Maryann and Jose stared at the arrest card dated July 23, 1982, on the desk. They recognized the face in the picture. For more than a month, they had been looking at a family photo of this same woman who had gone missing in New Bedford. It was Dawn Mendes, age twenty-five, a tough New Bedford woman and one of ten children in the Mendes family. Dawn, the mother of a five-year-old boy, was a drug addict with a history of prostitution arrests who disappeared September 4 while walking from her South End apartment to a family christening party.
By the time the identification was confirmed on December 2 through dental records, the searchers were already out on the road, looking for more victims.
There were still four other unidentified bodies, and Maryann and Jose weren’t sure how many more would be found before this was over. That was what the search dogs—and their handlers—were trying to find out.
WHILE MARYANN AND JOSE were finalizing the identification of the body of Dawn Mendes, Andy Rebmann was prepping for yet another search with his dog. After an early breakfast at the hotel in New Bedford’s North End, he got back on the highway again with Josie. If his dog found two bodies so quickly, maybe a third or even a fourth could be found today. Andy planned to keep looking, but he was getting a little concerned with the media attention the search was attracting. He could see a still photographer across the highway ramp, the camera keyed on his dog. He could see the swiveling heads of the motorists as they drove past. Right, left. Left, right. Traffic on the wide ramps onto Route 140 from one of the city’s main North End streets was steady but not heavy. However, Andy was worried Josie was getting distracted by the man with the camera. He could keep the dog’s focus away from the cars but keeping her away from people could be harder. Andy looked again across the road and saw the photographer inching closer. This is not good, he thought. This was a situation Andy always worried about during high profile searches: reporters and photographers distracting the dog.
After Josie had found the second body on the highway, media attention on the search and the dog intensified. The plus side to it: investigators might get more tips in the case. Andy was now dealing with the downside of publicity. The reporters had been warned about getting too close for just that reason—repeatedly. There always seemed to be one person who didn’t listen. He briefly considered putting Josie on a leash during searches like this along busy roads but she did her best work without one, and he wanted her to do her best work today.
Andy could see the photographer across the way raising his camera, focusing on his dog. He motioned to one of the troopers in a nearby cruiser and pointed at the photographer. Josie perked up. She looked across the highway and started forward. A car sped by. Then another. “Stop,” Andy yelled. The dog froze and turned back to her handler.
The trooper shooed the photographer away with a stern warning. Andy snapped the leash on Josie and led her back to the truck.
Three hours into the search, it was over for the day.
A few days later, more than an hour away in Newport, Rhode Island, a sixty-year-old former Navy cook was watching the news. It had been months since James McConnell had seen his youngest daughter, Debroh Lynn; that last time was at a Rhode Island cemetery on May 3, 1988, as they buried his wife, her mother. His daughter was “real hyper” at the time, James McConnell later remembered. When Debroh didn’t call or show up for her daughter’s tenth birthday, he was a little concerned but knew his daughter would often disappear for long periods of time. This was just another one of those times. Then the bodies began to show up on the highways in Massachusetts, and by December 1, the date when the search dog found the fifth woman’s remains, the second to be found on Route 140 in Freetown, he began to worry. Debroh’s boyfriend also called him, saying he feared this body was hers.
First, the elder McConnell called the state police and was put off, he would later say. “He got mad at me because I said I-95 instead of I-195,” he said.20 When he called New Bedford police, the detective was busy and couldn’t take his call.
He never spoke to any of the investigators at that time and never reported his daughter missing.
NEW BEDFORD DETECTIVE Bruce Machado, a member of the Bristol County Drug Task Force, knew how to blend into a scene—a major plus working narcotics. He could sit on a barstool or at a restaurant table anywhere in the city, a beer he barely sipped before him, and listen to the idle chatter. Some of it was drunken bragging. Some of it was the stuff major cases were made of. He was always surprised by what people would say in public, and he was always surprised so few people recognized him. He grew up in the area. He testified in court. His picture had been in the newspaper. But he had that everyman look of a hard worker just trying to make ends meet. He wasn’t flashy, he wasn’t loud. He was quiet, serious, and cautious. From his four years in the U.S. Navy, including time in Vietnam, he learned the importance of working as a team. He wasn’t looking for glory; he just wanted to do a good job. That’s what he learned from the military, and that’s how he approached working narcotics in the New Bedford police department. He joined the Bristol County Drug Task Force in 1980 while still working in the city’s narcotics unit. He was then “loaned” to the district attorney’s office in 1985 where he worked on the task force full-time along with another city detective. It was a good assignment, but it caused some occasional rifts within his own department. His bosses worried he and his partner, Paul Boudreau, had been away too long. They worried the two would forget they were New Bedford cops first. Bruce tried to reassure them that wasn’t the case; after all, his brother was a New Bedford patrolman and so were some of his closest friends. He knew he was just on loan to the district attorney’s office a few downtown blocks over. To stay in touch with city life and to check the pulse of the community, he would stop in to different bars across New Bedford, quick check-in stops, after the DA’s office closed at five o’clock. He wanted to keep getting the feel of the city, to keep an open ear for potential trouble, to be accessible to some of the people who recognized him and wanted to slip him information.
Bruce knew about the missing girls, the found bodies, the course of the overall investigation from the papers.21 It was hard to be in the office, or the city for that matter, and not be aware. But the drug task force didn’t do murder cases. That was the purview of the state police and local police detectives; his job centered on the drug traffickers. But that didn’t mean he didn’t hear other things, or notice things in the city. Bruce always noticed what was going on. What he noticed now was a face that wasn’t behind the old Burt’s Pub bar, now renamed and under new management, on Union Street in the city’s downtown: Marilyn Cardoza Roberts. It had been a while since he had seen her, he realized. He knew her because her dad had been a New Bedford cop. In recent years, he knew she was using heroin and had been arrested with one of the main heroin dealers in the city, a Cuban with ties to New Jersey who came over on the Mariel boatlift.22 He would see Marilyn sometimes, just out and about on the streets, and hoped she would eventually get clean.
He motioned to the bartender and asked: Whatever happened to Marilyn?
She just vanished, he was told. That happened sometimes with addicts, Bruce knew, but with the bodies of women discovered along the highways he wondered if she might be one of the victims. No one, he learned, had seen Marilyn in months. No one knew where she was.
He wondered: Could Marilyn be dead? Could she be one of the unidentified?
Marilyn’s father, Robert, retired from the force in 1982 and was now working security at the Claremont building near the district attorney’s office downtown. Bob had been a top local soccer player in his younger days, serving as captain for the semi-pro Salty’s Cleaners team and scoring the only goal for the 25th Signal Battalion Blazers in the Seventh Army Soccer League Championship game in 1958, before settling back in his hometown and joining the police department. He and his wife, Bernadine, raised two children and lived quietly in a modest home in the South End of the city. Bruce liked Bob and his wife. They w
ere a nice couple who put their children first. He hoped his hunch was wrong.
Bob and Bernadine Cardoza spent years—and thousands of dollars—trying to get their daughter off drugs.23 It started when Marilyn was in her mid-twenties and began dating the son of a business owner from the neighboring town of Dartmouth. Initially, they thought he was a nice match: smart, good-looking, and from a good family with means. What they didn’t know was that he was addicted to heroin. It was a tumultuous time for the family as they searched for ways to get Marilyn help. By her late twenties, and after considerable effort, Marilyn seemed to settle down and put her drug issues behind her. She married a fisherman from Virginia at the historic Seamen’s Bethel in downtown New Bedford, had a reception in the function room at Burt’s Pub where she worked, and moved into an apartment behind one of the city’s fire stations. She kept a nice house and seemed to enjoy her new life. But the marriage fell apart when, while her husband was out fishing, she met a man named Raul M. Yero whom narcotics detectives considered one of the largest heroin dealers in the city. He was once imprisoned in Cuba and bore a crude prison tattoo on his hand signifying a drug dealer, said former New Bedford narcotics detective sgt. James Sylvia.24 He had been arrested in the city in four separate drug raids with thousands of dollars’ worth of heroin and cocaine and, one person told police, kept Marilyn well supplied with drugs.25 On December 4, 1985, both Marilyn and Raul were arrested during a drug raid at the Whaler Motor Inn. By that time, her marriage was over, she was living with Raul, and she was back using drugs.
Marilyn’s parents had already sent her to one of the few inpatient drug-treatment programs for women in the state, escorted her to the methadone-treatment program, and underwent a series of counseling sessions with her over the years. They tried to force her into additional treatment but, at the time, she refused. They sought help as a family—and for her individually. Resources at the time were few and answers even fewer. The family felt alone in their battle.
By early 1988, as Marilyn’s life spiraled downward, her frustrated family pleaded with her to change her life. You need to get help, they told her during her last visit home looking yet again for money. You have to get help. She stormed out of the house. When she didn’t call on her mother’s birthday in March, her parents were nervous. When she didn’t call for Mother’s Day, they tried not to be scared. Her father asked New Bedford police if anyone had seen her on the street. One person later said she might be in New Jersey; another told police that Sandy Botelho, who also went missing, once confided that Marilyn stole $25,000 worth of jewelry from Raul and fled south.26 Others weren’t sure where she was. While some New Bedford police officers kept an eye out for Marilyn, her name was never posted on the missing-person’s clipboard in the record room. She was never on the official missing list.
As 1988 neared a close, Bruce swung by Bob’s work one night to discreetly ask if there was a chance his daughter’s dental records were available. They both knew what was left unsaid. Bob got the records to investigators a couple of days later. Bruce hoped they wouldn’t need to use them; he hoped Marilyn would return home safely.
THE FIRST COMPARISONS of Marilyn’s dental records with the remains were disappointing: it wasn’t her. None of the other records they had of known missing women matched that of the person found along Route 140 by the search dog on December 1. There was some good news, though. By the end of the month, they did know more about this latest Jane Doe thanks to an examination at the Smithsonian by the noted forensic anthropologist Dr. Douglas Ubelaker. They knew she had long, light brown hair; she had what the anthropologist said were “protruding front thighs” (although investigators weren’t quite sure how to describe that to the people they interviewed on the street), and had surgical staples, indicating she may have had abdominal surgery at some point. She was between twenty-two and thirty years old and stood between five feet one and five feet two. Based on her bone structure, she may have been racially mixed. An earring with two gold leaves was found near her body. Photos of the earring and the description were circulated to the media.
But no one came forward to say they knew a woman matching that description.
The investigators were back on the street, trying to get names of women who hadn’t been seen in a while as well as the names of the odd or violent men who were picking women up. The list of the men was starting to get very, very long.
THE NEW BEDFORD WOMAN telling the story remembered it clearly: It was August 1987, a year before the women began going missing, before the bodies started showing up along the highways. A guy with dirty blond hair, scars on his face, behind the wheel of a white pickup truck pulled up alongside her as she worked the streets of Weld Square. She got in. She liked to stay local, just in case there was a problem. She had her favorite spots to take her johns. Then he hit the highway. What’s going on, she recalled asking him. He wouldn’t hurt her, he insisted. Just do what I say. She wasn’t so sure once she saw the point of what appeared to be a fillet knife stuck up his sleeve.
The man, she would recall a year later, got off a highway exit in Dartmouth—one exit short of the area where three bodies were later found—and tried to turn onto a dirt road. She jumped out and ran. The man chased her in the truck. She hid in bushes. She ran to a business nearby. No one helped her. She ran again, this time on to the highway toward New Bedford. The man was hiding in a ditch, she would tell a reporter. He had been waiting for her. She was dragged into the ditch, ordered to strip and then was raped. His knife was stuck in the ground where she could see it.
“I’m thinking in my mind . . . he’s going to stab me,” she later told a reporter. “I knew that knife was going to find a hole in me.”27
She fought back, grabbed her clothes and ran again. “I never came so close to death in my life,” the woman would later say.
Months later, she would see the man again in Weld Square. She was convinced he was stalking her. She never reported it until the bodies started appearing on the highways. After the story about her attack appeared in the Standard-Times, on December 3, 1988, she saw him again. He glared at her. She jotted down his license plate number. She then turned the information over to authorities.
The woman’s story intrigued investigators. Could this be the killer? Could this be the break they needed?
Less than two weeks after the woman came forward, a team of state police officers assigned to the district attorney’s office arrested a thirty-five-year-old man by the name of Neil Anderson at his home and charged him in connection with the attack. Neil Anderson, who lived not far from Weld Square with his mother, had an arrest record for breaking and entering, drunken driving, disturbing the peace, and larceny, among other petty crimes. He was once a welder. He was once a fisherman. A day later, he was charged with rape and intent to rape in connection with an attack on a hitchhiker who told authorities she was attacked near Copicut Road in Dartmouth on July 22, 1988. When state police officers searched his home, they seized a wide range of items, including fillet knives, eight rounds of 30–30 caliber ammunition, a round of 45-caliber ammunition, brass knuckles, a hatchet, a switchblade, an ice pick, a whip, and some clothes. A pair of boots—described as “engineer boots” worn by many motorcyclists—matched the description of the ones the woman said the attacker was wearing, according to court papers in connection with the search.
A month later, Neil Anderson was indicted for a third rape stemming from an attack in the eastern section of Fall River known as the Reservation.
He would be the first of dozens of suspects police would investigate—then later set aside—as time wound forward. There was a twenty-year-old New Bedford man who raped a prostitute in a store parking lot; a Rhode Island man who brought prostitutes to his home for weeks at a time; a man named Louis DaSousa who met a woman at a bar and viciously raped her with a pipe at Fort Taber, a rundown Civil War–era military fort in the city’s South End, and who was eventually convicted of the attack. There were the men with the weird sexu
al tastes, the men who turned violent quickly, the men who beat prostitutes, the men who cruised the bars.
Maryann and Jose found it wasn’t a case of no suspects. It was now a matter of too many. They knew they couldn’t investigate every lead and every suspect alone.
4THE STREETS
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
Maryann Dill hit the button on her Bose clock-radio alarm.
Six o’clock.
Less than five hours earlier, she had crawled into bed, exhausted from a fifteen-hour workday. She and her partner, Jose Gonsalves, spent the night circling the streets, searching for people who might give them yet another shred of information. Finding the right people was tough, getting accurate information even tougher. These were not folks with nine-to-five jobs, with neat homes and listed phones. The lives of the people the two needed to talk with were messy: Getting high, getting arrested, going to court, going to barrooms were the four walls of their rough existence. It could take hours for the state police partners to find one person on the street. Or it could take five minutes. Nothing on the street was predictable, just the unpredictability.
Shallow Graves Page 8