I'll Be Watching You (27 page)

I

Kevin McDonald had participated in the search and seizure at Ned’s. There was some later confusion over whether Ned was driven to Troop H in Hartford by McDonald or another officer, but McDonald and his partner, Arthur Kershaw, were at Troop H after the search, preparing to ask Ned a few questions. McDonald advised Ned of his rights, but it was important to make him aware of the fact that he was
not
under arrest. McDonald had an easy manner about him. It was hard not to feel comfortable around the guy; he spoke softly, with poise and eloquence, and chose his words carefully. However, he seemed to exude an air of cockiness if you didn’t know him or his style.

McDonald had to play it cool. One misstep, especially dealing with a suspect as smart as Ned, could be detrimental to the case. Ned wasn’t what McDonald had expected. There had been a lot of discussion among detectives about Ned over the past few weeks. “With his background,” McDonald told me, “I expected someone different. He didn’t look like a monster. He looked, well, he looked like a traveling salesman—quite harmless. Like he wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

McDonald approached Ned. “You ever been in Rhode Island?”

Ned was sitting, drinking a glass of water. He appeared calm. He was appalled that they had, by his estimation, “dragged” him down to Troop H without charging him.

“You don’t have to speak to us if you don’t want to,” McDonald added. “You can request an attorney, if you like. You can stop talking anytime.”

“I’m not going to talk about anything to do with the investigation,” Ned said. (“You get to talking to Ned and you understand he fancies himself as someone who is very intelligent,” McDonald recalled later. “He likes to put himself over people.” It was that pompous arrogance Ned could turn on and off:
I’m smarter than you…. You won’t get me for this murder.
It was implicit, McDonald said, in his demeanor. “He would try to put his intelligence, in the way he spoke, over us, like we couldn’t understand his superior English skills. He looks down on us. The feeling we got was that Ned was saying to himself, ‘I did this—and you morons are never going to catch me.’”)

McDonald was under the impression that since Ned had “agreed to come down to Troop H” he was willing to talk about the case. Otherwise, why would he agree to get into a police cruiser and ride downtown? He had never called his lawyer from the house.

They talked for approximately two hours, McDonald later testified (and verified with me), and yet Ned revealed nothing about Carmen or the case.

“He was confident,” McDonald said. “We talked about the Red Sox.”

Arthur Kershaw asked a question about Rhode Island. The Hartford PD had a witness who claimed Ned had called Kenney’s one night after Carmen disappeared and said he was in Rhode Island. Kershaw mentioned Rhode Island again. He knew McDonald had already broached the subject with Ned, but he wanted to see how Ned would react.

“You already asked me that,” Ned said haughtily. He smiled. “Do you really want me to answer that all over again?”

Near the end of the conversation, Ned said, “Let’s do this again sometime, but over lunch, huh?”

II

McDonald and Kershaw left Troop H and walked a block away to a meeting that was going on at State’s Attorney James Thomas’s office. Within the past week, a woman had come forward and claimed Ned had tried to kidnap her outside Kenney’s somewhere around the same timeframe when Carmen disappeared. Christina Mallon said she had fought Ned off and then had thrown an empty beer bottle at his car.

It was just the break they needed: arrest Ned on a kidnapping charge—unrelated to Carmen’s disappearance—and get him off the street so they could seriously investigate Carmen’s murder without Ned meddling.

Perfect.

With all the detectives working the case sitting in the room, Thomas said, “I suggest you prepare an arrest warrant.”

With that settled, McDonald and Kershaw were asked to take a ride to the Berlin Turnpike. The idea was to ask around, show a photograph of Carmen and Ned, and see if maybe Ned had taken Carmen to a motel and killed her there. Ned lived with parents at the end of the Berlin Turnpike.

There was no doubt Carmen was in Ned’s car, he had admitted it. Yet, detectives found nothing to prove Ned’s own admission. Ned had cleaned his car. If he had killed her in a motel room, evidence would have been almost impossible to gather at this late stage. However, if a motel employee could place Ned in a room with Carmen, it would prove he was not being totally honest. But after an afternoon combing motels and asking about Ned and Carmen, investigators couldn’t find anyone who recognized either.

III

When McDonald and Kershaw returned to Troop H, Detective Kevin Hopkins, an RISP investigator who had met up with Kershaw and McDonald in Hartford that day, explained he found something important in the items seized at Ned’s.

“The receipts,” Hopkins said. “Ned’s gas receipts.”

McDonald and Kershaw were interested.

“He filled up his gas tank on September twentieth, the day before Carmen went missing.” Hopkins had sat and dug through the enormous pile of even more gas and mileage receipts Ned had kept. Ned had written his mileage down on yellow legal pads—every mile carefully accounted for. He logged where he went on a specific day, the times, the mileage, how much fuel he used, and—to investigators’ surprise and delight—the time he purchased the fuel. For example, in the days before Carmen disappeared, Ned kept records down to the tenth of a mile and tenth of a tank of gas.
Went to the Miller residence today;
in other words,
filled up at 7:30
A.M
., arrived at Miller residence for appointment at 8:15
A.M
.
This sort of spotless record keeping went on and on for days and months. Every tank of gas and hour and minute of Ned’s life was accounted for. But in going through the records, Hopkins figured out that for a stretch of time when Carmen went missing—an entire day—Ned’s record keeping didn’t add up.

It seemed he had tried to fudge it.

I

CSP sergeant Patrick Gaffney knew he was dealing with a twisted individual in Ned Snelgrove. Ned’s past record indicated as much. Beyond that, Gaffney knew the smell of evil, had seen it during his years on the job—but he also understood that the best way to capture a madman was to beat him at his own game. Gaffney was a veteran homicide cop, involved in some of the CSP’s most high-profile cases over his fifteen-year career as a member of the MCU, out of Bethany, Connecticut. At the Snelgrove residence during the search, Gaffney hadn’t seen or spoken to Ned. “I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself to him,” Gaffney said later. “Just that there was a bit of commotion and stuff, people in and out….”

Gaffney stayed out of the way and focused on overseeing his investigators and delegating jobs during the search. Back at Troop H now, Ned was in the interview suite sitting alone, stewing, wondering what the CSP was going to do with him.

The CSP couldn’t hold him. It was getting late. According to Ned, he had been at Troop H for eleven hours already, confined like a prisoner of war.

(“I wanted to make myself known to him,” Gaffney said, recalling that moment before he went in to talk to Ned, “so I introduced myself.”) “Were you at the house?” Ned asked when Gaffney, a large man, sat down across from him.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I was.”

“You were?”

“Hey,” Gaffney said, “we’re done here. I’m heading to Meriden”—a town just south of Berlin—“you want a ride home?”

Ned smiled. “Sure.”

As they headed down Interstate 91 from Hartford, Gaffney began, as he later explained, building a rapport with Ned. “We’re about the same age, huh, Ned?”

“Probably.” Ned seemed more relaxed.

“You like living at home?”

“Sure. Saves me some money.”

While in Ned’s house earlier, Gaffney noticed several board games Ned had stored away. Seeing the games brought back memories for Gaffney. “I saw that game,” Gaffney said to Ned.

“Oh yeah, you saw that,” Ned answered.

After some small talk about childhood memories and sports, Gaffney asked, “What’s up with the suicide attempt, your demeanor, you know, why’d you do it?”

Ned winced. “You know about those?”

“Of course,” Gaffney said. “We’re human beings. I understand tough times.”

“It’s part of my sickness,” Ned said. “Let’s change the subject, OK?”

“Sure,” Gaffney said.

“Hey, what kind of things did you guys take from my house?” Ned asked. He was more assertive now. It wasn’t so much a question as a demand.

“I spoke to your dad about it. I gave him a copy of a receipt for everything.”

Ned shook his head. “Thanks.”

Pulling into Ned’s driveway, Gaffney said, “Take it easy now, huh.”

“You too,” Ned said, closing the door.

II

Ned and his old high-school classmate George Recck had teamed up together while Ned was in prison and decided they’d someday write a book about Ned’s life. Ned didn’t want Recck to think in the “
short
term” regarding the commerciality of his story. One of the reasons Ned wanted Recck to wait was that Ned considered his postrelease to be a time to gather more salacious material for the book.
Wouldn’t it be a great story when I pick up right where I left off…,
Ned wrote to Recck. Perhaps Ned figured the added body count could help sell his story and also add an additional layer, as Ned put it, of
great characters and anecdotes.
Ned had written the letter on Thursday, August 25, 1988, not long after he was incarcerated.

III

Detective Gaffney grew up (and lived) just north of New Haven, Connecticut, in Hamden. A first-generation Gaffney from ancestors in Ireland, he didn’t base his desire to become a cop on a family tradition or an inner calling of some sort. It was, more or less, a challenge. “It basically came down to one night when me and a friend of mine were out discussing our futures and I challenged him to take the naval exam and he challenged me to take the state police exam,” Gaffney said. “He scored one of the highest scores ever, but went no further, and I ended up…with the Connecticut State Police.”

Gaffney spent the early part of his career in Westbrook and Bethany, which he knew well from having grown up in the area. By 1989, he was working for the Major Crimes Unit. Gaffney learned throughout the years to be open to any situation. Any conclusion. Any possible outcome. And to always think outside the box. Generally, killers don’t hang around their crime scenes. Yet, killers with a certain amount of hubris like to be involved. They like to become part of the investigation—part of the story. It feeds the ego, supplying to the killer that additional, after-the-crime high.

From being briefed about Ned by his fellow investigators, Gaffney knew Ned wanted desperately to be involved in the investigation. Gaffney felt there was a part of Ned that wanted to dangle a carrot in front of investigators. Because of that, and the decade or more of experience Gaffney brought to the investigation, he couldn’t just allow Ned to sit at home and stew. He had to reach out to him.

IV

It was 2:30
P.M
., on January 16, a day after the search, when Gaffney showed up at Ned’s. The ruse for Gaffney to stop by was that he said he wanted to drop off a receipt for some items they had seized that might not have been on the original receipt. So Gaffney handed Ned the document, saying, “How are things, Ned?”

“Hey,” he said, “why did you guys seize my maps of Rhode Island? I need those back. How can I get them back?”

“Well,” Gaffney said, “those are regarded as evidence. Sorry, Ned, but you’ll have to get a court order at this point if you want them back.”

At one time, Ned’s parents had a vacation home in Rhode Island. Gaffney knew Ned had already said he had never been in the state. Yet, he had maps and now wanted them back.

Looking at the list, Ned appeared a bit shaken. “You took a postal receipt. Why?”

“The name ‘Carmen’ was written on the receipt,” Gaffney said.

Ned turned white. His eyes popped open. He looked down and away. (“He didn’t want to hear that name,” Gaffney commented later. “You could clearly see the wheels turning. That momentary pause, you could see that he was thinking…‘How do I explain this?’”)

Ned had a revelation to make, however. “No,” he said. “That’s not the
same
Carmen you guys are investigating.”

“No?”

Ned changed the subject. “What about my
maps
—”

“Who is this Carmen on the receipt, then?” Gaffney interrupted.

Ned wouldn’t answer. As Gaffney began to ask another question, Ned’s parents stepped in and asked what was going on.

“Listen,” Gaffney said, trying to avoid, as he later described it, negative contact among the four of them. “I have to get back to the office. If you have any problems, call me.” He handed Ned his business card.

I

Ned viewed his ten years in prison as “downtime.” He wrote this to George Recck on August 25, 1988.

Downtime.
A vacation. Some years for Ned to sit back.

Relax.

Reflect.

He sounded cocky and well-situated in his new role as an inmate—rather, a convicted, admitted killer and violent serial attacker of women. In his own words, he couldn’t get rid of those obsessive thoughts: seeing women in helpless positions, terribly vulnerable, ready for his ultimate judgment.

George Recck had a tough time adjusting to his new way of life, he wrote to Ned. It was apparent in the way Ned addressed him that Recck had complained about not being able to find a wife. All of his friends, Recck apparently said, were pairing up. But Ned told Recck not to be in such a rush to get married. He wrote he
expected that famous Recck sense of humor to return
in no time.

It was odd, a man who had killed the only girlfriend he’d ever had—a man who had issues with women—was handing out romantic advice.

Recck had asked Ned for real estate advice. Ned agreed that the condo deal Recck had signed “sounds good.” As the letter continued, Ned counseled Recck on the advantages of owning property. After a paragraph regarding the state of the American League Eastern Division of Major League Baseball, Ned asked Recck to get hold of a few old schoolmates. They would all play a role in the life Ned was designing for himself postprison, he explained.

Speaking to this relationship, ASA David Zagaja summed up Ned’s life quite cogently, making a point that the time Ned spent in prison fueled his desire to kill. That Ned wasn’t interested in rehabilitating himself or getting help. Every day he spent behind bars was an opportunity to hone his craft as a manipulator, chauvinist, sadistic serial attacker, and killer. “Does [Ned] have a continued obsession as to what he’s doing?” Zagaja asked, explaining Ned’s tenure in prison and how he spent
years
thinking about his release. “He most certainly does. Over the years, George Recck established that he wrote, for some ten or eleven years, to him, continually talked about Ted Bundy, continually talked about a possible book deal for his prior crimes, his prior experiences. Continually talked about what went right, what went wrong….”

More than that, Ned’s ability to compartmentalize his gloating while writing to Recck stood out most when one had a chance to read the letters in the context of Ned’s life. In his eleven-page sentencing letter to the judge, Ned explained how remorseful he was for his crimes. He talked about Karen Osmun being the “first time” anything like “that” had ever happened. He purported to need help. He couldn’t stop the thoughts in his mind or seeing women in such a violent manner. In a sense, Ned wanted the judge to believe he was crying out.

Four months after writing that eleven-page letter, however, Ned started writing to George Recck, explaining his desire to
pick up where [he] left off
once he was released.

II

The receipt seized at Ned’s house with the name “Carmen” written on the top turned out to be exactly what Ned had said it was: a coincidence. Besides
Carmen,
Ned had scribbled a telephone number and
room # 502
on the same receipt. When the CSP did a reverse search of the number, it turned out to be for a local YMCA in Hartford. At first, detectives thought maybe Carmen Rodriguez had stayed at the YMCA and Ned had been going to visit her. But the housing director explained that the room number was given to a woman by the name of Carmen Carrel (last name pseudonym). The phone number was for a pay phone in the lobby on the fifth floor. Carrel had been renting the room since May 2001.

The situation became even more confusing when the CSP located Carrel later that day. She was at work. “I have a [cousin] named Carmen Rodriguez,” Carrel said.

“What?”

“I just saw her a few days ago.”

“Huh?”

“I know a Carmen Rodriguez who is missing,” Carrel explained.

Upon further talking to Carrel, the CSP learned that she had seen Carmen with Ned at Kenney’s on the night she went missing. If there was any reluctance on the CSP’s part regarding Carrel’s story, she gave spot-on descriptions of both Ned and Carmen, down to the growth on the side of Ned’s neck and the long, black “Nancy Sinatra” boots Carmen wore. Like many of the girls from Kenney’s, Carrel’s name popped up on that receipt of Ned’s because she filled out an application for Ned and was paid $25.

The bank, however, refused to cash the check.

“I still have it,” Carrel said.

“Great,” the detective answered. “I’ll need that.”

“Ned gave me a ride home one night,” Carrel said.

“Anything happen?”

“He tried raping me.”

III

On January 23, 2002, Patrick Gaffney was with some of his coworkers discussing Ned’s case when he realized that during the search the CSP had ended up with documents of Ned’s that had not been part of the warrant. So he phoned Ned.

“Hey, listen. I was just reviewing what was taken at your house during the search and seizure and I realized there was an item here that should not have been taken. I was hoping I could meet you at, maybe, the Olympia Diner and give you back some items we didn’t mean to take.”

The idea was to get Ned out of the house. Break that bond of him being in his comfort zone. Maybe pull him out of his element and get him on neutral ground. Gaffney figured if he could get Ned alone, he could work on him and possibly get him to open up.

But Ned was “suspicious” of Gaffney’s suggestion right away. “I don’t know,” Ned said. “Sounds…why don’t you meet me here. I’ll make us some coffee.”

“OK.”

As Gaffney drove to Ned’s, he contemplated whether to accept Ned’s gesture of coffee.
Everybody knows where I am,
he thought.
It’s not like they don’t know where I’m going.
Ned’s offer seemed subtle and neighborly, but Gaffney knew that for Ned it was a test—an experiment in trust. Gaffney had taken quite a ribbing from his colleagues before leaving the office. “Don’t drink that coffee. He’s probably gonna spike it.” And yet, as funny as it sounded, the situation was more serious. Gaffney knew he had to accept Ned’s coffee. (“Ned’s actions were one of a person who was guilty,” Gaffney explained to me later. “He’s exhibiting guilty expressions and mannerisms. By this time, we were like, ‘OK, how do we enforce what we believe—that Ned murdered Carmen?’”)

As Gaffney pulled into Ned’s driveway, Ned came out of the house and hurriedly walked down the few stairs from the porch onto the driveway. He had two mugs of coffee in his hands.

Gaffney laughed to himself.
He’s waiting for me?

“Sergeant,” Ned said, handing Gaffney the mug, “here.” There was a car in the driveway. Ned pointed to where the cream and sugar were sitting on the hood.

“Thanks,” Gaffney said.

After some small talk, Gaffney handed Ned the documents, asking, “How are you doin’? How are your parents?”

“Good, considering.”

“Coffee’s not bad, Ned,” Gaffney said after taking a sip.

“Hey, you got those maps of Rhode Island—can I get those back?” Ned pressed.

“They’re part of the evidence, Ned. I can’t give them back. You’ll have to make a request by court order.”

Ned shook his head. “The Hartford PD never gave me a receipt for the car search.”

“You’ll have to take that up with them,” Gaffney suggested.

Gaffney and Ned stood in the driveway exchanging small talk for a few more moments. The Red Sox (of course). Weather. Family. But Ned kept dragging the conversation back to the HPD and how irritated he was at them for not giving him a receipt. For Ned, he was all about following rules, providing they worked to
his
advantage. He kept an itemized inventory in his head—checks and balances—of the investigation, ready to pounce on the system the moment he saw a violation of his rights.

“Those Rhode Island cops,” Ned said next, “they have a lack of credibility with me. They don’t know how to deal with people.”

Gaffney shrugged. The comment opened up an opportunity. “Why do you feel that way, Ned?”

“Well, when you guys came here for the search warrant on the fifteenth, they were rough. I thought I was being arrested. As soon as I realized I wasn’t being arrested, they told me they were going to bring in cadaver dogs and bulldoze my parents’ yard.”

“It’s all part of this,” Gaffney said.

“Yeah, but if they had something on me, they
would
have arrested me
that
day, instead of just threatening to dig up my lawn.”

“What would they have on you?” Gaffney wondered out loud.

Ned changed the subject. “That Stratford case!” he raged. “My palm prints are being compared.”

Since Ned had been under investigation for Carmen’s murder and his prior convictions from New Jersey had become part of the case, the Stratford Police Department (SPD) had inquired about Ned’s possible role in several missing persons cases and murders it had open. Ned’s former employer, American Frozen Foods, had an office in Stratford. It was practical to at least look into the prospect.

This, however, infuriated Ned. There was one particular case the SPD had matched up to Ned’s MO and requested a set of his palm prints from the CSP. He was worried about how those comparisons were coming along. “Look,” Ned said to Gaffney as they continued talking, “if Stratford had
anything,
if Rhode Island had
anything,
they would have arrested me.”

“I can’t speak for them, Ned. But they must have good reason for doing what they’re doing.”

“Do you know anything about those Stratford comparisons?” Ned asked.

For once, Gaffney had an answer. “They came back negative.”

Ned looked relieved. Gaffney wanted to maneuver the conversation back into the yard and the idea the CSP had that Ned could have buried evidence or more victims. As they spoke, Gaffney looked toward the backyard. There was a section of the landscape that looked disturbed, which investigators had noticed during the original search. As they talked, Gaffney could see that Ned was stewing over the thought that he could be arrested at any moment. Of course, Ned had no idea an arrest warrant was being prepared for him at that moment, not for Carmen’s murder, but for the attempted kidnapping and assault of Christina Mallon.

“Why are you so preoccupied with being arrested, Ned?” Gaffney asked. “Why you so worried about it?”

Ned wouldn’t answer. (“He’s asking these questions,” Gaffney told me later, “because he realizes that once he’s arrested, he’ll never see the light of day. He’s probing. Being evasive. Answering the questions he
wants
to. This tells me that he’s hiding something.”)

At one point, Gaffney started staring into the neighbor’s yard. Ned noticed his interest and became nervous, according to Gaffney.

“How long that house been empty?” Gaffney wondered.

Ned was looking off in the opposite direction when Gaffney posed the question. It was a subject that rattled Ned. He “suddenly turned,” Gaffney said. The mention of the neighbor’s house put him in a defensive mode.

Pale as paper, Ned asked, “How do you know
that
?”

“The physical appearance of the home,” Gaffney said. “It’s obvious it’s been neglected.”

“That woman died some time ago. The family is making arrangements, I guess.”

Gaffney immediately began contemplating the notion that Ned had possibly buried a few bodies next door, or hid evidence in the home or yard. Ned was entirely uncomfortable talking about the house. He wanted to change the subject.

Gaffney had struck a nerve.

“Ah, um, I…were you present when they searched my parents’ house?” Ned asked.

Gaffney looked at his watch. “It’s two-thirty, Ned. I need to get going.”

“Oh, OK.”

“Thanks for the coffee. I appreciate it.”

Ned stood by his door as Gaffney drove away.

Gaffney later said Ned was the type of suspect who always thought “two moves down the road.” He was “squirrelly, introverted. I understood this. I wanted to put myself in a position where, if he decided, ‘OK, if there comes a time when I have to tell somebody something, I want to be comfortable telling this guy.’”