I'll Be Watching You (24 page)

I

Ned and his parents lived in a modest cape—white with dark green shutters—in a rural neighborhood near East Berlin, right off Route 372 and Route 15, which is more commonly known as the Berlin Turnpike. It’s a rather busy four-lane roadway, dotted with strip malls, chain restaurants, fuel stations, strip joints, and seedy motels with rooms that rent by the hour, day, week, or month. The area where Ned grew up and now lived, in the basement of the house his parents had purchased a half century ago, was twenty minutes from New Haven and the same from Hartford. The house next door had been abandoned in lieu of being sold. The grass was knee-high and the house looked vacant and lonely. At about 2:00
P.M
., on October 22, 2001, Luisa St. Pierre and Jerry Bilbo drove to the Berlin Police Department (BPD) before heading over to the Snelgroves’. Pulling up to Savage Hill Road with that Berlin PD escort sometime later, Luisa saw an older man in the front yard raking leaves. “Must be Snelgrove’s father,” she said to Bilbo.

Edwin Snelgrove Sr. stopped what he was doing and watched the BPD cruiser pull into his driveway with an unmarked cruiser behind it. He didn’t seem too surprised.

After brief introductions, St. Pierre said, “We’d like to look inside your son’s car.”

“Come with me,” Mr. Snelgrove said.

The garage was set back a bit from the house at the end of the driveway. Snelgrove reached down and lifted up the garage door. Then he unlocked the door to Ned’s car, a 1998 tan Ford Escort. As St. Pierre, Bilbo, and the Crime Scene Unit (CSU), which had just arrived, began going through Ned’s car, his father went into the house and came back out with
an itemized list recording of all [Ned’s] appointments and mileage dated from Saturday, August 11, 2001, to Tuesday, October 16, 2001,
St. Pierre later reported. Ned had promised St. Pierre that his father would provide the documents, and here they were. Right on cue.

“Thanks,” she said.

What proved interesting to St. Pierre and the other detectives, who had since arrived on scene, was that there were several bundles of rope on the wall, hanging on hooks, yet there was one bundle missing. Inside Ned’s car were several interesting pieces of evidence. Among them, what St. Pierre described as
vegetable matter (leaves & seeds),
a set of partial latent prints on the passenger’s side of the vehicle from the window, several “stain swabbings” taken from various blotches on the inside of the vehicle, one leaf in the trunk, hair fibers, along with envelopes full of trace evidence that crime scene investigators had sucked up with a vacuum.

II

Andrea Collins (pseudonym) worked as a bartender at Kenney’s on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. She was familiar with Ned, who would sit at the bar by himself, she said, and drink Moosehead beer. On several occasions, Collins explained, she noticed how Ned sat in a booth with Carmen, talking. “He would always buy her drinks.”

It was about the first week of October, Collins said, when she was working one night and a call came into the bar. Looking back, she said that it seemed “strange.”

“It’s for you,” the bar back said.

“Hello?” Collins answered.

“It’s Ned.”

“Who?” Collins didn’t recognize the name right away.

“Ned—”

“Oh…yeah?”

“I heard you spoke to the police,” Ned said.

Collins told detectives what everyone else in the bar had: Ned left with Carmen on September 21, or early September 22, and had been dancing with her.

“Yes,” she said, “I did.”

“You spoke to them about ‘the missing girl.’” Another patron, Ned said, had informed him that Collins had talked to the police.

“I did.” Collins didn’t see the big deal in talking to the police. “Why?”

“I just gave her a ride to Capitol Avenue and Broad.”

“OK…”
And your point?

“I’m calling right now”—Ned felt the urge to divulge—“from Rhode Island.” It was odd, thought Collins, that he would say where he was, as if she cared.

“I’m busy, Ned, I have to go.”

Similar stories came in as detectives continued interviewing Kenney’s employees and patrons. Paula Figueroa worked at Kenney’s and remembered Ned as the guy who ordered tuna steak salad with extra Russian dressing. “He usually dressed like…he had just left work…and sat at the bar and made small talk with me.”

When she was interviewed by police sometime after Carmen’s disappearance, Paula said there was “something about Ned that was really weird—he gave me the chills. He was always polite, but would repeatedly ask me out. He even asked me if I would go away with him. I always refused politely.”

III

While all of the forensic evidence was processed—it would take weeks—the search for Carmen continued. As November approached, there was still no word from Carmen. Detectives investigating her disappearance expected the worst, hoped for the best. As Christmas neared, Detective St. Pierre and her colleagues heard that none of the forensic evidence collected in Ned’s car yielded any indication that he was involved in Carmen’s disappearance. Not one hair matched Carmen’s DNA profile—and not one stain was considered suspicious.

Investigators were baffled. Yet, as Christmas and the new year came and went, the investigation was about to take a major turn.

I

At about one o’clock in the afternoon, on Sunday, January 6, 2002, thirty-six-year-old Peter Mareck was walking on Grassy Pond Road, a dirt and gravel connector running along his property line. Mareck lived on the corner of Grassy Pond and Route 138 (Rockville Road), in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, a mile or so over the Connecticut border. On certain days, he’d grab his trusty pole with the spike at the end of it, a few trash barrels, and troll the area, picking up the garbage that young kids and litterbugs so rudely dirtied the beautiful landscape with. Mareck hated seeing the trash along the roadside. It took away from the splendor of the pond across the street on Route 138 and the vast wooded area in back of his home.

Picking up other people’s garbage came with its share of surprises. On any given day, there was no telling what Mareck would find. “The most unusual thing I came across—until that day in January—was a bag of flounder skeletons,” Mareck said later.

Finding the bag, he left it alone and called someone to have a look. It was the large fish vertebrae that piqued his interest. During the years he has dedicated to picking the garbage, Mareck knew there was nothing people didn’t toss out their windows. “I found a dog once,” he said. “Someone had put a dog in a bag and just threw it out their car window.” That kind of obvious disregard for life disgusted him.

Whenever Mareck found something it was generally on Route 138, which is a fairly busy roadway, being a two-lane state highway. Grassy Pond was more of a byline to another dirt and gravel road and a few private homes out in the woods. As Mareck was walking along Grassy Pond that afternoon, about two-tenths of a mile from Route 138, heading toward Kenney Hill Road, a dirt path that actually led to Hopkinton police chief John Scuncio’s home, he noticed a large garbage bag off to the side, approximately three meters into the woods. It was the middle of winter. The foliage on the trees and brush was stripped bare, which made it easy for Mareck to see deep into the woods. He had seen garbage bags this size before. But this one was different. There was something about it. The shape. The way it was sealed up.

The area was known to be a common region of the town for poachers to flash a light in a deer’s eyes at night and take a potshot. Some poachers killed the deer, took the meat, and then left the guts and rotting carcasses there in the woods, on the road, or placed them in bags and tossed them as deep as they could into the woods. With this in mind, Mareck walked a bit closer to the bag. Poking at it with his stick, he wanted to see what was inside. As the bag tore open, a putrid smell as potent as a Dumpster in the sun wafted up at him. Unlike the common smell of garbage, however, this aroma was vile and rancid.

And very unfamiliar.

Reaching deeper into the bag with his stick, Mareck opened it so he could see what was inside.
A vertebra? A spine?
he told himself. “It was large,” Mareck said later. “It looked human.”

He was well aware of what the anatomy of an animal looked like, not to mention large fish. But this spine was a bit larger than Mareck had ever seen. “It didn’t look like an animal’s.” So he ripped the bag open some more.
Clothesline…?

The clothesline had been wrapped around the bones several times and tied into knots. Mareck stood and thought about it:
This is a little weird. The only two things that would be distinctive are the skull and the pelvic bone.
So he tore at the bag toward the end where he assumed a head would be—and there it was: a human skull. (“It had long hair on it.” And maggots, like thousands of Tic Tacs, slithering and sliding throughout.)

Mareck knelt down and went in for a closer look. “The entire torso was decomposed,” he said later. “But I could make out the skull. I could see the little cracks and plates that make up a human head.”

Once Mareck saw the skull, he lifted the bag from the opposite end and saw the hipbone. He then knew for certain it was a person—a woman.

A flood of emotion washed over Mareck as he stood there. He had lost his sister in 1988. She was one of 243 passengers aboard Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, killing all passengers and sixteen crew members, as well as eleven people on the ground. A total of 270 people perished that day. That pain had never left Mareck. Something like this, seeing a dead body in the woods, all wrapped up in a bag, brought it all back. Standing over the bag, Mareck said aloud, “Sit tight…stay right there, you’re found now. I know what to do. I know somebody’s looking for you.” He had no idea why he said it. But he knew there was a family out there somewhere worried sick about the person in the bag. They had lost sleep. Wondered what had happened to this person. All sorts of scenarios were running through their minds. Mareck was familiar with these same feelings. It had been a week or more before his sister was identified, which made the agony of knowing—but not
truly
knowing—even more traumatic. As he stood there over the bag, it hurt him to know that another family was going through the same pain.

Standing up, Mareck told himself,
I need to call someone.
He didn’t want to disturb (any more than he already had) what was now a crime scene. So Mareck took off, running. Heading for Kenney Hill Road. His intention was to make it to the police chief’s house, whom he had known for years, and tell him. In fact, Mareck had just seen the chief. They’d chitchatted for about ten minutes.

On foot, the chief’s house was a haul. So Mareck turned around, ran back by the bag of remains, and headed for his own home. Once there, “John,” Mareck said over the phone, out of breath, “I think I found a body—”

“Relax,” said the chief. “You sure it’s not deer remains or something?”

“That’s why I’m calling. I don’t want to make a big deal out of nothing. I know you’re home. So, I figured, why not. You can take a ride down and check it out for me.”

“I’ll meet you out there,” the chief said.

II

Lieutenant Mike Gilman arrived on scene first. Chief Scuncio used his cell phone to call it in. He advised everyone, at this point, to communicate via cell phone so as not to alert the local press. It was important to make sure it was a human body before news spread.

Scuncio explained to Gilman what Mareck had told him. Then he showed him the bag. Gilman taped off the area and made a few calls, while Chief Scuncio contacted several members of the Rhode Island State Police (RISP) Detective Division and Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BCI) Unit. In about ten minutes, patrolmen were at the scene closing off the road.

III

As Mareck described to patrolman Brian Dufault what he found, Hopkinton Police Department detective Kevin McDonald was at home trying to enjoy a well-deserved day off. It was about ten minutes to two. For McDonald, during the winter months, Sundays weren’t scheduled around tending to the horses he and his wife raised on their sprawling spread outside Hopkinton, just south of Providence. Mostly, McDonald liked to sit in front of the television with his college-bound son and watch New England Patriots football. On this day, early into the game, the Patriots were trouncing the Carolina Panthers, on their way to a 38–6 victory.

Growing up in nearby Narragansett, a port town close to the wealthy tidings of Newport, following the Patriots had become a way of life for the somewhat reticent detective. He kept one picture on the wall of his office: a poster of the Patriots.

As a twenty-three-year veteran Rhode Island cop, however, McDonald was aware that any day could turn from the ordinary into the extraordinary with a phone call. And sure enough, about three-quarters of the way into the football game, McDonald’s cell phone rang: “We got a situation out there near the Connecticut state line,” dispatch explained. “Maybe a body in a garbage bag.” The chief was involved, McDonald was told.

So he grabbed his car keys and flew out the door.

When he arrived on scene, Mike Gilman filled McDonald in. After all, it didn’t take McDonald long to get out there. He generally drove one of the Hopkinton PD’s many confiscated sports cars. For years, McDonald had worked narcotics and drug detail, setting up major buys, busting the big drug dealers. There was always, McDonald said later, a boat or several cars involved in the raid. “I could drive a different car every day of the month if I wanted to.” A Hummer. A Porsche. Whatever.

McDonald photographed the scene. As he studied it, he assumed the person who had dumped the body had obviously chosen the area out of necessity and randomness rather than design. There was no reason to believe the woman’s killer knew the chief of police lived down the road and wanted to dump the body in, basically, his front yard. (“Son of a gun,” the chief said later, quite animated that a killer had left one of his victims in his front yard, “I drove by that body every day for months on my way into work.”)

After photographing the scene, McDonald walked up the road and sought out one of the chief’s neighbors, John Czerkiewciz. McDonald wanted to know if Czerkiewciz had seen anything suspicious. Although the nights were as dark as used motor oil out there in the woods, someone had obviously drove up Grassy Pond Road to dump a body, which meant someone could have perhaps seen him.

“I saw that bag for the first time about a month ago,” Czerkiewciz said. “I remember a friend telling me about a ‘foul odor’ near the bridge”—there was a small bridge over a small rain creek about twenty yards from where the bag was found—“and I heard about that odor maybe two months ago.”

“Thanks,” McDonald said. “If you think of anything else, call us.”

What the brief interview told McDonald was that identifying the body might prove difficult, especially if it had been out there decomposing for a few months.

IV

By late afternoon, Arthur Kershaw and Diane Dougherty, two members of the RISP–BCI Unit, arrived to assist what had become Detective Kevin McDonald’s investigation. McDonald was happy to have the help. It was going to be tough to identify the body. Besides the lower right leg, from about the top of the DB’s (dead body) shin down, the body was decomposed to the point of, essentially, a bag of bones. The victim, as McDonald described the body to the detectives, had been placed inside several white bags, which were placed inside several black garbage bags. The person who had placed her—they knew it was a female—inside the bags had gone to great lengths to seal the bags. They found no clothing besides a pair of “medium blue” panties she was wearing. (“There was a rope (clothesline),” McDonald explained later, “wrapped or tied around her pelvic bone, which told me that she had been tied up and bound at some point.”)

The coroner arrived, took some photos, searched the area around the body with McDonald and the others, and ordered the body to be taken to the medical examiner’s (ME) office for further assessment. When McDonald got back to the Hopkinton PD, he had officers check out the local campgrounds. “Preference paid to domestic disputes,” he suggested. See if any females had been reported missing within the past six months. Maybe a husband got drunk, pissed off, and did his wife in after an argument. While they did that, McDonald called the Connecticut State Police (CSP) troop closest to where the body had been found to see if the CSP had any unresolved missing persons cases that fit the criteria. A trooper told him they had been investigating a missing prostitute case from a truck stop near Hopkinton. “She worked that truck stop and vanished at some point last summer.” But there was never a missing person report filed.

Then McDonald called Detective Mike Carrier, from the Westerly Police Department (WPD). Westerly was beach territory. Weekend beachgoers from all over the Northeast flocked to the popular Misquamicut State Beach Park. There was always trouble on weekends during the summer. Kids getting drunk. Drugs. Bar fights.

Burlingame, a campground near the beach, was a common spot Westerly cops were called out to patrol and investigate. The Mashantucket Pequot Casino at Foxwoods in Ledyard, Connecticut, was a twenty-minute drive from the beach. Lots of drugs and trouble flowed from the casino to the beach, back and forth. Maybe a woman had been reported missing from the casino, campground, or somewhere in between.

“I’ll search our records, Kevin, and get back to you,” Detective Carrier said.

The next morning, McDonald drove out to the CSP barracks in Montville, Connecticut, to see if it had a match of any kind.

No luck.

From there, he stopped at the truck stop to see about the missing hooker. But it was a rumor, he was told. There was no prostitute working the truck stop.

Back at the Hopkinton PD, McDonald sat down with Chief Scuncio. The chief said he remembered something that, in hindsight, might be important to the investigation. “Last November I saw a vehicle—an Explorer or Bronco—in my driveway,” he told McDonald. The only way to get to the chief’s driveway was to turn left or right from Route 138 onto Grassy Pond and head west toward his house. “I went up to the driver and asked him what he was doing.” The vehicle had driven into a gravel bank. The driver seemed confused. When the chief approached and started asking questions, “the guy took off.”

So the chief made chase.

Reaching speeds up to 100 mph, the chief lost the guy somewhere over the Connecticut border.

It seemed like nothing, but McDonald said he’d look into it.

McDonald went back to his office and spread out the photographs he had taken at the crime scene. Something was missing. He had recently received several photographs from the coroner, which gave him a fairly good view of the body. What struck him right away was a tattoo on what was one of the only patches of skin that time and the elements hadn’t decayed. The coroner described the area as the “lateral aspect” of the “left ankle.” McDonald’s Jane Doe had a rather unique piece of art there: quite faded, it was an image of flowers, a bird, and several “unreadable words,” the coroner noted. Looking closer, however, McDonald noticed something.