Shallow Graves

by Maureen Boyle

  Are you aware of the investigation into the murders in the New Bedford area? You know Kenny’s name came up, Paul Boudreau told him.

  “What do you think? You think I killed the girls or Kenny did it,” Ryley answered.9

  Paul could see the suspect was getting agitated, at times “almost jumping out of his seat.”

  They took a break and returned to talk to him at the Florida lockup later that day.

  “I want to cooperate with you,” Ryley said. “Ask me any questions you want and I will answer them truthfully.”

  Bob St. Jean read the Miranda rights again. Ryley again said he understood.

  Two heavy-set sisters used to hang out with Kenny in New Bedford, he told them. The detective nodded. (The detective knew the sisters were still alive; the women had talked with police.) There was a woman named Rochelle from the Cape who was there, too, in 1988. In Florida, he thought a woman named Linda stayed with Kenny along with a short, very thin blonde woman with no front teeth named Mary. Yet another woman named Amber who spent some time in the Hillsboro County jail was also there in Florida at one time.

  Kenny was living off “residual checks” from three New Bedford attorneys who picked up his cases in Massachusetts, and he hadn’t worked at all in Florida. Ryley said he suggested that Kenny practice law in Florida. He never did.

  By the time Paul Ryley was back in a Massachusetts to enter a not-guilty plea to forgery and larceny charges on January 2, 1990, the district attorney’s office was sketching out the witness list for the next special grand jury session.

  The lawyer representing him on the larceny charges, Stephen J. Amaral, withdrew from the case after his client was served the subpoena to testify “in the case of John Doe,” citing a conflict of interest. His law partner, Joseph Harrington, was representing Kenny Ponte.

  “We have reason to think we know who John Doe is,” Amaral told a judge on January 16, 1990.10

  “The whole city of New Bedford knows who John Doe is, if they read the newspapers,” Superior Court judge John Sheehan answered.

  Nine days later, New Bedford detective Paul Boudreau testified before the special grand jury for one and a half hours.

  Ryley appeared later with his new lawyer, Joseph Macy, and stayed in the grand jury room for nearly as long. After testifying, the former prison guard and Bristol County deputy sheriff was escorted back to the Bristol County jail in handcuffs, ordered to return the next day.

  To the media, the district attorney, Ronald Pina, called the session “very productive” and said that his office would be following up on the testimony. “We’ll have a full day of work,” the prosecutor told the growing group of reporters outside the courthouse.

  Ryley would indeed be back before the grand jury, testifying for roughly two more hours.

  Some people in the city were speculating Kenny Ponte was now the target of the grand jury. In the grand jury room, the prosecutor, however, was also presenting testimony about other people. On the streets, police were still tracking new leads, different suspects, and a wide range of scenarios.

  Publically, the district attorney was telling reporters the case could be coming to a close. “I think we’re very close,” Ron Pina said during a radio show on WHTB in Fall River on February 15, 1990. “I think we’re really focusing down to a possible suspect—not three, four, five, or six but a possible suspect. And where we’re at is looking for that last piece of evidence or those last pieces of evidence.”

  He had said similar things before in this roller coaster of an investigation. Six months earlier, in June 1989, he told reporters there could be an indictment within a month if some information provided to the grand jury was borne out. There was no indictment, and by July of that year Pina would admit the information couldn’t be corroborated.

  That “information” centered on claims someone stole a sex tape from Kenny’s house featuring local women and then tried to blackmail the lawyer. The tape was never found, and the woman who purportedly stole it insisted it was all a lie.

  In Florida, Kenneth C. Ponte was likely seeing hopes for a new life in Port Richey slip away.

  10THE CIRCLE TIGHTENS

  AT AGE THIRTY-SEVEN, Kevin Reddington was a lawyer’s lawyer: no-nonsense, respectful, and schooled in the law. He grew up in Stoughton, Massachusetts, a midsized middle-class town between Boston and Brockton, with childhood dreams of becoming an attorney. As a child, he had even signed a note to his mother “Esq.,” foretelling of his future career. He graduated from Boston College, got married, graduated Suffolk University School of Law cum laude in 1975, eventually set up his law office in Brockton and was raising four children in the suburban town of Easton, Massachusetts, less than twenty minutes from his parents’ home. He was, everyone agreed, one of those grounded, down-to-earth individuals who remembered the names of secretaries and clerks, who never forgot his roots. He was tenacious in the courtroom but didn’t hold the petty, post-trial grudges some other attorneys harbored. His job was to defend his client; it was the jury’s job to render a verdict. And he did that job well. From drunk-driving cases to the first murder acquittal using a battered woman’s defense in Massachusetts, he was one of the busiest lawyers in the state. He worked long hours, crisscrossing the county and eventually the state, honing his skills and drawing more clients. He was always learning new skills in the courtroom, even more than a decade after passing the bar. He would watch the top attorneys of the time quiz witnesses, listen to opening statements and closing arguments, always paying close attention to what worked and what failed. He prepared for the unexpected and took the trial adage “never ask a question you don’t know the answer to” seriously.

  Kevin was in his second floor office on Route 123 in Brockton, waiting for his newest client to show up. His wooden desk faced the doorway, giving him an easy view of visitors. A few days earlier, an attorney he never met by the name of Kenneth C. Ponte had called asking if he would represent him. Kenny was in a bit of a mess in New Bedford and was afraid things would get even worse. Come in and we’ll talk, is what Kevin Reddington told him on the phone. Before the meeting, Kevin did some cursory research on what his potential client was facing and was troubled by what he found. A lot of innuendo, a lot of headlines. Trial by media, he thought. To him, it appeared the prosecution was tainting a potential jury pool before charges were even brought. He thought it appeared unethical, and it would be an interesting case to defend.

  When Kenny walked through the door, the defense attorney was struck by the man’s awkward appearance. Kenny was a big guy who didn’t wear suits well. He was agitated but not obnoxious. He wasn’t what Kevin expected, based on what he had read in the papers and seen on TV. “I expected him to be scratching to make the bugs go away,” he recalled. “He was just a regular guy who got caught in a bad situation through no fault of his own.”1

  Kenny was upset about his treatment by the district attorney; angered by suggestions he could be a killer. He was complaining the prosecutor was looking to ruin him. He didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t hurt anyone. It was a witch hunt.

  Kenny couldn’t understand why moving to Florida in late 1988 was such a big deal to the district attorney. He had been telling people for a while he wanted to move south, start fresh, and get away from New Bedford. Yes, he moved a month after the disappearances ended; but that was because the move was delayed. It was a coincidence, he said.

  Looking over the desk as Kenny’s voice rose, the defense attorney knew what the first step would be if he took this case. Kenny had taken to calling television, radio, and newspaper reporters, complaining “off the record” to anyone who would listen. The district attorney was out to get him, Kenny would rant. Occasionally, he would end up on the local radio call-in show, railing against the district attorney. He was angry and he let everyone know it.

  By the end of the meeting in the Brockton office, Kevin Reddington agreed to represent Kenny—with some provisions. Here are the rules: Keep your mouth shut,
let me do the talking, listen to what I tell you to do, and, please, stop calling the media.

  Kevin didn’t realize how hard that last request would be to enforce.

  THE LEGAL COMMUNITY in New Bedford in 1990 was a tight political circle. Personal ties went back, in some cases, to elementary school; alliances were woven through families, through jobs, through church, through sports, through children. Most people in New Bedford hired New Bedford lawyers, just as those in Fall River twenty minutes to the west hired Fall River lawyers. Occasionally, a public defender would come down from Brockton or Boston to represent an indigent defendant accused of murder, but, generally, law and justice were decidedly local.

  Then Kevin Reddington drove up to the New Bedford Superior Courthouse in his red Porsche convertible, sporting the Massachusetts license plate NG—the abbreviation for not guilty. He was jovial as he chatted with court officers and clerks. He smiled, as he always did, at the lawyers he knew. Sometimes before the start of a court session he would make small talk or joke around, breaking the tension in the emotionally taut room. Judges called him a gentleman; fellow attorneys called him a worthy and fair trial opponent; defendants called him their savior. That year, the Office of Public Counsel named him Massachusetts Attorney of the Year, and in the following decades he would top the lists as one of the best lawyers in the state and country. He would represent Red Sox baseball ball player Mo Vaughn on drunk-driving charges, Catherine Greig, the girlfriend of Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, a host of average joes on average charges, and a growing number of people accused of murder. There would come a time when young lawyers would sit in court to watch his closing arguments to learn new skills, and when people in a jam called him first and prayed he would take their case. This wasn’t that time. He considered himself still a young attorney with a wry sense of humor with a young family, working hard and trying to learn from defense attorneys he admired.

  He also disliked two things: pedophile cases and snitches. While he sometimes represented pedophiles, he vowed to never represent an informant. He hated those cases so much he eventually had the Latin slogan Nunquam redo an intentor tattooed on his right forearm—“Never represent an informant.” If a defendant wanted to cut a deal and testify for the prosecution, he would recommend another attorney to handle the case. Otherwise, he would fight hard at trial for an acquittal or negotiate the best deal for the obviously guilty. He was a realist. He knew everyone was presumed innocent in a court of law; not everyone was.

  In his first days as Kenny’s attorney, Kevin Reddington hit hard against the district attorney’s office in the way he knew best: in court. First, he asked Superior Court judge Chris Byron to order the DA not to discuss the murder case. He claimed the district attorney “labeled by innuendo” his client as a suspect in the killings. Look, he told the judge, look at the news articles quoting Ronald Pina saying his client was uncooperative. Look at this statement by the DA to reporters saying if he leaves the grand jury room to see a judge, it means a witness refused to testify. The district attorney was forced to answer the allegations in an affidavit, saying he never divulged grand jury testimony: “My answers to these questions were of a general, informational nature on matters of law and procedure and at no time did I, either explicitly or implicitly, make reference to any particular individual or case scenario.”

  The judge ruled the district attorney didn’t divulge grand jury testimony but cautioned the extensive media coverage could hinder a fair trial.

  Kevin lost that first fight. He didn’t plan to lose again.

  PAUL BOUDREAU immediately recognized the typed return address on the envelope sent to his North End video rental store, Movies To Go: “5848 Sun Glo Ave., Port Richey, FL” It was Kenny Ponte’s address.

  “Dear Mr. Boudreau: I am sincerely puzzled as to why you and Mr. St. Jean failed to come over and knock on my door during December of 1989. Instead you chose to look in my windows (you were seen by myself and others) and run around my backyard like the undercover idiot [sic] you both are. Next survielance [sic] mission to my house you should make it easy on yourself. Stop by and have a coffee. Surely you must have gotten numerous mesquito [sic] bites hiding around the nursing home like you were,” read the typed letter from Ponte, postmarked March 1, 1990, from Tampa, Florida.

  Amused, Paul kept reading. It had been months since he and Bob St. Jean were at Kenny’s house back in October of 1989, battling mosquitos. They swung by the house again after talking with Paul Ryley two months after that but weren’t doing much surveillance when that arrest was made. Port Richey police were already keeping tabs on the house. Paul held the letter in his hands, chuckling. Why did it take so long for Kenny to write? If Kenny saw them, why didn’t he invite them in?

  When the letter arrived, Paul and the members of the Bristol County Drug Task Force were wrapping up loose and not particularly nice ends in the two-year cocaine-dealing operation centered at Whispers Pub in the South End. Thanks to a wiretap, the task force was able to get enough evidence to shut the operation down. Or so they thought. Paul later learned from an informant that the dealer was out on bail and back in business. Armed with information from the informant, Paul obtained a search warrant to raid the dealer’s home where, he was told, there was a cache of cocaine and lots of cash. There was just one problem—a big problem—with this second case. Paul’s informant in the case had swiped money from the suspect’s home about a half hour before police raided the house in September of 1989. Now, the dealer’s attorney was using that information to try to get all the charges dropped, suggesting the drugs were planted before the raid and that there was police misconduct. Paul was pissed. He was pissed at the informant for screwing up what he considered an airtight case, and he was pissed that what this informant did was tarnishing his law-enforcement reputation. Paul knew the defense attorney would use this to try to get his client off. But this was a good drug case, a damn good case, and Paul was angry at how it was turning out. He was certain Ponte was now needling him about the Whisper’s Pub case in this letter.

  “Next time you are observed around my home I’ll have you arrested before you can frame me like you’ve obviously done to others,” Kenny wrote. “It does not surprise me that you would accuse me of being a murderer without any evidence at all. It is your style apparently to simply plant the evidence that you need to convict. Luckily the system weeds out corrupt cops like you before they can do any further damage.”

  Paul later slipped the letter and envelop into an evidence bag for safekeeping.

  Kenny is losing it, he thought.

  Reporters gather on the courthouse steps to interview Kenneth Ponte on August 19, 1990 (author on the far right) (Standard-Times photo by Hank Seaman)

  Home of Kenneth C. Ponte in Port Richey, Florida (photo by Paul Boudreau)

  Franklin Pina, the boyfriend of Nancy Paiva, is led from New Bedford Superior Court after testifying before the special grand jury on July 30, 1990 (Standard-Times photo by Ron Rolo)

  Anthony DeGrazia, accused of attacking prostitutes, with his first attorney, Edward Harrington, in New Bedford Superior Court on May 11, 1989 (Standard-Times photo by Hank Seaman)

  Neil Anderson, accused and later convicted of raping prostitutes, in district court to face charges on December 14, 1988. He was one of the early suspects in the case. (Standard-Times photo by Jack Iddon)

  Kenneth Ponte confers with his lawyer, Kevin Reddington, before his arraignment on a single count of murder in New Bedford Superior Court in August 1990 (Standard-Times photo by Hank Seaman)

  Kenneth C. Ponte mugshot from New Bedford police department, 1970

  Funeral of Mary Rose Santos on May 2, 1989. Her mother, Mary Jeronymo is left, son Joseph is front, and husband Donald is far right. The family is waiting at St. Joseph Church in Fairhaven as her coffin is loaded into a hearse. (Standard-Times photo by Mike Valeri)

  New Bedford detective sgt. John Dextradeur in 1984 photo pointing out burglary locations in New Bedfo
rd (Standard-Times photo by Ron Rolo)

  Richard Ferreira, retired New Bedford detective, in 2015 (photo by Maureen Boyle)

  Robert St. Jean, former chief investigator for the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office, in 2015 (photo by Maureen Boyle)

  Maryann Dill and Jose Gonsalves outside the old Massachusetts state police barracks on Route 6 in Dartmouth in undated photo (photo courtesy of Maryann Dill)

  Photo of Dawn Mendes circulated to the media in 1988

  Wedding photo of Debra Greenlaw DeMello provided to media by her family. The photo hung on her mother’s wall for years.

  Photo of Nancy Paiva supplied to media and police by the family

  Photo of Debra Medeiros supplied to the media by the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office

  Photo of Debroh Lynn McConnell supplied to the media by the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office

  Photo of Mary Rose Santos supplied by family to the media and to the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office

  Marilyn Cardoza Roberts, missing, photo supplied to the media by the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office