Hearse carrying the body of Sandra Botelho, the ninth body discovered, pulls away from the scene on Interstate 195 in Marion, Massachusetts, in April 1989 (Standard-Times photo by Jack Iddon)
Teams of dogs continued to search for more victims in 1989. Here Massachusetts Trooper Walter Keenan walks along Interstate 195 near Reed Road, the general area where three bodies were found in 1988 (Standard-Times Photo by Jack Iddon)
Judy DeSantos, sister of victim Nancy Paiva, hugs Chandra Greenlaw, the teen daughter of victim Debra Greenlaw DeMello, after Ponte was arraigned (Standard-Times photo by Dana Smith)
Paul Ryley, a friend of Kenneth Ponte, is brought to New Bedford Superior Court in handcuffs to testify before the special grand jury in January of 1990 (Standard-Times photo by Jack Iddon)
Authorities remove the ninth body, later identified as Sandra Botelho, from the woods off Interstate 195 in Marion on April 24, 1989 (Standard-Times photo by Jack Iddon)
The homes of Bristol County district attorney Ronald Pina and the mother of suspect Kenneth Ponte, separated by campaign signs in 1990 (Standard-Times photo by Hank Seaman)
First Assistant District Attorney Raymond P. Veary Jr. (left) and Bristol County district attorney Ronald A. Pina at the scene where the body of Mary Rose Santos was found along Route 88 in Westport in March 1989 (Standard-Times photo by Jack Iddon)
The press surrounds District Attorney Ronald Pina during a press conference outside New Bedford Superior Court in June 1989 (Standard-Times photo by Hank Seaman)
An angry Kenneth Ponte stops on the courthouse steps on his way into the courthouse where the murder charge was to be dropped to swear at a Standard-Times news photographer (Standard-Times photo by Jack Iddon)
State Trooper Jose Gonsalves walks to the scene with a bag for evidence where other investigators are examining the spot where the remains of Mary Rose Santos were found on Route 88 in Westport on March 31, 1989 (Standard-Times photo by Jack Iddon)
First Assistant District Attorney Raymond P. Veary Jr. walks along Route 140 in Freetown in the distance as a state trooper takes photo of the scene in March 1989 where the body of Robbin Rhodes was found (Standard-Times photo by Jack Iddon)
Trooper Ken Candeias talks with divers John Garcia and Jay Faulkner as they search a small waterway near Interstate 195 in Marion after the body of Sandra Botelho was found in April 1989 (Standard-Times photo by Ron Rolo)
His family was prominent in the way local people are who stay put and work in the community. His father was once the veterans’ agent in the city, his mother worked at local businesses, and they had raised three children. They were connected the way everyone can be in a small city: local politicians were neighbors, high school friends, or members of the same Catholic parish. They were a respectable middle-class family with a son who, as folks would whisper with shaking heads at the time, “was on drugs.” Drug addiction—and heroin addiction in particular—wasn’t openly discussed in polite society at the time. Few admitted the opiate snared the children of the well connected or middle-class parents in the city or surrounding suburbs. It was still considered a drug of the street, and the difficulty in shaking its hold was still misunderstood by many. Kenny Ponte’s family was rooting for him to succeed once he was released from jail, and it seemed to work.
To all appearances, he was turning his life around after getting out of jail. He went to Bristol Community College, and in 1974, while still in community college, he asked the state to wipe his record clean and give him a pardon. “My record represents a barrier towards fulfilling my goal of attending law school,” he wrote on the application. His probation officer agreed, noting the conviction was due to Kenny’s past drug problems. “During that time he became deeply involved in the local drug scene and ultimately became a very obvious addict,” the officer wrote in a letter, supporting the pardon. A state representative at the time, George G. Mendonca, also recommended the pardon be granted, telling the Advisory Board of Pardons in 1974 that Kenny had “done an outstanding job in rehabilitating himself.” He got the pardon.
Things in his life were changing. Drug addiction seemed to be in his past. He graduated from Southeastern Massachusetts University in nearby Dartmouth, later renamed UMass–Dartmouth, and earned a master of arts degree in public administration from Suffolk University in Boston by 1977. Two years later, he was working as a law clerk in the office of attorney Norman R. McCarthy Jr. in Westport. By 1980, he was awarded a degree from the New England School of Law and admitted to the bar the following year. Drug addiction and the streets appeared to be receding in the rearview mirror of his life.
Now, less than four years after graduating law school, it appeared this new life was unraveling.
Paul Boudreau, the New Bedford detective, had wondered as he watched the Porky’s film for the fourth time that night in 1984 how far gone the lawyer was and if he could ever recover.
WHILE BOB ST. JEAN tried to get more information from Kenny Ponte, other investigators in late November and early December of 1988 were still trying to identify the remains found along Route 140 in Freetown and Interstate 195 in Dartmouth. Clothing discovered scattered near the remains found in November by the Department of Public Works crew on the Reed Road entrance ramp on westbound side of Interstate 195 in Dartmouth appeared to match that of Nancy Paiva, the thirty-six-year-old mother who disappeared in July. The height and body frame appeared to also match Nancy’s description. The next step was to bring in her family to identify the clothing.
Judy DeSantos and her two nieces, Jill and Jolene, were apprehensive as they were led into the prosecutor’s conference room where clothes were neatly placed on a table late one December afternoon. A London Fog jacket. A purple tank top. Underwear. Two jackets. Three stud earrings—one solid gold, two with a chip of blue topaz. Socks.
Is this how you identify the missing, Judy wondered. Is this how it ends? With a few articles of clothing stretched out on a conference table?
Troopers Jose Gonsalves and Maryann Dill waited next to Judy and the girls.
“Do you recognize any of this?” Jose asked.23
Judy pointed to the London Fog jacket.
It was one her sister used to wear. It had been their mother’s.
Jill looked at the earrings and fought back tears. Two of the earrings, the ones with the December birthstones, had belonged to Jill’s own young daughter and the gold stud to her mother’s grandmother. Her mother always wore them. Jill thought it was her mom’s way to always keep her family close.
“My mother used to wear it,” she whispered to the state troopers, pointing to the earrings.24
The underwear?
“My mother’s,” Jill answered softly.
The sweatshirt?
“My mother’s,” she answered again.
Her sister, Jolene, looked hard at the troopers. She wanted to see her mother. Her family and the troopers could hear her voice beginning to crack.
It can’t be done, the troopers told the teen.
Jill could hear anger, frustration, and grief in her sister’s voice.
“Show me my mother,” Jill heard her repeat.25
It’s not possible, the troopers told her gently.
The investigators knew that the girls needed to hold tight a living image of their mother, not the haunting image of a dead body after four months of being exposed to the elements.
Did your sister have a partial plate? Judy was asked.
“Not that I know of.”
The troopers looked at the girls.
“I don’t think so,” Jill answered.
The troopers pressed them again.
Were they sure?
Judy was puzzled. Why were they asking this? Didn’t they have her sister’s dental charts?
“No, at least I don’t think so,” Judy said. “No, I’m pretty sure she didn’t.”
She told the troopers they should check her sister’s dental records. Earlier, she had told Detective John Dextradeur who Nancy’s
dentist was. The records must be somewhere, she told them. Wouldn’t they know right away if the records matched? Isn’t that how things were done?
The troopers looked at each other then made a mental note to check if any dental records had been given to the office. Then they quickly explained why they brought the three into the office. The clothing on the table before them had been found on Interstate 195, near one of the bodies, the troopers told them. Judy knew what that meant. Nancy’s daughters tried not to. The now eighteen-year-old Jill Paiva could feel her mind go blank as the troopers spoke. This wasn’t happening. This is a dream. A bad dream. This is not real. She could hear her younger sister’s voice in the background. She couldn’t tell if Jolene was crying or yelling or both. The troopers’ reassuring voices were verbal Muzak to her.
Jill focused on the gold earrings on the table, the ones her mother always wore. She could see her mother in her mind’s eye, the jewelry in her earlobes. She could see her mother’s smile. If she thought hard enough, she could imagine her mother’s voice.
Jill kept her eyes on the earrings until it was time to go.
TROOPERS MARYANN DILL AND JOSE GONSALVES had wanted to talk with Nancy’s girls when they came in to look at the clothes, but it was clear the youngest child was too upset. It was hard when a parent dies, even harder when it is murder. They planned to wait a couple of days to let the children try to process the possibility their mother was dead, check on the dental records, and then ask the family to come back to talk. It would not be easy for the girls, they knew. It was never easy for the children.
It was another late afternoon when Judy and her nieces returned to the state police offices to talk with investigators. Judy went into one room with Trooper William Delaney, the one called to the scene where the first two bodies were found in July: one in Freetown, the other in Dartmouth. Maryann and Jose split up to interview the girls alone. The troopers needed to know who had visited Nancy’s apartment, whether the girls recognized the photos of the missing women, whether they saw anything strange, whether they heard anyone make threats. It would take a few weeks before the troopers would be able to learn at least two women who had been reported missing had stayed in or visited Nancy’s apartment.
As the three left the DA’s office that evening, the body on the ramp still hadn’t been identified, and Nancy Paiva’s family was still in that state between fear and grief. Judy could see her young nieces were trying to focus on the present, on things they could control. Jolene looked at her aunt and told her she was hungry.
Billy Delaney slipped Judy some cash. Get something to eat, he told her quietly.
Judy knew feeding the children was easy. Healing their hearts would be harder.
MARYANN AND JOSE spent the next days and weeks making sure they now had up-to-date dental X-rays for all of the missing women. A Fall River detective, Bob Miller, called about a woman from his city who was reported missing in the spring of 1988 and was last seen in New Bedford and brought over her dental records. A Falmouth detective, Bob Nolan, tracked down Rochelle Dopierala’s records. They also had the records for Robbin Rhodes and for Sandra Botelho, and more records belonging to missing women from throughout New England would eventually be coming in.
At the top of their list was getting the dental X-rays belonging to Nancy Paiva. Handwritten dental charts for Nancy dated 1983 had been forwarded to the state police offices, as Judy believed, but the exact date that was done was unclear. However, a forensic dentist had done a preliminary comparison sometime in October of 1988, three months after Nancy went missing. The finding: there was a possibility Jane Doe No. 2, found on Interstate 195 on July 30, might be Nancy, but the dentist couldn’t be positive since, unlike X-rays, handwritten dental charts aren’t always accurate for identification purposes and can be misleading: sometimes things are entered on the chart wrong; sometimes a person goes to another dentist and additional, and extensive, dental work is done. When the information about that preliminary identification by the forensic dentist was forwarded to the state police was unclear; neither was it clear why Maryann and Jose were not made aware of the information earlier. However, even if the troopers had been aware of the information, it would not have been enough to make a positive identification. To confirm the preliminary finding from the dental charts, Jose, in the days following when the clothing was identified, tracked down Nancy’s most recent dentist to see if he could obtain her X-rays for comparison. The dentist Nancy had gone to in 1983 who had completed those initial handwritten charts had closed his office by that time, and Jose needed to learn if Nancy had gone to a new dentist sometime after the old charts were done. He prayed X-rays were taken—and those prayers were answered. The new dentist not only had Nancy’s full dental records—those records also included X-rays taken just three months before she went missing. They would now know for certain if that was Nancy’s body that was found on the ramp on November 8, where her clothes were discovered, or if the remains found at the end of July were hers, as the preliminary comparison of the dental charts suggested. Jose was taking no chances. He picked up the records personally.
The body on the ramp, where Nancy’s clothing was scattered, was not Nancy Paiva, a comparison of the X-rays and the teeth showed.
What the comparison later confirmed was that the remains found on Interstate 195 on July 30, 1988, the day Judy was returning home from the pool and saw a line of police cars along the highway, were those of Nancy Paiva.
By the end of December, three more bodies, in addition to Nancy’s, would have names.
FOR MONTHS, Judy had stayed focused on finding her sister, keeping her family together, and trying not to let the stress influence her performance at work. She felt like a juggler on a high wire, keeping different aspects of her life in the air, trying not to let anything fall. She couldn’t fall. She didn’t have a safety net below.
Throughout the summer, people had called her to say they saw Nancy. One person claimed to see her in a bar in the South End, another at a club in the North End, yet another saw her walking in the West End. Judy bounced around the city, trying to follow up on the sightings. Judy was surprised at the strength she was finding within herself. She would walk up to strangers, ask them questions and demand answers. She would go into darkened bars she once feared—usually with a friend, of course, she wasn’t that brave yet—to follow up potential leads. Now, after seeing the clothing stretched out on the conference table at the DA’s office, the chance that Nancy would return alive seemed to be slipping away. Judy couldn’t keep the images of her sister’s clothes on the table out of her mind. She stared at the typewriter at work and fought back tears. Judy the introvert was slowly channeling her sister’s strength.26
IT WAS DECEMBER, soon after Nancy Paiva’s family had identified her clothing, and New Bedford detective John Dextradeur wasn’t feeling well. A year earlier, he was told his heart wasn’t in the best of shape and that he needed to be careful. There was a history of heart trouble in his family, he knew, and the stress of the job was getting to him. Smoking also didn’t help. He spent months trying to convince people there might be a serial killer in the area after he noticed a number of people had gone missing. The chief investigator for the district attorney, Robert St. Jean, and Trooper Jose Gonsalves seemed to take notice, and he was pleased to see search dogs were brought in to comb the highways. But the case still didn’t seem to be moving fast enough for John. More could be done, he thought. In the meantime, he was feeling sort of “off.” He felt tired most of the time, even after a good night’s sleep. He suspected it might be his heart. He knew he wouldn’t live to collect his pension if he continued at this pace and stayed on the job much longer. That’s what he told his son, Chris, who was attending the police academy to become a cop. He also told him not to worry if he was rushed from the station with chest pains.27 Better to have a suspected heart attack on the job rather than at home.
Then it happened, midday on the job in a nearly empty detective-division o
ffice, the time when most of his colleagues were out in the field.
Detective Richard Ferreira looked up from his desk in the check-and-fraud division office where he was banging out yet another report on the typewriter and saw his longtime friend in the adjoining, violent-crime office trying to stand. You all right, buddy? Richie asked, walking toward the desk.28
John looked pale. He seemed uneasy on his feet and appeared woozy. He was having difficulty breathing. I just need to get out of here, he answered.
Richie loosened his friend’s tie and collar and helped him to a nearby conference room. The captain, Carl Moniz, came in, took one look at his detective, and called for an ambulance.
That was the last day John Dextradeur would work as a detective. He would be off the job on sick leave for months and then, on May 28, 1989, he would officially retire with a full disability pension due to his heart issues. He was forty-seven.
On the day the man who helped launch the massive murder investigation left the police department in an ambulance, six bodies had been found. By the time John officially retired, that number would grow to nine.
JUDY COULD FEEL her hands shaking as she took deep breaths sitting at her desk at city hall. The day before, the troopers—Maryann and Jose—told her they would know by today for sure if one of the bodies found on Interstate 195 was that of her sister. She knew part of the answer: Nancy was dead. Nancy would never leave without her children. If she did, she would make sure the girls were safe with family or close friends. She would never miss the girls’ birthdays. She would never just not call. And then there was the clothing she saw, neatly spread on the table in the prosecutor’s office for identification. The clothes were Nancy’s, she knew. But the body found a few feet away from the clothing apparently was not, she was told by state police. She was told it was likely the body found in July on Interstate 195 was that of her sister. She wasn’t sure why it took so long, but she was thankful she would finally have an answer.
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