Between the spring and late summer of 1988, at least eleven women disappeared in and around New Bedford, a fishing city on the south coast of Massachusetts. Over the following months, into April 1989, the bodies of nine of them were found near highways in towns around the city, among them Freetown, Dartmouth and Westport. The other two have never been found. Most of the women struggled with drug addiction, and some had worked as prostitutes, according to the reporters and investigators who followed the case. Many of them had ties to Weld Square, then a high-crime area near the center of the city.
The case has been described by Boston 25 News as possibly the largest unsolved murder case in New England, and investigators told the station it was the largest homicide investigation in Massachusetts since the Boston Strangler. One man was indicted, in 1990, for one of the deaths. The charge was dropped the next year for lack of evidence. No one has been convicted, and the families of the women are still asking for answers.
Reports name five of the nine women whose bodies were found: Debra Medeiros, Nancy Paiva, Debra Greenlaw DeMello, Rochelle Clifford Dopierala and Mary Rose Santos. The other four, and the two women who have never been found, were not named in the reports.
The victims shared similar backgrounds, Maureen Boyle, who covered the case as a crime reporter in 1988 and later wrote a book about it, told CBS Boston; drug addiction was the common factor. Boston 25 News described her book as an effort to make sure that the women, wives, mothers and daughters, are not forgotten. The families of several of them have spoken publicly over the years, and their accounts are the main record of who these women were outside the case files.
Nancy Paiva was a 36-year-old mother who was addicted to drugs, CBS Boston reported. In the summer of 1988 her sister had not heard from her for a couple of weeks and began to worry.
Nancy Paiva was last seen leaving a bar. Her body was found in Dartmouth about three weeks later, CBS Boston reported, and she was the second victim in the series.
Her daughter was a teenager when her mother died. Thirty years later she told Boston 25 News that there was no justice and no answers, and that she could not call her mother to talk about her day. "There has to be somebody who saw something, heard something, knows something," she said. In 2025 she was one of the relatives who pressed prosecutors and the courts for DNA testing that might open a new line of inquiry. "It won't bring her back, but at least we'll know," she told The Boston Globe. Her sister told CBS Boston in 2021 that she had never stopped looking and would keep fighting for justice.
Debra Medeiros was the first of the women to be found, in Freetown in 1988, Boston 25 News reported. Identifying her took months. Maureen Boyle has said that Debra Medeiros had argued with her boyfriend and left his home in New Bedford before she disappeared.
Debra Greenlaw DeMello's brother has said that she disappeared in July 1988, and that no one heard from her for months. Her body was found in Dartmouth in November 1988. Her daughter, then a teenager, watched police recover the body without knowing at the time who it was. "I actually watched them pull my mother out of the woods," she told Boston 25 News in 2018.
Her brother described her as a good person who had become caught up in something she could not control, and said that her addiction, which began when she was a teenager, had hurt the whole family. He has run a Facebook page about the case and has said he does not believe the case would have gone unsolved if the women had been the daughters of police officers, judges or lawyers. Neither he nor her daughter ever believed that the lawyer indicted in 1990 was the killer, they told the station, and they want to know who was.
Little has been published about several of the women. Mary Rose Santos's body was found in Westport in 1989, Boston 25 News reported.
The 1990 indictment in the case of Rochelle Clifford Dopierala said that she died on April 27, 1988, and charged that she had been beaten to death. Hers is the only death in the series in which anyone has been charged.
Two more women disappeared in 1988 and have never been found. Investigators and the families have long feared that they were victims of the same person. When Boston 25 News reported on the case in 2017 and 2018, it described them as presumed victims; the filmmakers who made a documentary about the case spoke of eleven families who had lost someone.
The disappearances drew little notice at first. "No one realized that these women were missing until they started turning up dead," Maureen Boyle told Boston 25 News.
Boyle was then a police and crime reporter for The Standard-Times of New Bedford, and she was the first to report that a serial killer appeared to be at work. She has said that she sensed a pattern in the summer of 1988 and that it became clear in November, after the third body was found and a fourth turned up in Dartmouth soon after. More bodies followed in quick succession.
A former New Bedford police detective, Richard Ferreira, investigated Nancy Paiva's death with his partner and linked it to the other missing women. "I think we have a serial killer around here," he recalled saying. He told CBS Boston in 2021 that it was the most difficult case he had ever worked, and that the families of the two women who were never found still stayed with him.
The case was investigated by the Bristol County District Attorney's office and the Massachusetts State Police. Boston 25 News described it in 2018 as the most expensive investigation in the state's history. Investigators faced problems from the start. The killer left few clues, and there were no eyewitnesses. Women on the street described a man who drove a pickup truck, but many trucks in the area fit the description, Boston 25 News reported.
A grand jury began hearing evidence in the case in March 1989, according to a newspaper report on the 1990 indictment.
The filmmakers Aaron Cadieux and David Grochmal, who spent about a year and a half researching the case for a documentary called The Highway Murders, told Boston 25 News in 2016 that they believed the killer chose women who used drugs, possibly drawing them out of bars to his vehicle. "The women were in bars," Grochmal said. "There were 11 families that lost family members and they want answers."
Over the years several men were looked at. The guilt of four different men had been widely speculated about since the fall of 1988, a newspaper report said, although the district attorney's office had never publicly named a suspect and none of them had been charged. WBSM reported in 2026 that the district attorney's office had considered at least three men as suspects. Only one was ever charged with any of the killings.
K.P. was a New Bedford lawyer. He had been convicted years earlier on narcotics and breaking-and-entering charges, and Governor Francis Sargent pardoned him in 1975, according to the same report. He had a drug habit, Boston 25 News reported, and he knew several of the women; three of them had been his clients, the ABA Journal reported, and he acknowledged a relationship with a fourth, Rochelle Clifford Dopierala. He moved to Port Richey, Florida, in 1988.
Maureen Boyle has said that he was uncooperative with the police, which raised suspicion. A retired state police lieutenant who worked the case, Jose Gonsalves, said later that his lack of cooperation had hurt him.
In 1990 a Bristol County grand jury indicted K.P. for the murder of Rochelle Clifford Dopierala. The indictment, filed under seal, said that she died on April 27, 1988. He pleaded not guilty. Bail was set at $500,000 surety or $50,000 cash, and his mother's home was posted to secure his release. District Attorney Ronald Pina would not say whether K.P. was a suspect in the other deaths. Court papers indicated that the authorities believed he had personal relationships with at least three of the women. Pina's office alleged that K.P. had become involved in the drug trade and had recruited women to buy drugs, and that Rochelle Dopierala had planned to expose his drug activity; that was the motive the prosecution put forward.
K.P. called himself the victim of a witch hunt and said the indictment was political. His lawyer, Kevin Reddington, said he had been under intense pressure. At the time Pina was seeking a fourth term and faced a challenger in a September 18 Democratic primary who accused him of political motives, which Pina denied. A relative of one of the dead women told reporters at the time that she wanted K.P. to hang. In a 1990 interview with the Associated Press, K.P. said the indictment had ruined his legal career, the ABA Journal reported. Even before he was charged, speaking by telephone from Florida, he had blamed Pina's office for floating his name. "He's ruined my career as a lawyer. He's ruined my life," he said of Pina, and he counted 254 news articles that had linked him to the case.
The murder charge was dropped in the summer of 1991. A special prosecutor, Paul Buckley, cleared him for lack of evidence and called the indictment "a fishing expedition," the ABA Journal reported; Boston 25 News reported that a new district attorney dropped the charge. He remained the only person ever indicted in the case.
K.P. stopped practicing law in 1997 and was disbarred that year for taking $12,000 from a client's insurance settlement for his own use, the ABA Journal reported. He struggled with drug addiction and was arrested several times. Some years before his death, investigators dug up the yard of a house where he had lived with a backhoe, the ABA Journal reported. In January 2010 he was found dead in his home, in his early sixties. The authorities said the death did not appear suspicious. "It ruined him," his lawyer said of the case. The families of Nancy Paiva and Debra DeMello have said they never believed he was the killer.
A.D. was another man whose name was linked to the killings in the press. He was arrested in May 1989 on sexual assault and assault and battery charges, according to a newspaper report, which did not link those charges to the killings. He was never charged with any of the killings. He died by suicide around the time K.P. was cleared, the ABA Journal reported.
In 2021 the Bristol County District Attorney's office told CBS Boston that it was using up-to-date technology on the case, that DNA testing had been completed, and that the investigation was active and ongoing, with investigators following up on tips.
In 2025 Boston 25 News reported a tip that had reached one of the families. Debra DeMello's brother told Boston 25 News that a man had told him he saw two men throw a wrapped object from a van near the beach in Westport in the summer of 1988. The man who gave the tip later died in a house fire. DeMello's brother said he had passed the information to the district attorney's office, and that the office had done nothing with it. Boyle said she had also passed on tips she received after her book was published.
The most recent legal turn in the case came from a different killing. On April 28, 1988, Mary Harris, 33, a dancer at a New Bedford-area nightclub, was strangled in a motel room in Dartmouth where she had been living for about a week, The Boston Globe reported. Shawn Tanner, a 23-year-old part-time bouncer at the club, was charged within a week. He testified that he had last seen her when an unfamiliar man arrived. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder in 1989, largely on the testimony of a witness who said Tanner had described the killing to him, and the Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the conviction in 1994. He was sentenced to life without parole and always maintained his innocence. DNA testing did not exist when he was tried.
Her death was not considered part of the highway series. Tanner was in jail for nearly all of the highway killings, and Mary Harris was not found beside a highway. But The Globe noted that she resembled the other victims in several ways: she was a New Bedford woman who sold sex and was strangled with clothing in 1988. Nathaniel Mendell, a lawyer for relatives of highway victims, has said her killing was close in time, place and cause to the highway murders.
The New England Innocence Project took Tanner's case in 2020. In 2021 he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. A Superior Court judge ordered DNA testing of the evidence from the Harris case, and an agreed order entered on June 2, 2022, listed the items: a stocking, fingernail scrapings, bedsheets, towels, hairs and rings, according to the Supreme Judicial Court. The Innocence Project agreed to pay for the testing. The state police were to send the materials to a private laboratory, Bode Technology Group, which received them on June 22, 2022. Tanner was granted medical parole and died on September 13, 2022, at 57, before testing began.
The laboratory could not begin work until June 2023, the court found, because of the timing of the Commonwealth's approval for it to use the national DNA database, CODIS. It then found that the fingernail scrapings had never been sent. On August 15, 2023, the Bristol County District Attorney's office moved to vacate the testing order on the ground that Tanner was dead. Judge Raffi N. Yessayan denied the motion, and the office appealed.
Relatives of victims of the highway killings joined the fight in support of testing. Among those named in the court's opinion as family members of victims of "the New Bedford highway murderer" were Nancy Paiva's daughter and Debra DeMello's daughter. Their brief said that this might be their last good chance to find new physical evidence, The Globe reported, and argued that a third person's DNA could open a new line of inquiry into the unsolved killings. "They deserve a criminal justice system that completes the testing ordered by the Superior Court," the families wrote, according to the Innocence Project. The Massachusetts Attorney General, the Committee for Public Counsel Services and the Boston Bar Association also urged the court to let testing go ahead.
The district attorney's office argued that the order had lapsed with Tanner's death and that testing could not prove his innocence. Its chief of appeals, David Mark, told the justices that this was "not a case where testing alone can produce a definitive result of exoneration." The office also said it had ruled out any connection between Tanner's case and the serial killings. At the argument on November 3, 2025, one of the justices asked what interest the Commonwealth had in not finding out what was under the fingernails.
On February 27, 2026, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that a DNA testing order under the state's post-conviction testing law "does not expire automatically upon a defendant's death," although a judge keeps the power to reconsider such an order when circumstances change. Justice Gabrielle R. Wolohojian wrote the opinion. The court found no abuse of discretion in the judge's refusal to vacate the order, and it pointed to society's interest in identifying any other possible culprit, which it said continues regardless of the defendant's death. The district attorney's office said it would comply.
Laura Carey, a staff attorney at the New England Innocence Project, said it had been Tanner's "dying wish" to have the evidence tested and his name cleared, and that the testing would likely take months. His older sister said she wanted to continue his fight. Nancy Paiva's daughter, by then a grandmother, told reporters that her grandson had begun asking about his great-grandmother's death, and that any new information was worth having. "It doesn't matter if it's a pebble," she said.
As of June 2026, no result of the testing had been reported.
The killings remain unsolved. In June 2024 and again on June 3, 2026, FBI agents searched woods in Westport for what the bureau called "specific evidence." A spokesperson for the FBI's Boston Division said in 2026 that the search was connected to "an ongoing, multi-jurisdictional investigation" and that there was no threat to the public. The FBI did not say what the searches were about, and WBSM, which reported them, did not say that they were connected to the highway killings. The station noted that the district attorney's office lists the highway cases among its unsolved cases.
Maureen Boyle's book Shallow Graves: The Hunt for the New Bedford Highway Serial Killer was published in 2017. Boyle has said she believes the killer has never been identified partly because officials were slow at first to recognize that a serial killer was at work.
Anyone with information has been asked to contact the Bristol County District Attorney's office or the Massachusetts State Police Cold Case Unit.
The number of victims. Nine women's deaths are counted as the highway killings in court papers and news reports. The two missing women have never been found, and their inclusion rests on the fears of investigators and families, not on any finding.
Whether one person was responsible. The Boston Globe wrote in 2025 that the deaths may have been the work of one person or several. No court has found who killed any of the women.
K.P. He was indicted in one death, and the charge was dropped for lack of evidence; he was never tried and is legally innocent of all the killings. The prosecution's theory of a drug-related motive was never tested in court.
A.D. He was named in the press as a suspect but was never charged with any of the killings, and no published evidence links him to any of the deaths.
The Harris case. Shawn Tanner was convicted of the murder of Mary Harris. Whether DNA testing will clear him, and whether it will say anything about the highway killings, was not known as of June 2026. The district attorney's office says it has ruled out a connection.
Who dropped the charge against K.P. Sources agree that the murder charge was dropped in the summer of 1991, but they differ on who dropped it: the ABA Journal credits a special prosecutor, Paul Buckley, and Boston 25 News a new district attorney.
April 27, 1988: Date of death of Rochelle Clifford Dopierala, as given in the 1990 indictment.
April 28, 1988: Mary Harris strangled in Dartmouth (a separate case; Shawn Tanner convicted in 1989).
1988: The first body, later identified as Debra Medeiros, is found in Freetown.
1988: Nancy Paiva is found in Dartmouth, the second.
November 1988: Debra DeMello found in Dartmouth; the pattern becomes clear to reporters.
March 1989: A grand jury begins hearing evidence.
1989: Mary Rose Santos found in Westport.
April 1989: The last of the nine bodies is found.
May 1989: A.D. arrested on assault charges unrelated to any killing charge.
1990: K.P. indicted for the murder of Rochelle Clifford Dopierala; pleads not guilty.
Summer 1991: The murder charge against K.P. is dropped for lack of evidence.
About 1991: A.D. dies by suicide.
1997: K.P. disbarred.
January 2010: K.P. found dead at home; death not considered suspicious.
2017: Maureen Boyle's Shallow Graves published.
2021: District attorney's office says DNA testing is complete and the case is active.
June 2, 2022: DNA testing ordered in the Harris case.
September 13, 2022: Shawn Tanner dies.
August 15, 2023: Prosecutors move to vacate the testing order.
November 3, 2025: Supreme Judicial Court hears argument; relatives of highway victims support testing.
February 27, 2026: The court rules that testing may go ahead.
June 3, 2026: FBI search in Westport; no link to the highway killings stated.