He assured us,” Butler wrote, “that he did not have AIDS.”
“I have nothing to do with the girls who have been found dead,” Tony added. “I’m not a madman. I get scared. I get nervous. These girls are full of diseases and needle marks. They look good until you see them up close.”
Tony now agreed to take a lie detector test about the murders, but refused one on the rapes. An appointment was set for the following Monday.
Around 11 that night, Jose Gonsalves returned to the office from Tony’s mother’s house in Taunton, where he and Maryann Dill had gone to retrieve Tony’s truck. The truck was seen as a potential repository of trace evidence, and the troopers hoped that any hairs, fibers, or bloodstains found in the truck might link Tony to the murders. But first Gonsalves wanted to ask Tony some questions.
Gonsalves asked Tony about the check he’d written to Sandy Botelho. At first Tony said he’d given the money to Sandy because she’d been crying about her children. Then Tony admitted he’d given her the money for oral sex.
Now Gonsalves asked whether the police would find any blood in Tony’s truck. Tony assured them they would not. Although he said nothing to Tony, Gonsalves was already pretty sure that wasn’t true. It appeared that there was a large bloodstain on the passenger seat of Tony’s truck, and spatters in several other places as well.
At quarter to one in the morning, Tony finally asked to be allowed to go home. Forrest and Butler drove him back to his house, and then explained to Tony that his truck and much of his clothing had been seized for examination. Then the detectives said they wanted the clothing that Tony was wearing, too. Tony literally gave the detectives the shirt off his back. Butler and Forrest told Tony they’d see him again the following Monday for the lie detector test.
But when Monday rolled around, Tony didn’t show. Instead, he’d hired a lawyer: Eddie Harrington, the former mayor of New Bedford, and Joe Harrington’s brother. But that was the same day another public works crew, clearing brush and trash along the north side of I-195 some eight miles east of New Bedford, discovered the remains of a ninth presumed victim of the Highway Murderer.
36
Spies Like Us
Like several of the earlier victims, the latest discovery was of a female skeleton without clothes. The remains appeared to have been folded in the fetal position. The discovery seemed identical to the earlier eight, at least in the assessment of Gonsalves, Dill, and forensic expert Kenneth Martin. But there was one difference: the newest remains had been found in another county, Plymouth County, and that meant there would be another district attorney, not Ron Pina, in charge of the investigation.
Three days after the discovery, the remains were identified as those of Sandy Botelho. Sandy’s family was devastated by the news. Soon the news media was camped on the Botelho doorstep. Sandy’s father, Joseph Botelho, said he intended to leave New Bedford. “New Bedford,” he told the Standard-Times’s Boyle, “is one of those cities that hurts everybody. It’s a city of hurt.”
Now began a rather strange dance between the offices of Ron Pina and Plymouth County District Attorney William O’Malley. Legally, Botelho’s murder was the responsibility of O’Malley. But Pina and his people had done virtually all of the work investigating the earlier eight homicides. It was only logical to allow them to continue with the latest case, since it appeared that the same person or persons were responsible for all nine. But the law wasn’t always logical.
A second jurisdictional complication developed because Botelho’s remains had been found inside the boundary line of the township of
Marion. Marion was about as far away from New Bedford as Beverly Hills is from Brooklyn, culturally and economically speaking. Marion, in fact, is one of the wealthiest cities in the entire state of Massachusetts. What on earth was the killer doing in Marion? That was what Marion Detective John Torres wanted to know, and because the remains had been found on his turf, he had every legal right to try to find out. And with Plymouth County D.A. O’Malley sensitive to the interests of one of his wealthiest constituencies, it wasn’t going to be easy for Pina and his people to keep Torres and O’Malley out of the investigation—at least, that’s what Torres thought. He hadn’t counted on Pina’s intense interest in the case.
Later, Detective Torres recalled that he quickly began having real trouble getting information about the murders from the Bristol County people.
“Well,” he said, “there was never a problem with sharing our information, it was the problem of obtaining their information.” Part of this bottleneck occurred because two different counties were now involved in the investigation, along with two different district attorneys, and two different CPAC units. When CPAC investigators from Plymouth County tried to find out what had been done in the investigation so far, they were rebuffed by their counterparts in Bristol County.
According to Torres and former Plymouth CPAC Sergeant Nelson Ostiguy, the Plymouth contingent was told that the Bristol troopers couldn’t give them certain kinds of information without Pina’s prior approval. That in turn created embarrassment and some friction among the state police of both counties, who worked for the same organization.
This was an eye-opener for Torres, who was working on his very first homicide investigation. Murder, of course, was a rarity in a place like Marion.
“I could not believe that guys on the same job were doing this to one another, you know what I mean?” Torres said later. “They work on the same job … But I think that the politics of it all screwed it up, and had the politics not been involved, had the cops been allowed to work and to do what they get paid to do, I think that there’s a good possibility the investigation would have gone further than it did.”
The facts unearthed by the investigation became a sort of currency in a subterranean competition between the investigators and their nominal bosses, the district attorneys, Torres concluded. “It was almost like, ‘you can’t have my marbles, because I have more marbles than you and I wanna win the game,’” he said.
Eventually Ostiguy, Torres, and others in the Plymouth CPAC group found themselves acting like spies—conducting secret rendezvous in parking lots with the Bristol County people, who slipped them information but begged them not to say where it came from. But the flow of information was haphazard and interruptible at any time. After several weeks, Torres and Ostiguy went to O’Malley to complain. O’Malley said he’d see what he could do.
On the first of May, another round of witnesses was brought before the special grand jury. Most of them were people who had worked at three taverns in New Bedford, including the Quarterdeck Lounge and the Town Tavern. Somewhat surprisingly, little of this testimony was subsequently leaked, although it may contain some of the most significant information developed by the jury, because of the frequent presence in the taverns by many of the victims. Still, the leakage of other information from the closed-door hearings continued to be remarkable.
Pina’s spokesman Jim Martin, in fact, was increasingly upset by the leaks. It was part of Martin’s job to keep track of virtually everything published or said about the investigation, and the burgeoning leaks were driving him to distraction. The news media always knew when the grand jury was in session, and planted themselves right outside the jury’s door. As soon as a witness emerged, they would be bombarded with questions.
“How many courthouses have you gone into where the press can stand right outside of the judge’s lobby?” Martin asked, later. “I mean, the judge can’t even go into the courtroom without walking by the reporters. It’s absurd to have that.”
And Veary, too, was upset with the situation.
“There were a lot of people,” Pina’s chief deputy recalled, “who, for whatever reason, perhaps this was their moment in the sun, came in and talked, and gave press conferences moments later, despite all our efforts to try to respect the secrecy that’s supposed to surround grand jury proceedings.
“We had people conducting press conferences and occasionally talking about everything that they said; occasionally talking about things they didn’t say; occasionally embellishing their stories; occasionally, just coming up with something from Mars and then, of course, pontificating or giving their own opinions as to who the real culprit was. It was an amazing situation.”
Veary remonstrated with Pina about the problem, but Pina didn’t seem that concerned. Although Pina advised witnesses not to talk to the news media, he also made it clear that nothing would happen to them if they did. Indeed, the law gave Pina no power to keep the witnesses quiet.
Thus, on the afternoon of May 2, Margaret “Peggy” Medeiros emerged onto the courthouse steps after testifying, and in front of a national television audience, accused Tony DeGrazia of being the Highway Murderer.
This may in fact have been Peggy’s moment in the sun, as Veary would have put it. Peggy told the astonished reporters that the investigators had told her that Tony was the killer, when in fact, Peggy had just told the investigators that she thought Tony had committed the murders. Peggy added some details:
“He told me, ‘I’m going to do to you what I did to the other bitches,’” Peggy said. Pina had showed her Tony’s picture in the grand jury, she added. “You don’t forget that face when someone tries to kill you.”
Reporters for the Standard-Times rushed back to their office and dug into their files, unearthing old stories about Tony’s previous arrests, including the three for sexual assault in the early 1980s. Whether because Peggy lacked Pina’s credibility, or because of growing doubts about the propriety of naming names, the paper at first withheld Tony’s identity.
That lasted for just a day, however; on May 4, 1989, a warrant for Tony’s arrest was issued, and the search warrants against Tony’s house and truck were released. Now Tony’s name, as well as his alleged crimes, were known to everyone. The investigators, reporters noted, had recovered samples of blood from the truck, and one victim had told police she had seen a black rope under the seat. The detectives had been watching Tony for two weeks, the papers reported.
In East Freetown, Tony first heard of all this when a horde of reporters began banging on his front door. He was astonished to find himself at the center of their frantic interest.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I’m guilty until I’ve proved myself innocent.” He claimed the police were railroading him. “I’ve been advised by my lawyer not to talk to the media. I don’t want my name in the paper, people believe what they read in the paper. I’m confused, I don’t know what to do.” Then he shut himself inside and called his mother.
In Dartmouth and in Taunton, Tony’s family rallied around him. “Tony has been through hell,” said his father, a Dartmouth dairy farmer. He added that police had offered Tony a lie detector test but that Eddie Harrington had advised him against it. At the time, that was probably the wrong thing to say.
37
Video Fun
Tony turned himself in on the following day and immediately pleaded innocent to any of the rapes and assaults. Based on several of Tony’s statements made the night they interviewed him, some troopers thought that Tony was a prospective suicide. As a result, a psychiatrist was appointed to assess Tony’s mental state. The doctor concluded that Tony was extremely depressed, that he seemed to exhibit signs of at least two personalities, that he suffered from flashbacks of childhood abuse, and that he was a danger to himself, or possibly others.
Now all the stories about Tony and his mother were spread across the front page and on television. Tony was held under a suicide watch at the county jail, with bail set at $75,00
0. Trooper Martin wanted to take samples of Tony’s hair and saliva. Tony had no objection, but his lawyer did. A new hearing was set to determine whether Pina had grounds to take the samples.
While Tony waited in jail for this hearing, two other odd events unfolded. A team of ten drug detectives smashed in the front door of the apartment occupied by Donald Santos, the grieving husband of Mary Rose, and there arrested four women and seized a thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine. Santos wasn’t present at the time, but a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Two days after that, the city of New Bedford was named as an All-American City, a prestigious designation sought by municipalities all over the country. While the mayor was inviting the whole city to attend a parade and celebration, Donald Santos appeared in court to claim innocence of charges of cocaine possession with intent to distribute it. Santos also told reporters that he thought police no longer believed his story about the night he’d left Mary Rose at the Quarterdeck. He’d had no idea his apartment was being used to distribute coke, Santos said.
In mid-May, the simmering rivalry between Pina and Plymouth County District Attorney William O’Malley suddenly lurched into public view. Where Pina had long been quoted as saying there were “three or four” suspects in the murders, now O’Malley’s office was saying there might be as many as a dozen. That clearly implied that Pina and his investigation had overlooked some possible suspects—about nine, to be exact.
Talk also circulated widely that Pina’s investigators refused to share information with the Plymouth people, or even to invite them to coordination meetings. As a result, the Plymouth County detectives had been sneaking into New Bedford to investigate on their own. Obviously, it appeared, communications between the two offices had severely broken down.
Killing Season Page 18