Pina tried to defuse the embarrassment. He told reporters he intended to visit O’Malley at his home, where the Plymouth district attorney was recuperating from a severe hip injury, to iron out any differences. For his part, O’Malley acknowledged that there were some bitter feelings between the two offices, but seemed to put the blame more on the troopers in each CPAC, rather than on Pina himself.
“They’re all very capable investigators,” O’Malley said, “and they don’t all like each other. There’s not much you can do about it.” Part of the problem, O’Malley intimated, had to do with lingering bitterness from the 1982 election. Some of the troopers Pina had evicted from his office in that year had later wound up working for the Plymouth County CPAC—among them Nelson Ostiguy—and bad blood remained.
Then Jim Martin, Pina’s spokesman, muddied the waters further by telling reporters that some of the Bristol County people distrusted the Plymouth County people because they were prone to leak to the press. Some reporters thought this claim, made with a straight face, had to be the howler of the year, given the leaks that had already gushed from Pina’s own office in the preceding months.
Pressed for examples, Martin said he was referring to a Marion detective—Torres was the only detective Marion had—who had made an offhand remark to a reporter about the position of the last skeleton. That was confidential information, Martin said sternly, and shouldn’t have been discussed.
Asked to comment on Martin’s inference that he was not to be trusted, Torres ignited and demanded a public statement from Martin clearing him of any wrongdoing. A correction followed in both papers within a day or so. Martin apologized to Torres personally, but Torres was still furious.
In the midst of this flap, a new uproar unfolded when the ever-eager search dog Syros, working the sides of I-195 with Torres and a state trooper, alerted one day at a possible new body site.
The trooper put the report of Syros’s reaction on the troopers’ radio network, where it was picked up by the news media, who immediately flocked to the scene. One television editor broke into regular programming to report that a new body had been found. But Syros had struck out again: instead, on further investigation, it appeared that all Syros had sniffed out was an abandoned cache of ammonia-containing dirty diapers.
As May turned into June, Pina found himself increasingly frustrated. The overtime budget had run out again, and this time the troopers had publicly announced they wouldn’t work any overtime without getting overtime pay. While Pina gave political cover to the troopers, noting that most of the people the investigators needed to talk to could only be found in the wee hours, inwardly he fumed.
It seemed to him that the troopers were repeatedly getting bogged down; and, he noticed, it was becoming harder and harder to get them to do what he wanted them to do. It wasn’t that they overtly refused, he thought, it was just that certain tasks never seemed to be accomplished, no matter how much he asked that they be done.
Tony DeGrazia had been sent to a secure mental hospital for an extended examination. Tony’s blood, hair, and saliva, along with a massive amount of clothing, dirt, hairs, and fibers found in his truck and his house, had been dispatched to the FBI’s forensic laboratory in Washington, where it was slated to be compared with similar samples recovered from the skeletal sites, as well as with control samples taken from Tony’s alleged victims.
But this examination was a painstaking, time-consuming process. First, the samples had to be collected from the questioned items—like Tony’s clothes—and then they had to be microscopically compared with the known samples, including the materials taken from the skeletal sites. Although the FBI gave top priority to the Bristol County samples, it would be several months before anything could be definitively established.
Meanwhile, the stories purveyed by the MCI prisoners continued to roll in. Gonsalves and Dill continued to assemble information about James Baker, the Rhode Island mechanic. Baker appeared to be a mixed bag, with some women insisting that he was not a violent person at all, but with others swearing that he was both mean and dangerous. Some said he once stalked Sandra Botelho, and others said he had picked up a young woman in 1987 who had been found dead two days later. The tale about the identification papers of two victims being seen at Baker’s house was reprised, although by now Gonsalves and Dill were certain that was bogus information dreamed up on the prison grapevine.
At the end of May, the troopers searched Baker’s car, with his permission, and vacuumed the interior for any hairs and fibers. Those samples were shipped to the FBI, along with the usual complement of Baker’s own hair, saliva, and blood.
And although the bail for Neil Anderson had been sharply reduced—indicating he probably wasn’t a viable suspect in the crimes—information about the former fish cutter continued to come in. A motorist told Torres and the Plymouth County CPAC people that she’d seen a man driving a pickup truck pull off I-195, get out of the truck, and carry what looked like a rug into the woods. The motorist had noted the description of the vehicle and a part of the license plate, and when Torres checked, the information seemed to match Anderson. Although Anderson had not been tied to the crimes by forensic evidence, here was a new possible link, so investigators decided to see if any more information could be developed.
In mid-June, Pina reconvened the grand jury for more testimony. This time about a dozen witnesses were called, and almost all of them were then reinterviewed by reporters after they left the jury room. A taxi driver told how he’d once taken Tony DeGrazia to Weld Square in the early morning hours, an excursion Tony later told the driver never to conduct for him again, even if Tony offered him $1,000. A New Bedford furniture store owner testified that he hired Kenny Ponte to collect on bad debts, and that his store owned a white pickup truck.
On the second day, James Baker himself testified for just over four hours. One Weld Square woman was brought into the jury room in handcuffs, took one look at Baker, and said, “That’s him, get me out of here.”
But was any of this testimony pertinent, or even truthful? While the grand jury process might have worked in the Big Dan’s case—when a known crime occurred on a specific date at a specific location, with identifiable witnesses—it wasn’t necessarily effective or reliable in a case where no one could say for sure when a victim was last seen, or where, or by whom.
The wobbly nature of the testimony was never more obvious than the offhand remark by one witness, a woman familiar with Weld Square, that she knew of a pornographic videotape featuring eight of the victims, and starring dogs and a pig. The tape, said the woman, had been directed by Kenny Ponte.
Where was the tape? The woman told the jury that she’d buried the tape in her mother’s backyard.
Pina was nearly overcome with excitement. He rounded up several troopers and rushed over to the address. He was thinking, This is it! In half an hour, it’s going to be all over … Soon the troopers were digging up the backyard at the place where the woman said she’d buried the tape. There was no tape.
Investigators rushed back to the jail to interview the woman again. What side of the yard did you dig on? the woman asked. Oh, she said, that’s your problem, you dug up the wrong side of the yard.
Back to the address, and more digging. Now the opposite side of the yard was attacked with shovels. Still no video. The woman’s mother kept shaking her head. I told you, she said; I told you my daughter is an accomplished liar …
The sweaty troopers looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Pina’s excitement now gave way to frustration. He didn’t want to let go of the videotape story. He talked to the woman once more, and this time the woman suggested that a second woman had stolen the tape in order to blackmail Kenny Ponte!
Attracted by all the activity, reporters asked Pina what was going on. The investigation, Pina told them, could be over very soon if only the troopers and the city detectives could confirm some new information. And in a front page story published the following day, the Standard-Ti
mes’s Boyle reported: “The district attorney hopes to indict the highway killer in about a month if information given to the grand jury probing the slayings pans out.”
“If it pans out,” Pina said, “then I think we’re very close to a situation where we can be in an indictment stage. People have said some things to us that I hope are true. If they (aren’t true), we’re back to the grinder.
“We’ve gotten some very good information, if it’s for real,” he continued. “I’m encouraged by that, more so than I have been in the past.” Did Pina still want to talk to Kenny Ponte? “Absolutely, at some point in life.”
Later, Pina looked back on the videotape episode as one of the worst moments of the whole experience.
“It was all kinds of crazy,” he recalled. You’re dealing with people who dealt with the drug world, who dealt with the prostitution worlds, so you were into everything. I mean, the space cadets were here too, you might as well check that out.
“What got me going (on the videotape) is, they said, ‘If you go to the place right now, you’ll get it,’ so we went. I can’t believe it …”
But Pina wasn’t done with wild stories—not by a long shot.
38
“I Took Them”
By the end of June, the troubles between the district attorney and his state police contingent were worse than ever. The videotape fiasco had embarrassed everyone, especially when the woman who had supposedly stolen the tape swore she didn’t know what the first woman was talking about, and then told reporters that everyone knew the woman who had first told the story was a wild fabricator.
Pina’s frustration with the troopers had grown to nearly unmanageable proportions. The troopers still refused to work overtime without overtime pay, and that meant witnesses who could not be interviewed. Worse, Pina felt absolutely in the dark about what the troopers had so far discovered. His only source of information was the Tuesday “group therapy sessions”—the meetings that Pina thought were aimless and meandering. Suspects, victims, and witnesses would be discussed, and Pina would ask how someone knew something that had been asserted as a fact or a possibility.
“Someone would say,” he recalled, “‘Well, it’s in this report,’ and I’d say, ‘What report?’” The troopers’ reports were not routed to Pina, but to the state police bureaucracy in Boston.
They go to the colonel in Boston,” Pina said. “The sergeant gets a copy. But Colonel Wonderful, it’s directed to him from Trooper So-and-So. It goes into space. It’s beamed off to Boston somewhere … how the hell it gets there, don’t ask me. The sergeant gets a copy of it, okay, but I don’t get one, and somewhere, I guess, the sergeant’s got ’em in boxes. (But as for what’s) in Boston, I never see what’s up there. I would love to see where all those reports go, because I’m sure they don’t read them.”
Pina began asking to see all the reports.
“And I know they collect reams of data and they had, and probably still do, files and files of reports. I’d say they’re down there and they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, we got ’em in that drawer.’ What are they doing there—can I see them? ‘Oh, we haven’t had a chance to get to them.’ This is from the beginning of the investigation.”
In late June, Pina boiled over. “They’d had reams of interviews they had done. They’d forgotten all those interviews, right after the first one. They couldn’t remember if they’d met this woman, or that.
“They’d say, ‘I think we did an interview with that person.’ And they’d look at each other, and one would say, ‘Yeah, I think so.’ It was just two people talking to each other … and they had it all, it was right there in that filing cabinet. And I’d say, ‘Where do I find it, let me look, I wanna read it myself,’ I’m that way. And frankly, in all fairness to them, they didn’t know what was in those boxes and what was in those filing cabinets.”
So Pina took the files. “I physically went out and took them,” he said. He went down to the troopers’ floor in his office, picked up the file cabinets, and carried them out. The troopers were not happy.
As the summer of 1989 wore on, Pina decided it was absolutely critical to get control of the information that had been collected so far. He decided to computerize the files he’d take from the troopers. He turned to a Raynham police captain, Louie Pacheco, who was a computer buff, and also one of the prime movers in the Bristol County Drug Task Force. Pacheco looked around and found some text-based software that ran on a microcomputer. Now the problem was getting the information loaded into the computer.
As it happened, Pina’s office had a number of summer interns—law students, mostly, who worked for low wages to gain experience. Pina decided to put the interns to work on the murder case.
“I had these summer interns,” Pina said later, “and I said, ‘What are we doing for the summer? Instead of doing legal research, you’re going to be going into those files, you’re gonna read ’em, you’re gonna put ’em on that terminal.’ Louie (Pacheco) was helping them put them on the terminal.”
The troopers didn’t like this at all, according to Pina. They started chiding Pacheco and the interns for wasting time. Relations deteriorated even further. “And they were bullshitting,” Pina said. “They were bullshitting Louie, they were bullshitting the summer interns, because we violated their space. (But) what I wanted to do was get that information into a usable form. Now, if I have to ask questions, maybe there’s somebody’s name on there that might have the answer.”
But the computer, of course, was only as good as the information that was put into it. And in the end, the answers it gave were a product of the questions that were asked; no one has yet designed a computer that can think, a point that the troopers made among themselves.
SUMMER AND FALL 1989
“Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events, but …”
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
39
Positive Thoughts
As the summer following the murders wore on, the relations between Pina and the troopers grew even worse.
“At that time,” Pina said later, “there was some dissension going on in the office. And part of the dissension was that I had pretty much, more or less, taken it away from Jose (Gonsalves) and Mary Ann (Dill).
“They were burnt out, as far as I was concerned. I wasn’t getting information, I was asking for things to be done that weren’t getting done, I was not pleased with their production or their lack of production. And it was spinning my wheels. I felt like, ‘What are you doing?’ and I couldn’t get any answer.
“So there was a real gap there at that point. They weren’t exactly the people I was relying on. I was relying more on Lou Pacheco and the drug guys to get a fresh view of this thing.
“Not that I was replacing them, they were all coming in, but I wasn’t getting a fresh view, and so as this thing developed, as the information came in, Jose and Maryann had their noses really bent out of shape, and I could see them dragging their feet.
“When I’d ask them to just check on another witness, it didn’t happen. Or they couldn’t find her. And somebody would say, ‘Oh, I saw her last night.’ A local police officer would say, ‘She’s standing on a Weld Square street corner, (if) you go over there around two o’clock, you’ll see her.’
“(But) They couldn’t find her; it was that kind of foolishness that was going on. Why? They were resenting the other guys getting involved, I think.
“But in any case, I wasn’t getting cooperation at that point. I was getting foot-dragging. So I did shift over to St. Jean, and Paul Boudreau was seeing more of it than Jose and Maryann …” In fact, Gonsalves and Dill were returned to the office’s on-call board, which meant they would be assigned any new, unrelated cases for the first time in nearly a year.
But if Pina and the troopers were feuding, that didn’t stop
the stories from rolling out of the prisons and the House of Corrections. Late in June, a man who had known Neil Anderson contacted investigators and told them he’d once been riding around out on I-195 with Anderson, and Anderson had acted “odd.”
The informant, like many others who had contacted the investigators, had spent time in jail. He said sometime during the summer or fall of 1988, he’d ridden with Anderson out to a rest stop near the Sippican River on I-195 near Wareham, on the road to Cape Cod. At that point, Anderson had walked off into the nearby woods by himself for about 15 minutes.
Nothing was said, according to Anderson’s companion; but then Anderson had returned to the truck, left again by himself for five minutes, and came back once more. Anderson got back into his pickup truck—so did the companion—and together the pair drove south to Route 6, then east to the Weweantic River.
There Anderson once more got out of his truck and looked under the Route 6 bridge crossing the Weweantic River. Then, without a word from Anderson, both men left the area, according to the companion.
Because the Sippican River empties into the Weweantic, which forms the border between Marion and Wareham, some investigators speculated that this behavior showed Anderson first checking for a body in the Sippican near the rest stop, then, failing to find one, driving to the bridge over the Weweantic; the idea was that Anderson might have been checking to see if a body might have floated downstream.
As a result, on June 27, 1989, the troopers put four divers into the Weweantic near the Route 6 bridge. But nothing was found.
Later, Anderson learned of his former companion’s tale, and rejected it utterly.
Killing Season Page 19