Families hope excavation leads to closure on missing women

Bernadine and Bob Cardoza hoped they might finally learn what happened to their daughter when the State Police called this week to say that authorities would be digging up the patio at a New Bedford house. It had belonged to a onetime suspect in the slaying of one of several women believed to be victims of a serial killer.

Their daughter Marilyn Roberts, who they say was addicted to heroin, disappeared in 1988 when she was 34. Police have long believed that Roberts was one of the victims of a serial killer who discarded the bodies of nine women alongside New Bedford highways in the late 1980s.

"My daughter's body, it's out there," Bernadine Cardoza, 72, said yesterday in an interview from her New Bedford home. "Give me a bone even. . . . Give me something to bury."

Cardoza said she knows her daughter is dead, but she wants a grave to visit. She said she realized that Marilyn was no longer alive when Mother's Day and her birthday passed in 1988 with no phone call from her daughter.

"She left, and we never saw her again, and that was it," she said.

The man who once owned the house where authorities excavated Thursday has long been a subject of police interest in the case. Kenneth Ponte, a New Bedford lawyer who was charged with the slaying of one of the women but was released when an independent prosecutor found no evidence linking him to her death, did not return a phone message seeking comment yesterday.

C. Samuel Sutter, the district attorney in Bristol County, defeated incumbent Paul Walsh Jr. last year with a campaign promise to focus on resolving the county's many unsolved slayings,

Yesterday Sutter said he could not discuss what led authorities to the house on Chestnut Street. He also declined to say whether the search of the house was tied to the slayings probe, because it could jeopardize the investigation.

Sutter did say that solving the slayings, popularly known as "the highway killings," is a major priority for his office.

"We're devoting resources to that investigation, considerable resources at the district attorney's office, and we're pursuing every lead," Sutter said. "When we do a review of an unsolved homicide, we look at everything, and if there's something that we think should be done that was not done in the past and we have the resources to do it, we're going to do it. That's how you solve unsolved homicides."

A law enforcement source with knowledge of the probe said that the concrete patio slab that investigators dug up Thursday was poured around the time the women went missing. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Cardozas say they have no doubt that authorities were looking for their daughter.

"Why would they call us?" Bob Cardoza said. "We have no other connection with the investigation."

Bob Cardoza said he drove by the scene Thursday hoping for some clue to what authorities found, but he discerned nothing.

"I just saw them digging," he said. "They had the backhoe in there, and I saw a few people standing around. I didn't get the impression that it was a positive atmosphere where they were looking and they found something. . . . I said, 'What am I going to do there?' I didn't stop. Maybe I should have."

Neighbors on Chestnut Street said they saw officials carrying bags from the scene, but they did not know what was inside them.

Donna Mahoney, 40, whose cousin, Christine Monteiro, is missing and feared to be one of the killer's victims, sat on Chestnut Street yesterday and stared at the spot where the concrete slab had been. "Chrissy Monteiro, the one they never found," Mahoney said. "I want closure for my aunt and cousin."

Bernadine and Bob Cardoza want the same thing.

"Shortly after she disappeared I used to drive the streets almost endlessly looking to just get a glance," Bob Cardoza said. "You know, maybe I'll see Marilyn. But that never happened."

Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@globe.com.