I'll Be Watching You (22 page)

I

“Do you know Carmen Rodriguez?” Malave asked Ned as they sat down. Malave sounded unthreatening. Calm. They were looking for Carmen. They were worried about her. They weren’t accusing Ned of anything.

Well, maybe they were.

Ned stumbled with his words, appearing not to answer the question. Then he broke into a garbled rant, saying, “The…the…last time I saw her was the night I gave her a ride home. I…drove her up Lawrence to Russ…she asked me…she…” He looked around the bar. He wouldn’t look Malave in the eyes. “She asked me for money, twenty dollars, so I told her to get out of my car.” According to Ned, when he told Carmen to get out, she asked him to drop her off at her apartment.

Ned looked at Malave. Miguel, Jackie, and Cutie were impatient. Miguel started screaming, so Cutie walked him out of the bar.

“I told her no,” Ned said, talking about the point at which Carmen asked him for money. “I told her to get out of my car ‘now,’” adding that after Carmen asked him for money, he took a hard left on Russ Street and stopped on the corner of Broad, about one block away from a Shell gas station. Once there, he told her to “get out.”

Police later found this to be suspicious: Carmen lived in the opposite direction, several blocks away. Additionally, Ned had said only moments prior to this that he had taken Carmen to eat at a diner and left her there.

Which was it? Malave was confused. “Do you know where Carmen lives?” he asked.

Ned shook his head no. Then, “She told me she did not want to go home.”

At first, Ned had said Carmen asked him for a ride home, but now he was saying she didn’t want to go home. Besides, as Ned spoke, Malave noticed his hands: he was shaking like an alcoholic, sweating more and more as the conversation continued.

Jackie, too, was visibly upset. She wouldn’t say much.

“I’m sorry Carmen disappeared,” Ned said, looking at Jackie, “I’m sorry.”

“Give me your telephone number so the detective who’s in charge can call you.”

Ned took a napkin and wrote a number on it. He slid it across the table toward Malave. “Call Nick (the bar owner) if you need anything more,” he said. “He can get hold of me.”

Jackie, Malave, and Cutie left.

When Jackie got home, she called one of the detectives and told him what had happened. The following day, the detective called back and told her that the number Ned gave to the bar owner was “not a working number…but the bartender knew where Ned works,” the detective explained, “which will help us find him.”

II

It was clear to members of the Hartford PD that the disappearance of Carmen Rodriguez was more than an adult taking off and not telling anyone where she had gone. Add Ned Snelgrove into the mix, with his track record of assaulting and murdering women, and the seeds of a more sinister plot seemed to emerge. Thus, in light of the new revelation that Ned was admittedly the last person to see Carmen, a detective was brought into the case. Luisa St. Pierre was a seasoned cop with the HPD and had strong ties in the Hispanic community. She had seen the missing persons file on Carmen and asked around, but she wasn’t able to come up with anything. At the time Carmen’s case crossed paths with St. Pierre, she and several colleagues had been working on an ongoing serial killer investigation known as the “Asylum Hill Killer.” The Asylum Hill neighborhood, where the murders had been occurring, was a half mile—maybe ten city blocks—from Kenney’s. More than a dozen prostitutes had been savagely beaten about the face and body, strangled, and left naked and unrecognizable in different areas of the Asylum Hill section of the city. All the victims had been placed—it seemed strategically—inside a small neighborhood. They were brutally savage crimes.

As St. Pierre began investigating Carmen’s disappearance, the questions in front of her became: Had the “Asylum Hill Killer” snatched Carmen and, like all of his victims, dumped her body in an abandoned building, warehouse, alleyway, or parking lot somewhere? What’s more, was Ned the “Asylum Hill Killer”?

But then the questions turned into: If Carmen was part of the Asylum victim pool, where was she? All of the Asylum victims had been left out in the open, their bodies riddled with the signature marks of his vicious rape and murder techniques. The killer’s DNA had been left on many of the victims. To St. Pierre, maybe the Rodriguez missing persons case was going to finally lead the Hartford PD to catch the most notorious serial killer the city had ever seen.

III

For most of her adult life, Luisa St. Pierre lived in East Hartford, a small blue-collar city just across the river from the Hartford PD. When St. Pierre took a look at Ned and studied his background in New Jersey, she found it interesting that he had chosen Carmen as his next victim—if, indeed, Ned had had something to do with her disappearance. “Those two victims in New Jersey,” St. Pierre told me, reflecting back on Mary Ellen Renard and Karen Osmun, “were professional, working women. Whereas Carmen was a lost soul.”

To St. Pierre, there wasn’t a connection. The pattern didn’t match.

Part of it was that Carmen, although not a prostitute, fit into the MO of the “Asylum Hill Killer,” more than Ned’s, and could have certainly been confused to be a prostitute by the “Asylum Hill Killer” because of the women she hung around with at times. Of course, St. Pierre had no idea at this point that Ned had spent ten years in prison studying Ted Bundy’s behavior, and that Carmen fit into Bundy’s choice of “vulnerable” potential victims.

Indeed, Ned had gone from a professional-looking Hewlett-Packard salesman in the 1980s to an ex-con with a massive tumor growth on the side of his neck. In some respects, he fit in with the crowd that hung in the neighborhood around Kenney’s: men and women beaten down by the system, tired and poor, living day to day, hand to mouth.

Although he’d never admit it, Ned might have been acting under the pretense that he was now fashioning himself after Bundy, but instead, without realizing it, he had become one of the crowd he had tried to infiltrate.

Save for that one day when Jackie, Cutie, Miguel, and Malave ran into Ned at Kenney’s, Ned had stayed clear of the place. If not because he was being suspected of having had something to do with Carmen’s disappearance, he was terrified that he was going to be beaten by Miguel if he ever showed his face in the bar again.

IV

By the first week of October, St. Pierre and Detective Harry Garcia, her partner, spoke to a few people at Kenney’s and figured out that Ned worked for American Frozen Foods, located in Stratford, Connecticut, an hour’s drive south of Hartford, and was basically running American’s satellite office in Wethersfield, a town in between Hartford and Berlin. There was still no word from Carmen. Although her body hadn’t been found, her disappearance was now an open investigation, a possible homicide.

During the afternoon of October 16, things got interesting for Garcia and St. Pierre. Garcia received a call in the missing persons unit from a guy named Ned, a nervous-sounding man who would not reveal his last name (as if they didn’t know who he was): “I’m aware that the police are looking to speak to me about a missing person, Carmen Rodriguez,” Ned said. He sounded timid, but also curious. Ned wanted to know what the Hartford PD had on him, or how far along in the investigation they were. Garcia could tell the only reason Ned had called was to fish for information.

“We do want to talk to you,” Garcia said.

“What can I do?”

“You can come down here, for one.”

They made arrangements for Ned to show up at the Hartford PD to speak with Garcia on October 19, three days later. Ned said he’d be there.

I

Ned was forty-one years old—and once again the cops were on his back. After talking to Garcia, Ned sat down in his basement bedroom and decided that he had no future. Being on the road, visiting strangers’ houses, Ned had been in some of Connecticut’s most expensive homes. He’d pull into the driveway and sit for a moment, staring at mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, swing sets and pools, two cars and a dog and a white picket fence, and hated thinking that none of it would ever be his. He considered himself a huge disappointment to his parents, or “best friends.” The six-figure incomes he saw on credit applications his clients filled out turned his stomach. There were people ten years younger than him, he wrote to his parents that October night, living their lives in style and class: this
ate
at him.

Although Ned wasn’t an Ivy Leaguer, here he was, a Rutgers grad, making 30K a year, if he was lucky. He lived in the basement of his parents’ home. He drove a secondhand car. Dressed in what felt like Goodwill clothing. And felt as though he’d be living at Mom and Dad’s in this same set of circumstances for another twenty years. In fact, he wrote, he never saw himself having a
decent career…an apartment of [his] own, or a girlfriend.
Never.

Ned saw a sad life for himself. What a disappointment he was to his family. He could never show himself in New Jersey to his old friends. He was a disgrace. It depressed him when he thought about it. Just getting up in the morning, he insisted, and having to struggle through another day was a chore. He saw very little point in living anymore. What for? He had a tough time showing his emotions to anyone besides his parents.

Sitting in his basement room on that Friday night in October, Ned decided to lay it all out in a letter to his parents. They were sleeping upstairs. He was at his desk writing. The television was on in the background, flickering. Pulsating. He paid no attention to it. He had other things on his mind. More important things. Life or death? He had a choice. He could end it right now.

A rope and a rafter.

A razor blade and a bathtub.

A glass of water and a bottle of pills.

The road to death didn’t matter. He just needed to get on it and go.

In the letter, Ned said he loved “both” parents. He wrote he
was sorry to do this to you.
Looking at it optimistically, however, he suggested that it might turn out to be the best thing for everyone:
This is the last time I can hurt you or disgrace the family.

What did it matter? The family hadn’t been proud of him, he felt, since his Rutgers years.
And
that
bothers me.
He hated dragging his family through his troubles. They were
his
problems, he insisted.
It’s best if I go away…,
he wrote. He couldn’t bear the thought, he explained, of being in the house if one of them had died before him. The pain would be too much. If only he could “go” before them.

End it now.

Take the coward’s way out.

As far as going through with it, Ned wrote he wasn’t
afraid to die.
Eventually it
would happen to everybody
. On top of that, he wrote, he didn’t believe in hell,
just sleep.
Anyway, he knew God would
forgive even me
for the life he had lived and the pain he had caused so many. He apologized to his mother first for not playing the piano for her since returning home from prison. She used to like that: Ned sitting at the piano, corduroy jacket, polyester bell-bottom slacks, belting out tunes into the late hours of the night, while she sat nearby drinking tea, tapping her foot, mouthing the words.

For Dad, Ned said he was sorry for playing only one game of golf with him since returning. He knew this disappointed his father.

If it was a suicide note—which it surely seemed to be—Ned didn’t have the guts to go through with it on this night. Because instead of putting the barrel of a .45 in his mouth, or slitting his own throat, he went to bed. What seemed odd later was that not once did Ned claim to be innocent of the latest accusations made against him. Quite to the contrary, he seemed to be depressed that he had done it again.

II

Ned’s parents went to Applebee’s on October 13, 2001, the following night, while he stayed home, stewing, contemplating once again the idea of taking his life. It was a Saturday night. Ned had no date. Never did. Here he was again at home, while his peers and friends were out and about going through their lives with wives and kids. But not Ned. When he wanted companionship, he paid for it. He was a john. A frequent one at that. He struggled with the emotions that came with purchasing prostitutes. For him, it wasn’t about the sex or even power; it was more about talking to someone, having a woman there to listen.

Again feeling as if suicide was the answer, Ned paced in his room. He had heard his parents leave the house. He had said good-bye, too. Urged them to enjoy their dinner.

The
real reason,
he wrote, that he could
never
go out to eat in public with anyone ever again, let alone Mom and Dad, was because he knew he could
never hold it together
long enough to get through the night. He’d
fall apart.

He said it was not feeling comfortable enough to open up to his parents—especially his dad. There were times, Ned explained, when he’d sit in the kitchen across from his father at breakfast or dinner, and the two of them would be at the table with nothing but silence between them. Eating wasn’t a social event; it was a chore. Something Ned and his dad had to do.

Sit. Eat. Be quiet.

The not-to-be-discussed elephant wasn’t in the Snelgrove living room—it was in every part of the house, wherever Ned and his parents were.

Before bed that night, Ned sat down again and wrote to his mom and dad. A short suicide note was turning into a series of journallike entries, each dated and timed. Ned asked his father if he ever noticed how Ned could never look him in the eyes when they were together. He wondered if his dad had ever really contemplated the reason why. Part of it, Ned explained, was that he felt like a disappointment to them. But it also had to do with guilt and disassociation: Ned felt he had never been able to “tell” his dad “what” he was thinking, or how he felt, because he knew his dad would never understand.

But again, as the night wore on, Ned fell asleep instead of completing a job, one could say, he had started nearly two decades ago when he tried to kill himself after murdering Karen Osmun.

III

Ned woke up late on October 15. He sat in bed for a while, thinking.

Today is the day.

His parents were upstairs, either sitting at the kitchen table reading the morning paper, or lounging around in the living room doing crossword puzzles, watching television. They loved to bury their minds deep into the world of questions and letters. Perhaps it made everything else go away.

It had been a week since Ned had made the decision to kill himself. At 11:00
A.M
., he got out of bed and sat down at his desk. By 11:20, he was writing.

He explained that he had “kept calm” because he had made the decision to go through with it. Doing it had given him back a sense of control over his life. He had spent the past several days in bed, covers over his face, curtains on the little box basement windows drawn so what little sun that managed to sneak into the basement was shaded. He liked it that way: dark. He felt he was ready to “go” now. Eternal sleep sounded like a “good idea” to him.

Ned told his parents that if they were to sit down and talk about it as a whole, his legacy could be boiled down to a series of what-ifs and could have beens. And next, for the first time in what had turned into a three-day suicide manifesto, Ned wrote there was a
missing persons case in Hartford
that would be causing him more problems in the coming months and years. He warned his parents that the Hartford PD would
be in touch sooner or later.
He was
supposedly
—a fact that had been indisputably proven by the time he wrote the note—
one of the last people to have seen Carmen something-or-other
—he knew darn well what her last name was—on the night she disappeared. He then launched into details that could arguably be viewed as some sort of alibi he was trying to set in place for himself, making his parents aware of those “facts” he wanted them to know.
I gave her a ride from Kenney’s…to the Shell Station two blocks from Capitol Avenue,
he mentioned. Carmen, Ned further explained, referring to her as
this girl,
had
reportedly…not been seen since.

He didn’t want to
go through this
again, he wrote, no doubt referring to what had happened in New Jersey. Even worse, he didn’t want to have to see his parents go through it all again.
It’s best,
he wrote, that
I just end it now.
He was
sorry
for leaving the family
holding the bag…. I have no answers for the police.

Ending the letter, he said he appreciated
all the help
his parents had given him since his release from prison.
I
do
love you both….
And then he took a handful of pills and, comfortably numb, lay down and went to sleep.