I'll Be Watching You (32 page)

I

During those first few days of hearings, where both sides argued over which evidence would make it into trial, the talk inside the courtroom wasn’t so easy for Sonia Rodriguez, Carmen’s oldest sister. “I had to go out,” Sonia said. “I had to scream. I had to clench my fists.”

Carmen’s life—and death—had come down to this one moment. What if, for some reason, Ned was allowed to walk? The Rodriguez family didn’t need a trial to convince them that Ned was guilty. They knew it in their hearts, Luz told me later. Jackie, Carmen’s daughter, slated to testify (but nowhere to be found), had interrogated Ned with Miguel, Cutie, and Jeffrey Malave at Kenney’s that night shortly after Carmen disappeared: “Oh,
that
was your mom? I’m sorry,” Ned had asked Jackie. It was a fact of the case the family had a hard time letting go of.

“That
was
your mom….”

For the Rodriguez family, Ned’s use of the past tense was a confession. Sonia, like Luz and Kathy Perez, however, got over the anger and sorrow and decided to honor Carmen’s life by moving forward and, being the glue, hold the rest of the family—some twenty members at any given time during the trial—together. There had been one tragedy after another for the Rodriguez family. But it didn’t stop them from fighting. Jesus Ramos, the older man from Puerto Rico whom Carmen was married to when she went missing, died two weeks after she disappeared. (“He died of a broken heart,” Luz said. “Thankfully, Jesus never knew that Carmen’s body had been found.”)

With Carmen having been the gypsy she was, it helped her mother cope. Because Carmen moved back and forth between the United States and Puerto Rico throughout her life, always in and out of her mother’s house, Rosa could always look at Carmen’s photo in the house and, knowing she was dead, still be able to tell herself,
She’s traveling. She’s in Puerto Rico.
She wouldn’t have to deal with the immensity of Carmen being gone forever.

“We have a shirt,” Luz recalled, “that Carmen wore shortly before she disappeared, that we haven’t washed. You can still smell her on it.”

These are the people Carmen left behind.

“He had thought he chose the perfect victim,” Luz said later, “that no one cared about Carmen. That no one would miss her. We were there in solidarity to show him—and everyone else—that Carmen was part of our world and our lives.”

I

On the morning of January 4, 2005, the
State of Connecticut
v.
Edwin Fales Snelgrove Jr.
was officially on record. Ned sat next to O’Brien on one side of the small room, while Rovella sat next to Zagaja on the other, as Judge Espinosa addressed the court with her usual cheery demeanor. “Good morning. All right. Is there anything we need to consider before the jury comes in?”

David Zagaja said, “Thank you, Your Honor. I did…alert the court that the state is putting forward [an] oral motion
in limine….”

For the layperson, the term “
limine
” probably threw a kink in the proceedings immediately. In Ned’s case, it meant that a request had been submitted to the court before trial in an attempt to exclude certain pieces of evidence. In this instance, Zagaja was arguing that a particular witness Ned was going to call, a man who had supposedly taken a deathbed confession of Carmen’s murder, needed to be qualified before he could take the stand. There was some controversy surrounding the witness’s statement, whether he was credible.

The judge said they’d take it up at the appropriate moment; right now, she wanted to get on with the day’s proceedings. The trial had been held up long enough.

For the next hour or more, the judge went through and gave the jury its instructions and the attorneys talked about witnesses and availability and other tedious issues that would bore the average reader. The entire time, Ned sat with guarded composure. He watched every move and listened to every word as if he were sitting in a business meeting and had been warned not to speak.

Zagaja’s first witness, Hartford police officer Jeffrey Rohan, set the stage for Carmen’s disappearance, taking jurors through how he answered the call at Carmen’s apartment from Jackie (who, incidentally, was dodging Zagaja and could not be found).

Ever since Carmen had been pronounced dead, more than three years ago now, Jackie’s life had taken a turn for the worse. “Poor Jackie…she could never face Carmen being murdered like that,” said a family friend.

“We have to find her,” Zagaja had whispered to Rovella more than once as the trial got under way. “We need her.”

Janet Rozman, assistant manager, bartender, and Kenney’s waitress, who had seen Carmen and Ned together on the night she disappeared, testified next. Rozman’s words were powerful and enlightening. It gave the jury an image that they could use for building events around the night in question. It was clear from Rozman that Kenney’s was a special place for Carmen. A place out of her normal routine that her family didn’t know about, where she could let loose. A hideaway. Zagaja wasn’t trying to tell the jury that Carmen was a choir girl; but she was a human being. She liked to party. She liked to drink and dance and meet guys and flirt.

A free spirit.

And yet, what Zagaja proved was that on the night of September 21, 2001, Carmen met the wrong man. The Devil dressed in a businessman’s suit. A killer in disguise. A sexual sadist on the prowl for a victim.

After a few opening questions, Zagaja asked Rozman, “And did you see Carmen do anything when she came in?”

“She walked directly over to Ned.”

“And could you describe what you observed them doing, if anything?”

“Um, they were playing pool and dancing, drinking, kissing.”

“Was this the first time you had seen them interacting that way?”

“Yes.”

“Had you ever seen them together in a situation like this previous?”

“No.”

II

Paula Figueroa was another Kenney’s employee who took the witness stand and established several important factors. For one, Ned was not some sort of customer who showed up once in a while: an interloper who stopped in from time to time. Ned was a regular Kenney’s barfly.

The bar had even ordered a case of Moosehead beer especially for Ned, Figuroa said.

By the end of the morning, Zagaja established that Ned and Carmen knew each other. They had danced and kissed and talked and drank together on the night she disappeared. And there was no way, absolutely
no
way, that Ned could deny that he and Carmen left Kenney’s together. Too many people had seen them.

III

One of Kenney’s owners, Nick Taddei, raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth, and then told his story of coming in between Ned, Jackie, Miguel, Cutie, and Jeffrey Malave that day when Miguel and Jackie were on the warpath looking to question Ned.

“The problem was that Ned didn’t want to reveal his whereabouts,” Taddei testified, “where he lived, he didn’t want to give them any information. Family members wanted assurance that he was going to contact the officer, wanted to make sure that he was going to go and talk to the police….”

Taddei was just one more piece of the puzzle Zagaja was gluing together with each one of his witnesses—all of whom O’Brien tried to impeach on cross-examination, but failed.

IV

The following day began with Jeffrey Malave, who backed up the testimony of the witnesses Zagaja had already presented. On this day, Ned wore a charcoal gray sweater and black tie. He looked every bit as uptight and on edge as he had the previous day. If he thought he was going to walk in and control the room, he had perhaps watched too many episodes of
Law & Order
. Judge Espinosa was not about to let anything in her courtroom get out of hand.

What was intriguing to some, while others didn’t even notice, was that Ned was paying a price for not wearing his glasses. Reading documents became a task. He struggled like an old man trying to read the fine print of a contract. Ned would hold a piece of paper up to the edge of his nose and stare at it, unable to read it, but he refused to put on his glasses.

One of the problems Zagaja ran into early on was that many of his witnesses had records of their own to contend with. Felonies from the past or present. Each witness had admitted to his or her crimes. Zagaja was the first to ring that bell. Miguel Fraguada, for example, Zagaja’s next witness, had two prior felony convictions. “They were a long time ago,” Fraguada explained through an interpreter.

All Zagaja could do, of course, was have each witnesses point out his or her faults, as well as his or her role in the case. The jury could decide from there who was credible.

Fraguada told the jury exactly what had happened on the night Carmen disappeared and the day he confronted Ned with Jackie, Cutie, and Jeffrey Malave.

Fraguada kept referring to Carmen as his “wife,” but, of course, it was a figure of speech. To him, he loved Carmen—and in his eyes and heart, that made her his wife.

Then Zagaja asked him how upset he was about seeing Ned at the bar. “You said you were going to hit him?” Zagaja said.

“Yeah. He…I was going to hit him because he ran off on me.”

After several more questions, Zagaja handed Fraguada to O’Brien—who went right after him: “Mr. Fraguada, you say that Carmen was your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get married?”

“She lives with me, but we weren’t married.”

“OK. So she wasn’t your wife, she was…you were living with her, correct?”

“Yes. She lived with me.”

“And how long had you lived with her?”

“From May until she disappeared on September twenty-first.”

I

As the clock began to nudge its way toward the noon hour on January 5, in walked a crooked old man, a man of great intelligence and absolute dedication to his son: Edwin Fales Snelgrove Sr. Zagaja called Edwin as a witness to discuss, among other things, the suicide note Ned had written shortly after the Hartford PD and CSP began to investigate Ned—before Carmen’s body had been found. In Zagaja’s view, this was a very important point. It showed a pattern. Ned had fallen right into his old behavior of killing a woman and then, not being able to deal with it, setting it off with a feigned, ill-fated suicide attempt. For a criminal—
any
criminal—the past is a good indication of the future.

When Mr. Snelgrove settled into his seat on the witness stand, the judge excused the jury, saying that the remainder of the day would be taken up by a lengthy discussion regarding the content of the letters Ned had written to his parents.

Then Mr. Snelgrove was asked to step down. And while the lawyers got into the minutia of the letters, Ned kept calling O’Brien back to the table and whispering things in his ear, to the point where Zagaja and Rovella began laughing at him. (“It was funny,” Rovella said later. “He looked like he was directing the entire defense—and I guess he was.”)

At one point, Zagaja explained to the judge why the letters were important, saying, “Your Honor, regarding…relevance. The fact that the defendant contemplated suicide beginning on October 12 and wrote what his thoughts were—that being, shortly thereafter the alleged disappearance of Carmen Rodriguez—
is
relevant…. Already the court has heard he kept up a somewhat normal routine at the bar, up until the time of the disappearance. These are inconsistencies that should be presented to the jury for consideration. These are the defendant’s words to what state of mind he was at….”

O’Brien, of course, didn’t agree.

As they continued, both parties discussed which parts of the letter would be redacted. The main issue was Ned’s prior acts. Zagaja was working hard to get in as much information as he could about Ned’s prior convictions. “What’s your claim on that?” the judge asked Zagaja, regarding trying to sneak in Ned’s prior bad acts.

“I don’t see—I don’t make that leap. That’s why I left it in. I don’t see it referring to his prior conviction or his prior record.”

The judge agreed, adding, “I don’t think there’s any connection to any prior convictions or record there.”

Unable to contain himself any longer, Ned blurted out, “What else
could
it be?”

Everyone turned. O’Brien tried to downplay Ned’s outburst by interrupting: “Other than making a reference to this incident, what else could it refer to? I mean, I’ve spoken to my client, that’s
exactly
what the reference is all about, so he, certainly, knows what his own reference is. But to say, ‘They’ll never know who I truly am….’”

“Because he’ll be dead, that’s why!” the judge clarified. “Because he won’t be around for them to get to know him.”

“No,” Ned yelled, “the reason…” O’Brien tried to speak over him, but Ned wouldn’t let him. “Well…,” O’Brien started to say before Ned interrupted.

“I can’t have lifelong friends because I can’t tell
them
who I am,” he yelled.

The judge said, “Well, that might be—you know, you can say it as loud as you want, it’s not going to make
any
difference. Whatever he says
now
is of no significance.”

O’Brien wanted to keep the discussion professional. “No,” he said, “but if you read it in context, ‘I can never have lifelong friends who will know who I really am.’ The court is looking at it that that’s futuristic after he does the deed. But my point is that the reference is that he will not have friends who know who he really is.”

“Yeah,” the judge said, “people don’t know
who
he really is—”

O’Brien interrupted, “Because of the
prior
convictions.”

The judge had heard enough. “That’s a leap that is not reasonable,” she said. “It is to you because you know what his past is. But the people who don’t know what his past is, they are
not
going to assume that. It’s not logical to assume that it means that he
has
prior convictions…. It’s just [not] reasonable…so the court will allow that.”

II

After an ice storm on January 6, the jury was brought back in on January 7 and the trial resumed. Outside the courtroom, the ice cast a translucent glaze, giving everything a lucid appearance. Salt and sand were tossed all over the sidewalks heading into the Hartford Superior Court, and those entering the building tracked it into the foyer area, making things a bit messy. Inside the courtroom, however, cold feelings and tension—forever building among Ned, O’Brien, Zagaja, and Judge Espinosa—were about to make things even messier. Ned looked rather respectable: blue necktie noosed tight up to his throat and a light-colored shirt. He smiled, if ever so slightly, while studying the jury.

After O’Brien, Zagaja and the judge had a brief argument over the redacted suicide letter. Ned watched closely as his father, clearly tired and physically weak, walked up to the witness stand. For a few moments, the elder Snelgrove talked about his family, Ned and his siblings, where they lived, his army days, and how the kids had split up and gone their own ways as they grew older. In many ways, it was a familiar American story.

White picket fence. Suburbia. Two cars. Dog. Neighbors. Kids in expensive colleges. Empty nest.

But then, Ned started acting bizarrely, Edwin implied. Not like the son who had left home for college after high school.

“OK,” Zagaja asked, “did there come a time when he ended up living at home with you again? [And] could you describe your home?”

“It’s a cape on about a third acre—”

“How many bedrooms?”

“Three.”

A few questions later, “Did he occupy one of the bedrooms?”

“No. He lived in the…he decided he was more comfortable in the—in the recreation room downstairs. He slept on a sofa down there because he had a desk and some other stuff down there.”

And then they discussed Ned’s employment. Indeed, Edwin testified, Ned traveled around the Northeast. Meeting people. Selling frozen foods. Driving through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, and, well, Rhode Island.

Zagaja was quite shrewd in his questioning. He was setting up his closing argument. Laying the foundation for one of those character-building sections of the trial. Without even possibly knowing it, Edwin was giving Zagaja exactly what he wanted: the details of a man who liked to be alone, a man who forwent a cozy little room upstairs in the house he had grown up in for an old smelly couch downstairs in the basement. The dungeon. The sexual den, as Zagaja put it later.

III

Edwin talked about Ned taking a bottle of sleeping pills in October 2001, and Edwin calling 911 and Ned ending up in the hospital—which, of course, afforded Zagaja the opportunity to introduce the suicide note.

After even more debate, Zagaja was allowed to read the letter into the record—exactly what he had wanted to do from the start. Near the end of his reading, one of the main points he had wanted to make, by getting the note in, was that Ned was setting up a story, his excuse, his reasoning for being investigated. He was acting strange. Bizarre. Odd.

Guilty.

The end of the note was a warning of sorts by Ned to his parents, letting them know that the cops would be calling on them once again to ask questions about a woman—a missing woman. And here we go again…“‘Last, but not least, there is a missing person’s case in Hartford,’” David Zagaja read aloud. Ned squirmed a bit in his chair hearing his words echo into the record. Zagaja read aloud that Ned told his parents that he was “‘supposedly one of the last people to see Carmen something-or-other…’”
Carmen something or other.
Ned knew her name. Knew it well, in fact. Zagaja continued, “…This girl, reportedly, has not been seen since…It’s best that I just end it now.”

The cops were badgering him again, Ned implied. Focusing on him solely because of his record. He was never going to be able to escape that person he had been in New Jersey. It was better to just kill himself.

Zagaja later explained his thoughts regarding Ned “supposedly” committing suicide. Here’s a guy who’s going to end it all, yet he is writing details, clear details about where he picked up this woman and where he dropped her off. “He was telling his parents what to say to the police,” Zagaja suggested. “That’s what he was doing.”

Anyone who looked hard enough could have figured out that Zagaja was only interested in dropping the letter into the trial to show how, in addition to all the other evidence he was presenting, Ned was a calculated, well-experienced killer who had gone to great lengths to put every duck in a row. When things didn’t work out for Ned, when the cops moved in and his mistakes surfaced, he tried to cover himself.

An innocent man, in other words, had no reason to kill himself.