Shallow Graves

by Maureen Boyle

  Forensic experts hired to examine all of the remains told investigators, based on a comparison using dental X-rays, there was a nearly 100 percent chance another set of remains found in July on Interstate 195 were those of Nancy Paiva. But what if it wasn’t her? she wondered. What if they still didn’t know?

  Judy didn’t know whether to throw up or cry. She was nervous. She was scared. She was sad. Today she would have an answer. Maybe. But first she needed to get through this day at work in the election office. The workday—in at eight, out by four—gave her a sense of normalcy. There would be lunch, there would be a break, there would be people coming in. Work to be done. It could be just another day. Her coworkers knew Judy’s sister was missing and knew she considered the office her refuge from the reporters looking for interviews. The office—and work—created a protective blister for eight hours, five days a week. Today, though, she didn’t tell her coworkers why she was so anxious. To do that, she would have to face a truth she still didn’t know. And she was afraid she would cry. Judy was a stoic type. Tears are best kept hidden and fears confronted. But today, she wasn’t sure she could do either.

  She told the troopers to wait until she wrapped up work and then meet her at the office at city hall to talk. There were too many people at her house, too many children, too many reporters circling the neighborhood waiting to see if her family is one of the unlucky—or is it the lucky?—ones to be visited by the state police.

  Judy was dreading this day. For the last five months, in her mind at least, her sister was alive. She could imagine Nancy popping up on her doorstep, asking where her kids were. Jill and Jolene would run up to their mother and hug her. They would cry, then laugh. Judy would ask where she had been. She would yell at Nancy for taking off—maybe. She knew it was an unlikely scenario. She knew her sister would never leave her girls like this. But she didn’t want to think of her sister as dead. She had to pretend the unlikely had happened. She could pretend Nancy was coming back. All this was possible yesterday. All this was possible this morning. All this was possible as Judy sat at her desk, waiting for the end of her workday. Part of her wanted to stay at work. Here, at her desk, there was a routine. She knew what to expect. When she left today, she would be stepping off an emotional ledge. She just hoped there was something to catch her.

  Nine people had been living in Judy’s five-room apartment since her sister disappeared: Judy, her husband, her four children, and Jill and her two children. At one point it briefly had been ten, but two months earlier Jolene moved back in with an aunt on her father’s side.

  Her niece Jill, however, was getting tired of the cramped living. After searching for an apartment, the young mother finally found one in the city’s South End. Jill was determined to be in her own place for her daughter’s second birthday and insisted on moving out the day before. Stay one more day, Judy asked her. Just one more day. She didn’t say why. What if the troopers told her they still hadn’t found Nancy? What good would it do to put her sister’s children through more agony?

  Judy looked at the clock. It was four o’clock. Time to leave.

  Maybe it wasn’t Nancy. Maybe it really was a big mistake. Maybe she really did just take off. Maybe.

  Judy grabbed her purse, bolted from the office, and then out the front doors of city hall. If no one says Nancy is dead, then she isn’t. If the troopers hadn’t come to city hall, if they weren’t even waiting outside, it will all be good. She will yell at her sister for putting them through these months of hell. She will yell after she hugs her. She walked faster through downtown. One step closer to home. One step closer to life staying in limbo. One step closer to believing Nancy was alive.

  The unmarked cruiser pulled alongside her. She stopped, afraid to turn.

  It was Maryann Dill and Jose Gonsalves.

  Judy pulled open the rear door and got inside.

  We’re so sorry, Maryann began.

  The forensic dentist made the final confirmation using the dental X-rays Jose tracked down. The body found on Interstate 195 in Dartmouth on July 30, that hot day Judy drove by with her family and saw police on the side of the road, that day she insisted her sister was found, was officially identified. It was Nancy-Lee Paiva, thirty-six, mother of two. The intense heat of that July summer had left Nancy’s body so decomposed it appeared she had been out there for months, not weeks.

  Judy sat quietly in the back seat. She couldn’t cry.

  “Where do you want us to take you?” Jose asked. “Who do you want to tell first?”

  It was important to notify everyone in the family and close friends quickly. The district attorney planned to officially announce news of the identification the next afternoon. No one wanted relatives to find out through media reports. First on the list were Nancy’s two girls.

  The troopers spent the next two hours with Judy, making stops at two apartments: one in the South End to notify Jill, the second to United Front Homes to notify Jolene.

  Jill remembers how surreal it was to have Judy and the two troopers standing in her apartment, saying her mother’s body was officially identified. “I was a little bit relieved and confused. I was like not thinking it was real,” she recalled.29

  An hour later, Judy and the investigators pulled up to the apartment where Jolene—then fourteen—was living with her paternal aunt, Linda Spinner.

  The three spotted Jolene getting out of Linda’s red Mustang.

  Linda didn’t give it much thought when she saw the unmarked cruiser out of the corner of her eye as she drove into the parking lot. An unmarked state police car was a common sight at United Front Homes. Then she saw the cruiser stop. Then she saw the two troopers she knew get out. Then she saw Judy. And she knew.30

  A day earlier, Jolene helped string Christmas lights around the living room window with her fifteen-year-old cousin, Jon, and her aunt Linda. It was something Linda encouraged her to do to get in the Christmas spirit, to forget her mom was missing. For that moment, as they strung lights, it was just a Merry Christmas.

  “Jolene, I need to talk with you,” Judy called, as she walked from the cruiser.

  There, in the parking lot of United Front Homes, the teen was told her mother was dead.

  Maryann Dill would later describe the scenes as heartbreaking. “I remember the girls as just being so young,” she recalled.31

  Throughout the night, calls went out to family and friends.

  The next day, the district attorney would announce it to reporters.

  “Then the floodgates opened,” Judy recalled.

  Reporters camped out in front of Jolene’s school, and outside the homes of Linda Spinner and Judy. They tracked the women to their workplaces. The phone calls were incessant. It was hard to grieve amid the news noise.

  IT WAS LIKE MOST of the tenements in the close-packed Broad Street neighborhood in Fall River: well kept and freshly painted, with the storm windows that pinch the fingers when you open them. It was a neighborhood of people who worked hard in the shops, who went to the neighborhood church, where families gathered for Sunday dinners. It was an ordinary neighborhood with ordinary people living ordinary lives.

  Night had already fallen when Maryann and Jose walked up the stairs and knocked on the door. They were recently given the name of yet another woman who went missing and, with the name, were able to match her fingerprints with one set of remains. For five months, the first victim found along the highway had remained unidentified. Until now. Debra Medeiros, twenty-nine, of Fall River, left the New Bedford home she shared with her boyfriend and his family in May after an argument and never returned. Her mother reported her missing to Fall River police a month later. Her body, like that of Nancy Paiva’s, was skeletal when found, erroneously leading authorities to believe she had been dead much longer than she was.

  The troopers knew the background of Debra Medeiros. She had been arrested for drugs, was in jail at one point, and had been in and out of local rehab programs. Freetown detective Alan Alves would lat
er say she was once one of his informants. She had been staying on Liberty Street in New Bedford, within a three-block radius of where two other victims lived. She likely knew some of the other missing and dead women. She could have known their friends. She could have known her killer. All this, they would be looking into later. At this moment on December 8, 1988, however, they had a more important task.

  The door opened.

  “I’m sorry,” Jose told Debra’s mother, Olivia Medeiros.32

  In the apartment, another daughter was there to comfort her.

  “If she had died from a heart attack or overdose I think I could handle it,” the mother later told a reporter, Carol Lee Costa-Crowell from the Fall River Herald News. “But this, this, it’s amazing how many sick people are out there. I hope she didn’t suffer.”33

  IT WAS A WEEK before Christmas, and most houses along the street paralleling Route 28 in South Yarmouth glimmered with holiday lights. Jose and Maryann pulled the unmarked cruiser onto a side street and into the darkened driveway of the small Cape Cod–style home. The two had spent the few days after the most recent body was found in the Dartmouth gravel pit talking with an ever-growing list of people with snippets of information that went nowhere. The medical examiner determined the cause of death of the woman as strangulation, and a forensic dentist had positively identified the remains as that of Rochelle Dopierala.

  All that was left was notifying loved ones, in this case Rochelle’s mother, and this was the hardest part of the job.

  In this moment, before the knock at the door, the troopers knew that, for the family, the missing woman was still thought of as being alive. The months-long purgatory of uncertainty provided a shred of hope. This potential nightmare of not knowing could give way to an implausible dream. The family of someone who went missing faced a desperate need for an answer mixed with the dread of learning the truth.

  The troopers paused in the cruiser, the engine idling in the cold Cape Cod air. Then, the two got out and walked to the front door.

  Jose got there first and knocked. The door opened. He could see the look of recognition and pain in the eyes of Rochelle’s mother. He had seen it too many times in his years on the state police.

  State troopers know from experience what to say when they notify someone about a death. Too many times they’ve had to knock on doors to tell a family about a fatal crash. They learn quickly. Prepare for the unexpected. Be gentle. Be caring. But in that moment, before the door opens, before a parent of one becomes childless, before a wife or husband becomes a widow or widower, there is often that flutter of unease. Troopers often try to figure out how a family member might react and come up with a plan to console them. It doesn’t always work.

  Some people collapse. Some wail. Some yell. Some are angry. Some are quietly still. But that deep, aching agony is always there in the eyes. That was what Jose could now see as he looked at the mother of twenty-nine-year-old Rochelle Dopierala on this night.

  He began to talk.

  I’m sorry. . . .

  The woman’s eyes shifted to a figure behind him.

  Then she froze.

  He saw her face change for a second, her eyes slightly brightening.

  Maryann crossed the dim threshold behind her partner, the light from the interior finally illuminating her face.

  The mother began to cry.

  I thought you were Rochelle. I thought you brought her home. I thought you found her, she told Maryann.34

  I’m so sorry, Maryann answered. I’m so very sorry.

  The troopers told her Rochelle was identified as the woman found in the gravel pit in Dartmouth a few days earlier. They expressed their condolences. They asked: who could they call? Who would she like to be with? What does she need?

  No one, she told them, shaking her head. No one.

  The troopers knew the only person Rochelle’s mother wanted on that night—no, needed that night a week before Christmas—was gone.

  WAYNE PERRY opened the front door of his South Plymouth home three days before Christmas and saw the two troopers.

  He knew, before they said a word, that his sister was dead.

  He heard them say they were sorry. He heard them offer condolences. His sister, Debra Greenlaw DeMello, they were telling him, was positively identified as the person found dead by a cleanup crew on the eastbound Reed Road ramp in Dartmouth on November 8. It didn’t come as a surprise. He knew something was wrong months earlier when his sister first missed her daughter’s sixteenth birthday, a worry that increased when she didn’t call on their mother’s birthday.

  “You hear from Debbie?” he had asked their mother several times. “It’s been a while.”35

  She would shake her head. It wasn’t unusual for Deb to drop out of sight for weeks but this was longer than usual.

  Deb was serving time in Rhode Island on a prostitution charge in June of 1988 when she had walked from a Rhode Island prison work-release program. She was now officially considered a prison escapee, and her brother didn’t really expect her to pop up at home after that. But no phone calls? No cards? Not even a quick call to ask for money?

  And then those bodies kept cropping up along the highways outside New Bedford, about forty-five minutes from Providence. One after another. He worried—no, he knew–one would be his sister. That was why he called the district attorney’s office a few weeks earlier to see if anyone had checked to see if one of the women might be Deb. He hoped someone would dismiss the idea right off. We know who they all are, he wanted them to say. We know it is not your sister. The trooper on the phone—Jose Gonsalves—was polite when Wayne called that day to give Deb’s description.

  Wayne was ready to hang up when he remembered something else. The trooper had asked earlier if she had any broken bones or anything else that could identify her. Wayne at first didn’t think so. But now, as he prepared to end the conversation, it came back: that time when his sister was in the women’s prison in Framingham, Massachusetts, she got hurt in a fight or a fall.

  “There was another thing,” Wayne told him. “She broke her wrist when she was in Framingham.”

  He heard the trooper’s voice change.

  Did he know which wrist? Wayne was asked.

  Wayne knew at that moment, just before he hung up the phone, his sister would not be coming home.

  FLASHING BACK A YEAR to December 1987: Christmas was less than a week away, and Debra Greenlaw DeMello felt a crushing emptiness. Debra was spending the holiday in a women’s prison in Rhode Island, serving a twenty-one-month sentence on a charge of loitering for the purpose of prostitution. Two of her children were living with her mother; a third was living with the extended family of a former lover. Her mother, brothers, and sisters lived more than an hour and a state away. She made, then broke, promises to her family and disappointed her children—all to chase the high that had first snared her more than a decade earlier. It was a high that was never as good as the first time, an elusive high she could never quite “catch” again. There were just the lows. This is what a life of heroin got her: a cell in a state prison and a fractured family. She knew how she got there. She now wished she could have chosen differently so many years earlier.

  Debra once tried explain to her mother how tight a grip heroin had on her, how hard it was to stop using. “I hope you see in your heart that I am just a weak person who couldn’t seem to take control of her life,” she wrote in a letter dated August 5, 1982. “Herion [sic] is a dangerous enemy it makes you completely helpless in life even after the withdrawals are gone. The anger part starts again it’s the need to be high that destroys all thoughts all good intentions of wanting to stay straight.”

  Debra knew her addiction led to missing so many milestones in her children’s lives: the first day of school, school plays, birthdays, reading a bedtime story. There were times she wasn’t even sure what her children looked like. Five years earlier, when her son, Justin, was two, and daughter, Chandra, was nine, she was in the women’s state pr
ison in Framingham, Massachusetts, the only lockup for women in the state. It had been a while since she had seen the children and wondered how they were faring. She wrote a letter to her mother, asking about her toddler son. “Is he talking a lot? Is he fat?” She added a p.s. at the bottom: “Ma, does Justin still remember me? HUG Chandra for me!”

  Debra tried, really tried, to stay straight at different points in her life. She went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, she cycled through detox programs, she turned to God. Each time, heroin was always stronger than she was.

  Now, at age thirty-five, after testing positive for the virus causing AIDS, she feared she was seeing the end of her life before she could make amends, before she could really live, before she could prove she really loved. The month of December 1987 had started on a high note in prison: she got new glasses and, after some teeth were pulled, she was finally getting fitted for dentures. “All I wanted for Xmas was my two front teeth and got them all. Ha-ha!” she wrote her mom. She drew a smiling face beneath the note in teenager-like flowery handwriting. Deb was trying to stay upbeat, despite her medical issues. She expected to be paroled in four months and had repeatedly promised her mother that this time, really, things in her life would be different. Her outward optimism, though, began to crack as the weeks stretched on and the side effects surfaced from the antiviral drug AZT, or azidothymidine, she was taking to stall the advance of AIDS. She first worried how she would be able pay for this cutting-edge and expensive treatment—which cost between $8,000 and $10,000 a year at the time—once she was paroled. Then she noticed her hair falling out. She began to forget things. She was frightened. She didn’t want to die. There was a strong chance she would—and it likely would be in the next two years. In the 1980s, the death rate for those with AIDS was high as researchers scrambled to find “drug cocktails” to combat the virus and increase lifespans. Just 15 percent of people with AIDS survived five years after being diagnosed, New York City researchers found in 1987. The average intravenous drug user lived about a year and a half after being diagnosed.36 Debra likely wasn’t aware of the death-rate numbers but she could feel her body wasting away behind bars. “I’ve killed time, squandered it, lost days, weeks, years. Now, I know there is a limit, an end, and I’m just reaching out now to save the very life I’ve destroyed,” she wrote in one letter.