Killing Season

by Carlton Smith

  Boudreau filled out a report, then went over to Ponte’s house to see for himself. But first he collected several witnesses from Pina’s office.

  “So we put the movie on and we’re all sitting there in anticipation of these gross scenes and he said, well, ‘What I have to do to get into the movie is, I have to put it into slow motion.’

  “He had a two-headed machine, so when you put it into slow motion, it sort of distorted the picture and as he did that … he actually sat there in front of the—he had a wide-screen TV—he sat there on the floor and looked at it and started describing things that he’d told me before about. ‘Look at the little babies, they’re getting chopped up,’ and we’re all sitting there looking at each other, going, you know, he’s lost it, the man’s absolutely lost it.”

  Neither Boudreau nor anyone else could see what Kenny was talking about. But Boudreau wanted to be sure. He took the videotape and ran it on his own machine in slow motion. “It took me hours and hours, just in case there was some kind of a glitch there or somebody maybe taped something into it and spliced it,” Boudreau said. “I didn’t know. So, I did, I looked it over.” He couldn’t find anything wrong with the tape. Eventually Boudreau decided Kenny had gone around the bend.

  In the next year or so, however, Boudreau recalled, he began to hear from informants—many of them prostitutes—that Kenny had fallen back into drug use. It wasn’t that Kenny was selling the stuff, at least as far as Boudreau knew; it was just that different street people kept contending that Kenny had hired them to buy drugs for him; or, in some stories, Kenny had traded legal services for drugs. Boudreau filed these stories away at the time, since even if they were true, they only seemed to involve small amounts of drugs.

  At one point, however, Boudreau arrested a man who lived across the street from Kenny, and that man led Boudreau to a major cocaine ring involving a man from Brownsville, Texas. There was no evidence that Kenny was at all involved with the Brownsville group, but Brownsville was a location well known as a major border crossing for drugs such as cocaine and marijuana; and in later years, Kenny would be connected to another man—Paul Ryley—who did spend time in Brownsville.

  In any event, it was sometime during the summer or fall of 1989 when the drug task force’s Pacheco asked Boudreau to take a look at Kenny Ponte’s possible involvement with drugs as part of the Highway Murder investigation.

  By the time Boudreau got involved, most of the police reports had been loaded into Pacheco’s computer system. Boudreau started playing with the data, and was immediately struck by how many of the reports mentioned drugs, Ponte, the victims, and Ryley, he said later.

  “The thing with Kenny Ponte’s really deep,” Boudreau said years later, “because there’s so many players involved, so many people from the New Bedford area in this drug world and prostitution and so forth, prostitutes, you know … a lot of these prostitutes were informants of mine, see? And I had a good rapport with them.” By the fall of 1989, Boudreau had assembled the stories of a variety of people who claimed they had sold drugs to Kenny, or who claimed they had injected him with cocaine. But Boudreau wasn’t satisfied; he was particularly puzzled by the relationship between Kenny and Ryley.

  In retrospect, what is almost equally as striking as the frequency of Ponte’s name popping up on Pacheco’s computer is the parallels between the lives of Boudreau’s suspects—Ponte and Ryley—and Boudreau’s own background.

  For one thing, in addition to growing up with Kenny, Boudreau was also a longtime friend of Ryley. Ponte was said to have contact with women in Weld Square; so did Boudreau, who frequently used them as informants. In fact, Boudreau later claimed that he’d also used Ryley as an informant. Ponte and Ryley were said to like to rent videos; Boudreau owned a video store. Ponte and Ryley moved to Port Richey, Florida; the adjacent city of New Port Richey was the home of Boudreau’s father, and Boudreau often went there. Ponte, at least, was said to be involved with drugs; Boudreau was a narcotics detective. And, Boudreau later contended, Ryley had once offered him a $100,000-a-year job as a private detective—during the summer of 1988, when the murders were going on.

  Thus, it seems entirely possible that, in his suspicions, Boudreau focused only on the issues that were most familiar to him, in an effort to make the facts of the murders fit circumstances he himself knew the most about. In turn, there might have been facts or circumstances about the murders that Boudreau unconsciously discounted because of his belief in his own theory.

  Whatever his predilections, as Boudreau began assembling the information on Kenny and began to unearth the name of Ryley over and over again, he became curious about his old friend, Paul Ryley.

  “Again, there’s a guy that I’d known very very well for many many years and their names kept coming up together,” Boudreau said later, “and it just didn’t seem right that these guys would be together. Because Kenny Ponte was just a strange character allegedly using drugs, hanging around with known prostitutes.

  “Paul Ryley actually was a friend of mine at the time … he was a businessman, a family man, now all of a sudden he’s involved with Ponte. And he’s not only involved with him—I find out he’s living with him in Port Richey in Florida, and he’s getting himself involved (with) all these people. So that got me even more interested, and I started working diligently on that whole thing because of Paul Ryley.”

  42

  “She Did Die”

  Ryley was a curious figure—just the sort of person someone like Diane Doherty might have fantasized about. Handsome—blond, in fact—well-dressed, polite, seemingly suave, Ryley also seemed to be rich. He’d been a former prison guard, but had left that work in the early 1980s; he’d left his job when he’d begun to take care of his great aunt, Margaret Sundelin, in the middle of 1984, and had obtained her power of attorney, with its access to Mrs. Sundelin’s $620,000. By early 1985, Ryley was involved with Ponte in the videotaping of Mrs. Sundelin’s last will—the one that was disputed by Ryley’s cousins.

  “So it was an incredible entanglement of all these people,” Boudreau recalled, “and then Paul Ryley steps in. Paul Ryley, again, I’ve known him for 20 years. My parents lived right across the street from him in New Bedford. His kids played Little League baseball with mine, we were very good friends. I knew his wife very well, I’d been to his home.

  “But I didn’t see him for about three or four years, he just sort of disappeared. All of a sudden he came up to my video store one day with a Lamborghini, money, diamonds, gold. I said, ‘What’re you doing?’ He said, ‘Oh well, I just bought a string of theaters last week, I just invested in a gold company in Acapulco.’ It just didn’t make sense to me. He said, ‘Well, I inherited some money.’ I still didn’t think much of it. A few months later he comes back again to see me, he offered me a job as a private investigator, with an incredible salary and benefits and so forth.”

  All of this made him suspicious of Ryley, Boudreau later said. He began poking around in Ryley’s affairs, and learned that Ryley traveled frequently to Puerto Rico, the Cayman Islands, Texas, Florida, Mexico—all sorts of exotic places. And when Boudreau tried to confirm all of these supposed investments, none of them turned out to be real, according to Boudreau.

  “Now I’m starting to get a little suspicious of the whole thing, so I start doing a background on him and I find out that a lot of the things that he’s told me and told other people were not legitimate, they were not, they were not even real, they were just figments of his imagination, I suspect. Although he was at the time spending tremendous amounts of money—where he was getting it, I don’t know. He was traveling constantly to Puerto Rico, up and down the East Coast, he was in New Bedford a lot, he was on the West Coast, he was in Mexico a lot, and I find out he’s with Kenny Ponte. And I couldn’t figure out why.”

  What Boudreau didn’t know about Ryley was something Ponte did know, or at least believed: that Ryley was involved with selling guns abroad.

  As his interest
in Ryley deepened, Boudreau decided he needed some local eyes and ears in Florida to keep tabs on the comings and goings of Ponte and Ryley. He made an arrangement with a local police officer in Port Richey to keep both men under a covert watch. Pulling some other strings, Boudreau was able to get copies of Ponte’s telephone bills, and business papers that seemed to connect Ponte to Ryley. Soon he learned from the Port Richey police that Ryley had a house in Spring Hill, Florida, but that he often stayed for days at a time at Ponte’s house in Port Richey.

  Boudreau also learned that some of Ryley’s relatives were unhappy with the way he’d handled a family trust in Massachusetts, and that a lawsuit had been filed accusing Ryley of fraud.

  As a result, in December 1989, as Boudreau was trying to sort through all his suspicions about Ponte and Ryley, a request was made to the Port Richey police to arrest Ryley and hold him for extradition to Massachusetts on criminal charges of theft and forgery.

  From the Pasco County Jail in Florida, Ryley called Boudreau to ask him why he’d been arrested. Boudreau told Ryley he didn’t know anything about the charges, but two days after Christmas in 1989, Boudreau and the Saint flew to Florida to interview Ryley about Ponte.

  At first, according to Boudreau, Ryley denied having contact with Kenny, but then Boudreau told him that the Port Richey police had seen him visit Ponte on numerous occasions. And Boudreau pointed out that Ryley’s Florida driver’s license had Ponte’s address on it. Why? Ryley told Boudreau he was “hiding out,” Boudreau said later.

  Why was he giving money to Kenny? Well, said Ryley, Kenny didn’t have any money. In fact, Ryley suggested that a friend of his, Elsa Johnson, move into the other side of the duplex to help Kenny pay the bills. Elsa did move there, and Ryley sometimes visited her. Boudreau knew that Elsa, also from New Bedford, was a drug addict and a severe alcoholic.

  Had Ryley ever seen Kenny use drugs? Never, he said. What about watching pornographic movies? Never, Ryley repeated. He didn’t remember watching a movie at Ponte’s house with a woman named Jeanne? No.

  “Well,” persisted Boudreau, “do you remember watching a movie with Jeanne with Kenny Ponte? Jeanne was sitting next to you watching an adult movie of a woman being raped by several men and then strangled to death?”

  Ryley got mad, but Boudreau continued. “Do you remember her asking you whether the woman did die in the film, and you answered, ‘Yes, she did die on the film. These movies cost a lot of money.’ You said, ‘You can get $100,000 for these movies. We use women who are homeless or terminally ill, and they get killed on the film. We get big bucks for it.’”

  That was ridiculous, Ryley retorted. Where was Boudreau getting all this?

  The answer, of course, was: from Jeanne Kaloshis.

  43

  Making It Run

  At first, earlier in the fall, as they had begun their work with the computer, Boudreau and Pacheco weren’t exactly sure what sort of case theory they were going to come up with. They had begun with a drug conspiracy involving Kenny Ponte and several of the victims, namely, Rochelle Clifford, Nancy Paiva, and perhaps several others. They were sure they could show that Kenny had been consuming cocaine.

  But the idea of Kenny killing all of the women over an extended period—six months—seemed to rule out the notion that Kenny had killed the women to silence them about his supposed drug use. Clearly, there were other women who had the same knowledge who weren’t dead, so Boudreau and Pacheco scratched their heads and thought some more.

  Maybe, Boudreau told Pacheco, it had to do with Ryley. Why was Ryley hanging around with Ponte, anyway? Hadn’t Kenny helped Ryley with the will involving Ryley’s aged aunt, who had then so conveniently died and left Ryley with all the money? How’s this: Ryley wanted the aunt’s money, so he hired Kenny Ponte as the lawyer to make the will; Kenny performed some legal sleight of hand to make sure Ryley got the dough, then together, Ryley and Kenny conspired to do in the old lady with poison. Boudreau liked that one; he’d discovered that Ryley’s friend Elsa Johnson had worked as a maid for the aged aunt shortly before the untimely death. But how did it relate to the Highway Murders?

  Well, okay, said Boudreau, let’s try this: suppose, after the aunt died and Ryley collected the money and gave a share to Kenny, the lawyer, in one of his cocaine-induced frenzies, had inadvertently told Rochelle Clifford about the poisoning of the aunt. Then, when Rochelle tried to blackmail Kenny, Kenny had had to kill her.

  Okay, but that didn’t explain why all of the other women were also dead. Did that mean the babbling Kenny had told ten other women the same thing he told Rochelle? And even if that were true—and the victims died because they knew the Secret of the Will—why did it take Kenny so long to kill all of them? Wouldn’t they have told someone else, if only to protect themselves? As each victim disappeared, wouldn’t the remaining women have grown suspicious?

  Well, maybe Kenny only killed Rochelle, then. But what about the trace evidence that seemed to link Rochelle’s site to several of the other victims?

  It was all a tangle. Try as they might to find some way to link all the information together, loose ends kept popping out. Every time a new explanation came forward, more inconvenient facts emerged to make it break down. It was like trying to tune a balky engine; it would turn over a few times, but then sputter to a stop. Boudreau and Pacheco decided they’d left some parts out.

  Back to the computer. What else tied all of these people together? How about videos?

  Well, yes: Ponte was a videophile, everyone knew that. Hadn’t Kenny once called Boudreau himself to complain about the movies with all the mutilations that never were? Ryley liked video movies, too, Boudreau noted: in fact, he’d rented them to Ryley himself from his own video store, and the records showed Ryley was a consumer of X-rated videos.

  What else was there about videos? Well, hadn’t Nancy Paiva, who knew Kenny Ponte and who had actually once worked in his office, hadn’t she also worked in a video rental store? The computer said she had.

  And what about Elsa Johnson? Hadn’t she once lived with Paul Ryley at a Dartmouth address that was only a short skip-and-a-jump away from a video production company that police believed produced pornographic videos? Right, said the computer.

  And hadn’t Ponte and Ryley videotaped the will of Ryley’s great aunt, Mrs. Sundelin—the one who’d died and left all the money? Right again, the computer answered.

  And hadn’t several women from Weld Square said that Kenny liked to pick them up and watch dirty movies? You are so smart, said the computer, and Boudreau and Pacheco decided they might get their engine to run, after all. What they still needed, however, was better fuel—like evidence.

  That was where Jeanne Kaloshis came in.

  WINTER 1989–1990

  “All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.”

  —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  44

  Screen Test

  While Pina wasn’t entirely sure he agreed with the ideas of his task force investigators, at least they were giving him something to work with. Best of all, he thought, Boudreau and Pacheco were aggressive, not like the troopers. And Pina believed that he had the appropriate tool to open the can of worms: the grand jury. Just as with Big Dan’s, Pina would get all the players under the strobe lights and find out, once and for all, what was going on.

  In early January 1990, Pina announced that the special grand jury investigating the murders would reconvene. Subpoenas were issued, and on January 25, 1990, the hunt for the Highway Murderer resumed. The first witness was Boudreau himself.

  Answering questions, Boudreau sketched in most of his work for the past few months: his interest in Ryley, his prior experiences with Kenny Ponte, the connections between Ponte and Ryley, Ryley’s interest in
guns, the alleged New Bedford pornography business, the fact that Ryley lived not far from that business, and the incident in which a woman named Jeanne claimed that she had once seen a possible “snuff” video with Ryley and Ponte, and Ryley’s reaction to this allegation.

  But the jury wouldn’t have to take Boudreau’s word for it, because Jeanne herself was now about to testify.

  Essentially, Jeanne told the grand jury, Kenny was one strange person. And it was through her that Kenny had first come to know Rochelle Clifford, who was, as Jeanne put it, her getting-high partner.

  She’d met Kenny for the first time in April 1988, Jeanne said, when she had been visiting her husband at the House of Corrections. Kenny had seen her arrange to smuggle drugs to her jailed husband. He threatened to expose her if she didn’t cooperate with him, Jeanne contended.

  “He asked me if I wanted to get high,” she said. “I told him I did. He said he wanted to do some coke. I told him I didn’t want to do coke, that I wanted to do heroin. And he said, ‘I’ll buy you heroin.’ And we went to his house.”

  At that point, Pina attempted to pin Jeanne down as to the time frame of this supposed first encounter with Ponte.

  “Okay,” said Pina. “Let me get a time on this. When was your husband in jail?”

  “He was in jail in April.”

  “Of ’88?”

  “Of ’88.”

  “So would that be around the time you met Ponte?”

  “Right.”

  “So after that, you’re going to—Rochelle gets to meet Ponte, right?”

  Right, said Jeanne. “Must have been around the end of April when Rochelle met him. Maybe the beginning of May.”

  While Pina then complimented Jeanne on the quality of her memory, this exchange has to stand as possible evidence that Jeanne was fabricating her story. After all, the police knew for sure that Rochelle had been seen with Kenny on April 3, 1988—apparently weeks before Jeanne supposedly introduced them. Jeanne could not therefore have been right about introducing Rochelle to Kenny, if indeed it took place in late April or May.