Shallow Graves

by Maureen Boyle

  There was also an “outpouring of public support” for the defendant, he said.

  The sister of Sandra Botelho, Liz Tavares, widened her eyes. “Tssss,” she quietly hissed.

  The judge sided with the prosecution. Bail was set at $50,000 cash or $500,000 surety. Most murder defendants are held without bail. Kenny’s mom posted a house she owned on Austin Street as bail.

  Two hours after pleading “absolutely not guilty,” Kenny walked out of court.

  “I just want to say, it’s been a two-year-long nightmare for me so far, and I greatly look forward to the trial to be acquitted to end the nightmare once and for all,” he told reporters.16 Then he got into the passenger seat of his lawyer’s Porsche and the two drove off.

  ACROSS THE STREET from the courthouse, Gwen Andrade held a homemade sign and a painful vigil. The sign read

  No. 1

  What About???

  Joanne Andrade.

  Possibly #1 victim of the highway killings remains still forgotten.

  And her 9 yr old daughter still lives day by day not knowing what happened to her mother

  Gwen’s sister, Joanne Andrade, was found drowned off State Pier on October 25, 1987. Joanne, a recovering heroin addict, had been hit on the head several times and choked before being thrown into the water. Was she one of the uncounted highway killing victims? Were there more?

  The deaths of Joanne and three other women murdered between 1986 and 1988 had been examined in connection with the highway killing case. Two different suspects were looked at in two of the cases.

  But in the cases of Joanne Andrade and Dorothy Danelson, the nineteen-year-old woman found brutally raped along railroad tracks in New Bedford on July 16, 1986, some people still wondered if there was a link. Those were the same two cases that got now-retired John Dextradeur wondering if there could be a serial killer in the area.

  Joanne’s sister was convinced the answer was yes.

  “I believe she was the first victim,” Gwen told reporters outside the courthouse. “I believe she was number one.”17

  A YELLOW SCHOOL BUS idled in the lot reserved for court personnel at the front side of the courthouse. After the arraignment, the families were escorted to the bus and brought to the district attorney’s office for a meeting.

  Chandra, Debra Greenlaw’s teenaged daughter, leaned out the window of the bus as reporters reached up with microphones to catch her words.

  “I want him hung,” she said bluntly.

  AFTER THE ARRAIGNMENT, after meeting with the district attorney yet again, Madeline Perry went to Melrose Cemetery in Brockton and stood at her daughter’s gravesite.

  She couldn’t bear to come here four days earlier, on what would have been her Deb’s thirty-sixth birthday. She had nothing to say to the heavens. She had nothing but tears to leave on the soft grass. Now, on this day, she could say it was over, she could rest.

  13THE CAMPAIGN

  IT WAS TIME TO CRANK UP the campaigning. The primary was less than a month away, and everyone in the Pina camp feared it would be a close vote. Whoever won in September would take the seat; there was no general-election challenger. Ron’s closest advisors were worried—and convinced he was in big trouble. There was a chance he could lose. A very real chance. Ron shrugged off their concerns. He would win. He always won. He was a good DA and people knew it. They would vote for him. He was sure of that.

  He made some campaign stops, debated his opponent, and figured when the votes were finally counted he would slide back into his downtown office. There was no doubt in his mind.

  THE BEER WAS FLOWING and the cheers were loud when the election results were announced at LeBeau’s Tavern in the city’s North End where hundreds of Paul F. Walsh Jr. supporters were gathered on September 18, 1990.

  As the votes from each ward and precinct in the cities and each town came in, cheers went up. Walsh won Dartmouth. Walsh won Fairhaven. Paul refused to get his hopes up. He was up against a twelve-year incumbent, and this was his first election. It would be close but there was a good chance he could lose. “The conventional wisdom was he would win Fall River and I would do well in New Bedford and then it would be a street fight,” Paul recalled.1

  When results came in from the Niagara section of Fall River, a neighborhood where 99 percent of the voters were Portuguese, he knew he had won. “We won, 2-to-1, and we knew Ron was in trouble,” Paul said.

  With each ward and precinct, with each town and city, the news continued to be good. The thirty-six-year-old, in his first bid for elective office, trounced the incumbent in all twenty communities in the county by a 62 to 38 percent margin. People crammed the building, backslapping and laughing as they celebrated the victory. Some supporters in the street raised brooms bought at a nearby store and shouted “sweep, sweep” until Paul’s father, the campaign veteran, told them to stop, saying it was disrespectful. Paul moved easily through the crowd, thanking supporters and praising his opponent for a good campaign.

  Across the city, in the waterfront restaurant Twin Piers, Ronald A. Pina was solemnly giving his concession speech at 10:15 p.m. before grim-faced supporters. His daughter, Kari, could see him tearing up.

  Kari, aged sixteen, suspected this was how the election would turn out. She could see the Walsh signs on the lawns of former Pina supporters. She heard people talking about being disillusioned. She could feel that rumble of discontent. So did others in the campaign, but they all hoped the years of work would pay off with the electorate somehow.

  “I’ve never lost in my life so I’m not used to it,” Ron said that night.2

  The party at the restaurant overlooking the fishing fleet this primary night was now over. The one in the middle-class neighborhood in the North End was just starting.

  A FEW MEMBERS of the staff gathered in Pina’s office in October of 1990 figuring out what needed to be done before January when the district attorney would be leaving office. It would likely be one of the last times—if not the last time—those in Pina’s inner circle would be together there. When the incoming prosecutor came in, he would handpick his own staff. A few, maybe, would be asked to stay after officially “applying” for a job and undergoing an interview with the new boss. Out with the old. In with the new. That was how politics worked. That was how it always worked.

  Lance Garth listened to what Pina was saying and wondered what would happen to him. He weathered politics well up until now as an assistant district attorney. He’d worked under four different district attorneys in Bristol County and had seen, firsthand, the housecleaning after each election. Some pending cases, upon review, got dropped. Some cases that had languished got prosecuted. The top staff, those closest to the outgoing DA, nearly always got the boot. Garth had started as a prosecutor in 1969, a year after passing the Massachusetts bar. It was the same year Senator Edward Kennedy drove an Oldsmobile off the narrow Chappaquiddick Bridge, killing twenty-eight-year-old staffer Mary Jo Kopechne. His boss then was Edmund Dinis, whose district at the time included the island of Chappaquiddick. Dinis knew politics. Dinis’s father was the first Portuguese-American elected to the state senate, and his godfather was the legendary Boston mayor James Michael Curley. But it was clear he didn’t know politics enough to know what would happen in the Kennedy case. Ed Dinis oversaw the grand jury in that case and the outcome—Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and got a suspended sentence—failed to satisfy either the Kennedy lovers or haters. Dinis lost the election the next year.

  Now, as Lance sat in the office, listening to Ron Pina, he wondered if his time as a prosecutor was finally coming to a close.

  The meeting was wrapping up when the DA turned to him. “You’re going to prosecute the Ponte case,” the outgoing DA told him.3

  Lance was quiet. He wasn’t sure if Ron was doing him a favor, thinking this would secure him a spot with the new administration, or if it was a final way to stick it to him. Lance never felt part of the true inner circle in the office. He was a holdo
ver from previous administrations, not one of Pina’s handpicked young turks on the way up the political ladder. He was one of the prosecutors watching from the sidelines during the highway killing investigation. He wasn’t privy to what investigators were doing. He wasn’t involved with the grand jury presentation. His caseload was often filled with the heavy-hitting and headline-making murders, but this was not one of them. He wasn’t sure why, but he knew not to ask. Now, he was tasked with prosecuting one of the biggest cases in the office, and the trial clock was ticking. In Massachusetts, a case must be tried within a year unless there are special circumstances or court-approved delays. It is called the speedy trial rule. Nearly two of the twelve months had already passed since Ponte was arraigned on the murder charge. Lance was now left with less than a year to try one of the most complicated and scrutinized cases in the county—and he knew little about the evidence.

  Why didn’t you give it to me eight months ago, he thought

  Instead, he nodded. Okay, he told the lame-duck prosecutor.

  As he left the office, he started a mental list of things to do to prepare for a trial.

  I can do this and win, he tried to convince himself.

  14OLD SUSPECT BACK

  IN THE MONTHS leading up to the indictment of Kenny Ponte and the district attorney’s loss in 1990, the Freetown man accused of attacking prostitutes, Tony DeGrazia, was trying to start fresh and get back to work. The time behind bars trying to make bail took a toll on him financially and emotionally. It would be hard to get someone to hire him after the arrest and ensuing news coverage linking him to the murder case. Starting his own business seemed the only alternative. Tony once worked in the stone business with his father and figured he could do that again on his own. There were a few problems with that plan: he had no credit, and he had no truck. He turned to his parish priest for help.

  The St. John Neumann Catholic Church overlooked Long Pond and was next to a popular church youth camp called Cathedral Camp. Tony would often come by the church to talk with Father George Harrison during the week and would be at Mass every Sunday. Sometimes the priest would see him in the pew, quietly saying the rosary. “He had a lot of spirituality,” Father Harrison recalled. “He was always in church, praying.”1

  The priest knew about Tony’s personal and legal problems—everyone did—and tried to counsel him. When police first searched Tony’s house, he told the young man to go with the police and give honest answers. When Tony was later charged and held pending bail, the priest talked and prayed with him at the jail. He had nothing to fear if he was innocent, the priest told him. Eventually, Tony asked the priest if he could help him get started in his business. Would he be the guarantor on some rental trucks? Could he also be an officer of his company, at least temporarily, so he could rent the trucks? Please? The priest reluctantly agreed with the caveat that his name be removed as quickly as possible.

  By March of 1991, Tony had created a new company called Colonial Stone Supply, leased a 1990 red Ford pickup truck and a Mack dump truck, and started to work. There were three people, including Tony, listed as corporation officers. By June of 1990, only Tony was listed. “Once he got off on the business, he was busy, busy all summer long,” the priest would later testify.2

  For Tony, things were changing personally and on the legal front, too. After years of self-consciousness about his appearance, Tony had surgery to repair the nose everyone described as “boxer-like.” He wasn’t considered a murder suspect anymore after that lawyer from New Bedford was indicted in the highway killings case. He still had the rape charges pending but he was feeling good about how those cases would turn out. He had a new attorney, an up-and-coming aggressive Boston lawyer named Robert George, whom he first met with in April of 1990 and officially hired by August, and Tony felt the charges would either be dropped or he would be acquitted. “He struck me as a young man who was deeply upset by the allegations against him and desperately wanted to be cleared,” Robert George recalled.3 “It was like he was caught up in a whirlwind he couldn’t get out of.”

  Tony’s demeanor surprised the attorney, too. “I was impressed what a gentle kid he was. He was gentle and he was very polite. I was touched by it.”

  There was still one rough spot in Tony’s life, though. More than a year earlier, his high school sweetheart had broken up with him a month after they got engaged and was now dating someone else. She told him they would always be friends but she was in love. Tony took it hard. He had seen the new couple together one night at the Eagles Club in Lakeville and began to cry. When the couple noticed and left, he followed them outside, tears still in his eyes. He told her new boyfriend to take good care of her. People told Tony it would get easier and he would meet someone else. He still wasn’t sure.

  Other than his love life, the dark days for Tony seemed to be coming to a close. He was feeling good about his looks, his work, and, it appeared, his life.

  The good times didn’t last. By the fall of 1990, work had slowed down, there was little money coming in, and Tony couldn’t pay his rent. He needed a place to stay. He sought a refuge at the church rectory.

  Father Harrison had encouraged and counseled Tony over the years, just as he had other parishioners. Tony was now asking for more help. He wanted to stay at the rectory. The priest said no. Tony asked again. And again. And again. Finally, the priest relented. It would be a temporary arrangement, Tony was told. He could stay in a small room in the back of the rectory. But it had to be a short stay, just until he got on his feet. It was not permanent. “He was moving through,” the priest recalled. “He was getting out. He didn’t want to stay there. I mean, he just needed a temporary place to stay. And he was [saying] just, like, ‘Can I stay here?’ I was hoping he’d get out any day.”4

  Tony went to work early, went to Mass, and helped with church readings. Sometimes he ate in the rectory, often in the den. He would get anxious when a court date neared and he would talk with the priest and pray beforehand. The priest said there did not seem to be anything to suggest a problem at the time, other than the pending court case. Between church services, the youth ministry, parish business, and related events Father Harrison was very busy. Tony was focusing on work, church, and upcoming court dates.

  A year earlier, Tony had been in jail, accused of beating and raping women. Now, he was hoping his new lawyer could convince a judge or jury he was innocent.

  IT WAS A CLEAR NIGHT, around thirty degrees, when the woman on Purchase Street in New Bedford’s Weld Square hopped in the red truck after midnight on November 2, 1990. Her boyfriend was nearby, taking note of what the truck and the driver looked like. The first two numbers on the license plate were 99, and there were three letters on the side of the truck, CSS. The truck had what appeared to be oversized tires, and the vehicle was sitting higher off the ground than most. It seemed new. He got a good look at the driver and knew, if anything happened, he could identify him.

  Once in the truck, the woman and the driver agreed on a price for sex. She tried to chat with him but he was quiet as they drove to a spot behind a waterfront bar and stopped. The driver slid toward her. Then he grabbed her neck with one, then two hands and began squeezing. Tighter and tighter. “I was saying to him, ‘What are you doing?’” the woman recalled.5 She fought back. She could feel herself losing consciousness. She began to kick. The doors were locked. Each time she tried to unlock them, the man would lock them again using the automatic lock. She kept pushing and kicking and fighting until she reached the driver’s side door. “Why are you doing this to me?” she cried.6 She opened it slightly and then, gripping the door handle, pushed herself out of the truck. The inside door handle broke off as she toppled out.

  Then she ran. First, she hid in a field, and then began banging on trailer trucks parked near the waterfront tavern. One of the truck drivers, sleeping in his cab, woke and called the police.

  When police arrived to Herman Melville Boulevard at quarter to one in the morning, they spoke with t
he frightened woman and searched the area. New Bedford Officer William Perry, the first on the scene, later found the door handle on the ground.

  Detective Paul LeClair on November 5, 1990, separately showed the woman and her boyfriend a photo array of men to see if they recognized the attacker. They both picked out an old photo of Tony DeGrazia, saying it looked similar to the man they saw. The nose, they both noted, looked different in the picture. A few days later, on November 8, Detective Tommy Thomas interviewed the couple and developed a composite drawing based on their descriptions. The drawing looked like Tony.

  When Detective Richie Ferreira, who worked on the highway killing case, heard about the attack, he called the Chamber of Commerce to see if Tony registered a business with the group. The answer was yes: Colonial Stone Supply. C.S.S.

  Richie called the state police. You’re not going to believe this, he told them.

  The same New Bedford and state police investigators who once wondered if Tony was tied to the highway killings were now looking at the Freetown man in yet another attack.

  Trooper Lorraine Forrest, who, along with Trooper Kevin Butler, had interviewed Tony in the earlier cases, found Tony’s truck parked at Cathedral Camp next to the church. It was a red 1990 two-door Ford pickup truck with silver gray strips on the side. The letters C.S.S. were painted on the doors. The first two numbers on the license plate were 99. Richie checked a local Ford dealership and found the handle recovered the night of the attack was one used for four years in full-sized trucks. One of those models was a 1990 Ford full-sized truck.

  ON NOVEMBER 20, Tony was in the church rectory, preparing for his sister’s wedding the next day. He would be doing the readings at the Mass and was making sure it was perfect. Father Harrison was eating spaghetti in the den and was about to head out in a few minutes to perform a wedding at four thirty, followed by a wedding rehearsal at six, and a Mass at seven. The wedding rehearsal for Tony’s sister was at eight.