I'll Be Watching You (16 page)

I

The MCDB continued interviewing suspects and dragging former college friends of Karen’s in for questioning and polygraph testing. And for weeks into the new year, everything kept pointing to one person.

Finally, by January 20, 1984, detectives were able to get a court order forcing Ned to give up exemplars: hair, blood, saliva, fingerprints. If nothing else, they could place Ned in Karen’s apartment. His story was that the last time he saw Karen was after the party out on the street as she wiped snow off the back of her window.

It was a lie, of course.

And the cops knew it.

The goal was to catch Ned lying, which would invite probable cause and, with any luck, force Ned into a corner.

But Ned was sticking to his story.

With Ned’s attorney present, Watson and his colleagues began asking Ned a series of questions after he gave up the exemplars. It was important to keep asking the same repetitive questions to see how accurate Ned was over a period of time. Lies are hard to keep track of, no matter how smart you are—whereas the truth is a cinch.

Ned gave up a few more names of men he had seen talking to Karen, he claimed, at the party. Then one of the detectives asked him if Karen had any foibles, any characteristics that could potentially cause her trouble. Like, for example, would she talk to strangers? Would she hitchhike or accept a ride from someone she didn’t know?

“Look,” Ned said rather defensively, “she was friendly toward strangers, but was not a tease,” as if they had insinuated such.

“OK…and your point is…”

“But she was not a Girl Scout, either.” Literally, she had been; figuratively, though, Ned was saying that Karen had a reputation for being promiscuous. Several other men they had interviewed had said the same thing. But the truth was, Karen liked to act like she was wild, when she was nothing more than an innocent young girl.

“But then,” Ned asked out loud, “was she a whore?”

Detectives wondered what the heck he was talking about.

“Did she hang around with any [other] people?” one of the detectives asked, changing the subject, trying to keep Ned focused.

“There were no black people at the party, nor did she know any that I know of.”

They cut Ned loose.

II

A friend of Karen’s, who along with several others had been asked to provide exemplars, called Detective Watson on March 2, 1984, to tell him he had found something he believed was important.

“What is it?”

III

There was a guy who liked Karen. He had a thing for her, you could say. He watched out for her. He had wanted to “take it to another level,” a friend later said, “but Karen wasn’t interested.”

The guy felt in his heart that Ned had killed Karen. No one could tell him different. So as time went forward, the guy became fixed on tripping Ned up and catching him in a lie. He’d send Ned letters from Karen. Cards from her, too.

Taunting him. Making him think.

As the second anniversary of Karen’s death came up, the guy placed a wreath on the house where Karen had attended that party before her murder. It was nothing more than a memorial.

IV

Watson asked his caller, again, “What is it?”

“A wreath.”

“Where?”

Someone had also placed a wreath in another location.

“It’s from an unknown person. It was placed [on Karen’s grave] between January twenty-second and January twenty-ninth. I spoke to Elizabeth Anne and she contacted every single family member, and no one they knew had placed the wreath….”

The twist to it all was that Karen’s headstone or name had not yet been placed where she was buried.

Watson called the cemetery. They had collected the wreath and discarded it. “Has anyone been in lately to ask where Karen Osmun is buried?” he asked.

The cemetery worker said no.

V

That December, Elizabeth Anne, with help from a local newspaper, the
Home News,
invited Dorothy Allison, a well-known, veteran psychic, to travel to New Brunswick, take a ride around town, and see what she could come up with. Middlesex County prosecutor Alan Rockoff, whose office was now driving the investigation, gave the
Home News
the most gratifying quote one could offer when dealing with psychics and murder investigations. He equated Dorothy Allison with “chicken soup,” saying her input “couldn’t hurt.”

As she drove around town with a reporter and detective, Allison made several broad statements regarding Karen’s killer, at one time saying that he had “very small ears, with pointed features like a mouse.”

One thing she did nail—yet it could have been the sheer chiseling down of facts and applying Karen’s lifestyle to the prediction—turned out to be that Karen’s killer, and she was adamant, traveled through the campus, which she called a “path the murderer took all the time.” She then said that she saw Karen leaving the party and being followed by a black-and-yellow car “driven by the murderer, who had been at the party with her.”

When she was asked to point out where the house party was, an address that hadn’t been publicized, Dorothy didn’t fare so well.

Bringing in the psychic did not advance the investigation. Still, it gave Elizabeth Anne a bit of solace in the fact she could at least, for that one day, grasp onto
something
—something that might lead her to her daughter’s killer, which was her only focus in life by this point. Barbara’s firstborn daughter, Lauren, who arrived that March, helped Elizabeth cope, but the impact of Karen’s death kept dragging her failing health down. She felt tired all the time. Quite sickly. Her heart was thick, tight in her chest, as if something was
always
wrong.

VI

“The police and friends of ours kept a close eye on Ned,” Barbara Delaney later said, “following his whereabouts. But no evidence surfaced.”

The case grew frigid.

Months turned into years.

Soon, two years had gone by and no arrest had been made.

Frustration.

For Barbara. For Arthur.

For Elizabeth Anne.

Then, out of nowhere, it happened.

Elizabeth Anne dropped to her knees one day and suffered a major heart attack. All that emotional pain had manifested into physical trauma.

I

According to Barbara, her mother was “living a life of constant agony.” She had suffered a heart attack solely because of Karen’s murder and the fact that Ned Snelgrove was out and about walking the streets. By now, it was almost a given among a small group of friends and family—and several investigators—that Ned had murdered Karen; but no one could do anything about it. Barbara had another child, Caitlin, and spending time with her grandchildren helped Elizabeth Anne to recover and heal. She soon joined Parents of Murdered Children and became extremely active in fighting for victims’ rights. “She tirelessly went to meetings, signed petitions, and talked to other parents of murdered children,” Barbara said. “It was her catharsis.”

A pacifier. A cause to help her bridge the gap between losing a child and understanding that there was nothing she could have done to protect her. That maternal instinct. That bond. The mother-daughter connection. Inseparable.

“By doing good for others,” Barbara said, “she was able to draw strength and maintain a purpose to go on.”

Barbara joined a group, too: Voices for Victims. A group that fought for legislature to ensure that victims of crime were entitled to the same rights as criminals.

II

The pressure was off Ned for now. He had escaped justice. Later, in a letter to the court, in which he explained what was happening in his mind after the Osmun murder and before the attack on Mary Ellen Renard, Ned spoke of this period when he was in between attacks, if you will. He wrote that he couldn’t
eat or sleep,
that he
promised [him]self [he] would never do anything like that again;
at the same time rationalizing Karen’s murder, talking about the feelings he had toward females which were “so strong” he couldn’t help it.

Karen didn’t die, Ned insisted, because she was his ex-girlfriend. It had nothing to do with her breaking up with him. It wasn’t an act of revenge.

Instead, it was as simple as Karen being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His other side had come out and Karen was there. There was nothing he could have done to stop it.

Yes, according to Ned’s twisted way of analyzing his sick behavior, Karen was killed because she knew him and he had acted out on those stuffed feelings of violence against females.

For no other reason.

According to law enforcement, however, the strangest part of this time in Ned’s life is the lull in attacks. As most profilers will say, a person like Ned just doesn’t stop for four years and then pick up again. “No way,” said one profiler who had Ned on radar for twenty years regarding a murder in Essex County, New Jersey—a female with large breasts who was murdered shortly after Karen Osmun. “There’s no way a guy like Snelgrove could just stop for that long a period of time.”

He was incapable of it.

III

During this period, between the attacks, Ned and several friends were invited down to West Virginia for a wedding. They rented a van. Drove all night.

As one friend there that day later explained it, Ned was anything but touched by Karen’s death, as he would later write to the judge. In fact, having murdered Karen didn’t even seem to bother Ned one bit.

At the wedding, Ned drank and laughed and joked and had a ball. He even enjoyed a belt or two of moonshine that a relative of the groom had brought.

By then, Ned had grown a mustache. Put on some weight. He was making 40K a year at HP, traveling, and enjoying the fruits of his labor. And yet here he was, partying it up with friends, having recently murdered someone. To look back, that friend later told me, it was almost remarkable to think how Ned acted. How cold. To be able to socialize like that after killing someone. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself,” that same friend added.

There came a point during the wedding when no one could find Ned—or one of the bridesmaids.

“Where the heck is he?” someone asked.

The wedding reception ceased. Everyone was now looking for Ned and the bridesmaid.

About a half hour later, someone spotted them in the boiler room. (“Ned was [having sex with] her right there. The girl’s brother wanted to kill him.”)

They left the wedding to avoid any trouble.

“The all-American boy,” that same former friend described Ned during this time. “You don’t look at your friend and see a killer. You reflect later and say, ‘Oh yeah, that makes sense now.’”

Ned was obnoxious in his college days. Intense. Physical. He’d grab kids in the hallway of the dorm around the neck and wrestle them to the ground, for no reason. “He liked to cause pain. He’d pick guys who he knew he could beat up, and guys who he knew would beat him up.”

Ned would do odd, quirky things. Quite strangely, it struck his dorm mates, Ned had an old fishbowl in his room. Inside the bowl were pieces of paper with the names of his old high-school friends. Once a week, Ned would pick a name and write that person a letter. “He did that religiously…. We found it very weird. We’d ask, ‘Ned, why are you writing a letter every week?’”

He never answered.

In college, this was something Ned took great delight in: being different. Making people wonder about him. Ask questions. It kept the focus, of course, always on Ned—which was what he truly craved more than anything.

All the attention.

IV

During his college years, Ned seemed happy, even cheerful: he was a young adult with so much promise of a future in business, a future, essentially, in any profession he chose. He was popular. Went to parties on campus and played sports, debated politics, took part in extracurricular activities, and seemed to display a fitting amount of social skills. Still, Ned was fighting those demons that had plagued him since childhood: those feelings that, according to him later, had emerged and
forced
him to kill Karen Osmun and attack Mary Ellen Renard.

Even after he admitted in 1988 to killing Karen and attacking Mary Ellen Renard, and was sent to prison, those feelings kept pounding in his head. Wherever he went. In the prison yard. In his cell. Violent images. Violent thoughts.

Women. Blondes. Long hair. Curves. Large breasts.

Ned was a pressure cooker.

V

When Ned’s attorney had phoned Mr. and Mrs. Snelgrove in Connecticut after Ned had tried to kill himself, Mr. Snelgrove couldn’t believe it at first. But then, after Mr. Snelgrove thought about it, he realized Ned had been acting strange over that past year. Yes, it did make sense to him when he sat down and put it all through the mind wringer, he later explained in a letter to the court.

Still, Mr. Snelgrove had to shake his head after hanging up the phone.
Neddy…

I almost wish he had succeeded,
Mr. Snelgrove later wrote to the judge Ned was facing for sentencing in 1988,
when I try to imagine his future.

There were questions Mr. Snelgrove had that, perhaps, nobody had answers to.

Only time would tell.

Wondering if Ned would even survive prison, Mr. Snelgrove pondered,
What will he do when he gets out?

The best years of his life will have been wasted,
he wrote, wondering how in the world Ned would ever
start life over with his record?

Beyond that, Mr. Snelgrove angrily wrote, Ned had
betrayed all his friends…caused terrible disruptions within his family.
The road ahead, he went on to note, would be paved with solitude for Ned.

He will be very much alone,
he wrote.

Where would he go?

What would become of him?

If he is some sort of Jekyll/Hyde character,
the elder Snelgrove mused,
can he be reformed?

And the question on everyone’s mind, including, of course, Mary Ellen Renard and family members of Karen Osmun, when Ned faced parole,
[would it be] safe to let him back into society?
Mr. Snelgrove penned. A question that, in its sincerity, shocked many when they learned it had come from Ned’s own father. The old man admitted that he had many more questions, but
at the moment I don’t see any answers,
he wrote.

Where it pertained to Ned, no one did.