Lou researched what other departments in the country were doing with databases and how they handled complex cases, such as serial killings. With the blessing of the district attorney, he and Julian Paul flew to Seattle in August of 1989 to see how detectives in Washington State handling the then unsolved Green River–killer case compiled information and coordinated investigative agencies. There, the two talked with an investigator, looked at some of the crime scenes and examined how the Green River Task Force organized and cross-referenced files. “That was still an open case at the time,” Lou said. (The Green River Killer, Gary Leon Ridgway, was finally caught in 2001, confessed to killing seventy-one women and was convicted of forty-nine slayings between 1982 and 1998.)
By the time the two flew back to Massachusetts, they were feeling upbeat.
“I thought we were on the right track,” Lou recalled. “The stuff was coming together.”12
The information going into that database was coming from more than a dozen local and state police investigators. However, in early 1989, in the months leading up to the creation of that database, it was a much more basic investigation. The human end of the investigation, where detectives were delving into the lives of those on the edge and trying to prod the hazy memories of addicts was more difficult. Some of what they learned could not be boiled down into a cold computer entry. Sometimes the stories the investigators heard were heartbreaking, like when one of the women they had interviewed several times discovered she was HIV positive. Sometimes it was uplifting, like when one of the women noted she had been clean for six months. Sometimes it was just unexplainable to anyone except those “on the job.” Sometimes things were just plain weird.
THE DOOR WAS OPEN to Trooper Kevin Butler’s office at the district attorney’s office in New Bedford. In the days, weeks, and months since he saw Andy Rebmann’s dog find the remains of Dawn Mendes on Interstate 195 in Dartmouth, the trooper found himself—like many of the investigators—bouncing across the region to find witnesses and evidence. Now, the trooper, who grew up in Brockton about forty-five minutes north of New Bedford, was staying late yet again to interview another potential witness in the murder case. Each person he talked to yielded another piece of information. Sometimes what they said was irrelevant, other times it appeared to cut to the heart of the case.
This night, he was in the office with a female colleague interviewing a New Bedford prostitute. The woman sitting in the office knew the drug scene, she knew Kenny Ponte, and she knew the women who had been assaulted by johns in the past year or so. She appeared to be a credible witness who remembered details and sometime rough dates, despite years of drug use.
Jose could hear the troopers talking as he walked down the hall, toward his own office. He could hear snippets of the questions and the answers. Curious, he stopped at the open door and noticed Kevin was deliberately looking away from the woman. The female trooper looked bemused.
Jose glanced at the witness as she nervously crossed her legs once, twice, three times. Then he noticed: she wasn’t wearing panties. He hurried back to his office. Years later, he was reminded of that scene while watching the 1992 film Basic Instinct, where actress Sharon Stone, dressed in a skimpy white dress, seductively, during an interrogation, crosses her legs to reveal she wasn’t wearing underwear. For now, though, this wasn’t a movie scene. It was just another night in the investigation.
For the state and local police detectives on the case, it still remained a nearly around-the-clock job in early 1989. Each daytime tip meant a nighttime trip through the city searching for potential witnesses and sources. Sometimes a state trooper paired up with a city detective, sometimes with a fellow trooper. Sometimes they went alone.
Jose and Maryann usually searched the streets and interviewed people together; sometimes New Bedford detective Richard Ferreira joined them. Richie worked check and fraud cases, the type of crime many addicts—particularly women—were drawn to. There were several reasons: some businesses at the time were more likely to cash a check from a woman, and it was a nonviolent crime often drawing fines, not jail terms.
After years in New Bedford’s detective division, Richie knew quite a bit about the city’s heroin and cocaine addicts. He knew where they lived, where they hung out, what they looked like, and who their friends were. Richie, like nearly all of the detectives working the case, was juggling a full caseload with this new, top-priority investigation. There was no one, anywhere, to pick up the slack. Often Richie would be in the New Bedford station, typing out reports on the case—he typed the fastest of the three—when the phone would ring and he either rushed to the DA’s office or Maryann and Jose would pick him up. They would head to MCI Framingham, the state prison for women, or someone’s house, or to any of a handful of lockups in the state to interview possible witnesses. Sometimes they would circle the city streets, searching for the people who might know something. With his broad smile, easy laugh, and earnest talk, Richie could get just about anyone to talk. He came across as the good friend there to help. Richie was a good addition to the team, Jose knew.
One thing nagged the trio as well as others working the case: the district attorney’s continuing fascination with Kenny Ponte, who had already been indicted in January 1989 in a gun case. There were other people who looked better and needed to be examined closer. Technically, the district attorney wasn’t naming Kenny as a suspect. The prosecutor would always note investigators were looking for the “person or persons” responsible for the killings. However, Kenny’s name somehow made its way onto newspaper pages and onto the television and radio airwaves as a person tied to the dead women. It wasn’t helping the investigation. Putting Kenny’s name out in the media wasn’t forcing him to cooperate. It was having the opposite effect. He wouldn’t talk with anyone in the office now. It also wasn’t fair to suggest, even in broad terms, that he was a suspect. Kenny wasn’t charged in the murders. From what police had so far, there wasn’t any evidence linking him to murder. None of the girls who went to Kenny’s house said he tried to kill them. Most of the girls said he wouldn’t even have sex with them. Kenny knew the murder victims, but so did a lot of other people.
In December and early January of 1989, Jose flipped through the Boston and New Bedford newspapers each morning and afternoon, scanning the headlines: “Lawyer Was Pardoned on Two Drug Convictions,” read one. “Lawyer Was Seen with 3 Highway Killing Victims, Witness Says,” read another. “Lawyer Was Seen with Victim,” read yet another. As January came to a close, Kenny remained in the headlines and, it appeared, the focus of the investigation in the district attorney’s mind.
Tunnel vision, Jose said to himself yet again. I hope the DA doesn’t have tunnel vision.
THE FILE FOLDERS were brimming with reports. Some were typed, some handwritten. There were interviews with drug addicts, with store owners, with psychics, with families of the victims, with friends of the victims, with employers, with social service workers. There were neatly typed official reports from medical examiners, from laboratories, from technicians. There were motor-vehicle reports, criminal-background reports, and photographs. There was information from the tip lines. The information gathered was detailed and massive. There was a problem, and it was a serious one, Bristol County district attorney Ronald A. Pina knew. Many of the witnesses were drug dependent, some were infected with the AIDS virus, and could be gone, or dead, before the case—if they could even press one—went to trial. He wanted these people on the record, under oath. He also wanted to make sure they were telling police everything they knew.
We are going to launch a grand jury investigation into the case, Pina told his chief investigator, Robert St. Jean, the state police staff sergeant, Gale “Pat” Stevens, as well as Maryann and Jose. Get everyone under oath. Get the stories—all the stories—on the record. We can sort it all out later. Bob St. Jean knew it made sense to do it that way. Drugs and alcohol can fade the memory quickly. They needed to lock in the evidence, whatever it may be, and the testi
mony. A special grand jury, just to hear this case, seemed sensible. Hopefully, Bob thought, it will go smoothly.
Word spread quickly through the office in February of 1989 that the murder investigation—the district attorney was still reluctant to call it a serial killing—was taking a different turn. The district attorney would launch a special grand jury investigation into the deaths, and he would handle it personally. He would question the witnesses. He would present the evidence. Some worried it would be a disaster. Others predicted it would turn into a media circus. Ron Pina was bright, personable, and a good politician but district attorneys generally hired the prosecutors to do the boots-on-the-ground work. Rarely did they try a case or present cases to a grand jury. The staff could count on one hand the number of cases the DA personally prosecuted while in office. They weren’t shining courtroom moments. So, why was he doing it now?
Jose saw the upside of the plan in theory: get people under oath while memories are still fresh. But doing that took more than just issuing a subpoena. It took manpower to find these people and manpower was already stretched thin in the county. More than a dozen state and local detectives were still tracking leads, interviewing witnesses, scouring motor-vehicle, financial, prison, and arrest records. The teams were already regularly logging an average of fifteen hours daily in the case. Overtime money already ran out once, and there was the fear it would yet again.
Generally, a prosecutor in Massachusetts will present concise evidence and testimony to a grand jury then ask the panel to hand up an indictment charging the suspect with a crime. Grand juries sit fairly regularly, often once a month; and there are usually up to twenty-three people on the panel. Unlike a trial jury, grand jurors do not have to unanimously agree to indict; only a dozen or more must agree. For a case to move to superior court in Massachusetts, a person must be indicted by a grand jury; as a result, a typical grand jury may hear testimony in cases ranging from armed robbery to rape to murder. However, a special grand jury can be used as an investigative tool by prosecutors to subpoena records, witnesses, and other evidence with the plan to eventually charge someone. The main difference: prosecutors presenting to a “regular” grand jury have the evidence to hook a suspect; prosecutors presenting to a special grand jury are still fishing. The question now was whom was the district attorney trying to bait?
The district attorney, through his spokesman, stressed the panel wasn’t targeting any one person. “We are not seeking an indictment at this time,” the district attorney’s spokesman, James Martin, said at the time. “We are using the grand jury investigative powers to compel witnesses to testify.”13
This new, special session of the grand jury was originally set for March 1, 1989, but it was already being put off for a day. The district attorney was testifying before a State House committee on a state forfeiture plan that day. The extra twenty-four hours would come in handy for the police on the case. The investigators had had only two weeks to serve subpoenas, track witnesses, reinterview them, and figure out how to get them all to court.
Meanwhile, new tips were still coming in.
IT WAS VISITING HOURS at the Bristol County House of Correction in New Bedford, a century-old walled-off, two-story red-brick building a few blocks just outside the city center, and Jeannie Kaloshis was there to visit her husband. She was also there to slip him a little something extra, some heroin. The two had a history of drug arrests and heroin addiction. Going through withdrawal in jail, cold turkey, was not pretty. One’s body shakes and sweats. There are stomach cramps, vomiting, nervousness. Some people get diarrhea. Nearly everyone says it feels like death. This “gift” to him would keep that pain away.
Bristol County House of Correction was the oldest working jail in the country, and it wasn’t air-conditioned. Even for this June 1988 visiting day, it was hot. Visitors were corralled in the center-caged rotunda of the jail and, separated by wire, would visit for up to sixty minutes. The correction officers would try to keep watch inside the rotunda with the visitors and outside the caging with the inmates. They didn’t see everything.
On the day Jeannie Kaloshis visited her husband, only one person saw her slip heroin through the caging. She discovered this when a man approached her as she was leaving. He saw what she had done; she could get in trouble for that, he said. By the way, he added, when would she be coming back?14
The man was a lawyer. His name was Kenneth Ponte.
The next day, she met him again outside the jail at the corner of Ash and Union Streets. He liked to party, he told her. Want to get some coke and heroin?
She hopped into his Datsun 280Z, and they drove to his Chestnut Street home. He handed her lingerie. Put it on, he told her. Then they did the drugs.
The first time, she injected cocaine into Kenny’s neck because he didn’t like to do it himself. He began to foam at the mouth and sweat. Then paranoia set in. The police were outside, he told her. They’re raiding the house. He was frantic and tossed a quarter ounce of cocaine down the sink.15
She would later tell Trooper Kevin Butler and New Bedford detective Gardner Greany that she stayed with Kenny often that summer of 1988 doing drugs. When she wanted to get away for a bit, she would introduce him to a friend who wanted to get high. One of those friends was Rochelle Clifford Dopierala, the woman later found dead in the Dartmouth sandpit.
There was a steady stream of women at Kenny’s house between the spring and fall of 1988. He always supplied the drugs or gave money to the women to buy him the drugs so no one would see him. He was using so much cocaine at the time, even the hardcore addicts were nervous. “I would have to keep hitting him with cocaine. I was afraid I would kill him,” one woman told police.16 Another woman said he was injecting coke every fifteen to twenty minutes when she was with him.17
When Kenny talked, he bragged. He claimed he got high with the district attorney’s girlfriend, although there was never any evidence of that; that he knew important people; that he was important. He was, he reminded them again and again, a lawyer. He was also, as one woman told police, kinky and paranoid.18 Another woman called him a “real freak” who ran around in his underwear.19
One woman with a fifteen bag a day habit—roughly $300 at the time—remembered walking along Franklin Street in the city in May of 1988, desperately needing a fix. A Datsun 280Z pulled up.
“Looks like you need what I got,” the driver told her.20
She hopped in. They first drove to Hazard Street to buy three bags of heroin, then to Rivet and South Street in the South End to buy a sixteenth of coke. Kenny flashed a $16,000 check and drove to a bank across from the district courthouse. While inside, the woman searched the glove box and found a letter addressed to Attorney Kenneth Ponte.
At his home, she injected him in the neck with coke and she did a “speed ball,” a combination of heroin and cocaine. Then he ordered her to strip. He locked the doors. Give me another shot, he told her. Paranoia set in. Kenny began crawling through the house on his hands and knees, checking the door locks. He wouldn’t let her leave for two days. The next time it happened, two months later, she escaped by telling him they needed more drugs.
More women began to stay at Kenny’s house for longer stretches, burning through his cash and coke. “He would do coke, then walk around the house on all fours and bark like a dog and sometimes foam at the mouth,” yet another woman told police.21
Things started to get stranger.
While a pornographic movie played on his widescreen television, he crawled naked on the floor peering out the windows. One prostitute said he used to throw her around while trying to get aroused. He pulled a gun on another woman who tried to leave his house. “You’re not going nowhere. Just stay here,” he told her.22 He accused people of ripping him off. One woman claimed he would dress up in women’s clothes.23 Yet another claimed he locked her inside a house in the nearby town of Fairhaven where there were handcuffs and women’s clothing in a room. He took two Polaroid photos of her: one holding a two-head
ed dildo against her buttocks, the other holding a bottle against her vagina, she claimed. All of the girls would tell police Kenny was odd. None would say he tried to kill them.
Kenny told a guy who used to sell him drugs he would kill him if he or anyone he knew testified against him.24
With each interview, the detectives learned one more secret in Kenny’s life.
They also discovered he had known a growing number of the missing or dead women.
Rochelle Dopierala seemed to spend the most time with Kenny. She was pretty, personable and struggled with drug addiction for years. The Falmouth mother of two had been in a detox center in Quincy for three or four days before bolting. She had bounced between Cape Cod, where her family still lived, and New Bedford, where her drug connections were. Like many others, she was rootless, crashing with drug friends on floors or couches or with men enchanted with her beauty, hoping to help her get clean. She stayed with an aging dentist who lived not far from the county jail; then with Nancy Paiva for a few days. When she stole a VCR from the dentist’s home, it was Nancy’s boyfriend who helped sell it on the street. She gave her family the names and phone numbers of the people she stayed with. She told her mother about the dentist and, prosecutors later said, about a lawyer—Kenneth Ponte—who she was now staying with. Kenny would drive her to the Cape and back when she needed to deal with a welfare check or other issue. She would also drive around with him to buy cocaine. “He used to have her bring coke dealers to the car; and he would stick ’em up,” Nancy’s boyfriend would later tell authorities.25 When she moved out, she took his VCR and other things. Kenny wasn’t pleased. “She was afraid of him,” Frankie Pina said.
Debra Medeiros, the first woman found dead, also stayed with Kenny for a while, part of the group of girls rotating in the apartment. Mary Rose Santos, who disappeared in late July, once hired Kenny as an attorney. Nancy Paiva hired Kenny for a bankruptcy case, and he used to call her apartment. Dawn Mendes was seen outside his house. Robbin Rhodes told people about the lawyer she knew, later identified as Kenny. But knowing someone was not evidence of murder. There were other suspects on the list, suspects with a knack for violence. There were men who raped the girls, men who beat them, at least one who choked several into unconsciousness. Kenny, the girls were telling investigators, was just a weirdo who wanted company, who was afraid to be seen buying drugs.
Shallow Graves Page 18