“And, these people had heard tons of information, a great deal of things about a lot of people, and they took notes and were very studious, they pretty much were ready to inquire. They cross-examined. I mean, they literally cross-examined the witnesses.”
Pina took Diane back over her story, probing for discrepancies. There were, in fact, a number of discrepancies. But Diane resolutely hung on to her assertion that Kenny had confessed to killing Rochelle Clifford, and that Kenny had told her the other victims had all been killed in connection with their roles in some sort of video.
“So,” said Pina, “when did this so-called conversation between you and Mr. Ponte take place? How can you remember that?”
“Which conversation?”
“Well, you just said about all these murders. When did you hear that from Mr. Ponte?”
“The night before I left when he showed me, I told you, the movie I talked about.” Diane was saying Kenny had actually shown her the fabled video. Previously she had only said that Kenny claimed it existed.
After more questions about the gun Rochelle had supposedly taken from Kenny, Pina returned to the subject of Rochelle herself.
“Did he say why Rochelle died? Did he tell you why?”
“Something to do with testifying against him, first of all.”
“That she was going to testify against him?”
Diane agreed.
“Did he say anything else? Was there any other reason?”
“By this time, she was starting to try and blackmail him about these—this movie. All those girls, I guess, were talking too much before when they shouldn’t have been. And they all owed money for drugs, too. Like he did.”
“What about Rochelle? Let’s stay with Rochelle.”
“I don’t think—I’m not real, real sure about if Rochelle was in the movie or not. But he offed her, as he said.”
“He what? Offed her? Is that what you said?”
“Yeah. I think it means murder. Kill. Whatever. And so, because she was starting to blackmail him about that movie. And to who—I don’t know who she was blackmailing him to or whatever. But once, you know, he gave into her once, like that, he would have continued blackmailing her, I guess. Plus, I think he loved her, too, of what love is to him. You know.”
No, the jury didn’t know, Pina persisted. Finally, one juror became exasperated. He or she wanted to know about the video, no more fooling around.
“Would you describe for us again, please, in details the film you had earlier told us Kenny—Mr. Ponte required you to view when you were with him in Florida, in which the murder of these women or some of them was depicted. Would you describe that again from the very beginning and tell us as much about it as you recall?”
That was putting it in plain terms.
But Diane balked.
“Mr. Pina,” she said, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to go through that again.” She’d been sick, Diane said. Couldn’t the jurors just look through their notes? “I’m sorry.”
Diane said she’d been harassed at Framingham; half the women there thought she’d refused to testify against Kenny in Florida and hated her for that, whereas the other half thought she had testified against Kenny, and considered her a snitch.
“Ms. Doherty,” said Pina, “let me tell you something.”
“What?”
“I think most people are having a tough time believing you.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
No, said Diane. Even her own family was having a hard time believing her.
But the jurors weren’t going to let go of the videotape issue.
“Ms. Doherty,” said a juror, “let me ask you this.”
“What?”
“If this case goes to trial, you’re going to be asked to testify about that movie. Are you still going to (refuse) to testify about it?”
Diane said she thought she’d get better with the passage of time. “I spend a good deal like every day, like I cry for hours and hours. Not like I miss Kenny or anything. Just because of how bizarre this thing happening in my life (is) and happening in my daughter’s life.”
“Well,” said the jury foreman, “you made it happen.”
“I didn’t make it happen.”
“You certainly did,” the foreman shot back. “You went down to Florida.”
“I didn’t make him have anything to do with those girls.”
“But before you even went down to Florida, that’s where we find a huge credibility gap. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Honestly,” the foreman continued, “I think you’re a fruitloop. Your daughter told you not to go to Florida. Okay. There’s numerous articles pointing toward this man, Kenneth Ponte. Whether or not he is guilty remains to be seen. And why would you even jeopardize yourself and your daughter’s safety to do such a thing? Okay? Not because you felt sorry for him.”
“Well, I tell you what,” said Diane. “I don’t like being called names either. So I think you should refrain from calling me a fruitloop or anything else.”
“That’s my personal opinion.”
“Well, it’s very unprofessional, too.”
“I’m not a professional type person,” the foreman said.
Name-calling was something Pina wanted to avoid. He tried to steer the discussion back to more productive channels. “Why did you go down there?” he asked. “What did you really think?”
“I had to know for myself,” Diane said.
“Why?”
“Because I loved him.”
A juror was incredulous. “How did you love him? You had never met him.”
After another sharp exchange between Diane and the foreman, who as much as accused her of lying, another juror tried to edge back toward the videotape.
“I’d like to ask you, and I sympathize with what you’re going through, but it’s very important to this grand jury that we know what went on in that videotape. It’s very important because we are the ones who have to sit down in the end and make a decision. And we don’t want to make a wrong decision, and then have this certain person get acquitted. This is a serious charge. We do have to know what’s going on in that video. And I would appreciate it if you tell me what went on in that video and if you recognize any of those persons (the victims) in the video.”
“When I was here the last time,” Diane said, “Mr. Pina put the pictures on the table. And some of the girls looked like some of the girls that were in that movie. And I’m not going to go through the whole thing again today. If you want to do whatever you have to do to legally make me come back here … at least I’ll have enough time to get more control of myself inside.”
But some jurors were insistent.
“We have to know what went on in that video. I think it’s very important,” said one juror.
“Well,” Diane said, “you can reread the notes if you want.”
“We’ve heard it before,” a juror continued, “and we want to hear it again. We went through your past testimony already.”
“Excuse me?”
“We went through the past testimony about what you said about the video. Now we have more questions about it.”
“Does the video exist?” a second juror asked.
Diane nodded.
“Where is it?”
“It’s in Florida,” said Diane.
Now several jurors started talking at once. “It’s in Florida? Where? At his house? Outside?”
“Did he destroy it?”
“What did he do with it?”
“I don’t know what he did with it after I left,” said Diane.
“What’d he do with it while you were there at the house?” Pina asked.
“We watched it,” said Diane. “And then he went back outside, and I went in the bathroom.”
“Don’t you care about these families, all these little children that they’ve left behind?”
&nbs
p; Diane nodded.
“Why don’t you stop thinking about yourself for a minute?” a juror asked.
“Look,” said another, “instead of wasting everyone’s time, why don’t you tell us exactly what happened in that video one more time?”
“Because I’m not going to do it,” said Diane. “I can’t, I can’t handle it.”
“Because, just like you weren’t going to come home and leave Kenny Ponte,” a juror said, turning nasty.
“Just like I wasn’t—”
“You left your daughter home that you loved so much to go see this jerk in Florida who may be a murderer. Why didn’t he come to New Bedford to see you?”
She didn’t want Kenny in her house, Diane admitted. She thought he might get in trouble with the police.
“Diane,” said another juror, “you’ve got to realize that there are 11 women missing. Okay, and we’ve found 9 of them.”
“Yeah,” said Diane.
“All right,” the juror continued. “And there are nine parents out there suffering and wondering who killed these women. Why did their daughter have to die the way she did? And you have given us testimony, very crucial testimony, than any other witness that we’ve had in this courtroom in the past 20 months. Okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now, you gotta stop thinking about yourself. And you’ve got to think about the rest of the people. And we’ve got to know what the hell’s going on. And you know more than anybody else. And we want to know it. We want to know it because we gotta make a conviction here. And we don’t want to pick a wrong guy, and then send him to trial and then have him acquitted because we don’t have enough evidence. So you’ve got to stop thinking about yourself—”
“No,” said Diane. “I don’t. I don’t have to stop thinking about myself. I just arrived too. I need to be able to carry on in my life, too. Everything that’s going to be my future blew up in my face. It’s been a lot of pain and grief for me, too.”
“That’s your fault.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Because you’re the one who went down to Florida.”
“You’re the one who went down to Florida,” said another juror. “You’re the one who spent the time with the man. You’re the one who knows all the bullshit. All right. And we want to know it. And we don’t want to hear no more bullshit.”
The jury was getting hostile.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Diane said, “but I’m not going to go over the whole thing again.”
She would, she said, be willing to come back another time.
But the jury wasn’t receptive to that. Because, a little more than an hour later, the jury voted to indict Kenny Ponte on one count of first-degree murder.
56
Indicted
Just why the jury voted its indictment remains uncertain, known only to the jurors who were in the room. Certainly Pina hadn’t asked for the indictment. As he later recalled, he was as surprised as anyone when the jury voted its true bill.
That there was no definitive evidence to connect Kenny Ponte with any of the crimes seems clear. Even Pina later admitted the case had its problems.
“I’m not going to tell you it was the greatest case in the world,” he said later. “No one is gonna have the greatest case in the world when you’re dealing with people who are druggies, have bad memories, have been in jail, prostitutes … You’ve got to go through this stuff with a rake, and try to figure out what’s true and what’s not true. I think that we were doing that. And I think the grand jury … I’ve got to give those people a lot of credit, I really do.
“They weren’t cops, they weren’t lawyers, they were normal human beings, who heard all this stuff and they asked questions. They didn’t sit there. Nobody spoon fed them. And they didn’t come back with, let’s indict everybody in the world.
“So, was there a smoking gun? No. Was there a lot of information that, when finally viewed in perspective, let’s really analyze it and take it apart, I think that they reasonably, based on testimony that they heard and cross-examined, led to the conclusion that they felt would be sufficient information to bring someone to trial … that’s all an indictment is, not that he’s guilty, but bring him to trial for murdering one individual.
But there may have been some other factors involved.
Fatigue, for one. For nearly 18 months, the jury had been hearing testimony from a long string of witnesses, many of them from the lower depths. And much of the testimony was unpleasant—stories about drugs, beatings, rapings, skeletal remains, pornography, snuff films, in short, about the rottenest sort of human behavior. One has to wonder whether the normal human being’s mind involuntarily recoils and wishes to put an end to the strain.
And it was obvious that Pina and the others expected something. They’d brought in all of the testimony, gone to all the trouble to make a road map, and then had sat back, waiting. It was almost as if the district attorney were saying, See, it’s there, all you have to do is look for it. Why else would the district attorney have announced there would be no more testimony? Wasn’t that like saying the jury now had everything it needed?
And there might have been another factor: the Stockholm syndrome. Just like the hostages in the bank in a lengthy standoff, or the prisoners at Framingham, the jurors may have been captured psychologically by the district attorney’s sense of mission. That was evident in the intensity that greeted Diane Doherty, and was even articulated. “We want to know it,” one juror said, “because we gotta make a conviction here.”
Making a conviction, of course, was not the grand jury’s job. The grand jury was charged with getting the facts.
While the jury was deliberating, Kenny was on the air again, lashing out at Pina. He was a guest of WBSM’s Henry Carreiro.
“In the last two years, my life has been a living hell,” Kenny said. “To be called a murderer, or portrayed as a murderer by a district attorney is very powerful. It has bankrupted me; it has caused me the most severe emotional distress that any one human being could ever undergo. I’ve challenged anyone on the face of this planet to come forward and prove that Ken Ponte has ever committed a violent act in his entire life. And yet, no one can come forward with any proof of that.”
Kenny reminded the audience that he’d volunteered to testify before the jury, if only Pina would grant him limited immunity.
“Why don’t the families let me go to court and let the evidence come out, and let the chips fall where they may?” he asked. “I believe it is a totally unfair, selfish, and obscene political move by Ron Pina to use these families right now. I don’t believe the timing of this grand jury was accidental—30 days before the election. I walk down the street of my own hometown in Port Richey, Florida, and neighbors verbally shout, ‘There’s the Massachusetts murderer.’ Little children follow me with their bicycles, and ask me who I killed today. It’s been an indescribable affair.”
The jury’s vote came on a Friday afternoon. As noted, Pina was surprised. He immediately asked a judge to seal the indictment so he could notify the families of the victims. His office sent a fax to Reddington to inform him. Plans were made to arraign Kenny on Monday, when the indictment would be unsealed.
But keeping the contents of the indictment secret did little to stop any of the news media. By the following morning, the Standard-Times’s Boyle had the story in the paper: “Ponte Secretly Indicted in Highway Killings Case.” Boyle said it appeared the charges were connected with the death of Rochelle Clifford.
But even as the citizens of New Bedford were reading about the grand jury’s decision, Ponte was once more attacking Pina over the airwaves on Henry Carreiro’s radio show.
“I am truly innocent of these crazy allegations,” Ponte told Carreiro. “I have watched in horror while the newspapers have reported that I am the one in the sealed indictment. No one has told me officially that I have been indicted other than the media, or other than the fact that Ron Pina’s spokesperson has allegedly leaked this
to the media.
“I greatly sympathize with the families (of the victims). I feel sorry for them. But I want to tell the families that I have nothing to do with the deaths of their loved ones. I miss my father every day, Henry. My father passed away. I don’t blame the families for his death. Why are they blaming me for the deaths of their loved ones, unfairly?
“I believe it’s a totally unfair, selfish, and obscene political move by Ron Pina to use these families right now. I don’t believe that the timing of this grand jury was accidental—30 days before the election. Ron Pina needed to explain why he spent three million on this investigation … he needed a scapegoat, and he needed it fast.
“If that indictment has my name, which everyone in the state except me seems to be sure of, I will be found innocent,” Kenny said. “There is no question about it. I am not going to hide from anybody or anything.”
Now Carreiro played the tape of the conversation that Trooper Jose Gonsalves had with Ponte’s friend Norman McCarthy back in February of 1989—the discussion over whether Pina would give Ponte limited immunity to get his testimony about the murder victims. That was the tape in which Trooper Gonsalves acknowledged that Pina had discussed the immunity question. The effect of playing the tape was to make it seem as though Pina was a liar.
“Ron Pina will not cooperate in that regard,” Ponte said after the tape was played. “I, publicly, once again offer to cooperate. Ron Pina, I will cooperate with any tests that you want. I am in Massachusetts to clear my name, to end this nightmare once and for all. Ron Pina, I ask your cooperation. Allow me to go before that grand jury with the necessary immunity all but for the homicides. Allow the grand jury to hear me. What are you afraid of, Ron Pina? Are you afraid that, once the truth be known, that Ken Ponte has nothing to do with this, that the taxpayers will know, 30 days before the election, that you have wasted three million of their money; at least one million chasing an innocent man? That is my opinion.
“The final statement I have to make is, I would like Ron Pina to explain why he wouldn’t allow me to cooperate back in February, when Jose Gonsalves informed Norman McCarthy that I would be allowed to testify and tell everything I knew. Basically, which is nothing. I don’t know who this killer is. I would like to see this killer caught. I would pull the switch myself if this killer was caught. Certainly I wouldn’t protect the nutcase if I knew who did this. Certainly. However, I must also inform you that, if I did, which I don’t, I would give this information to the U.S. Attorney, because I don’t believe Ron Pina is competent to handle the information. I would provide it to the U.S. Attorney, if I knew, which I don’t.”
Killing Season Page 27