Even though the stress of police work was out of his father’s life, Chris knew his father’s health was not good. In the six years since leaving the New Bedford force, the twice-divorced John Dextradeur suffered another heart attack outside a Fall River courthouse, and his doctor told him that his heart was badly damaged. He needed surgery. He declined. Instead, he kept busy as a private investigator, played a little golf and tried, overall, to enjoy retirement. He kept telling his son to take the department promotional exams to advance on the job. Chris, though, was enjoying his work in the narcotics division, and studying really wasn’t how he wanted to spend his free time. Sitting behind the wheel of the unmarked cruiser, with his boss in the passenger seat, preparing for a surveillance or raid was how he wanted to spend his days.
Chris knew the night in the city would be busy. It always was. This afternoon and evening, they would watch some of the street dealers, send an undercover in to make some buys, then make some arrests. Maybe they would get enough information from these street dealers to secure a search warrant and hit a house. He was always amazed by the drug subculture—and its business infrastructure—in the city. It was a big business where some people made big money destroying lives. That was clear to him when they raided apartments with bare mattresses on the floor and tens of thousands of dollars hidden in the refrigerator.
Chris knew the schedule tonight, and in the days to follow, would also be a bit relaxed and unstructured for his boss. The lieutenant’s daughter was pregnant and the call from the hospital that she was going into labor could come at any time. His boss planned to be at the hospital when that happened.
In the unmarked cars of the 1990s, detectives relied on a bulky phone with an antenna stretched toward the windshield for phone calls. Sometimes they had to move the antenna to catch a signal. The signal was strong as they drove along. The phone rang and the lieutenant looked serious after he answered. Sgt. John Silva was on the other end.
“Is Chris with you?” the sergeant asked.2
“Yeah, he’s right here.”
The lieutenant turned to Chris. They just took my daughter to St. Luke’s, he told him.
Chris turned the cruiser around and headed south, toward the hospital. His boss kept directing him down other streets, avoiding Cottage and Robeson Streets where there had been a car accident.
As they pulled up to the hospital emergency entrance, within eyeshot of an ambulance, the lieutenant put his hand on Chris’ shoulder. It’s not my daughter. It’s your dad. He had a heart attack. He got in an accident. Chris could see the paramedics pulling his father out of the ambulance, performing CPR as the stretcher was wheeled into the hospital.
John Dextradeur was pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Hospital on March 4, 1994. He was fifty-two.
At his wake, the line of mourners queued through the funeral home to pay respects. At his funeral the next day at St. Mary’s Church on Tarkiln Hill Road in the city’s far North End, six of his former police colleagues in dress blues carefully carried his casket.
WHEN THEY WERE PROMOTED, both Maryann Dill and Jose Gonsalves left the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office. Maryann left first in 1992 and eventually went to the state police unit at Logan Airport; Jose left later and eventually went back to the Dartmouth barracks. Both finally retired in 2009, both with the rank of lieutenant. Richie Ferreira remained a detective for a few more years then was transferred to the traffic division before retiring in 2006.
Bob St. Jean wondered for years what he could have done differently in the case. He still believes Kenny had something to do with the case but knows there was no hard evidence to convict him. The persistent stories of the locally produced pornographic—and possibly snuff—films nag him to this day. What was the seed to that story and was it related to the killings? When, as expected, he was let go from the district attorney’s office in the post-election purge of Ron Pina hires, Bob returned to work in the family excavation business in Acushnet and got involved in town government. As a civilian, he watched from afar as others tried to solve the case. He quietly sympathized with their frustration.
A series of commanders led the state police unit in the DA’s office in the following decades and each one would field calls and tips about the highway killings. One of those commanders would be Nelson Ostiguy, who returned to the unit for about a month, then moved on to a job in state police headquarters and a series of promotions. Each new commander would first call Maryann and Jose to confer when something about the case came up, years after the two had moved on. With each improvement in forensic science and the ability to pull DNA from smaller evidence samples, investigators quietly checked to see if anything they had could be tested anew. They checked and rechecked for fibers and hair. They cross-checked what was gathered at the scenes, then examined it again when new, improved tests came out. Lt. Joseph Costa, one of the commanders in the following years, sent evidence to the FBI laboratories to see if something—anything—could be gleaned to finally identify the killer, alive or dead. Nothing substantial came back.
Paul Walsh asked both FBI profilers and also the lab to give the case another look in the 1990s, hoping new developments in the field could yield a new perspective on the killer. “They thought it was significant none of the bodies were found in New Bedford proper,” he recalled, referring to the profilers.3 “If you put pins on a map, you can see all of the bodies are just outside New Bedford. The bodies seemed to be dotted right around the city border. It was as if the person didn’t want New Bedford police investigating, that by doing this it would keep New Bedford out of it. They thought it was very significant.”4
Walsh said profilers raised the possibility the killer was familiar with law-enforcement techniques, that a few of the bodies may have been left in what might be considered sexually suggestive positions intentionally and that whoever was responsible could have sexual problems. The intriguing theories had been raised before, but theories weren’t evidence.
The stuff investigators quietly examined in the years after the single murder indictment against Kenny Ponte was dropped was interesting but had “no legal significance,” Paul said, without elaborating.
Paul Walsh would eventually face his own upstart challenger in 2006, another candidate promoting that familiar political mantra of change. Walsh lost to C. Samuel Sutter, an attorney both Ron Pina and Paul had hired as a prosecutor at separate times over the years. This newest DA met with the highway killing families, pledged to do whatever he could to solve the case, but made no promises. Some items, including those already tested by the FBI, were sent to the updated state police crime-lab facilities to be examined. Nothing new was announced.
When a bank took over Kenny’s former home on Chestnut Street in New Bedford, investigators decided to resolve a rumor that the body of one of the still missing women, Christina Monteiro, was buried beneath a backyard concrete slab. They brought in heavy equipment and dug up the yard. No bodies were found.
By the late 1990s, Kenny Ponte was living in a single-story home on Austin Street owned by his mother and trying to eke out a living as an attorney in his hometown. He sued Ronald Pina on behalf of Tony DeGrazia’s mother who claimed the prosecutor hounded her son to death. The case was dismissed. He had some minor run-ins with the law, including arrests for shoplifting and driving under the influence, and tried unsuccessfully to sell the film rights for his story. He never published his book, “Presumed Guilty.” It was unclear if he ever finished it. Kenny’s neighbors on Austin Street didn’t like him and often complained to police about trash, traffic, and his demeanor. He had a lot of cats and fed the strays.
16MOVING ON
NEW BEDFORD OFFICER JACK INDIO didn’t recognize the man standing outside the Shirley Street apartment. The guy was disheveled and smelled bad. Jack figured he was homeless. It was a mid-September afternoon in 2003 and near the end of his shift when the call came in about a disturbance on the street. Based on what Jack was seeing, he figured he would be done with th
e situation fairly quickly and would be heading home.
Then the man gave his name: Kenneth Ponte.
Jack knew in that second it would not be an easy call. The young officer had been on the force since 1993, five years after the first woman went missing off the streets of the city, but he knew the story of the highway killing investigation and he knew the stories about the lawyer who became a central character in the probe.
In the decade since the charges against Kenny were dismissed, the drug addict turned lawyer turned addict still occasionally popped up in the headlines when he was arrested for shoplifting or drunk driving—short news briefs this time instead of the front-page eye-catching articles from a few years back. He briefly considered running for office but never followed through. Stories surfaced again about his drug use. He was disbarred in 1997 for stealing clients’ funds and mingling his personal account with his clients’ money. And he continued to obsessively write letters, sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed, still railing against Ron Pina, the man he blamed for ruining his life. Kenny did not fade into obscurity.
Here, outside the Shirley Street apartment on September 18, 2003, Jack was dealing with the latest drama in Kenny’s life.
Kenny was telling the officer he went to the house to check up on a friend whom he routinely drove to the methadone clinic. Instead, he was punched in the face then shoved out the door by a man.1 Those inside the apartment had a different story.
As the officer walked in, he saw a twenty-three-year-old woman on a bed. She was so still she appeared lifeless. Another woman was on the telephone, calling drug-treatment centers. Scribbled notes with the names and numbers of programs and hospitals were scattered next to her. Kenny was a problem, the woman told the officer as she put down the phone. He was part of her friend’s drug problem and, when he showed up, she asked him to leave. When he didn’t, she asked a male friend to get him to leave.
Jack leaned over the woman on the bed and spoke with her privately. What’s going on? he asked. She was a drug addict, she told him. She met Kenny a few months ago and partied with him quite a bit. He would buy a hundred-dollar bag of cocaine and the two would do it, she told him.
“Did he ever assault you?” Jack asked. “No, but,” she answered.2
He pressed her for more information. Kenny gave her the creeps, and she had an uneasy feeling about him. The sliding door lock in her apartment was broken and he would sneak in, she said. Sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night and find him standing over her in the bedroom. Kenny told her about the book he had written about a man who picks up prostitutes, kills them, and then leaves their bodies along the highway.
Until that September day, she did not know the bodies of nine women who vanished in 1988 were found along the local highways. She did not know that two women—Christina Monteiro and Marilyn Roberts—remained missing. She did not know Kenny had been charged with murder in one of the cases. She did not know the charge had been dismissed.
The next day, she was in a treatment program.
THE NEIGHBORS WERE FED UP. The stench of cat piss was overwhelming. The yard at the 336 Austin Street house was overgrown. There were rats. There was trash. People would drive up, go to the door then leave quickly with something in their hands. Sometimes Kenny would scream obscenities. Sometimes it would be veiled threats, like the time he yelled “Nice car? But not for long” at a neighbor whose vehicle was later found to be vandalized. He left a note scrawled in crayon for one person, saying “Please do not leave your trash on my lawn.” There was no running water in the house, so Kenny had taken to using the back yard as a “cesspool.”3
But the nudity was the last straw.
The heavy-set Kenny would stand in the front doorway naked just about every morning. It was not a pretty sight.
Every time police went to the house, he wouldn’t come to the door.
THE STENCH hit New Bedford detective Claudia Sampson in the gut as she walked up the driveway. It drilled up her nostrils and into her throat so deeply she could taste it. Cat urine mixed with decomposition. The veteran cop, who worked narcotics and vice before eventually taking over as evidence officer, stepped carefully through the back door of the Austin Street house, over empty boxes of food and soup cans. There were papers and bags and bottles littering the floor. There were needles and prescription bottles tucked in corners and on chairs. She looked down and could see the trash moving. She hoped it was a cat.4
She moved forward into the living room, through ankle deep trash. The odor was overpowering and all too familiar. It was the smell of death. By the front picture window, she saw two mattresses stacked. The bloated body of a man was on top. There were flies everywhere: on the body, on the mattress, on the windows. She held her breath.
A young man who said he did yard work and odd jobs at the Austin Street house had called police around 2:30 in the afternoon on January 26, 2010, to say he was worried about his employer. He noticed the guy was sleeping on the mattress in front of the living room window whenever he drove by. The guy seemed to be in the same spot for the past couple of days and he was afraid he was dead.
Uniformed patrol officer Mark Giammalvo was faced with the same scene as Detective Sampson encountered a few minutes earlier when, as the first officer to the scene, he choked back the smell, walked into the house, and saw a body partially covered with a thick bedspread. He had an idea who the man was. He had been to the house before. He noticed, as he carefully stepped away into the kitchen, that the oven was set to high and the oven door open. He turned it off and closed the door. He wondered if that was how the homeowner was heating the house.5
Teams of New Bedford and state police detectives soon converged on the house. Each investigator carefully stepped in, then a few minutes later ducked out to breathe. Sampson gave up trying to hold her breath inside the house as she took photographs to document the scene, instead pushing through the harsh stench. She took photos of the body, the needles, the black plastic bags filled with garbage. She took photos of the flies on the window, the empty bottles of water and juice. She took photos of the bottles filled with urine, the box of Frosted Flakes on the floor, the hundred-dollar bill sticking out of the mattress beneath the body. She took photos of the D-Con box, the window shade on the floor, the jacket slung over the lamp. She took photos of the bare mattresses, stacked atop each other, in front of the living room window, the body still on them. She took note of the hole cut on the bottom of the back door, a space just big enough for a cat to squeeze through. Sometimes she had to walk outside to take a deep breath, fill her lungs with clean air, before plunging back into the fetid house.
Next to the bed, Claudia saw several crack pipes and needles. She wasn’t surprised.
The medical examiner arrived and determined there were no signs of foul play. The body was removed by Le Beouf Livery Services.
Kenneth C. Ponte, the former attorney once so desperate for companionship and drugs he would feed desperate female addicts cocaine to stay with him, had died alone on a bare mattress at age sixty. His death certificate listed chronic substance abuse as the cause of death.
IT HAD BEEN EIGHT YEARS since Richie Ferreira worked in the detective division and four years since he retired after thirty-two years on the New Bedford police force. He was now working part-time as a private investigator, doing much the same thing he had done for years without the added stress of crime scenes. He kept in close touch with the guys on the job, though, and sometimes stopped in to one of the three stations in the city. On this day, he parked his two-toned green 2005 Kia Sorento on the street, just up from the South End station and walked in.
“Hey Richie, your buddy died,” Officer Lenny Motta told him.6
Richie paused. “Who?”
“Kenny Ponte. He was found dead in his house yesterday.”
Richie took a deep breath and shook his head.
Jose Gonsalves was home, eating dinner, when his son, who was a New Bedford police officer, called. “You’
re not going to believe this,” he told him. “That guy, Kenny Ponte, was found dead in his house.”7
Maryann Dill, retired for nearly a year, was driving to her parents’ home, listening to the radio, when she caught a familiar name in the news report: Kenneth Ponte, one-time suspect in a series of killings in the New Bedford area, was dead.8
Bob St. Jean was in Acushnet, working in the office at the family business, when he heard on the radio that the former lawyer was dead. He wondered what secrets died with him.9
Judy DeSantos was in Florida where she had moved a few years earlier, joining her sister Nancy’s daughter, Jill, when she got a call from New Bedford. Kenny Ponte was found dead, her daughter, Jessie, told her. Death usually came with a sense of finality, but Judy found herself left with that open-ended grief of unanswered questions.10
She thought back to a letter she once sent to Kenny during the height of the homicide investigation, pleading with him to cooperate with authorities. “It is not my wish to make you feel harassed, I just want to end this continual nightmare and maybe be able to pick up the remaining pieces of my life,” she wrote in the typed letter.11
At the bottom, in a handwritten postscript, she added: “I’m looking forward to hearing from you.”
EPILOGUE
AT AN UNDISCLOSED WAREHOUSE along the south coast of Massachusetts, boxes of evidence in the case are locked up. Some have been unboxed over the years, the contents sent to yet another laboratory for testing, and then packed up again. The FBI has examined the evidence at least twice; the state police laboratory at least once. A private laboratory was also used several times. Fibers have been compared and examined; DNA examinations have been done; evidence has been compared for similarities at the nine crime scenes. The investigative reports compiled by dozens of detectives over the years are massive. They are stuffed in cardboard boxes and file cabinets in the state police offices at the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office. The cold-case unit is now officially in charge of the case; if there is a new lead, it will go there.
Shallow Graves Page 31