Shallow Graves

by Maureen Boyle

  The case would pose a more concrete problem for Pina as primary day neared. His hands-on approach was keeping him off the campaign trail. While Walsh courted votes at the senior centers, the incumbent was in the grand jury room questioning witnesses. While Walsh was making phone calls to potential voters at night, Pina was at home reading grand jury transcripts and police reports. While Walsh was on the streets with new people, Pina appeared to tighten his circle of confidantes. Walsh was young, fresh-faced, and single, while the incumbent was dogged by questions about his second wife’s alcohol problems: in addition to the time Sheila Martines-Pina was found locked in her car trunk, there had been several reports of drunk-driving cover-ups and one instance where she rear-ended a local newspaper delivery truck.

  Ron’s daughter from his first marriage, Kari,8 was proud of his work and saw his dedication to the murder case firsthand at home. She also saw the growing number of Walsh campaign signs on the front lawns in the city and suburban towns. As the campaign progressed, the sixteen-year-old girl thought for the first time there was a chance her father might lose the election.

  11FLORIDA FOLLIES

  MORE THAN A YEAR BEFORE the primary for Bristol County district attorney, a woman named Diane Doherty entered the murder investigation and the case started to take an odd turn.

  Diane Doherty was living in the apartment in the house next door to Charles Dana Kuhn on Conomo Avenue in Lynn, Massachusetts, and would rattle off her troubles whenever she saw him. She suffered from narcolepsy, had contracted some other type of disease, and was about to be evicted. Diane told him she worried that she and her teenaged daughter would wind up on the streets of Lynn, the nondescript mill city in northern Massachusetts where they lived. She needed some help fighting the eviction. She couldn’t get to court because she was sick. Could he go for her as a friend? She kept pressing her neighbor for help. Dana, who was a private investigator, felt sorry for her. He finally agreed to assist. Armed with a power-of-attorney document, he went to court on October 26, 1989, and got her a few days’ reprieve. But that wasn’t the end of it, or his involvement in her life. She had found a new apartment but couldn’t move in yet, she told him. She had to get out of her current apartment by November 1, she told him, but she couldn’t get into her new one right away. Could she stay in his house with him until then? It wouldn’t be long. Sure, he finally answered and let Diane and her daughter move in for what he thought would be a few days.

  But when November 1 came around, she and her daughter were still in the house and didn’t show any signs of leaving. There was a problem with the new apartment she found, she told him. She needed to stay with him a little bit longer. It was then that things got a bit odd, he later told investigators.

  As the three were watching television in November, a few weeks after she moved into Dana’s home “temporarily,” a news report about the highway killings came on. “Gee, Kenny looks very good,” Diane said.1

  Dana was taken aback. He remembered that she casually mentioned earlier that she knew a man named Kenny Ponte. He didn’t remember the context of the conversation, and he didn’t ask her at the time for more information. This time, however, he decided to press the issue a bit.

  “What do you mean?” he asked when she brought up the name.

  She shrugged it off but later told him she had dated Kenny. She couldn’t say exactly when. Maybe it was the summer. Maybe it was 1987. Maybe it was 1988. At another time, she told him she and her daughter were in New Bedford, in the kitchen of Leslie Mello, a woman she had shared a cell with in the women’s state prison. Kenny Ponte was there, too, and he was depressed. Then Diane dropped the bombshell: Kenny told them he killed six of the women found along the highways.

  He was stunned. “Well, what have you done about this?” Dana asked her.

  “I like Kenny. I like Kenny,” she answered, he later recalled.2

  She told him she was worried about her daughter’s safety and couldn’t say any more. “Kenny Ponte has powerful friends,” she told him. She planned to send her daughter to Arizona. Once that happened, she would tell him more.

  The conversation nagged at the private investigator, and he repeated it to a colleague, Andy Tuney, who was a former state police lieutenant. His friend talked with Diane, heard the same story and then notified the lieutenant colonel of the state police, John O’Donovan. Eventually, the two private investigators met with Bristol County district attorney Pina and his chief investigator, Robert St. Jean, at the Tara Hotel in Randolph, Massachusetts, on November 21, 1989, to go over in detail what Diane had said and formulate a plan to verify her tale.

  Dana and his colleague, in a written agreement, promised to work for free for a month for the district attorney’s office to get more information from Diane. By the day before Thanksgiving, Dana had learned three important things: Diane was on probation, that she claimed to have a diary detailing Kenny’s admission, and it was really hard to keep her on topic. “She’d go back and forth to different stories and constantly change her approach to things,” he later told the district attorney. “Probably the most difficult person I’ve ever tried to interview in my life.”3

  The apartment elsewhere in the city that Diane was to move into never materialized in November, and in early December she and her daughter were still living in a spare room in Dana’s house with him. The district attorney’s office extended the agreement with the private investigators for another thirty days, hoping the extra time would yield something, anything. Dana tried hard to get more information from Diane but it was difficult. She kept repeating the story about being in Leslie’s kitchen with Kenny. One time she thought it was June of 1987—before any of the women went missing. Another time she thought it was 1988. She wasn’t quite sure about the dates. He asked her to show him the house in New Bedford where Leslie lived. She never did. She claimed Kenny said he had sex with the dead women and it involved Satanism but she wasn’t specific, Dana would later recount.4 One time she told him the diary where she documented the admission went missing when her car was stolen; another time she said it was at her mother’s house. She repeatedly told him that her daughter wasn’t living with her and was in a safe place out of Massachusetts but she didn’t say where.

  Diane would provide minute details about Leslie Stanton Mello, her former cellmate, though. Leslie grew up in South Dartmouth, her parents were well off and she had long been addicted to heroin. She talked about Leslie’s sister, about how Leslie had demanded money from her father on the day her mother had died years back, about her brief bouts with sobriety—usually while locked up—before plunging back into heroin use. What Diane didn’t say was that all of this information was in a newspaper clipping Leslie kept with her, a feature story about Leslie’s life. Leslie would show the article to people, often cops, to let them know where she came from, who she was. Providing background about Leslie’s life might on the surface give initial credence to the confession tale but not for long. Leslie knew Kenny Ponte from her earliest days of using heroin, and at the women’s prison she, like others from New Bedford, would talk about the lawyer. However, Leslie never considered him a killer. He was just someone she used to “run” with on the street.

  However, Dana didn’t know the full, detailed background of Leslie or Leslie’s early history with Kenny Ponte. He was just trying to figure out what, if anything Diane knew about a murder case. He also wanted Diane to get out of his place. He got his wish in mid-December, when Diane and her daughter finally moved. He was relieved. Close to six months later he got a phone call from her. Diane said she and her daughter were planning to become paralegals, and they were filling out a questionnaire, and there was a question asking about “death by snapping of the neck.” What did that mean, she wanted to know. Dana described what asphyxiation was, how someone dies when the air passages are cut off. “Is that a painful death?” he remembers her asking.5

  Then she abruptly changed the subject. She and her daughter were appointed to a Tercentenary S
alem Witch Commission. She also had a book for him to read, The Devil in the Form of a Woman. “Who wrote it? You?” he asked her.

  Months later, Diane would insist to authorities in Massachusetts and Florida that she never told anyone Kenny confessed to murder. She said she never met Kenny and was being pressured to testify before a grand jury investigating the highway killings. She eventually called Kenny’s lawyer and told him his client was being framed. Kevin Reddington met with her to learn more; he listened to her tale and knew within minutes his client needed to stay away from this woman—far away.6

  Leslie Stanton Mello, who knew Kenny since they were both in their late teens, provided a blunter description of Diane’s claims. “That’s bullshit,” she said.7

  KENNY PONTE’S ATTEMPT to keep a low profile in Florida wasn’t going very well. He was fielding phone calls from a couple of people in Massachusetts, telling him the latest in the murder investigation. He was indicted on drug charges in Massachusetts. His friend, Paul Ryley, had been hauled back to Massachusetts on charges of uttering a forged instrument and larceny and was subpoenaed to appear before the special grand jury in the murder case. Paul’s girlfriend, Elsa Johnson, who lived next door to Kenny in Florida, was back in Massachusetts. The Port Richey police were swinging by his house constantly, and Kenny was convinced he was being watched around the clock. He did have his cats for company, though. Kenny loved cats. Everyone knew that. He brought his cats down to Florida with him from New Bedford, and he would feed strays that wandered by.

  He wasn’t sure how things would shake out back in his hometown of New Bedford, but he was trying to stay upbeat nonetheless. He had a new lawyer, one of the best, or so everyone told him. He kept telling reporters he was innocent. He wrote letters to newspapers saying just that and insisting the district attorney was trying to frame him. Now, a woman who claimed she was being pressured to say he confessed to the killings was coming down to Florida to visit him for about a week in June of 1990. He didn’t mention the upcoming visit to his lawyer.

  As he drove to the airport to pick up Diane Doherty, Kenny wasn’t sure what to expect. She contacted him out of the blue in a letter and they wound up talking quite a bit on the phone. She seemed sincere and nice. There wasn’t anything to change that opinion when he finally met her and drove her back to his house. She was petite and blonde and kind of cute. Maybe life would finally get better for him in Florida.

  Once they were back at the house, Kenny finally told his lawyer about his visitor.

  “You’re out of your mind,” his lawyer, Kevin Reddington, told him. “Stay away from her.”8

  Kenny didn’t listen.

  Then things got bad, really bad, in Florida. A thirty-year-old Port Richey woman told police Kenny tried to run her down in his driveway after they argued about a fifty-dollar deposit she put down on the duplex he was renting next door. When he heard about the allegations, Kenny turned himself in at the police station to face charges of careless driving and leaving the scene of an accident with injuries. Diane was with him—and things got even worse.

  Diane, wanted in Massachusetts for a probation violation on a larceny charge in Essex County, was also taken into custody. After her arrest, she told Port Richey police a horrifying tale of how Kenny choked her and threatened her at gunpoint during her visit. She said she had gone to Florida to marry Kenny, a man she said she had known for at least four months. Kenny was hit with new charges: aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, use of a firearm during the commission of a felony.

  A few days later, Diane recanted.

  Then, a few days later she recanted the recantation.9

  Then Kenny’s lawyer in Florida quit because he believed he could be a witness to Diane Doherty’s now conflicting statements.

  Kenny’s bail was hiked from $15,000 to $207,500 after the Florida state attorney said Kenny was tied to slayings in Massachusetts. “The state attorney’s office has learned that the Bristol County grand jury in the state of Massachusetts has received testimony which would implicate the defendant in homicide,” read a motion to the Florida judge at the time.

  Port Richey police searched his two duplexes and a shed on his property at the request of the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office. Massachusetts state trooper Kenneth Martin was there to help.

  And the search dogs were back on the highways in Massachusetts looking for bodies. Kenny’s name was included in nearly all of those news stories.

  Things were looking pretty grim for Kenny in Florida.

  MARYANN AND JOSE sat in the air-conditioned office at the Pasco County Detention Center in Florida, waiting for the deputies to bring in the prisoner. The troopers had flown from Boston to bring back a Lynn woman wanted on a relatively minor probation violation and they wanted to talk with her about Kenny Ponte while the legal rendition process moved forward. The troopers heard the swish-swish of slippered feet enter the room.

  Escorted by deputies, the fair-haired Diane Doherty, dressed in prison garb and jail-issued slippers, plunked down in the chair in front of the troopers. Then she began to talk. The monologue bounced from stories about her daughter, to her time with Kenny to flying to Florida to her fears about her safety. Her train of thought weaved through tunnels of subjects and over bridges of people. She seemed jumpy to the troopers as she yammered. They asked her about Kenny, about her stay at the house, about the assault allegations she made against him. She repeated what she had told Florida authorities: she wrote Kenny a letter, talked with him on the phone, then later flew down to Florida on June 3 to marry him. She claimed Kenny at one point tried to choke her and threatened to kill her daughter.

  Five minutes into the hour-long interview, the troopers looked at each other and knew these stories wouldn’t hold up in court: they were wasting their time. A few days later, they were flying back to Massachusetts with Diane.

  KENNY WAS PREPARED to argue before the Florida court why his bail should be lowered, not increased as prosecutors wanted. It was a fairly routine argument, one made daily in courtrooms across the country. He made those arguments regularly when arguing bail for clients as an attorney in Massachusetts. He always reminded people, particularly cops, what his professional occupation was. He wasn’t practicing law in Florida—he hadn’t taken the bar exam—but he was a lawyer in good standing in his home state. He knew court procedure and, as he stood in the Florida courtroom, he wanted the judge to know it. He didn’t have a lawyer to help him—he was planning to meet with a private attorney that day—but he would give it his best. Ties to the community, no record of violence, and a property owner: those were all the things that showed a defendant wasn’t a flight risk. Bail was a legal mechanism to guarantee someone would return to court. It was not supposed to be punitive. After all, everyone is presumed innocent. In Massachusetts, all of the judges had set his bail at personal recognizance—his personal promise to return to court. That should count as something, he was likely thinking as he waited for his case to be called.

  The Florida state attorney was asking the judge to increase Kenny’s bail on the charges from $15,000 to $200,000 because he was a murder suspect in Massachusetts. It was the first time Kenny was officially linked by a court to the killings. Kenny had been locked up since his arrest four days earlier on Monday. He couldn’t even come up with the fifteen grand.

  Kenny read paragraph five in the state’s motion for higher bail. He asked if he could be heard on the issue.

  “Your honor, there have been five people besides me who have been dragged through the mud concerning this matter,” Kenny told the judge.10 “Your honor, the facts of this case is, three of my former clients were unfortunately the victims, and the police questioned me on that and I fully cooperated with them. I have an attorney up there.

  “Your honor, I’m certainly—I don’t pose any threat to anyone, I never have. I have absolutely no record of any violence towards anyone, ever, and I challenge the State Attorney to show that I have. And si
mply because I’m a suspect, your honor—and I have an attorney up there that is fighting this. I’m approaching it in a responsible way, and again, I just urge the Court to check with the Bar Association to see that I’m a licensed attorney in good standing. Your honor, I’ve done nothing. All I ask is a chance to get out so I can prepare for any defense, Your Honor,” Kenny told the judge.

  His bail was increased.

  “Your Honor, may I ask a question?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is my bond so high?”

  “Because of the Massachusetts situation.”

  Kenny asked the judge to check with the Massachusetts courts about the case and allegations about his involvement. One judge had said the evidence “did not even amount to a hunch,” Kenny said.

  “I beg you to check that, Your Honor.”

  “I will be checking that today.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor.”

  Kenny was led off again to the lockup to wait. He would stay there four more weeks, until he was released on July 13, 1990. He was now back home in his Florida duplex, free without bail. The charges eventually were dropped.

  KENNY WAS OUT OF JAIL just one day on July 14, 1990, and was planning to fly back to New Bedford shortly to stay with his mother. Then there was a new twist in his case. His buddy’s girlfriend, the Dartmouth woman named Elsa M. Johnson, who rented his duplex next door in Florida, told the grand jury in Massachusetts that Kenny threatened to shoot the prosecutor and harm both his daughter and second wife. “If he had to wait on Rockdale Avenue until you came out of the house, he’d blow your brains out there. Because his life was over with anyway. And if you didn’t come out of the house, he’d just shoot through the window. ‘And I don’t care if I harm Sheila or the kid,’” Johnson quoted him as saying.