Finding information in the late 1980s was laborious. There were few surveillance cameras. There were no smartphones. Narcotics detectives used the chirping Nextel push-to-talk radios to communicate; most of the other cops still used a handheld radio or one in the cruiser, transmitting information the public could hear on a police scanner. The daily lexicon did not include Google. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no MySpace. People had passbook savings accounts, and canceled checks came back in the mail. Record searches were done by hand. There were major gaps in the statewide database for people wanted on warrants or reported missing. Files were sent by mail, not e-mail. Office computer systems were clunky, often slow, and unreliable. People still wrote things on yellow legal pads.
Police investigations centered on people, not technology, and that face-to-face interaction came with a price. In the six weeks since the remains of Dawn Mendes were found by the search dog in November, state police investigators worked more than a thousand overtime hours on the case, depleting the state police unit’s $170,000 budget. The Bristol County District Attorney’s Office added another $25,000 to the pot, but as January was coming to a close, that money was also running out.
Maryann and Jose were working, on average, about ninety hours a week. Three others in the unit were averaging about forty-five hours a week, juggling the highway killing case with other cases. Under the union contract, state police were forbidden to work overtime without getting paid. However, many of the investigators were working even longer than they were putting in for, just to get the work done. Maryanne and Jose were hoping if they worked longer, the case would be solved quicker. The payoff wouldn’t be in the paycheck; it would be with justice.
With a brown bag filled with junk food, Maryann and Jose slipped into their unmarked cruiser and began the hunt anew each night.
They circled the North End, the South End, and Weld Square. They crisscrossed the narrow city limits. When they saw someone they recognized, they stopped, talked, and moved on. Sometimes they stopped people on the street they didn’t recognize, hoping this new face had new information. By now the working girls knew the troopers—and just about all of the cops—by sight, if not by name. The girls no longer turned to run or walk briskly away. They now waved the cruisers over, offering tidbits from the street. They were all listening and watching and hoping. They were afraid.
One woman told them she was choked then raped months earlier by a man in a truck; another shared a similar story; yet another woman said a friend was taken to a local cemetery, then choked and raped. Women gave the names of friends who had been attacked and those friends, some now in the women’s state prison, named others. Sometimes the man claimed to be a boxer and sometimes the women assumed he was. He appeared well built and had a flattened nose, the kind so many boxers sport after years of fighting. In each case, the attacks came without warning: a hand to the throat, sometimes a punch, then the rape. A few of the women said the grip was so tight they blacked out. One said she thought she was going to die. One kicked her way out of the truck and ran to an apartment at a nearby housing project for help and called a friend. Another woman told friends about her attack when the man brought her back to Weld Square. No one reported the attacks to police at the time. One woman said she feared cops would arrest her instead for walking the streets. Another thought she had outstanding warrants. Yet another said she tried to tell a cop what happened and he shrugged her off.
Maryann and Jose took note of the man’s description. Other troopers and city detectives on the street were hearing similar stories. Who was this man? Was he the man?
THE MANDATE, as expected, came down fast mid-January: No one in the state police unit assigned to the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office would be allowed to work more than eight hours a day. The overtime account was dry, and the union contract forbade working without getting paid. “They are now only putting in a minimum of half of the amount of time,” the district attorney’s spokesman, Jim Martin, said at the time. “It is now slowing the investigation down. Until now, they have been moving full-steam ahead. Now it’s taking them that much longer to get to the next step.”6
The district attorney wanted the troopers in the unit to work different shifts to save money, a violation of the contract. Until more overtime was available, the rule was in by eight in the morning, out by four-thirty in the afternoon. Get done what you can in that time.
Jose and Maryann, as well as others, knew about the mandate. However, they couldn’t just stop; the families were counting on them; the girls on the street were looking to talk with them. There was a stack of potential leads to be checked out. They would pull one thread and unravel complex stories in interview after interview. Not everything happened during daytime working hours, Monday through Friday, especially in this investigation. They still worked into the evening, trimming their hours a bit but not much. Time, they knew, was not on their side in this case.
They continued to check the streets at night, talking with the prostitutes, the drug addicts, the drug dealers, hoping to find that one thread that would solve the case.
Jose and Maryann wove the cruiser through the side streets of the city to Weld Square, just to check who was there. They weren’t officially working this night, but they wanted to stay in contact with the people on the street, to stay on top of what was going on.
Jose recognized the figure walking along the sidewalk and pulled over. Jose knew the person’s backstory well by now: the man took the first steps of a sex-change operation, a procedure funded by a wealthy boyfriend. When the relationship ended, so did money for the surgery. Prostitution was the quickest way to make money to finish things up, he once told Jose. Both Jose and Maryann talked many times with the man about his past and what he was seeing on the street. He was perceptive, funny, and from what they could tell, he wasn’t an addict. He could make a good witness, if needed.
Jose swung the cruiser to the curb and waved the man over. Jose could see the broad smile of recognition on the man’s face. Jose thought the man looked a bit different, a bit more “shapely,” this night.
“Things are looking good,” the man told him. “Really good. I got new boobs. Want to see them?”
Jose shook his head. “No, that’s okay,” he answered.7
The man lifted his shirt. “Look. Look. Don’t they look good?”
Jose averted his eyes and kept shaking his head. “That’s okay. I don’t need to see them, really.”
The man lowered his shirt, smiling brightly. Nothing else new on the street, he told Jose.
Jose shifted the cruiser into drive and the troopers moved on. Anything can happen on these streets. Anything at all.
WITH A RADIO-STATION TAPE RECORDER at his feet, Bristol County district attorney Ronald A. Pina stood before the microphone stand with the governor at his side. Two months earlier, Governor Michael S. Dukakis lost a chance at the presidency to Republican George H. Bush and with it the Washington-bound dreams of dozens of Massachusetts politicians. Some predicted a Dukakis win would send the district attorney, always larger than the New Bedford political stage, to the nation’s capital. Jobs like U.S. attorney and state attorney general were bandied about by the political gossips.
Instead of standing outside the White House, the two, hands stuffed in winter overcoat pockets, were standing outside the downtown New Bedford Free Public Library before five microphones stuck on a stand with gaffer’s tape. The state was bailing out the financially depleted murder investigation.
“I can assure you we will provide the resources necessary in this investigation and that we will move forward,” the governor told reporters on January 26, 1989.8
The state would be adding roughly $100,000 into the overtime account, money the governor said would be well spent. “We’re not pouring money down any rat hole.”
The money, the district attorney added, would keep the investigation moving “full speed.”
A few blocks away that same day, Trooper Kevin Butler
and New Bedford detective Gardner Greany were in the DA’s office interviewing a woman named Violet about snuff films.
IT WAS THE THIRD TIME Violet F. Farland, who had a record for drug offenses, had been at Kenny Ponte’s Chestnut Street house, and she knew what to expect. Kenny would want to shoot coke; would get paranoid and think someone was hiding behind the couch; and she would be there a really long time. Kenny didn’t like the girls to leave his house, she knew. Sometimes he would bolt the doors to make sure they didn’t. He would always ask the girls to shoot him up with the coke, usually in the neck. He liked the girls to strip, and sometimes he would wander around the house in his underwear. Violet once worried there was too much cocaine in the needle and syringe. “I’m not going to shoot you up with all that,” she told him. “You’re going to die on me.”9 He chased her around a table in the house a couple of times until she did it. He didn’t seem interested in sex, just coke and company.10 Kenny was weird and seemed a little bit lonely. Other than that, he appeared harmless.
This time, after they did the coke, Kenny wanted to watch a movie. Violet wasn’t interested. She was too busy getting high. He slipped the videotape into the VCR. On the screen was a naked man who appeared to be strangling a woman with a belt.
“Kenny, will you shut that goddamn thing off,” she told him.11
“Oh, I want you to see this,” he answered.
“I don’t want to see shit like that,” she said.
Kenny turned it off.
It wasn’t the first, or the last, time Kenny would play a porn tape depicting what appeared to be a murder, police knew.
Another woman named Jeannie Kaloshis, before she eventually kicked her drug habit, spent days on end with Kenny during the summer of 1988, doing drugs, talking, and watching movies. The movies were usually porn films brought to the house by one of his friends. Most of the films were S and M films. When she saw the film showing a man strangling a woman, she noticed the woman’s eyes. It looked like the woman was dead.
THERE WAS A STACK OF VHS TAPES on Jose’s desk. It was going to be a long night, he knew. He needed to watch this latest stack of porn videos as part of the highway killing investigation and try to get the tapes back to the store by morning. The videos, he knew, would be grainy and the audio scratchy. Most would be in black and white.
Watching the films was needed to prove or disprove yet another theory in the murder case. Police kept hearing vague stories about snuff films being made in the area. They were also hearing stories that area women were appearing in locally produced pornographic films. Was any of this true? And if so, were any of the victims in these films? Did Kenny know about any of these tapes? That was what police needed to know.
For months, investigators had followed rumors about “snuff films” being made in the area as well as reports that local women were appearing in pornographic movies. They wondered: Could the films—if they existed—be tied to the killings? There was one report someone was making movies with women and a pig in a local motel room; another alleged someone was making movies in his home. One prostitute said the owner of a shady Weld Square magazine store frequented by addicts gave the girls money to dance naked while he videotaped them. Another prostitute claimed someone stole a sex tape and tried to blackmail a man; the tape never surfaced, and the claims were never substantiated. As part of the homicide investigation into possible ties with the creation of porn films, the owner of a Dartmouth video business had appeared before the grand jury and handed over his business records, and several video-store owners voluntarily gave police the porn tapes from their shelves so authorities could check to see any of the victims appeared in them.
It wasn’t the first time police had investigated the possibility of locally made porn tapes in the county. U.S. Customs agents helped investigate allegations in 1987 and in early 1988 that a Dartmouth business was producing child pornography. Adult videos were found, including one involving sex with animals. So were bootleg copies of popular films. But no movies involving children, one of the investigators said. No tapes involving people being killed were found either.
The stack of videos Jose now had was from the owner of a business on Bakerville Road in Dartmouth; some other videos were borrowed from a store in Fall River. Investigators would borrow roughly twenty at a time, give the owner a receipt and promise to get them back as soon as possible. Jose, Maryann, and other investigators had been reviewing the tapes for days, looking for familiar faces or places. Sometimes they fast-forwarded to the next scene to see the face. They never saw anyone being killed. There was no plot in any of the videos, just a lot of naked bodies. The films were barely watchable. Some were even boring.12
Jose took his stack home that night and, after dinner when the kids went to bed, plunked down on the couch in the den. He searched through one tape. Then a second. Then a third. Then a fourth. After a few hours, his wife peered into the room. He was sound asleep, remote in his hand. She woke him gently to say it was time to go to bed.
If snuff films were being made and if the murder victims were in any of them, investigators still couldn’t find them.
6IN THE CROSSHAIRS
BOB ST. JEAN strode into the waiting room of the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office and motioned to the heavyset man rising from the chair. It had been decades since he had been in the same room with Kenny Ponte, the last time was probably when the now attorney was arrested in his twenties on drug charges. Bob gave him a quick scan. Kenny had put on some pounds over the years but he still had that same cumbersome look.
Let’s go into the conference room, Bob suggested.
There, for a few minutes, the two talked and sized each other up before moving on to Bob’s office at the other end of the building. Kenny didn’t want anyone to see him there. He didn’t want to talk with anyone else. Only Bob St. Jean, nicknamed “the Saint.” The conversation in January 1988 in the office, like the ones on the phone, went in circles. Kenny wasn’t being unhelpful, but he wasn’t being helpful either. He seemed to want to mitigate his ties to the women and the drug scenes, Bob would later say. “He was looking to see what we knew, looking to cover his tracks.”1 This January meeting, the first face-to-face meeting, had a different tone though from the phone conversations. While Bob detected arrogance in Kenny’s voice in the telephone calls from Florida, he thought he could hear fear and a rising anger now. Over the phone, friends in New Bedford had read Kenny the newspaper stories suggesting he was tied to the victims—or killings. One newspaper report said a search dog had taken an interest in a rug in the office. Why did police search his old office, Kenny demanded. What was this about the dog and the rug? What were they trying to do to him? Why were they doing this?2
Bob sat back and listened. Kenny, we think you can help us. What can you tell us about Rochelle?
Bob knew the attorney was close to Rochelle Clifford Dopierala. The Cape Cod woman had stayed with Kenny for a while, and Kenny had driven her several times from New Bedford to Cape Cod. He had waited outside a mobile home one day in April while she met with a man inside. People saw her with him.
Bob knew Kenny didn’t come back to New Bedford from Florida just to talk with him. The real reason was a court case with ties to Rochelle. Nine months earlier, on April 3, 1988, Kenny was accused of pulling a gun on a guy Rochelle claimed had raped her that spring. Kenny wound up charged in district court—the court where most shoplifting, drug, and assault cases were tried—on charges of assault with a dangerous weapon. Rochelle, who had allegedly recanted the rape allegation, was supposed to be a witness. But by late April and early May, no one could find her. The case was set for trial February 27 and Kenny was back early for a pretrial court hearing—where attorneys can file additional motions and deal with other matters—in his case.
The conversation in the office continued to seesaw. Bob eased up when Kenny’s voice rose. He hit hard with questions when Kenny calmed down. Up and down. Down and up. Bob wanted to know what Kenny knew. He had the fe
eling Kenny was there to find out what the police knew.
Kenny circled back to the search of his Dartmouth law office. Why? And why tell the press, he demanded.
Bob denied the information—credited to “sources” in the media—came from his office. The interview was not going well.
Less than a half hour after it started, the meeting was over. Bob escorted the attorney out to the back elevator.
It would be the last friendly face-to-face meeting the two would have.
The next time Kenny called, he had a simple question: Am I a suspect?
Bob had a simple answer: Yes, one of several.
Kenny hung up.
Days after the meeting in the district attorney’s office, Kenny was standing in the same courthouse where Lizzie Borden had stood trial back in 1893, and a cadre of reporters were watching. A Bristol County grand jury had indicted him on the old gun case from April of 1988, a legal process which moved the case from district to superior court, and he was now being arraigned on those charges. “Not guilty, Mr. Clerk,” Kenny said when the clerk read off the charges.
Moving the case to a higher court where more serious cases are tried meant, if convicted, Kenny could face a longer sentence. It also gave the district attorney a chance to ask a judge to get hair and saliva samples from Kenny.
Kenny was cooperative at first: he let a state trooper pluck hair—including the root—from his head. He allowed saliva samples to be taken. He had no problem with the fingerprints or the palm prints. But when it came to taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeve, supposedly so police could take a photo of a tattoo, he balked. His lawyer convinced a judge to impound all of the samples—at least for now.
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