A motorist pulled off Route 140 in Freetown on July 3, 1988 and found a partly clothed skeleton near the exit ramp. She was Debra Medeiros of Fall River, reported missing on May 27 after a fight with her boyfriend in New Bedford, and her age is given as both twenty-nine and thirty. She lay on her back with her feet toward the road and a bra wrapped around her neck, and the cause of death was strangulation. Identifying her took months; accounts place it in December 1988 or in February 1989.
She was the first of nine women recovered from the roads out of New Bedford over the next ten months. Two more disappeared in the same period and have never been found.
Nancy Paiva was thirty-six, of New Bedford, last seen on July 7, 1988 and found beside Interstate 195 in Dartmouth three weeks later. She had been walking home from a bar called Whisper's Pub after a fight with her boyfriend in the South End, and two men on motorcycles found her nude body on July 30, lying in the same position as Medeiros. She was not identified until December. Her daughter Jill, who was seventeen when her mother died, has described an outgoing, feisty woman who took everyone apple picking and filled the house with Christmas decorations before a bad relationship and drugs took hold of her.
Debra Greenlaw DeMello was thirty-five, of Brockton, last seen on July 11 and found on November 8 off the Reed Road exit of I-195, close to where Paiva had been left. A state highway crew found her among trees with her clothing caught in the branches, and some of Nancy Paiva's belongings were with her. Her brother, Wayne Perry, has said she went out to work one day and did not come back.
Dawn Mendes was twenty-five, of New Bedford, last seen on September 4 walking from her apartment to a family christening. A search dog found her on November 29 on the westbound Reed Road ramp of I-195. Little more than a skeleton remained, and she was identified from a fingerprint taken from her hand.
Debroh Lynn McConnell, whose first name also appears as Deborah, was twenty-five, of Newport. Her father last saw her in May 1988 at the cemetery after her mother's funeral. A cadaver dog found her body on December 1 beside Route 140 north in Freetown. She was nude, with a bra wrapped around her neck.
Rochelle Clifford Dopierala was twenty-eight, of Falmouth, and disappeared in late April 1988. Her body was found on December 10 in a gravel pit off Reed Road in Dartmouth, under a grove of trees about two miles from the interstate. People riding ATVs found her, partly clothed. She had been beaten to death. She had last been seen with Nancy Paiva's boyfriend, an ex-convict who was later cleared of both deaths. In April 1988, shortly before she vanished, she had accused a man of raping her, and the lawyer who represented her in that matter was Kenneth Ponte.
Robbin Lynn Rhodes was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, the accounts differ, of New Bedford, found on March 28, 1989 beside Route 140 in Freetown by a search dog. She had gone missing a year earlier. She had never worked as a prostitute. She knew several of the other women and was a friend of Mary Rose Santos.
Santos was twenty-six, of New Bedford or Fairhaven. On July 16, 1988 her husband, with whom she had recently reconciled, dropped her near the downtown bus station, and five hours later she was seen dancing at the Old Quarterdeck Lounge. Two boys found her nude body on March 31, 1989 beside Route 88 in Westport. Sandra Botelho was twenty-four, of New Bedford. She left her apartment at eleven at night on August 11, 1988 and did not return, and she was found on April 24, 1989 in woods beside I-195 in Marion, folded into a fetal position. She was the last to be recovered.
Marilyn Roberts, also recorded as Marilyn Cardoza-Roberts, was thirty-four and was last seen in June 1988; she was not reported missing until December. Christine Monteiro, whose name also appears as Christina, was nineteen, lived near her, and was last seen in May. Neither has been found, and neither has been formally established as a victim of the same person, although both vanished from the same few streets in the same months as the nine.
Those streets were Weld Square, which in 1988 was in the middle of a severe heroin and crack problem. Most of the women were dependent on drugs and most worked as prostitutes, which is the reason the disappearances were slow to be connected and the reason several of the bodies lay outdoors long enough to destroy the forensic evidence. Maureen Boyle, who covered the killings for the Standard-Times and later wrote Shallow Graves, has said the killer has never been identified partly because investigators were slow to recognize that they had a serial killer at all.
The investigation was damaged by a public falling-out between the Bristol County district attorney's office and the state police. On August 17, 1990 Kenneth Ponte, a forty-year-old New Bedford lawyer, was arraigned on a grand jury indictment for the murder of Rochelle Dopierala, the only charge ever brought in the case. He had known several of the women, had a record of drug offenses and had dated Robbin Rhodes. He had represented Dopierala in her rape complaint, had represented Mary Rose Santos in a civil case, and had helped Santos's husband make flyers after she vanished. He had moved to Port Richey, Florida, in September 1988. District Attorney Ronald Pina suggested he had killed Dopierala because she was planning to expose his drug activities. Ponte pleaded "absolutely not guilty" and posted a $50,000 bond.
On July 29, 1991 the district attorney dropped the murder charge for lack of evidence, and the next year the remaining drug and assault charges went too. Ponte maintained his innocence and always said the office had needed someone to charge. In May 2009 police dug up the driveway and patio of his former New Bedford home with a backhoe and found nothing, and that same month he was arrested for shoplifting four cans of sardines and a block of cheese. He was found dead in his New Bedford home on January 27, 2010, and the district attorney's office discounted foul play.
A second man was never charged with any of the killings. Anthony DeGrazia, in his mid-twenties, was a stonemason and construction worker known to the women of Weld Square as Flat Nose. In May 1989 a woman who had been attacked told a detective that his photograph looked like the man who had tried to choke her, and he was called before the grand jury but not indicted. He was then charged with a long series of rapes and assaults on women in the area, seventeen in the most detailed account, and posted bond or was rearrested more than once. Accounts of his death differ. The version most often repeated is that he killed himself in 1991. The fullest account says he was released on June 27, 1990, rearrested for threatening District Attorney Pina and released again, and found dead on July 17, 1990, face down under a picnic table at the Freetown home of his former girlfriend's parents. On that account the local police treated it as a homicide, the district attorney's office ruled it a suicide, a special prosecutor's public remark that DeGrazia had become the prime suspect was later retracted, and his family has alleged in a lawsuit that he was murdered. Investigators looked at him for the killings and found nothing that tied him to them.
A third name came from a prison. Daniel Tavares Jr., who had lived in New Bedford, sent a threatening letter to a member of prison staff while serving a sentence for killing his mother, and the letter indirectly claimed the highway killings. He was later convicted of the November 2007 murders of his neighbors Brian and Beverly Mauck, and in 2015 of the murder of Gayle Botelho, whose burial place, within a mile of his home, he had known. Nothing has connected him by evidence to the highway victims.
The case was reviewed in 2019, and the district attorney's office has since said that DNA testing is complete and the investigation active. In 2025 families of the victims, represented by the lawyer Nathaniel Mendell, asked the Supreme Judicial Court to allow DNA testing in a separate 1988 killing: another New Bedford woman who sold sex, strangled with clothing, a murder for which a man named Shawn Tanner had been convicted. She had not been left beside a highway, and Tanner, since dead, was in jail for nearly all of the highway killings, but the families argued that a foreign profile could open a new line of inquiry. Mendell called it perhaps their last good chance to find new physical evidence. In April 2026 the court allowed the testing to go ahead. No result had been announced in the reports that followed, and the case remains open.