A few days later, in the conference room of the Bristol County District Attorney’s office, John met with the chief investigator, a couple of troopers, and two New Bedford detectives assigned to the drug task force. He laid out what he had, what he suspected, what he feared. Then he tossed in two names: Franklin Pina and Kenneth Ponte. Frankie, he told them, was the boyfriend of one of the missing women. He suspected the man might know more than what he first told police. The second person, Kenneth Ponte, was a lawyer with a bad coke habit who knew all of the missing women and had some strange dealings with local hookers. He also knew Frankie. Kenny had worked on the Bristol County sheriff’s election campaign and was later sworn in as a deputy sheriff. Being a deputy in Kenny’s situation was largely considered an honorary title but, in practice, it allowed the lawyer to serve court papers, such as eviction notices. He could make a little extra cash doing that. The detective discovered Kenny also sometimes used the badge to do more than serve court papers. He was getting reports that Kenny flashed his deputy sheriff badge to drug dealers and then stole their drugs. The lawyer also brought prostitutes to his home. John also told them about the Cape Cod woman, Rochelle Dopierala, who was not on the official missing list but who had been staying with the lawyer. He had been looking for this woman since May because she was a witness in yet another case he was investigating.
John gave them more details about the case Rochelle was to testify in: Rochelle had claimed a guy in the Weld Square neighborhood named Roger Swire had raped her. Later, Kenny was driving along the street with Rochelle when they spotted the man. Kenny pulled over, pulled out a gun and threatened him. Kenny was charged in connection with that gun incident. Since then, Dextradeur had seen Rochelle walking around Weld Square—he even saw her with Frankie Pina—and discussed the gun case with her. She had already recanted the rape allegations but promised to testify against Kenny Ponte. It had been months, though, since the detective had seen Rochelle around. Months since anyone had. She could, he told the group, be one of the missing. She could be dead.
John Dextradeur knew what he was suggesting: there may be a serial killer in the city. It was not a popular idea in a city trying to bring in tourists and new businesses, he knew. City leaders were trying to shake New Bedford’s image as an aging, downtrodden mill city with high unemployment, an image damaged further in 1983 by a barroom gang rape at a local tavern called Big Dan’s. Six men of Portuguese descent were accused and four convicted in that case. Five years after the rape, which generated national headlines, city officials were working to turn New Bedford into a funky, possibly artsy, community drawing people from throughout the region to the historic downtown landmarks and humming working waterfront. But now some feared a new fictionalized account of the attack, a film called The Accused starring Jodie Foster set to premier in October 1988, would reinforce that old impression and hamper the revitalization efforts.
Bob St. Jean knew the politics of the city and the pushback that can occur when bad news hits the front pages and airwaves. None of that worried him. The district attorney had always told him not to worry about the politics. Just do good police work. As he listened to the New Bedford detective talk, Bob was intrigued and knew he was onto something and it likely was big. He also knew he would first have to take it up with the district attorney, Ronald Pina, before making a commitment.
“Let me talk with Ron,” Bob told the New Bedford detective. “We’ll see what we can do.”19
After the hour-long meeting, John Dextradeur headed back to the New Bedford police station. He had made his point. Everyone told him the right things. But would anything be done? Were they just blowing smoke? He wasn’t sure.
He waited a couple of weeks then decided to add some public pressure. He called the local newspaper, where a reporter had also noticed the cluster of women gone missing and had been asking if the bodies along the highways could be linked.
“Fears Build for Missing Women,” read the front-page article in the Standard-Times on October 3, 1988. The story listed four of the missing women, their similarities in appearance and lifestyles. It also quoted a heroin addict saying two more were likely gone. Relatives of the missing women were worried. The missing women had troubles but stayed close to their families, despite their drug problems, and visited or called regularly. A day, maybe a week, might go by without contact but not months. The women, the families insisted, wouldn’t leave without telling someone. It was out of character. Nancy’s sister, Judy, still nervous about stepping into the public spotlight, was quoted anonymously at the end as a “relative. “I think something has happened to her. I don’t think she’s alive.”20
3SEARCHING
BY LATE OCTOBER, the official list of the missing women considered endangered was officially six. After additional investigation, John Dextradeur noted that two more New Bedford women reported missing fit the criteria of the others: Robbin “Bobbie Lynn” Rhodes, twenty-nine, and Christina Monteiro, nineteen, who John earlier had suspected was a victim of foul play. Both had a young child, both were heroin and cocaine addicts, both stayed close to the New Bedford city limits and would check in regularly with relatives, usually their mothers. Both just vanished. John Dextradeur wondered how many more were gone and not reported missing, such as the Cape Cod woman he was trying to find for one of his cases. How high could this number go?
Bob St. Jean shared John Dextradeur’s fear that the missing women were likely dead, and he convinced the district attorney that the prosecutor’s office needed to step in. The case would not be easy to navigate, he knew. Bob needed to pull in the right people from different agencies to work on the case. He needed people who thought broadly, who were not territorial, who cooperated with others, who worked across different law-enforcement agency lines. He needed people who worked hard and played nice with others. He needed smart people without egos. He had a few in mind. He just needed to find a way to convince the chiefs in those already short-staffed departments to cut them loose for this case.
Bob had been a state trooper for thirteen years before the district attorney, Ronald Pina, convinced him to join his office as a civilian investigator. It was right after the district attorney won reelection in the 1982 primary with 49 percent of the vote against Patrick E. Lowney, a Fall River attorney whose brother was a state trooper. Two days after winning reelection, Ron Pina booted out all the state troopers working in his building, forcing them to work one town over in the Dartmouth barracks where road troopers were dispatched. “I know that there were a number of people down there (in the state police office) who were actively supporting Lowney. They made it quite clear where they stood. They were out to get me. They lost,” Ron said at the time.1
Kicking the troopers out strained the already tense relations the district attorney had with the state police. At the time the troopers were evicted from the downtown New Bedford offices—and that’s how the cops described it—Bob was out of town. He returned to a political hurricane. He also faced a choice that changed the trajectory of his career as well as his friendships with longtime colleagues. The district attorney took him aside and asked him to stay as his special investigator in the office and help rebuild the unit. It would mean, Bob knew, leaving the state police. The new job was enticing; it paid $20,000 more than his trooper’s salary, but he was forty-eight, just two years away from the mandatory state police retirement age at the time. “I had no intention of leaving the state police,” he recalled. “I told him I’m not going to do that.”2 The district attorney refused to take no for an answer. He called the governor who called the state police who told Bob to take a leave of absence as a trooper for a year and take the job to smooth things over between the agency and the prosecutor’s office. They needed someone in the office who knew the state police, Bob remembers being told. His state police job would still be waiting. Bob took the job. He was stunned by the swift and vicious backlash. Troopers he counted as friends called him a traitor and shunned him. Other troopers used much stronger la
nguage. The state police family he knew was gone. The rift and hard feelings ran deep and lasted for years. “I really didn’t expect it,” he recalled. “It was a very difficult time.”
During that first year, Bob tried to develop closer ties with local departments, strengthen a regional drug task force, and promote long-term investigations, including ones using wiretaps. When the year and leave of absence was up Bob was faced with a choice: stay or return to the state police. He had six children at home and was now earning $62,500, the equivalent of a captain’s pay, working for the district attorney. If he went back, he would be taking a huge financial hit with the much lower trooper’s pay. Bob resigned from the state police.
Younger men and women coming up the state police ranks had heard about the maelstrom that pitted trooper against trooper, but by 1988 it was fast becoming history, and new investigators coming into the unit saw it as a blip in law-enforcement relations and politics. Bob knew there were still some in the state police who held a grudge, but he tried to move on, finding ways to help the diverse law enforcement groups in complex investigations. The investigation into the disappearances of the New Bedford women was one he felt he could help coordinate.
By early November, Bob was on the phone taking one of the first steps in trying to solve the case. He was asking the Connecticut State Police if one of the country’s best search-dog handlers in its department could help with the case. The handler ran dogs that looked for the dead.
IT WAS A SUNNY and comfortable November afternoon in 1988 as the state cleanup crew trudged along the highway ramp off Interstate 195 in Dartmouth, picking up cans and garbage. The trash along the highway was a jumble of road life: tires, paper cups, bags, shoes, cans, diapers. Four months earlier, two men riding motorcycles stopped to relieve themselves across this same highway and found a body. From where the crew now stood on the eastbound Reed Road exit ramp, they even might have been able to see that spot about a mile and a half away. But that wasn’t on the workers’ minds around two o’clock on Tuesday November 8, 1988. Getting to the end of the workday was. The crew kept moving along the tree line, clearing the trash.
Then they stopped. There, in the center strip of the Reed Road cloverleaf, on the eastbound side of the highway, were human remains. About twenty to thirty feet away, scattered in the woods, there were some clothes: A London Fog jacket, a pair of pants, socks, underwear, shirts. The crew supervisor radioed the District 5 office in Taunton. The office called the Dartmouth state police barracks. Get your people down there now. They found a body.
Staff Sgt. Paul Fitzgerald, who was the supervisor in the Dartmouth barracks five minutes away, was one of the first to arrive. There he could see remains along the tree line. Nothing immediately identifiable was his first impression.3 Dick Phillips, a Dartmouth police officer who arrived soon after, thought it might be a woman.4
Paul Fitzgerald ordered the state troopers to keep people away from the scene and keep any gawking drivers moving. He shut down the on and off Reed Road cloverleaf ramps on the eastbound side of the highway. He knew what needed to be done. He joined the state police at age twenty-two, working the road and later intricate criminal investigations. For five years, from 1976 to 1981, he was in the district attorney’s office—one of the first members of the state police assigned to the Bristol County office—and was close to the troopers who were later kicked out by the prosecutor. He worked homicides, drug cases, white-collar crime, bank robberies—what he would later describe as “pretty much everything you can dream of.”5 He knew the intricacies of what it took to solve a case, and a good part of it started right here, at the scene. The first step: keep people, civilians, and fellow cops alike away until the state investigative-police team from the district attorney’s office arrived. Today, he figured that between the state police and the Dartmouth police officer, they had that part covered pretty well.
When the unmarked cruiser pulled up, he recognized the trooper behind the wheel: Jose Gonsalves. Tall with thinning dark hair, Jose was soft-spoken and conscientious. He was a family man who stayed out of the politics. Troopers who worked with him on the road, before he transferred into the detective unit in the district attorney’s office, praised his even temperament. He was, everyone agreed, a good guy.
Jose and Maryann Dill were the troopers on call that week to cover any unattended deaths in the county. Human remains found off a highway ramp definitely fell into that category. A tanned Maryann arrived a few minutes after Jose pulled up. It was her first day back to work from vacation in Aruba.
As Jose scanned the scene, he felt a sense of déjà vu. It was eerily similar to the crime scene he viewed just four months earlier on the same highway: the remains of a woman, on her back.
He turned to Maryann. “This isn’t good.”6
A few days before this discovery, the prosecutor’s chief investigator, Bob St. Jean, had already finalized the plans to bring the search dogs to the area. A couple of people in the office scoffed at the idea at first. No one would question the decision now.
By the end of the month, the three cases of the dead women would be merged into one: Case file 0515. Troopers Maryann Dill and Jose (pronounced “Joe-sey ”) Gonsalves, who was one of the senior troopers in the unit, were told by their state police supervisor that they were now the primary investigators in the case.
BOB ST. JEAN spread the map out on the conference table in the downtown office of the district attorney and pointed to the three spots where the remains of three women were found: Route 140 northbound in Freetown; Interstate 195 westbound, just short of the Reed Road exit; and off the Reed Road exit on the eastbound side of Interstate 195. The three were all within a twenty-minute drive.
Andy Rebmann, the Connecticut state trooper considered the premier police canine handler in the region, nodded.
A few minutes earlier, Andy had walked into the lobby of the fifth-floor prosecutor’s office after driving one and a half hours from just north of Norwich, Connecticut, to meet with Bob St. Jean. At the top of the agenda: Where would someone likely dump a body? Andy’s dog, Josie, was one of just a few canines in the Northeast trained exclusively to find bodies. Andy trained nearly all of those so-called “body” dogs, and Josie was considered the top dog in the pack.
This was the second time he had been in New Bedford. About a year earlier, Andy was called to search a cemetery in nearby Acushnet where police feared a missing young woman had been killed then buried in an open grave by her ex-husband. Andy and his dog didn’t find the woman—she was eventually discovered in a water-filled quarry a few years later and two towns away by a group of divers practicing—but the Connecticut trooper found the region rich in ethnic culture and food. Especially the food. The small Portuguese restaurants scattered throughout New Bedford rivaled anything he had tasted before. The people he met—both in law enforcement and on the streets—were warm and welcoming. This is a nice area, he remembered thinking at the time, one he wouldn’t mind going back to.7
So, when the call came asking if he could help find several missing women who were presumed dead, possibly at the hands of a serial killer, he didn’t think twice.
When Andy arrived in New Bedford that mid-November day in 1988, the chief investigator greeted him warmly. It was the first time the two had met, and Bob was struck at how unassuming the Connecticut trooper appeared. Andy was wearing coveralls, boots, and a broad smile. “He looked like a hunter,” Bob recalled. “He just came across as a regular guy.”8
Bob ushered him into the conference room where, along with state police investigators, they went over the case. The remains of three women, still unidentified, were found roughly thirty feet into the brush off two local highways. Several more were reported missing, no suspects. Could there be more bodies along the highways? Could his dog find them? Bob asked. Andy knew the answer: Yes. Hopefully.
After first reviewing the maps, Andy was brought to the highway crime scenes to get a feel for the search area. He noted the traffic patt
erns, the way the guardrails were spaced, where the brush was. He was out at the scenes for about an hour and a half before returning to Connecticut. Back home, he looked over the maps again, calculated the distance from the road to the bodies, and tried to estimate how many cars were on the road and how many were going over the speed limit for search safety. He also needed to determine how many miles could he safely search with his dog, Josie. “Are we going to cover a mile? Ten miles? We had to just come up with a basic search plan and a safety plan,” Andy recalled.9 A plan to keep Josie motivated during the search if she didn’t find anything was also crucial.
Work and reward are two key elements in police-dog training. Some trainers use treats, others use play. Play always seemed to work with Josie and several other cadaver search dogs that Andy trained. Cadaver dogs are the elite in the police-canine world. It takes weeks of initial training—and only if the dog is “right” for the job—followed by months of reinforcement and fieldwork.
The best dogs in the cadaver field are the ones who are not cross-trained, who specialize in the search for bodies. Give them just one job, just one, and they will excel. More than one, the dog’s skill set can be diluted. In the late 1980s, specialty police dogs were rare. Most police departments with canines, largely for budget reasons, wanted dogs to do general police-dog work: search, rescue, find drugs, and help catch suspects. That meant Andy was the first call when communities along the East Coast needed a good dog to search for a person. He was usually the only call. His bosses on the Connecticut State Police knew how important it was to find the missing, alive or dead, and rarely turned down any out-of-state request if Andy was available.
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