Shallow Graves

by Maureen Boyle

  With each phone call, Bob would assure the men the investigators were looking to identify a killer, not publically expose their sex lives.

  Just cooperate, he told them.

  He wanted to yell something different: Are you crazy?

  NOTHING SEEMED TO SLOW the sale of drugs in the city in 1988. Not raids on stash houses. Not sweeps of street dealers. Not the deaths and disappearances of women.

  Along the narrow South First Street in the South End of the city, the street dealers hawked heroin like newspaper boys of the 1920s. They lined the one-way street, sometimes just feet apart, calling out to passing cars the “brand” of the day stamped on the glassine packets of the heroin.

  “Hello,” one called out. “Power.”

  “What’s up?” another yelled to a driver. “Power.”5

  Cars driven by young white men and women—most originally from the suburbs—stop quickly, slip cash to the dealers then drive off. South First Street is a quick exit off Route 18, a highway built during the urban renewal in the 1960s dead-ending at a stoplight and cutting the waterfront off from the city’s center. It is flanked on both sides by stout two-story brick housing-project units. There’s a small playground and tiny swaths of dirt sprinkled with grass that pass for yards. Everything is cement and dirt and metal. You can hear the cars passing just yards away on the highway over the catcalls of the dealers. Every day, the city’s narcotics detectives—the unit was officially called the Organized Crime Investigative Bureau—drove through the neighborhood. Nearly every day, someone was arrested. In 1987, 974 people were arrested on drug charges in the city; 590 of that number were charged with either selling or possession of heroin or cocaine. Another 110 people were charged with possessing a needle and syringe, the paraphernalia used to inject heroin. In 1988, those numbers were continuing to rise.

  In a separate part of the city, young women addicted to heroin and cocaine paced a five-block neighborhood, waiting for middle- and upper-class men to pick them up. The price of oral sex—a blowjob—was twenty dollars, the price of a tiny glassine packet of heroin at the time. Sex had to be quick—since many of the women were shooting five to ten packets of heroin a day and needed more than a hundred dollars to satisfy their habits. Prostitution seemed the only way to get that amount of cash. While many male addicts were robbing banks or breaking into houses, the women victimized themselves in this never-ending devil dance with heroin. Finding treatment, even for those with the best intentions, was not easy. In 1988, inpatient drug-treatment beds for women were scarce, and addicts were waiting for months to get into publically funded, outpatient methadone programs. There were three treatment programs in the New Bedford and Fall River area at the time: two methadone programs and one twenty-day, inpatient detoxification program. Between the three programs, 255 addicts throughout the region could be served. But that clearly wasn’t enough, as everyone in the law enforcement and treatment fields discovered. The programs weren’t just serving those in the greater New Bedford area: addicts were traveling from more than an hour away to the area to get what little help there was available. There were other programs elsewhere in the state, including the in-treatment program at Spectrum House in Worcester where a number of the New Bedford women sought help, but waits for treatment across Massachusetts were also long.

  AIDS also hit the intravenous-drug community hard, and people were worried the virus would spread quickly if addicts—particularly prostitutes—didn’t get into treatment fast. In its first round of voluntary screening, the New Bedford methadone clinic discovered 25 percent had been exposed to the AIDS virus. About a third of the fifty tested in the second round were exposed. Ten of the people who were tested were prostitutes—and eight of those were still active on the street.

  The situation wasn’t improving with time. In 1985, there were 30 people on the waiting list for the methadone program at the New Bedford Area Center for Human Services. Within two years, that list ballooned to between 120 and 130 people. New Bedford wasn’t the only place with a shortage of treatment options. More than 500 people, including some pregnant women, were waiting for one of the 750 state-funded slots in a methadone program.

  One woman waited two months to get into the methadone program—then was sent to the women’s state prison on prostitution and bad-check charges a week before she was set to start.

  While some addicts struggled to find help, city narcotics detectives were seeing a steady stream of new heroin addicts and dealers on the street. The price of the drug in New Bedford was the cheapest in the state in the late 1980s, and the supply seemed endless. Each week, on average, the narcotics unit raided two houses and arrested close to a dozen dealers, buyers, and users on the street. For each dealer gone, another appeared. The drug business was booming.

  Old-time narcotics detectives and cops in the city insisted the seeds of the heroin trade were planted in the 1960s, when an influx of people from the New York City area moved to the city as part of a jobs program. When the program ended, a few people with ties to the New York heroin market stayed and found the area a ripe place for expansion. Well-meaning community advocates tried to find ways to address the problem but, even from the start, it was tough. Few realized the grip heroin could have on a person and, eventually, on the community. By 1970, community leaders launched a twenty-day campaign called “Countdown to Freedom” to raise money “to combat drugs” and take a stand on the issue. There was a fifty-mile hike from Hyannis to New Bedford, pledges from local leaders, and a telethon that drew national celebrities, among them director Otto Preminger, Clarence Williams III of Mod Squad television series fame, and David Selby, best known as Quentin from the popular afternoon vampire soap opera, Dark Shadows. The Standard-Times newspaper, the television station WTEV, and two radio stations, WNBH and WBSM, beat the media drum almost daily promoting the effort. By the time the campaign ended in April of 1970, more than $150,000 was raised to help buy a building and run a drug-rehabilitation program. However, just a few months after the campaign ended, there were major problems. Plans to open a clinic at a former nursing home were dropped when neighbors threatened to go to court, and it looked like the needed zoning ordinance wouldn’t be approved. Then people started questioning how the money raised was being spent. A methadone clinic eventually got off the ground in 1972 with the help of some federal money. By the late 1980s, about 400 heroin addicts were being treated daily.6

  The methadone clinic, though, created a different type of issue for the city and neighborhood. Originally designed to tackle a local drug problem, the clinic was now drawing addicts from across the southern part of the state and Rhode Island. Dealers, in turn, set up shop near the clinic to lure the addicts back. Police and community activists felt as if they were on a stationary bike, pedaling fast and getting nowhere.

  The heroin problem in the area in the 1970s and ’80s touched a wide range of families, foreshadowing what was to come when the opioid epidemic hit the nation more than three decades later. There were the children of politicians, doctors, and lawyers shooting up in the suburbs, and the children of textile workers and fishermen shooting up in the city. Heroin addiction crossed economic and town lines, but few families openly discussed it or knew what to do. There was the undercurrent of blame and shame: addicts could stop if they wanted; the families must have done something wrong for this to happen. Heroin addiction was the dirty secret of embarrassed families.

  The fishing industry was the backbone of the local economy. It was also a source of one of the largest “cash only” industries in the city. For years, some of the fishing catch was held back from the fish auction, and crews were paid under the table with a portion of that catch.7

  Commercial fishing could be lucrative, but it was also expensive. Fishermen could pocket thousands from a single trip, but it cost thousands to keep the vessels seaworthy and running. If the haul was low, so was the payout, and by the 1980s the federal government was continuing to develop regulations on everything from how much c
ould be fished, where boats could go, and how many days a boat could be at sea. The fishermen were saying it was strangling their livelihood. In the early 1980s, marijuana replaced fish on several of the commercial vessels coming into port, leading to large amounts of under-the-table cash circulating on the waterfront. More than a hundred tons of baled marijuana, hidden in false walls and compartments in retrofitted fishing boats, were believed smuggled into the harbor from Colombia at the time. One federal indictment alleged that between 1982 and 1983 alone, 160 tons of marijuana worth at least $150 million had been smuggled in. By 1988, with an influx of free cash flowing in some circles, cocaine became the drug of choice for people ranging from lawyers and businessmen to fishermen and bartenders—just as it had throughout the country. Touted as “nonaddictive” by some at the time, cocaine created a new circle of addicts and a bridge to the street life.

  This was the world investigators navigated in the search for the missing women. There is an old saying, don’t pick up a rock unless you are prepared to see what is beneath it. There were many rocks in the city in the late 1980s, and not everyone wanted to look under them.

  ADDICTS AND PROSTITUTES could be found in several parts of New Bedford throughout the day, but in 1988 Weld Square was the hub. The girls on the street didn’t look the Hollywood part. They eschewed heavy makeup and high hair. They wore jeans and T-shirts instead of miniskirts, sneakers instead of high heels. From a distance, they looked average and poor. Sometimes they were animated as they walked along the street and sometimes they just looked tired. It was only when you got closer could you see the drug sickness.

  Dark-haired and bone thin, one woman huddled in the shadows on the doorway step. Her dark eyes were aged by drugs and sleeplessness. Unlike the other girls who would walk confidently on the street, or sit smoking on the shadowed steps of the Mickiewicz Social Club in Weld Square, she just sat there quietly in the dark, watching the cars pass. She could be easily missed by anyone walking or driving by. If you got close enough to talk, though, you could see the sickness easily in this young woman, in her face, her eyes, her tiny body. Her voice was flat and dull. Drugs had already stolen her life. “I just need money to buy diapers,” she is saying, dropping her eyes. “That’s why I’m here.”8 She was just one of the desperate women on the dismal street in the spring and early summer of 1988, when the “girls on the street” were keeping a tally of the “weirdos and sickos,” the men who wouldn’t pay, the men who slapped them around. There was the guy with the knife, the two guys in a van, the guys in trucks, the trick who seemed nice then suddenly “snapped,” the guys who stole their money then beat them. The girls were jotting down license plates, memorizing facial features of johns and the vehicles they drove. They were frightened by what they were seeing on the street but stayed out there because they were more afraid of the gut-wrenching heroin withdrawal symptoms.

  In 1987, Margaret “Peggy” Nunes had been stabbed to death and left in a snow bank by a man named William Marquette, a Cuban who came over on the Mariel boatlift. Darcy Danelson, the nineteen-year-old Fall River woman, was found brutally raped and dead along the railroad tracks in 1986 (Marquette was questioned in that killing but was never charged). Another woman, Joanne Andrade, was found dead along the waterfront. Then there were two other murders, both unsolved, of women last seen leaving local bars.

  It was dangerous on the street, but most of the girls felt they could take care of themselves. They were tough. They were shrewd. They could usually spot the john who might rob them or worse and knew to keep walking when those guys came around. They were also ready to fight back; some carried small knives, others screwdrivers. However, even the most street savvy knew they couldn’t predict what might happen in the cars and trucks of strangers.

  One woman on the street that year was originally from Wareham, a waterfront town just before the Cape Cod bridges, and had the look of a young Jamie Lee Curtis: tall and lean, her hair often cropped short. Linda tried to cling to her dignity as she hopped in car after car to get just enough money to feed her ever-growing heroin addiction. She would always say she never stole from her family. When another addict she knew once slipped into her father’s garage and stole his tools, she pleaded with her dad to believe it wasn’t her. She couldn’t take what little her middle-class family had. But her father, weary after her years of addiction and wary of her stories, didn’t believe her. She had given him enough pain already. She disappeared from the street in the summer of 1988 after one of her close friends, Marilyn Roberts, disappeared. At first, police feared she was one of the murder victims. They eventually learned from a reporter Linda knew and had called that she had hopped a bus headed west when the other women began to go missing. She kicked heroin cold turkey on that ride and never looked back. In later, occasional phone calls to a reporter on the newspaper’s toll-free line, she would check in and ask about Marilyn but would never give specifics on why she left so abruptly. Some on the street speculated she crossed someone in New Bedford, that she may have ripped someone off. Whenever she was asked why she left, she would just say it was to leave the drug life behind. Eight years later, she was still clean. “I’ve seen people high on that shit since I’ve been clean and it makes me wonder why I was so in love with it. Yuk,” she wrote in a letter to a reporter in 1996. Some women, like her, did heroin and moved on, kicking the habit in detox or on their own. Others went to jail, kicked heroin, and returned to the street. Some were infected with the AIDS virus from shared needles and would later die; others would eventually be infected with the virus. The local methadone clinic in the city began giving prostitutes, particularly those who were HIV positive, top priority for treatment in an attempt to stop the spread of AIDS. There was talk of starting a needle-exchange program.

  The deadly virus didn’t stop the men from circling the streets and prowling the bars for prostitutes. The chance a killer was picking them up didn’t stop the women with the overpowering hunger for heroin and cocaine. It was a gamble both sides took.

  MARYANN DILL AND JOSE GONSALVES were in their office, examining their notes one more time. They were looking for links in the disappearances, any commonality in the women’s lives, evidence from the scenes tying the cases together. They went through the list.

  Drug use. Check.

  Going to city bars where drugs were sold. Check.

  Boyfriends who used drugs. Check.

  Prostitution. Partial check. The troopers discovered all of the women were heavy into drugs but several, such as Nancy Paiva, were not widely known as working girls on the street.

  Friends in common. The troopers would always pause on that point. Drug users in a small city tended to hang together. Just knowing a person wasn’t suspicious, they knew, especially in those circles and particularly in a city the size of New Bedford. However, finding more people who knew the missing girls could help them craft a detailed timeline on the last hours—and minutes—of their lives. The list of missing girls—everyone in the office still called them “girls,” even though only one was a teenager—was now likely at least eight. With five bodies already found it was unlikely the rest of the missing women were still alive. This was turning into a massive homicide investigation, and one of the most difficult the troopers had ever seen. Some people they interviewed who might have information were addled by years of heavy drug or alcohol use, able to remember scenes but not the finer details investigators needed. It was like a picture frame without the photo, or the outline of a puzzle on a card table. At times, they felt they were close to finding the killer. Other times they were chasing shadows in a shifting light.

  One name kept coming up in interviews with girls on the street, relatives of the missing women, and even fellow cops as a potential good witness: Kenneth Ponte, a local lawyer. He had represented Mary Santos in a civil case, and when she disappeared he helped her husband print missing flyers. Dawn Mendes, the identified murder victim who went missing in September, was once seen banging on the door of his home. Ro
chelle Dopierala, last seen in April or May, was spotted in his car and stayed at his Chestnut Street home. Robbin Rhodes, missing sometime in the spring, once told her sister she was “dating” a lawyer, later identified as Kenny. Nancy Paiva, last seen walking away from a South End bar in July, once worked at the neighborhood video-rental store he frequented and had hired him in a bankruptcy case. Maryann and Jose already heard Ponte’s backstory: a former heroin addict who kicked the habit then went to college followed by law school. He eventually passed the bar and was picking up lower-level civil and criminal cases, the bread-and-butter cases to pay the bills. He was never a premier lawyer with headline cases. He was just trudging along under the radar, a big guy in a rumpled suit. He had donated to the Bristol County sheriff’s election campaign and was one of a number of people who would be designated as a deputy sheriff. It was primarily an honorary title but it also allowed Kenny to serve court papers and earn some extra cash. He got a badge and, despite his drug record, somehow got a gun. He was also a heavy cocaine user and, according to the girls and some cops who dealt with him, a bit weird. The girls on the street told stories about his paranoia, how he would bring them to his house, bolt the doors and wouldn’t let them leave. He didn’t seem violent, just really strange. But that didn’t stop the girls from going with him, and none of the girls considered pressing any charges. He did, after all, give them coke and didn’t seem interested in sex.