It took some hours to get a story from Diane, but by that night, Sager felt he had enough evidence to charge Kenny with four felonies: aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
According to Sager, Diane told him she’d gotten the bruises when Kenny had choked her almost to unconsciousness during an argument over whether Diane could return to Massachusetts. After releasing her, Diane told Sager, Kenny had produced a gun and pointed it at Diane’s head while threatening to kill her if she returned to Massachusetts without him. Kenny then refused to let her leave the duplex, Diane said, and said if she went back to Massachusetts by herself, Kenny would have her daughter killed. Diane signed a statement for Sager which also contended that Kenny had raped her with a metal object that caused her to bleed. The language of the statement indicates that Sager wrote the words, not Diane:
“On the night of June 4, 1990,” the statement read, “I slept with Mr. Ponte. During the act of intercourse, I was violated by means of an object thrust repeatedly three times into my organs. After bleeding profusely, Mr. Ponte released me from his grip.”
The statement continued: “On Saturday afternoon, June 9, 1990, after a long conversation with Mr. Ponte about girls in New Bedford, he appeared to be caressing my neck and then just stopped, but his hand stayed on my neck. His fingers and thumbs began pressing so deep in my neck that I felt like I was going to suffocate, I couldn’t breathe or swallow. I thought I would never see my poor daughter again.”
Around 11 P.M. on June 12, Sager rearrested the already-jailed Kenny on the new felony charges. The next day, after a search of Kenny’s house yielded two bedsheets with blood on them and Kenny’s .38 caliber pistol, he notified the authorities in Massachusetts that he had Kenny in the cooler under arrest for choking and assaulting a woman.
That was exactly what Pina wanted to hear. It was the second piece of good news for Pina. Earlier the same day, a Massachusetts judge ordered the hair and saliva samples taken from Ponte in early 1989 to be turned over to the district attorney’s office. Pina’s enthusiasm was contagious.
“I feel we are very, very, very close,” he told the Standard-Times’s Boyle. “I think I have a good feeling in my heart that I know who did it.” The context made it very clear that Pina believed Ponte was guilty of the murders.
Over the next two days, lawyers in Pina’s office put together two affidavits for the Florida courts. One affidavit recounted the allegations made against Kenny in the grand jury—the assertions that seemingly tied him to the murders. Pina wanted the judge in Florida to authorize a search of Kenny’s house in the hope that evidence (such as a snuff film) could be found. The other document was an affidavit supporting a motion to raise Kenny’s bail from $5,000 to $205,000. Pina also arranged for State Trooper Ken Martin, the forensic expert, to go to Florida for the new search.
Meanwhile, Diane was being questioned by a Florida prosecutor about the statements she’d made to Sager. Under oath, Diane reiterated her claims, and expanded on them—even going so far as to say that Kenny had confessed to her that he and others had killed the Massachusetts victims in some sort of satanic ritual! By now, Pina was ecstatic.
But on the following day, June 14, 1990, Kenny appeared in a Florida courtroom, and at that point Diane also appeared, saying Kenny hadn’t choked her at all, or anything else that she’d told Sager he’d done; she’d only told Sager those things because Sager had been withholding her medicine, she said, and because Sager had promised her she could go back to Massachusetts immediately if she cooperated with the police.
Here was a monkey wrench of the first order: the victim/witness was recanting the whole story. The judge ordered an investigation into Diane’s claims, but he refused to release Kenny. The whole situation seemed to be spiraling out of control; all of these people from Massachusetts, all these allegations and recantations. Nobody wanted to make any mistakes, however, and it was decided that the best strategy was to hold everything in place until it could get sorted out.
The next day, June 15, Kenny was brought back to court again. He was expecting to be released because of Diane’s recantation. Instead, he was served with the motion raising his bail to $205,000. Pina’s affidavit linking him to the Massachusetts murders had arrived. Kenny was dumbfounded.
“Your Honor,” Kenny said, “I find this incredible. The young lady (Diane), the victim stood before you and the state attorney and told the state attorney that the police coerced her for six hours to sign that statement.
“For the life of me, I can’t understand why there should be any bond when that occurred.” Under the circumstances, Kenny said, he should be released without any bail at all.
But the judge wouldn’t allow it. Based on the statements in the affidavit, he said—but Kenny interrupted him.
“Your Honor, there have been five people besides me who have been dragged through the mud concerning this matter. Your Honor, the facts of this case are, three of my former clients were unfortunately the victims, and the police questioned me on that and I fully cooperated with them.”
The judge shrugged. Obviously, the Massachusetts authorities wanted more cooperation, or they wouldn’t have supported the motion to raise Kenny’s bail.
Kenny went back to jail and called an experienced Florida defense attorney, J. Larry Hart. He also telephoned reporters in Massachusetts and accused Pina of twisting the arms of the Florida police in order to look good for the voters back home.
That afternoon, Diane was grilled anew by the Florida prosecutors about her recantation. In the new questioning, the first thing Diane wanted to know about was perjury.
After a prosecutor explained what perjury was, Diane said she’d kept telling Sager she wanted a lawyer.
“And they kept telling me,” she said, “(that) I don’t need a lawyer.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, I have not committed perjury. I’m a narcoleptic, I drift in and drift out. I can be conscious and then not be conscious for a little while if I get high anxiety.
“I spent that whole day at that police station when I got arrested,” she added. “I spent the whole day crying, I throw up blood in the afternoon. It was like an hour, I don’t remember what happened. I can remember drifting back in and being in the police car …
“So if I did any kind of swearing or anything like that I don’t think I should get in trouble for it.” In effect, Diane was admitting she was an unreliable witness because of her medical condition, liable to say just about anything, and that she shouldn’t be blamed for it.
The prosecutors then showed Diane the two-page statement she’d signed. Diane admitted that she’d signed the statement, but said she didn’t remember telling Sager any of the things in the statement. Not only that, Diane added, but the statement simply wasn’t true—that none of the things had really happened. Kenny had never raped her with a metal object, Diane said.
They’d only had sex once, she said, and then her menstrual period came, which was how blood got on the sheets. Kenny had never choked her, she said, never threatened her with a gun, never held her against her will. He’d never said a word about her daughter, Diane said.
“The guy was nothing but a gentleman when I was at his house,” she said. “He didn’t do anything violent to me.”
Well, where did the bruises on Diane’s neck come from?
“I know where these bruises came from on my throat: the first night I made love with Mr. Ponte. I bruise real, real easy.” The bruises came during a bout of passion, she indicated. “If you look at them real close, you can see,” Diane added.
That same afternoon, June 15, 1990, Kenny’s lawyer J. Larry Hart attempted to have Kenny’s bail reduced, but failed. Hart then went to see Diane in jail. He interviewed her on a bench in a corridor, and Diane for the third time said she’d never said any of the things Sager claimed she’d said. She again accused Sager of coercing her.
After Hart left the jail, he learned
that the court had nevertheless granted a new warrant to search Kenny’s house, as Pina had asked. He drove over to the house that evening with his two young daughters, thinking he’d see what was going on, and also pick up a copy of the search warrant and its supporting affidavit, the paperwork provided by Pina’s office. When Hart arrived at Kenny’s house he was astounded to see it ringed with yellow crime-scene tape; all the television stations for miles around had set up cameras in Kenny’s backyard!
Hart stepped over the yellow tape and started toward the house, only to be confronted by Sergeant Sager. This is a crime scene, Sager warned, threatening to arrest Hart (a former prosecutor) for interfering with the search. Hart was taken aback, and then started laughing. Everyone seemed so uptight and self-important, he thought. Did they think he was going to go into the house and find the key piece of evidence with everyone looking at him, and then spirit it away? He stepped back over the tape and told Sager he only wanted to pick up the search warrant. Couldn’t he go into the house and pick it up?
No, Sager said. Sager went back inside the house. Hart waited outside as the evening wore on. Finally, after about two hours, Sager came back with the warrant. But the supporting affidavit—the document that contained all the real meat of the allegations against Kenny—wasn’t provided. Sager told Hart he couldn’t have that—it was being put under court seal at Pina’s request.
Although Ponte and his lawyer had an absolute legal right to see the paperwork that authorized the search, this maneuvering prevented it. That meant Hart couldn’t begin to figure out a way of getting Kenny out of jail, which was exactly what Pina wanted. But sealing the affidavit also prevented anyone from challenging the factuality of its contents. In effect, Pina was manipulating the Florida authorities to avoid any outside scrutiny of the viability of his theories about Kenny Ponte.
Later that night, officers from the Port Richey Police Department and Massachusetts trooper Ken Martin listed everything they had seized from Kenny Ponte’s house. The big item was videotapes—66 of them, in fact. Almost all of them appeared to be home recordings. Someone would have to sit down and watch them all to see if any one of them contained evidence of the murders. Other items taken included numerous articles of women’s attire, some snapshots of women in lingerie, two short lengths of rope, some jewelry, and two identification cards belonging to women—neither of them victims of the Highway Murderer. The house, according to Hart, was a complete mess.
Kenny meanwhile called all the newspapers in Massachusetts and fired off a new barrage at Pina.
“I wish to publicly inform Mr. Pina that there is no way he is ever going to frame me for the highway killings so he can win his upcoming reelection campaign,” Ponte told the Standard-Times. “It is clear to me that Mr. Pina will stop at nothing to try to win his upcoming reelection. It is my belief that the reason they coerced Ms. Doherty to sign false statements against me was to satisfy the overwhelming desires of the incompetent Bristol County District Attorney Ronald Pina to have the police search my Florida home, which they did.”
By Sunday, Diane was still in jail, and yearning to go home. She talked to her brother in Massachusetts. Then she called Sager and told him that when she’d recanted her allegations against Kenny, she’d lied. She did it to protect her daughter from Kenny’s powerful friends in Massachusetts, Diane told the Port Richey sergeant. But now her daughter was safe, having been spirited out of the country by her family, so she felt free to tell the truth, and the truth was, Kenny really had choked her.
The next day, Diane again testified under oath, reiterating that she’d lied about her recantation—and to Hart, Ponte’s lawyer—because she feared for her daughter’s safety. The effect of this was to make Hart into a witness for Ponte, which prevented him from being Ponte’s lawyer. Hart was exasperated with the flip-flopping Diane. Diane wanted to know if anyone was going to find out about her latest version of the events.
“Let me say this,” Hart told her. “I cannot assure you that others won’t learn of this statement. I can’t offer that assurance to you.”
“Mr. Hart,” Diane said, “he told me about all those dead girls. I think I have good reason to be nervous about my daughter.” Here was sworn testimony from Diane suggesting that Kenny Ponte had confessed to her—just exactly as had supposedly happened the year before at Leslie Mello’s kitchen table!
51
Neighbors
On Tuesday, June 26, 1990, Diane Doherty finally got her wish and was allowed to return to Massachusetts. Troopers Gonsalves and Dill went to Florida to pick her up. On the way back on the plane, Diane told them what happened to her in Florida. Apparently, Diane forgot all about the satanic ritual killings that Kenny supposedly had confessed to. Soon Diane was back in Framingham because of her parole violation.
Kenny remained in jail in Florida, but he was hardly keeping quiet. On the day Diane went back to the slammer, Ponte gave a political endorsement of Paul Walsh for district attorney. It was probably the first time in history that a jailed serial murder suspect had ever made a political endorsement.
Walsh laughed, but knew he had to be careful. The last thing he wanted to do was be seen as believing Kenny Ponte. Who knew what might happen? What if Kenny was the killer? “I don’t think this is out of any love for Paul Walsh,” he said. “I think it’s probably his distaste for the treatment he’s received from Ron Pina.”
Then, at the end of the week, Diane’s sworn statement in Florida that Ponte had “told me about all those dead girls” was leaked to The Boston Globe. That made Ponte look guilty, especially when Diane’s earlier sworn statement—that Ponte had treated her like a gentleman throughout—wasn’t leaked.
But if Pina and the press in Massachusetts were growing more excited about the prospect of a solution to the Highway Murders, the authorities in Florida were beginning to believe that they’d been had by their Yankee counterparts.
The problem was Diane. All of her waffling around on the facts had destroyed her credibility as a witness. And a hard look at the affidavits linking Kenny to the Massachusetts murders showed that the most damaging information was hearsay, and most of that from police officers like Boudreau—who might have every interest in doing Pina’s bidding. And wasn’t Pina running for reelection? The whole situation was beginning to smell, the authorities in Florida told each other.
On July 13, Kenny was finally released from jail. “Justice has prevailed, gentlemen,” Kenny said, as he was released without bail. “For two years, I’ve been dragged through the mud and called everything from a murderer to a sex pervert, with no charges.” Now, said Kenny, he intended to write a book about the whole nightmare. He intended to call it Presumed Guilty, he said, taking off from Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent.
But on that same day, Pina’s spokesman Jim Martin announced that police protection for Pina would be beefed up. The reason: one of the earlier witnesses before the grand jury, Elsa Johnson—Ponte and Ryley’s former housemate—had told the jury that while in Florida Ponte had threatened to come back to New Bedford and shoot Pina, his wife Sheila, and Pina’s teenaged daughter. Now that Ponte was out, Martin said, the talk seemed a lot more threatening.
This was serious, Martin added; and it was particularly serious because Pina had just learned, for the first time, that Ponte’s sister and mother were living in a house right next door to the district attorney.
In retrospect it seems almost unbelievable that Ron Pina could have lived next door to Kenny Ponte’s family for as long as he did without being aware of it. Pina later thought that Kenny’s sister and mother had moved into the neighborhood after he did, but before the murders or the investigation began. Reddington, however, said he found evidence that the Ponte family had been living in the house for six years, before Pina had moved in. Actually, Ponte’s sister and her husband bought the house in May 1989, not realizing that their next-door neighbor was the man investigating her brother.
In any event, in the years prior to the
shocking discovery that he was the neighbor of his prime suspect’s family, Pina once visited them without realizing who they were. Ponte’s mother and sister gave him the cold shoulder, Jim Martin related, but Pina had simply shrugged it off without realizing that his neighbors were in fact the closest relatives of the man he’d been pursuing as a possible serial murderer for nearly 18 months.
Nevertheless, the day after Kenny’s release in Florida, Pina’s office went to court and obtained an added condition to Ponte’s release on the assault and drug charges that had been filed earlier. The new condition barred Ponte from coming within 1,000 feet of Pina’s house, and it had the practical effect of preventing Ponte from visiting his mother.
In Port Richey, Ponte erupted once more. “I will never, ever be kept away from my family because of this crazy person who masquerades as a responsible public official, he told reporters. Then he issued a challenge to the district attorney. “Mr. Pina, if you believe that I threatened your life, indict me and I’ll go to court anytime I am summoned. Otherwise, why don’t you just shut your mouth and leave me alone once and for all?”
Pina’s resort to the courts to keep Ponte away predictably brought the criticism of Walsh, who called Pina’s action an abuse of his office, and said that it looked like Pina was grandstanding again. “It makes me wonder about the legitimacy of the threat complaints,” Walsh said, noting that the alleged threats had been made months earlier, if at all.
“Mr. Ponte was fifteen hundred miles away,” Walsh told Boyle from the Standard-Times. “The alleged threat was made back in April (actually before that). It was not communicated to Mr. Pina but said to some young lady (Elsa) who later told him about it. It was made back in April and Pina becomes afraid now? That strikes me as odd.”
Jim Martin immediately counterattacked on Pina’s behalf. “Shame on him if he thinks a death threat on a 16-year-old is political,” Martin said. Pina was really worried, Martin added. “They basically became prisoners in their own home.” Ironically, Walsh had represented Elsa on bad check and drug charges in 1988 and 1989. The challenger certainly knew something about Elsa’s reputation for veracity.
Killing Season Page 25