New Bedford Highway Killer

The New Bedford Highway Killer is an unidentified serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least nine women and the disappearances of two additional women in New Bedford, Massachusetts, between March 1988 and April 1989. The killer is also suspected to have assaulted numerous other women. All the killer's victims were known sex workers or had struggles with addiction. While the victims were taken from New Bedford, they were all found in different surrounding towns, including Dartmouth, Freetown and Westport, along Massachusetts Route 140.

Victims Robbin Lynn Rhodes, 29, was found on March 28, 1989, along Massachusetts Route 140 southbound in Freetown by a search dog. She is believed to have gone missing sometime in March or April 1988. Rhodes had previously dated suspect Kenneth Ponte. While she was never involved in prostitution, she knew many of the other victims and was friends with victim Mary Rose Santos. Rochelle Clifford Dopierala, 28, of Falmouth, disappeared sometime during late April 1988. Her body was found on December 10, 1988, in a gravel pit along Reed Road beneath a tree grove, about two miles from Interstate 195 by people riding ATVs. She was partially clothed and had been beaten to death. She had dated and stayed at the home of suspect Kenneth Ponte, who was arrested for her murder. This was the only time charges were brought in this case. Rochelle had testified against another man who had raped her, but he is not suspected in this case. She was last seen with victim Nancy Paiva's boyfriend, an ex-convict. He was cleared in both deaths and is not a suspect.

Daniel Tavares

While in prison for the murder of his mother, Daniel Thomas Tavares Jr. sent a threatening letter to one of the prison staff indirectly claiming responsibility for the Highway Killings. He lived in New Bedford, and had knowledge of where another murdered woman, Gayle Botelho, had been buried, within a mile from his home. He was convicted of the November 2007 murders of his neighbors, Brian and Beverly Mauck.

Lisbon Ripper

Between 1992 and 1993, three sex workers were slain and disemboweled with an instrument that was not a knife in Lisbon, Portugal, by an unknown serial killer that was dubbed the Lisbon Ripper, while two further sex workers were shot dead on the opposite shore of the Tagus river in the same time period. In March 1993, two detectives of the Portuguese Policia Judiciaria traveled to New Bedford to gather information on the Highway killings, while two agents of the FBI traveled to Lisbon, following a hypothesis that the string of crimes on both sides of the Atlantic could have been committed by the same individual. New Bedford has a sizable Portuguese community and many of the Highway victims were of Portuguese ancestry. The Lisbon murders were also linked to four similar killings that took place in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and the Czech Republic (all countries bordering Germany) between 1993 and 1997, the theory being that the Lisbon Ripper had then become a long-haul truck driver.

In 2011, a 21-year-old man named Joel applied to participate in the Portuguese edition of the reality show Secret Story, where participants try to guess each other's secrets while concealing their own. The secret he applied with was that his father, José Pedro Guedes, was the Lisbon Ripper. Guedes, 46, was arrested and confessed to the three slayings, but could not be prosecuted because murder has a prescription period of 15 years in Portugal and the murders had ended in 2008. Guedes could still be prosecuted for the 2000 murder of a prostitute in Aveiro, Portugal and similar murders in Germany (or neighboring countries) where Guedes resided in the 1990s. It is unknown however, if Guedes ever resided in the United States. Guedes was tried for the Aveiro murder in 2013, found not proven due to lack of evidence.