Troopers Jose Gonsalves, Kenneth Martin, and state police sgt. Natale Lapriore, all assigned to the district attorney’s office, were there pretty quickly to search the area for evidence as they waited for the medical examiner.
It all looked eerily familiar when Trooper William Delaney, the official on-call trooper from the district attorney’s office, pulled up and looked around.
Two women found dead in the brush off two highways in the same month, less than twenty minutes and thirteen miles apart. What were the odds they were related?
THE THREE KIDS were laughing in the back seat of the station wagon as the DeSantos family drove home from a day at a public pool in Fall River, about twenty minutes away from New Bedford. Even with the windows rolled down to fight the ninety-plus July temperatures, Judy DeSantos could smell pool chlorine and suntan lotion from damp swimsuits and towels. It was one of the hottest Julys she could remember, with temperatures hovering some days in the high nineties. There were days, as she walked to work at New Bedford City Hall, that it seemed higher. The heat was making her youngest three kids cranky. It wasn’t doing much for her mood either. And even though they lived in a port city, with a public beach, she wanted to get out of the city, and away from the worries about her missing sister, to cool off. The public pool in Fall River’s Kennedy Park was the perfect spot, she thought.5 So, early in the day, she had packed up the car, roused the kids out of bed, and handed her husband the keys to the family’s station wagon, telling him he was driving them to the pool.
It had been three weeks since her sister, Nancy Paiva, had disappeared, and she couldn’t shake off a feeling of dread. Her sister was devoted to her two daughters. Nancy wouldn’t just take off without them. And if she did have to go someplace, she would have taken pains to make sure the girls were taken care of. Nothing about Nancy’s disappearance made sense. But neither did Nancy’s taking up with Frankie Pina, Judy thought.
Squished in the back seat next to her children, Judy gazed out the window as they drove east along Interstate 195 around four o’clock heading back home to New Bedford.
She saw the medical examiner’s van and state police cruisers ahead on the opposite side of the road, parked on the grass. She felt a knot in her stomach.
“Pull over,” she yelled to her husband, Tony. “Pull over.”6
Her husband reflexively slowed down and glanced up at the rearview mirror at her, puzzled.
“Pull over. They are taking my sister out of the woods. That could be my sister,” she cried.
Tony shook his head and kept driving.
I’m losing it, Judy remembers thinking to herself that day as the family headed home. Of course, that’s not my sister.
TROOPER WILLIAM DELANEY was stymied. By the luck of the on-call shift—or was it the misfortune—he now had two, back-to-back tough cases: two bodies, both women, both found in the brush along a highway on their backs. Both were white, with brown hair, and both were five feet two inches tall. There were no obvious signs of a struggle at the scenes. What were the chances they were related? What were the chances they weren’t?
This last body, the one found on Interstate 195 in Dartmouth by motorcyclists on July 30, was “weathered,” meaning it had been exposed to the elements, and little more than a skeleton was left. He was told the woman was likely killed in the spring, before the warm weather struck.7 He checked missing-person reports for that time period, just as he had for the first body, with little luck. He now knew he needed more assistance. His state police colleagues would soon enlist the help of experts at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, which was working with the FBI, to conduct a microscopic examination of the bones. They would look for knife wounds, signs of bullet wounds, bone cracks—including slight breaks in the hyoid, the U-shaped neck bone that suggested strangulation—as well as anything that might help lead to an identification. The district attorney’s office had used one of the Smithsonian experts in previous cases to examine human remains; calling them for help this time wasn’t unusual for the prosecutor’s office.
This was a tough case in a tough and busy year for the state police in Bristol County, which included four cities and sixteen towns in the southern part of the state. There were fourteen homicides by early August of 1988, and nine of them had already been cleared with an arrest. One that was not cleared was the murder of a twenty-seven-year-old mother last seen at a New Bedford bar and who was later found dead on a beach in Dartmouth. Another was the shooting death of a man in New Bedford. A third was a Taunton man found dead in Fall River. There was a starting point to those cases and, hopefully, an end. Knowing the name of the victim was always the first step: How else can you learn where they had been, who they knew, what they did, who would want to kill them? Justice started with a name. With the bodies found on the highways, the trooper didn’t have that detail just yet. Based on the condition of the bodies, he suspected it could be a long time before he would.
William Delaney was an easygoing guy who worked hard but didn’t let the job frustrate him. He had been with the state police for six years already but was fairly new to the investigative unit, with just one year under his belt. He had handled a number of murders and other cases so far, but these two were the most difficult. He first needed to learn the identities of these two women so he could retrace their steps and have some hope of finding out who killed them. Two weeks after the second body was found, a front-page story ran in the New Bedford newspaper, the Standard-Times, on August 13, 1988, detailing the efforts to learn who the women were. He hoped someone who hadn’t yet filed a missing-person report would read the article. He hoped that person would call the police. He told the reporter what he had learned from the medical examiner’s office: one woman likely died just before cold weather set in, and the other woman likely died in the spring, before the warm weather. Weeks after that story ran, though, he still was no closer to knowing who the women were.8
ON A HUNCH, John Dextradeur flipped through the missing-person reports in the New Bedford police department record room and saw a pattern emerge. It was September, two months after Nancy Paiva went missing, and he could see there were now at least four women gone, all from similar backgrounds, all similar in height. He made a note of the other names: Mary Rose Santos, Sandra Botelho, and Dawn Mendes. Then he learned their stories.
MARY SANTOS hopped out of her husband’s car at the bus station, across the way from the Quarterdeck bar in New Bedford. It was a Friday night, disco night at the downtown lounge, and the place would be jammed once the sun set. Mary was a semi-regular at the Quarterdeck, but not so regular that the bartenders would remember what she drank. When she did go, it was on disco night where she would often stand near the railing close to the music or sit a table, talking with people. She loved to talk and she loved to dance, a barmaid said.9 On this Friday night, July 15, 1988, though, she told her husband, Donald, that she would walk from the downtown bus station to her friend’s apartment nearby. She would just be hanging out with the girls, she told him. It was only seven thirty and still light out as she stepped onto the sidewalk. She had change for the payphone for a ride back, and Donald returned home to wait for her call.
Donald and Mary had met while working at a fish-processing house in New Bedford nine years earlier. Three weeks after they met, they married, and now, in a few weeks on August 4, they were planning to renew their vows. The couple had two boys, ages five and seven, and seemed happy. Donald was a big guy—weighing in at well over 250—and Mary was what some called a little bit chubby with a round, angelic face. She was his world, his life, he would say. He adored her. “She was the only one who would give me a second look and liked me.”10
As his wife walked away from the car that night, Donald was already looking forward to when she would be back home.
Mary walked the few blocks to her girlfriend’s apartment where she did some cocaine with one of the two women there. It was dark out when she eventually left; no one remembers the exact time. One of t
he women at the apartment later told police she told them “she was going to work.”11 They knew what that meant. Her husband, several people later told police, had no clue Mary was making money on the street as a prostitute. It was quick, easy money, she once told one friend; it helped pay the bills. No one pressed her further. Mary was new to the work and the street. She was not a hardened or seasoned girl. One person called her naive and said she went with the guys others would ignore. She thought nearly everyone was nice and good.
At the Quarterdeck, things were hopping. It was wall-to-wall people, so many that it looked like close to five hundred were crammed inside even though the bar could only legally fit just under one hundred. One of the bartenders who served Mary thought she was there for a few hours.12 She didn’t remember seeing Mary leave. It was likely she may have left around one in the morning, no one was quite sure.
By five thirty that morning, Donald was worried. His wife hadn’t called, and she hadn’t come home. He put the boys in the car and began to drive around the city, stopping at the apartments and homes of anyone he thought might have seen his wife. He stopped at the friend’s apartment Mary had gone to, the bartender’s house, the Quarterdeck. No one knew where she was. He finally reported her missing to New Bedford police and, in the days that followed, he called the local newspaper and made up flyers with her photograph. A lawyer the couple knew, Kenneth C. Ponte, helped him make the copies.
Donald left one of the flyers at the Quarterdeck and it was posted on the mirror behind the bar. The owner of the Quarterdeck, Faith Almeida, later told authorities it was taken down after two months when a woman who claimed she was Mary’s “sister” spotted the flyer and laughed. She told the barmaid Mary had left with a boyfriend and “said they were fools.”13 No one in Mary’s family believed she had left voluntarily, and no one identified the woman who claimed to be her sister.
CRAIG ANDRADE was in bed around eleven thirty at night on August 11, 1988, when his girlfriend, Sandy Botelho, twenty-five, hollered from downstairs. About an hour earlier, she had been dropped off by a john at their Malden Street apartment, had done a bit of coke, and was now headed back out, this time to her girlfriend’s house a few doors down in the Brickenwood housing project in New Bedford to get some bread. She would be right back, she yelled up.14
Craig, twenty-seven, and Sandy, had been together for thirteen years. They shared the apartment with their two young sons. They also shared an addiction to cocaine. Things were getting so out of control with the drugs that Craig split for a few months—from January to July—to “dry out” at a treatment program in nearby Fall River. But Sandy didn’t stop. She was still home in New Bedford, shooting up about a gram of coke a day and hitting the streets to make money to pay for it. She worked the area between Hathaway and Nauset Streets and spots in the Weld Square area. Sometimes men would call her directly, and she kept their names and numbers, along with those of her family and friends, in an address book that she kept in the bedroom. One of the johns listed in that book would later describe Sandy as “a very nice person caught up in a real bad situation,”15 who was trusting and would get ripped off by clients on the street.
“Sandy looked like somebody you would see coming out of a shopping mall.”16
Sandy wasn’t home when her boyfriend woke up the first time around three in the morning. He thought she was still over at her girlfriend’s house. When he woke up a second time at seven, he was worried.
He called the neighbor’s apartment. Sandy had never arrived.
DAWN MENDES left her Bluefield Street apartment in the southern section of the city wearing a white dress and white gloves. Her plan was to walk to a christening party across town where her family and, most importantly, her five-year-old son would be. At age twenty-five, Dawn already had a fairly extensive record of drug and prostitution charges both in New Bedford and elsewhere. Her mother, Charlotte, a deeply religious woman, was raising Dawn’s son. Allowing Dawn to have custody of the boy was out of the question. Her addiction was too severe, her inability to care for the boy too great. Dawn’s mother, though, was still hopeful things might eventually change, and she encouraged supervised visits with the child. The people at the christening party weren’t sure if Dawn would show up high, but they were confident she would show up. If she couldn’t, she would call. She always did. “If she wanted to just take off, she would call me to make sure her son was okay,” her mother would later say.17
By the time the family party broke up, Dawn still wasn’t there.
It was September 4, 1988. Her mom would report her missing soon after.
DETECTIVE JOHN DEXTRADEUR took a drag from the Marlboro then mashed it into the ashtray at his steel-gray desk in the cramped New Bedford police detective division. He was frustrated. It was mid-September and the number of missing women in the city who had similar backgrounds and characteristics was now officially at four, and he was convinced there might be more. Most were likely dead, he suspected. But without any bodies in his city, or any solid evidence of foul play in the disappearances, each case was still officially classified as a missing person. That meant the missing-person cases fell to the bottom of the investigative pile in his department. But he suspected—feared was the right word—there was a serial killer in his city; he just needed to prove it. He knew the investigation, done right, would need manpower. His department didn’t have it. He wasn’t sure his department would even know where to start. He was sure nothing would be done based on just his hunch.
Two bodies had already been found in July along two highways outside the city, but, based on what he heard from the state trooper handling the cases, it appeared both remains had been out there for months—ruling out, to him, Nancy Paiva as one of the victims. But if there were two, could there be more? That was something John couldn’t answer. That was something he would need to prod the district attorney’s office to look into. At the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office, headquartered a few streets from police headquarters, there were two distinct plainclothes investigative units. One was the state police Crime Prevention and Control Unit, known as CPAC, made up of two divisions: homicide and drugs. State police lieutenants, sergeants, and staff sergeants supervised the trooper-investigators. While the state police officers worked out of the district attorney’s office and served there at his pleasure, they didn’t take orders from him. They all answered to the state police brass. However, the second investigative unit in the office, the Bristol County Drug Task Force, was more closely aligned with the district attorney. It was made up of local police detectives on “loan” to the DA’s office who worked on narcotics investigations that crossed city and town lines. A captain or lieutenant from a local department was also “loaned” to the district attorney’s office to supervise the task force. In 1988, that man was Capt. Louis J. Pacheco, a self-taught computer whiz from the Raynham police department, a bedroom community thirty minutes north of New Bedford. The task force had started four years earlier and was credited with seizing tons of marijuana off-loaded from commercial fishing boats in the mid-1980s. Each of the local detectives in that unit were sworn in as Bristol County deputy sheriffs to give them arrest powers in communities other than their own; salaries and overtime were picked up by the DA. Sometimes the task-force members got along with the state police narcotics unit and sometimes they didn’t.
Robert St. Jean, the chief investigator for the district attorney and a former state trooper, was tasked with making sure everyone played nice. Technically, neither of the other groups answered directly to him. He answered to the district attorney. He was often caught in the middle of internal squabbles while trying to play the diplomat.
John figured he would go right to the top, or at least close to the top, at the district attorney’s office to get support. Bob St. Jean had the ear of the district attorney, Ronald A. Pina, and had daily access to the state police investigators in the office. John hoped he could convince him to create a special task force, or at the very least lau
nch a deeper investigation into the disappearance of Nancy Paiva. In his pitch for the task force, he could tell Bob there was a similarity in the descriptions of the missing women, where they were last seen, the drug connections, and their addictions. By putting faces and names to the suspected victims, he could give them a starting point for identifications if any more bodies were found. He could rattle off the cases with ease. First, there was Nancy Paiva, age thirty-six, last seen walking home from the South End in the early hours of July 8. Then Mary Rose Santos, age twenty-six, a mother of two, on July 16 was dropped off by her husband near the downtown bus station and was seen dancing at a bar about five hours later. Another young mother of two, Sandra Botelho, who had a history of heavy cocaine use, left her Malden Street apartment around 11:00 p.m. on August 11 and never returned. Then, finally, Dawn Mendes, twenty-five, missing since September 4. He believed there could also be three more at risk: Robbin Rhodes, a New Bedford woman who hadn’t been seen since the spring and was reported missing by her mother on July 28; a Cape Cod woman named Rochelle Dopierala whom he planned to use as a witness in a gun case; and a New Bedford teenager by the name of Christina Monteiro, whose mother was engaged to a Dartmouth cop. The teen hadn’t been seen for months.
As he prepared what he would say, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the remains of the two women already found along roadways outside the city would eventually be on his expanding list of the missing. He dialed the district attorney’s office to make an appointment to share his suspicions, face-to-face, with state troopers and Robert St. Jean, the man who had the district attorney’s ear. John worked with most of the troopers in the prosecutor’s office on murder cases and had a good relationship with them. Whenever there was a murder, a local detective would be paired with a state trooper in the prosecutor’s office to coordinate the investigation, even though he always felt his department did the lion’s share of the work. John also felt comfortable talking with Bob St. Jean, whose brother, Laurent, was also a New Bedford cop. John planned to suggest a task force be created to see how many more missing women in southeastern Massachusetts and nearby Rhode Island there were, to examine commonalities in the disappearances, and to see if any of the cases were related. He wasn’t sure what type of reception he would get with the call. He worried Bob St. Jean would shrug off his suspicions. So, he was pleasantly surprised when Bob listened to his brief synopsis of the case by phone then asked him to stop by the office to chat. “Let’s see what you have,” Bob said.18
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