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Shallow Graves

Page 20

by Maureen Boyle


  Reporters were already starting to gather along Route 88 by the time Jose and New Bedford detective Richie Ferreira pulled up in separate cruisers.

  How did they get here so fast? Richie remembers thinking.

  When Bob St. Jean, the chief investigator for the district attorney’s office, arrived, he first thought the scene looked different somehow from the others. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. The position of the body? The type of road? The breakdown lane on Route 88 at the time was narrow, too narrow he thought for a car or truck to stop without being noticed. However, he knew it had been done before, in a different case. In that earlier case, the body of a Fall River woman was found dismembered on the side of Route 88 in Westport. One suspect was indicted but the charges were later dropped because potential alibi evidence wasn’t introduced as evidence to the grand jury. Charges in that case were never refiled. That death, however, was not tied to the highway killings, Bob knew. Police had already checked.

  When Bristol County district attorney Ronald A. Pina arrived, he looked at the scene and strode to the bevy of cameras and reporters waiting in the road. He talked a little about the scene and then made a startling proclamation to reporters: someone sent him a “personal and confidential” two-page, typed letter on March 16 saying if a body was ever found on Route 88, he or she had information to share. The letter would be in a Bible.

  “They said if there was a body found on 88, they would feel comfortable and come forward. We now have a body found on 88. We want them to come forward,” he told reporters.5

  The remains were identified three days later, on April 3, 1989, as Mary Rose Santos, the woman who went missing after a night of dancing at the Quarterdeck bar on July 15, 1988. “I knew she was going to be one of them,” her mother, Mary Jeronymo, said after the identification was made.

  The death toll was now at eight.

  ABOUT THREE FEET from the brush line, the state-highway-cleanup worker picking up litter along Interstate 195 in Marion the morning of April 24, 1989, spotted something odd. He walked closer and saw what appeared to be human remains. The person was slumped in a fetal position. The person was face up, feet toward the highway. “It was like someone was in a hurry,” Frederick Gomes, the foreman of the crew, said at the time.

  Things like this didn’t happen in the quiet town of Marion, and troopers called to help control curious drivers slowing with traffic could see how unsettled the highway crew that made the discovery was. When a pickup truck driver yelled out his window “Is that another one?” a trooper quickly pulled him over to get his name

  The town of Marion is twelve miles and a world away from New Bedford. The waterfront community of roughly four thousand residents in 1989 boasted a median household income of $46,189 and was home to Tabor Academy, an elite private school. It was considered a wealthy community, where more than two hundred of the fifteen hundred households earned more than $100,000 a year.6 Actor James Spader’s family were considered townies; television personality Geraldo Rivera had a house there; and there were stories that Jackie O. once stopped at the local pharmacy to replace a pair of sunglasses that fell overboard. It was a community where it was impolite to point out the rich, the powerful, or the famous. It was also relatively crime free. There hadn’t been a homicide in the town for close to forty years, and that was when a lumberman killed his wife with an axe then killed himself. “That was a really bloody one,” the town’s eighty-eight year-old historian, Edmund Tripp, recalled in 1989.7 In addition to being a quiet town, Marion was also in Plymouth County, where another district attorney had jurisdiction and a different group of state troopers worked the homicide cases. Some of those troopers were not big fans of Bristol County district attorney Ronald A. Pina. One of those in the Plymouth unit was state police corporal Nelson Ostiguy, who was one of the state troopers booted out of the Bristol County office when Pina won reelection in 1982. Nelson wasn’t a big fan of the district attorney.

  Jose and Maryann weren’t thinking about politics, though, when the remains were found in Marion. The investigation workload was now overwhelming the Bristol County unit, where other, unrelated cases continued to come in. To the pair, as well as others in the unit, assistance from a neighboring district meant more hands to help and a fresh perspective.

  The remains found in Marion were identified a few days later through dental records. They belonged to Sandra Botelho, age twenty-five, who disappeared after heading to a neighbor’s apartment to get “bread.”

  “How can a man live like that and sleep nights, knowing he killed all those girls?” her father, Joseph Botelho, said at the time.8

  The body count was now at nine. Two women still were missing: Marilyn Roberts and Christina Monteiro. Both were related to cops.

  NELSON OSTIGUY was gearing up the investigation into the murder of Sandra Botelho on the Plymouth County end. He was making plans to send troopers from his unit and Marion’s sole detective to New Bedford to get up to speed on the case and share whatever information they gathered. Everyone in the Bristol unit seemed excited and eager to work with his guys. Now, he was just waiting for the phone call to set up a time to meet the next day. The call never came.

  He called the commander when two days passed. “Hey, what’s up? How come you didn’t get back to me?”9

  The Bristol County district attorney didn’t want them involved, Nelson would later learn. Political rancor ran deep and long. Troopers in Plymouth County would complain the district attorney indirectly ordered everyone not to give information to them—an order those in the Bristol County state police unit ignored and a claim the district attorney, through a spokesman, would later deny.

  It was tense for a month as Ostiguy persisted in working the case, with troopers in the Plymouth unit conducting a parallel murder probe focusing on the single slaying in Marion. Police dredged a murky drainage pond off the highway in Marion; metal detectors were used to look for jewelry, and Massachusetts state police dogs searched the stretch of highway for other bodies and evidence. The Plymouth County investigators were now looking at eleven suspects, all from the area. They expected to look at even more.

  In Bristol County, the suspect list was also long, but it now appeared the district attorney had his eye on two people. One was Kenny Ponte; the other was a man with a flattened nose the prostitutes claimed attacked them. The name of a third suspect, Neil Anderson, also accused of attacking prostitutes, had come up in the grand jury earlier but interest in him appeared to wane as the sessions continued. The special grand jury met for a third session in April; teams of searchers with dogs from throughout New England earlier examined a twenty-five-mile sweep of roads in Bristol County; and money was yet again becoming an issue as overtime hours mounted.

  More than a month after Sandy Botelho’s body was found in April 1989, the state police in two counties were now looking at a wide range of suspects and conducting rival investigations. The situation was getting tense.

  The Plymouth County district attorney, William O’Malley, was an evenhanded prosecutor with a good reputation among cops. He was accessible to the press but was not a grandstander, only appearing before TV cameras when necessary. The cases were important to him. While his was an elected office, he set a clear line between politics and prosecutions. What was now going on in the highway killing case bothered him. It was not how things should work.

  He was at his Brockton home, recuperating from a leg injury, and hearing the complaints from the field. Something had to be done.

  He called his colleague in Bristol County and set up a meeting at his home.

  For an hour, the two met in Brockton. A compromise was reached. Plymouth County investigators could go to the task-force meetings. Ronald Pina’s office would still control the overall investigation.

  It looked good on paper, Nelson thought. In practice, the case was now firmly in the hands of Ronald Pina’s office, and his people in Plymouth County—several who had served under Pina years back—were sh
ut out yet again when it came to the nuts and bolts of the investigation. They went to a few of the meetings but little of substance would be shared with them, and the Plymouth County investigators eventually stopped going, he would later say.

  MARYANN SLIT OPEN the large manila envelope, pulled the audiocassette tape out and sighed. It was yet another tip from yet another psychic who claimed to have “seen” what happened using her psychic abilities. Most of the psychic tips came in the form of letters. This was the first tape. Maryann knew she had to listen to it. She knew she would take note of what was said. She also knew it would go nowhere. She would add it to the list of tips from beyond. One psychic claimed to “see” water. Another said the killer didn’t like prostitutes. Most of the information seemed to have been taken from news reports. Some of the information was sheer nonsense. Some could be plausible. None of the information panned out—yet. There was always that caveat: yet. They couldn’t discount anything, and there was always the possibility someone with solid information could be claiming to have gotten it via psychic abilities just to protect him or herself.

  She slipped the tape into the cassette machine and listened. It was interesting but it wasn’t helpful, she thought. That’s how most of the psychic “tips” turned out.

  One psychic told New Bedford detective Richie Ferreira there were five more bodies out there, including one not far from where Sandy Botelho was discovered along Interstate 195. There was still another off the highway heading toward the Cape, another near a marshy edge off a highway, and yet another in a sandpit-like area.10 The psychic said the information came from a psychic “communication” with the slain woman Sandy. The psychic said the killer bragged about the killings and told two people he “cracked the life out” of them.

  Yet another psychic from San Francisco sent a typed letter to New Bedford police claiming to have had a recurring dream about battered bodies pushed from a car then rolling down an embankment. The psychic wrote following this scene in the dream that a man, between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-four, is then seen. The man has a name badge with four letters.

  The information from the psychics, just like the dozens of anonymous letter writers purporting to know who the killer was, was unsolicited, and formal interviews in the office with the psychics weren’t done. “Nobody came down to meet with us,” Jose later said.11

  While police weren’t finding usable answers from the psychics, some relatives of the missing and the dead weren’t discounting it. Christina Monteiro’s desperate mother had gone to one psychic, hoping to find something, anything, that could lead to what happened to the nineteen-year-old. She later told Jose the psychic reported her daughter was near water. Another psychic, years later, told Debra Greenlaw DeMello’s daughter her mother was killed in a warehouse-like building by a group of men. If investigators couldn’t find the answers, a few of the desperate families believed a higher power could.

  8NEW SUSPECT

  FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, before the eleven women went missing, before the words “serial killer” and New Bedford were linked in local news reports, the girls on the street were talking to each other about the weird guys, the really weird guys, the ones who would rape them, the ones who would choke them, the ones who scared them. There was one who stood out, the one who often circled the city blocks usually in a pickup truck. He seemed normal when he first picked them up. Sometimes he was a bit quiet. Then he would park and lunge at their throats, he would choke them, he would rape them. Some of the women mentioned this strange guy to the police officers that they knew. And they all shared a warning among themselves. Stay away from the guy with the pushed in nose, the guy who looks like a boxer.

  By early 1989, police had put a name to that description.

  Anthony R. DeGrazia, a man in his twenties, lived in semirural Freetown, a community bordering New Bedford and home to the sprawling five-thousand-plus-acre state forest where Satanists were once rumored to worship. He grew up in nearby Lakeville, another rural town, and was, from all descriptions, a likeable-enough young man but with deep, personal family problems. In recent years, he was a regular at the St. John Neumann Catholic Church, a modern building overlooking the clear waters of Long Pond in Freetown. When he was still in high school, he left home and bounced from one home to another, often crashing on couches, sometimes camping in the woods. A family in town who felt for this sad-eyed young man opened their tiny home to him. There, for several years, he lived with the couple and their two daughters, and, from all accounts, he seemed to flourish. In a series of photographs taken during that time, Tony sported a childlike, almost elfish grin as he posed in pictures. A few years after moving in, Tony began dating the couple’s teenaged daughter who was reeling from the drowning death of her high school boyfriend. Tony worked hard and was polite. He was described as gentle and sweet. He liked beer, sometimes smoked a little weed and, like many young men in wooded towns, knew how to shoot a gun. He had a small circle of friends and adored his girlfriend like a “china doll.” He had the look of a fighter in the ring, the flattened nose of a young man having gone too many rounds. Eventually, he worked construction-related jobs, everything from masonry to hanging Sheetrock.

  But there was pain in his eyes. His parents’ nineteen-year marriage had ended in a bitter divorce in 1980, a proceeding peppered with complaints of cheating, spousal abuse, child abuse, and mental cruelty. Tony once told police his mother hit him in the face with a baseball bat as a child; there were allegations he would be beaten and humiliated when he wet the bed; another claim that his mother once hit him with a belt and beat him in front of his third-grade class when, during a school visit, she saw him misbehave. His brother would allege their mother beat them when they were young—a claim she vigorously denied to state police. (A psychiatrist hired by Tony’s mother during the divorce proceedings to evaluate the other DeGrazia children, but not Tony, saw no signs of systematic abuse.) His father would allege in the divorce proceedings that his soon-to-be ex-wife abused Tony. Tony’s mother alleged her husband abused her. It was the type of divorce with cross-allegations that are common in court when some marriages break down. The divorce judge gave the mother custody of the couple’s four minor children.1 Nearly a decade later, Tony told a court psychiatrist, Dr. Patricia Ryan Recupero, that he experienced flashbacks of abuse and sometimes “the bad person comes out.”2 Sometimes, he told the psychiatrist, he could smell strange odors or heard people call him when no one was there.

  By age eighteen, he had moved out of the home of his girlfriend’s parents and was living on his own in nearby Lakeville. He had been arrested on fairly minor charges such as trespassing, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, assault and battery, and threats in two separate cases. Eventually, all of those charges would be dismissed. By age nineteen, now back in Freetown and still living on his own, he faced more serious charges. He was accused of indecent assault on a girl from Maine, but that charge was also later dismissed. By age twenty, he was accused of picking up two teenaged Dartmouth girls hitchhiking in New Bedford after their car broke down on July 7, 1982 and later sexually assaulting them.

  The girls told police the man was playing a tape of Some Girls by the Rolling Stones in the blue Mustang. There was a dried flower on the dashboard, and the passenger side door couldn’t open from the inside. They asked for a ride home to Dartmouth, but instead he drove to the Freetown State Forest, where just four years earlier a fifteen-year-old high school freshman abducted while riding her bike in Raynham was found tied to a tree and dead. One girl said she was sure she was going to die that night. The girls told police they were sexually assaulted.3

  When that rape case went to court, the mother of one of the girls bolted across the foyer in the Fall River courthouse during a break in the trial and punched the handcuffed Tony in the side of the head.4 Tony’s girlfriend testified in the case, insisting he was with her the night of the attack, Freetown detective Alan Alves, who investigated the case, said. The jury deliberated ro
ughly three hours before finding him not guilty.

  This is what investigators in the murder case would eventually learn once they identified Tony as the man suspected of assaulting prostitutes in the city. In 1987 and 1988, most of the girls on the street just knew to stay away from the guy who looked like a boxer. But caution and sometimes memories fade when the body shakes and craves heroin. And it all blurs when the drug kicks in.

  One woman told Trooper Kevin Butler, Trooper Lorraine Forrest, and New Bedford detective Gardner Greany that a man driving a pickup truck took her to a Fairhaven park where he pulled out a switchblade before beating, raping, and robbing her in 1987. “I’m going to kill you, you bitch,” he said as he kept hitting her in the face.5 The man, who told her he initially wanted to drive to Lakeville, had brown hair, “heavy hands, and was likely five feet eight or shorter.” She told police she could tell he was a beer drinker—there were empty Budweiser bottles in the truck. She said his nose reminded her of a dog: “Ya know, the dogs with their noses pushed in.”6

  Another woman who, the previous day, had been stabbed in the leg and arm and robbed of twenty dollars by a john, was hobbling down the street to the pay phone by a fence at a gas station near Coggeshall Street. She saw a car go by with three men in it. One jumped out and ran toward her. They talked briefly. He knew she was a prostitute. They agreed on a price: twenty dollars for oral sex. The other men in the car had taken off. “Well, let’s just go around the fence,” he told her.

  “No, it’s all muddy and stuff. I don’t want to go around there. I don’t want to go there.”7

  The man pulled her; they fought; the stitches in her arm pulled out. He put her in headlock. She was gasping, trying to breathe. He threw her on the ground, one hand on her neck. “And he was growling like or making funny noises like, urrr, he was going to punch me, like he was going to punch me out. He’s got a big fist.”8

 

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