I'll Be Watching You (12 page)

I

Even though he suffered from polio, Ralph Osmun was expected to live a full life. Sure, there were always going to be doctor’s visits. Trips to the emergency room. Pills. Exercises. Joint pain. Sleepless nights.

Lots of discomfort.

But Ralph was a fighter. He fought off the ill effects of the disease—because what else could he do? The guy had a family that depended on him. Complaining about pain wouldn’t do anybody any good.

But then…it happened.

He was forty-seven.

Ralph had been in the hospital undergoing a few routine procedures, suffering from the residual effects, Barbara said later, of a heart attack three years earlier. His family expected him to take the tests he needed and return home.

He had done it all before, he’d do it again.

It was an October day. A Saturday. Karen and Barbara had gone to the football game in town. They were walking home.

“Great game…wasn’t it?”

“Sure was, Karen.”

And then they looked up the road as they walked and there was Elizabeth Anne driving toward them in the family car.

“That Mom?”

“Mom?”

“Get in.”

She was upset. What were they doing running off to the high-school football game when their father was in the hospital? “You should be visiting him,” she scolded. (Barbara later said, laughing, “My mother was always mad at
something.”
)

So they all went over to the hospital and sat with Ralph for the day and into the night.

II

The next morning, a ringing phone woke up the house.

It was 6:00
A.M
.

Elizabeth Anne answered. Groggy. Still half asleep.

Then she dropped her head and started crying.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” Karen asked, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

“Mom, you all right?” Barbara asked.

III

“Devastating” was the word Barbara used to describe what she and Karen went through after they had accepted that their father was dead and that they would never see him again, or hear any of those family stories, or attend church, or enjoy his supple, friendly, warm companionship and company.

Ralph had dropped dead of a heart attack. He’d had one in his early forties, brought on by, doctors said, the “residual effects of polio.” But no one expected Ralph to have another one—and then, on top of it, die. Especially while he was in the hospital undergoing routine medical exams and procedures. “It really disrupted the entire dynamics of my family,” Barbara said later. “Because, well, he was the center.”

The nucleus. Not the man of the house. That’s different. So different from what Ralph was to his daughters. He was the guardian. The light.

Within a week of Ralph’s death, the kids were told Ralph had left them something, which, during such a fragile time of mourning, seemed to be all too much to take. Apparently, he had left the kids an audio recording. Perhaps he had sensed death was imminent. Maybe he made the tape
just in case.
In any event, not seven days after they had watched mourners sprinkle dirt on their father’s coffin six feet below ground, here he was speaking from that grave.

They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t put the tape in and press
PLAY
.

No way. “I can’t handle this,” said Karen.

Me neither,
Barbara thought.

How grim. Macabre.

Ralph was one of those guys who had everything in order in his house, on his desk, in his car. Oil changes on the date. Paper clips in their box. Pencils—all sharpened—in one place. Pens, all the blues and the blacks, in another.

So, in retrospect, the tape didn’t seem like it was so out of the ordinary when Barbara thought about it later. “I remember,” she recalled, “after the funeral, my mother tried to play the tape and it was…well, it was awful. Just awful.”

It would be weeks before they listened to it.

IV

One day, a few years after Ralph passed away, Karen and Barbara were talking. “I always felt like I had picked up the role of stepping in [and] helping Mom to hold things together,” Karen said, “after Dad died.”

Two sisters chatting about a father they loved so dearly.

“Huh,” said Barbara lovingly, “I thought I had done the same thing.”

It wasn’t as if they were competing over who had played a larger role. The point was that they both did their part to pick up the slack—such a contemptuous word in this situation—and help Elizabeth Anne understand that she needed to move on. She was distraught. Her love, her world, was gone.

Elizabeth Anne had been a stay-at-home mom her entire life. Now, into her forties, she was forced to join the work-force like so many of her generation.
The Honeymooners
way of life was a memory…no more waiting for Ralph to walk through the door after a hard day’s work, toss his fedora on the chair, and sit down to a hot meal.

The routine of life was over.

The fact was, Elizabeth Anne would have to go out and punch a clock.

Which was exactly what she did.

I

Karen was a bit more of a “free spirit,” Barbara said, than she had ever been. And Elizabeth Anne certainly didn’t appreciate it. What she meant was, Karen would do stupid things. Like one night, for example, she took off from the house and didn’t come back. It wasn’t, however, that she was rebellious or sticking it to Mom; she had just forgotten, she later told her mother, to come home before dark.

Karen would often horse around and get herself into what we’ll call minor dilemmas. She once got her leg caught in a cinder block and the cops had to come in and help get her out. Then she got her hand stuck in an animal trap she and Barbara had run into in the woods while walking home from school one day.

Karen was one of those kids her peers could push into doing something and they knew, with enough “Come on, Karen, you chicken,” she’d ultimately give in.

Peer pressure—the adolescent web that the world spun around teenagers.

“She’d be the one to forget to hand in [homework], and at the last minute, you know,” said Barbara, “be scurrying around, looking for it.”

II

With the end of high school near, Karen began reaching out to friends, the undergrads, making those connections she’d hoped would last into adulthood and maybe a lifetime, while giving them all a bit of advice she’d hoped they could take with them into their final years. To several of her undergrad friends and peers, she wrote a special letter she handed out.

Before leaving school, Karen gave out gifts to those from her “gang,” a group of kids with whom she hung. Ellen Miller, one of Karen’s friends from that time, later said, “Somehow during September, she managed to get the locker combinations of all our lockers. Then, at each holiday, we would receive presents from ‘the Great Pumpkin,’ ‘Santa,’ ‘the Easter Bunny,’ et cetera. She was also careful to give a present to herself. As each holiday rolled around, we all anticipated the arrival of these gifts, never knowing who was giving them. It wasn’t until graduation we discovered who our ‘elf’ was.”

The greatest gift Karen had given anyone before she left for college was, of course, her love and friendship. Those around her adored Karen and all she had taught them about life through high school. She was, many later agreed, truly one of a kind. And now she was heading into the rest of her life, set to go to a fine college.

I

Some say that pride is a rejection of God’s grace—that it is such a depleting, emotionally draining characteristic of the ego, that it can bring any good man to his knees and make him beg for mercy. Ned Snelgrove was leaving home and heading south from Connecticut into New Jersey to attend Cook College (a subschool of Rutgers University) in 1978. It might have been only one hundred miles away, but for Ned, it was the beginning of a new life away from home and, for the first time, a departure from the comforting surroundings of family and friends. Perhaps this had been one of the reasons why Ned was able to keep his feelings of violence against women pretty much in check throughout his early years.

Part of Ned moving to another state involved him getting away from the parental grip he had been wrapped around for most of his life.
He wanted to make his own decisions,
his father, Edwin Sr., later wrote. Ned wanted to be able to make choices without the nagging parents telling him what to do.

Independence.

Adulthood.

Solitude.

Ned had never known any of it, but here he was, heading into the beginning of his own life.

His own dream.

II

Ned and his dad, Edwin Sr., always had a “close father/son relationship,” the elder Snelgrove noted. But now it was gone. Lost. Left somewhere along Interstate 95 as Ned made his way south into New Jersey during that fall of 1978. Back at home, before college, Ned had led a fairly quiet, ordinary life—at least according to family members and former schoolteachers and friends.
He used to watch football…sleep,
even work on projects he brought home from his job,…
and spend time with some old high school friends,
his younger brother later wrote. Ned seemed
happy and contented.

Ned’s brother, a navy guy, had always looked up to him.
He was a person,
he wrote,
that I thought people should emulate.

Like many who knew him back then, Ned’s brother viewed him as
ambitious, successful, intelligent, confident, capable and athletic.

Above normal. Above average. One who was expected to go on and become somebody, do something.

Then there was that side of Ned that reminded people of their next-door neighbor. The guy you’d least likely suspect to see in the newspaper with his hands cuffed behind his back facing accusations of murder, attempted murder, sexual assault, and a host of other charges.

His brother used the word “malice” to describe a trait, a characteristic, a behavior that Ned
never…ever displayed.
He wrote about Ned not having one
hateful bone in his body.

But Ned did. He hated himself. He hated who he was.

He hated women.

And yet he chose—and it was a choice, because he knew damn well that monster was inside him—to ignore those impulses and try to sail through life without complication. For Ned, murder wasn’t about hate. Or a burning detestation he had for himself and that other
person
percolating inside him. It wasn’t about one person—him—allowing a festering, burning resentment to turn into violence. A sort of “give in” to that twisted grandiose image of women he held so deeply. Nor was it about Ned thinking of this person night and day and developing a revulsion for him.

It wasn’t about revenge.

Or money.

Or even lust.

No, none of these.

Contrary to what any of his family and friends had failed to see—and, in truth, how could they?—in his youth, it was about one thing for Ned Snelgrove.

Control.

Well, maybe two: control and restraint.

But not necessarily that control most of us might attribute to a killer. In Ned’s case, it was a different type of control. One of which Ned had somewhat mastered through high school. One of which he learned then to keep at bay. A desire to do violence on women that Ned could manage.

That was it: For Ned, it was about mind management. Don’t act out.

Fight off those urges.

And for years—at least we think—it worked.

But now Ned was on his way south, out into the open world. No more would his life be contained within the confines of his childhood stomping grounds, his own little bubble. At Rutgers, there would be new people.

New situations.

New challenges for an unstable mind to overcome.

And, most dangerously, new females to encounter.

I

Ned was heading into his final year at Rutgers. He hadn’t returned home much during the past three years, but he decided that a trip was in order. In between the time he had left for school and now, 1982, as he entered his twenties, one could argue that Ned had matured. It was here, in fact, where Ned had changed, his father believed. He was now “arrogant” and “very self-assured,” the elder Snelgrove later described.

The center of his own design.

Ned the narcissist. Ned the perfect man. Ned the future business star.

The new Ned, if you will, was obvious to his parents from the moment he stepped foot in their graces. Mr. and Mrs. Snelgrove were, of course, excited to see their son. But to Ned, returning home was more of a duty, it seemed, than something he had wanted to do out of longing.
I was not really comfortable in his company…,
Mr. Snelgrove wrote, speaking about this day. The son he had loved, had adored, and had so many ambitions for, was alien to him—a different person altogether.

Moreover, several people would later report that Ned was emotionally abusive toward his parents. Controlling and domineering. Talking to them on the telephone once, said a source, Ned “would not ask them to do something for him—he would demand it. And not take no for an answer, often belittling them and emotionally abusing them.”

Ned had gone through the motions of
Hi, how you doin’? How’s things going?
But he wasn’t at all
interested,
Mr. Snelgrove wrote of his son,
in anything we had to say.

Condescending, in other words. Patronizing.

Mr. “I Could Care Less About You.”

While at home, Ned held his head high and went through the motions of being the good son, back in Berlin doing what sons were supposed to do: visit, eat dinner with Mom and Dad, lie about how much he loved being home, tell them what they wanted to hear about his life strategy after graduation.

Plans.
As if he even had them.

Ned wasn’t fooling anyone—especially his Yale-educated father.
I didn’t like him as much
, his father later wrote, obviously not mincing words,
as my instincts told me I should….
Standing, looking at this shell of a man in his kitchen, this man who was once a happy-go-lucky boy with curly blond hair and a Hollywood smile, the elder Snelgrove couldn’t believe his son and this “man” were one in the same person. Flashes of the days when Ned, as a kid, used to be “outgoing and gregarious,” Edwin Sr. described, enveloped Mr. Snelgrove. It was a time when Ned had friends. When he always laughed.

Joked.

Played the piano.

Excelled in sports and became a three-letter varsity athlete in high school.

He was on his way to the top,
Mr. Snelgrove wrote.

The other two Snelgrove children were more like the old man, Mr. Snelgrove admitted: bookish, cerebral, introverted, “not particularly athletic.” When he was a youth running around the Yale campus, Mr. Snelgrove considered himself “a follower,” he explained rather humbly, “not a leader.”

But Ned…Neddy Snelgrove was different—the family member who had broken the mold, so to speak, and carved out a life for himself. A niche. At least that’s what everyone thought when Ned left for Rutgers.

So much potential. So much opportunity ahead of him.

So much promise.

But now, his entire demeanor had changed. When Ned left for college, Dad was proud. Ned was a “brain,” as dad had told it, but also a popular kid doing cannonballs in the town pool as everyone stood around and marveled. There’s Neddy: smart, tough as nails, and popular.

But that person, Mr. Snelgrove could see easily as Ned stood in the kitchen years later, ready to graduate from college, cocky and altered, heading into his final few semesters, was different from the child that had left home some four years earlier—but not in a way that parents wished. Here was this shallow man. Someone so very much different from the child he had been. Someone so very full of himself. An inconsiderate human being who seemingly cared little for anyone but himself.

Cold. Unfeeling.

Ned talked of traveling to Mexico and the Caribbean after graduation.

Edwin Sr. and wife Norma looked at each other.
Huh?

Skiing in Colorado.

Ned, come on? That’s not you
was the common reaction.

But who knew Ned, really? Ned was already working for Hewlett by 1983, on his way to becoming one of its top executives. He was excelling in his job. But it did little to challenge his intellect, and instead turned him into an arrogant, self-centered undergrad, with a head too big to fit through the doorway.

What threw off Mr. and Mrs. Snelgrove was that Ned had never been one to spend money. He was always tight. Mr. Scrooge. Liked to hoard it and pack it away in the bank. His father was blown away by the mention that this same kid who had stowed away for college every penny he had ever earned, this same young man who never, ever took a vacation from
any
job he’d ever had, and generally brought work home with him on the weekends and kept to himself, was standing here, in this kitchen, talking about traveling the world. Was it the same child?

It was a “shock,” Mr. Snelgrove later observed, to see such a “self-assertive, me-first” person.

Ned Snelgrove. The new man. The new son. The new exec.

Confident. Poised. Egotistic.

Who the heck are you?
The senior Snelgroves wondered.

I always loved Ned,
his father went on to write,
but…I [felt] somewhat distanced from him (that winter he came home), as if I [were] seeing this whole situation through the wrong end of a telescope.

Mr. Snelgrove concluded by writing how the new Ned was
someone I know, but he is not really my son.

II

This sudden change Ned exhibited while visiting home could be attributed to many different factors. In a sense, all kids “grow up” while in college. All kids “find themselves,” to some extent. All boys leave home and return—dare we say it—men. For Ned, however, this idiosyncratic change in his demeanor at home during this trip was likely brought on by the unstableness of his relationship with Karen Osmun, a classmate he had recently proclaimed his enduring, undying love for. There was no other woman in Ned’s life that matched Karen’s beauty, pleasurable company, or “let’s live life to the fullest” attitude. Ned had fallen for Karen.

Deeply. Entirely. Maybe even obsessively.

But Karen was talking about her future lately—which did not include Ned Snelgrove. Slowly, casually, Ned was beginning to figure out that he was Karen’s college lover. A boyfriend. Some dude she dated and had a good time with, but also someone she did
not
want to spend her postcollege days hanging around.

Ned didn’t like that so much.

Ned had told people he loved Karen. That there could be no other woman like her.

Karen saw an end to the relationship; it had run its course. Certainly. But she also saw a beginning to her own life.

Ned saw the opposite—and it tore him apart.