I'll Be Watching You (31 page)

I

He was nervous. Rubbing his hands together as if it were a cold winter’s day and he was standing by a fire. But it was June. June 1982. Commencement day. Looking around. Fixing his hair. Checking his gown. Ned wore a black robe, white shirt, tartan tie, gray slacks. He was a good-looking kid, with the look of an innocent child with a business degree setting out into a world full of opportunity.

What was going on in his head, however, wasn’t how nice the weather was for his graduation day. Or, if those wrinkles in his gown would show up in photographs? Instead, this kid, the one with the golden smile, one of the chosen officers of Alpha Zeta, the honors/service fraternity at Rutgers, the same kid who showed so much promise, was struggling with thoughts of violence against the women around him. He fought—in his own words—just about every day with the tug-of-war between acting out on those thoughts and controlling himself, which, for the most part, he had seemed to do.

Indeed, the Ned Snelgrove of 1982—arguably not yet a killer:
arguably
because no one knows for sure if he had killed
before
Karen Osmun—was quite a different person from the man sitting in jail preparing his case twenty-something years later. Ned would soon stand in front of Hartford superior court judge Carmen Espinosa, a woman he would come to loathe more than perhaps anyone else in the justice system, a woman who would face Ned and say, quite sternly, “Sometimes people are just bad, beyond redemption, and you are one of them.”

David Zagaja hoped Mark Pascual could put the final touch on a conviction. Detective Mellekas and Jim Rovella were back at MacDougall-Walker Correctional wondering if Pascual was the real deal as he continued to tell what was turning out to be one heck of a story. Essentially, it was a narrative, as hard as it was to believe, of what actually happened to Carmen Rodriguez on the night she was murdered. It was a story, Pascual insisted, straight from the horse’s mouth.

II

“Ned said he covered up what he did real well,” Pascual told Mellekas and Rovella. According to Pascual, it was Ned who called Carmen “Carmie,” that’s why Pascual used the same name.

“What’d he say about how he did it?” Mellekas wanted to know.

“He talked generally about the crime, telling us he was in the bar with her dancing and buying her drinks, saying, ‘She was a Puerto Rican girl in her early thirties. I was
really
attracted to her.’” As they partied, Pascual said, Ned asked Carmen to leave.

“Can I get a ride?” Carmen asked. (Odd that she’d ask for a ride—she lived but a few blocks away.)

If you believe Pascual, “Will you have breakfast with me?” Ned supposedly asked Carmen next, before suggesting a diner near his house.

“Sure,” Carmen said.

So they left.

“After breakfast,” Ned told Pascual, “we went for a ride to get to know each other.” Ned drove to an area of his hometown where he used to hang out. The Berlin Fairgrounds. Wooded. Secluded. Dark.

Ned found a spot and pulled over. He “made a move on” Carmen, Pascual said.

After Ned made the sexual advance, Carmen opened the door and got out.

Scared. She stumbled and ran. Fast as she could.

Ned rolled his eyes. That burning he talked about in his letters began: that sexual compulsion, that need to render a woman unconscious and then strip her top off in a fit of sexual confusion and frustration. It was a powerful desire to play with her breasts and then sexually stimulate himself, and if she came to, take out a knife and start poking her with it.

As Carmen ran, it was all too much for Ned. That “feeling” took control of him as he opened his door and started running after Carmen through the woods.

And so the chase was on. Carmen. Drunk. Out of breath. Huffing and puffing. Falling. Slowing down…

Ned. On top of his game.

Within a moment, he leapt. Like a cat. Tackled Carmen in the brush. “Knocked her down,” Pascual said.

Ned was in his element now. A hunter. That person Mary Ellen Renard had described when Ned walked into the bathroom a nice young man and came out Mr. Hyde was back. He was much more powerful than Carmen, who was running for her life, as though they were in some sort of summer Hollywood slasher flick, and so he took her by the neck and, without speaking a word, squeezed.

Tighter.

Harder.

Yes. That feeling. Here it comes. It was part of the high.

“Her body went limp,” Pascual said Ned told him. Ned had that look in his eye while explaining it. “That gleam,” Pascual told me. “That sense of pride that he was a murderer.”

“‘I strangled her until her body went limp and she passed out,’” Pascual recalled, quoting Ned.

Then Ned walked back to his car. Carmen was on the ground. Ned had a tarp and a bag, he admitted, in his trunk.

Tools of the trade.

He took the tarp out first. The bag—that was where he kept his goodies: rope, scissors, duct tape, flashlight (or lantern, Pascual couldn’t recall which, exactly), staple gun, and “other things.” And then, after taking his murder instruments out of his trunk, Ned went back and picked Carmen up and carried her to the car, before spreading the tarp out on the backseat. Placing her on the tarp, Carmen “came to and started to fight back.”

Wild. Swinging. Screaming. She really didn’t know what was going on.

At some point, Ned said, Carmen bit him on the right arm. “[I] thought the police may find something of [me] on her teeth,” he explained to Pascual.

Then…he “finished her off.” According to Pascual, Ned said he took the scissors and stabbed Carmen until she stopped moving.

Stopped breathing.

But for Ned, the thrill—the best part of it all, perhaps—wasn’t over. As Carmen lay on the backseat of his car on top of a tarp, Ned pulled off her “top shirt and posed her,” Pascual explained. After posing Carmen, as he had reportedly done with Karen Osmun and Mary Ellen Renard, Ned then began to, as Pascual told it, “get off, meaning sexually,” by masturbating.

When he was
done,
Ned told Pascual, he “taped her and stapled her and wrapped her in garbage bags.”

III

“What’d you do with the body?” Pascual asked Ned after he was finished explaining how he murdered Carmen.

“I got rid of it,” Ned said.

The way Pascual told it, Ned chose Rhode Island because he had customers in Jewett City, Plainfield, and Thompson, Connecticut, towns along the Rhode Island border, near Hopkinton. Ned knew the terrain. He knew the land was spread out and woodsy. He knew that at night you were lucky if you found a raccoon hanging around out in the open.

“He would drive in these areas,” Pascual told Mellekas and Rovella, “while he was waiting for the customers to get home from work or whatever. Ned said the farther away from Berlin that the body was, the better off he would be about not being a suspect,” which was something Ned had bragged about learning from Ted Bundy.

What about evidence? The tarp? The scissors?

“Ned said he drove to Jewett City to a McDonald’s,” Pascual added, “and dumped the tarp and bag of stuff in a Dumpster. Ned was confident he covered his tracks.”

I

In jail, Ned was what Pascual called a “pack rat.” He saved everything. Condiments. Newspapers. Request slips. Empty bags. Books. Letters. Envelopes.

A real hoarder.

“No one liked him,” Pascual told me during one of our many prison interviews. “I was his only friend. He’d get beat up all the time. My mother sent him money because no one else would. He felt he could trust me. He told me everything. He had this gloss over his eyes, a different look altogether, when telling me about the women—several women—he killed. He was certain the cops would never catch him. He got off on retelling me the stories, especially when he spoke about posing their bodies.”

Ned would kill a woman, Pascual explained, rip her shirt open, tear off her bra, expose her breasts, and just stop and take it all in. “Looking at the girls all laid out like that, dead and posed,” Pascual said, “Ned told me, ‘That is the
perfect
woman.’” Ned’s idea of the perfect female was a dead woman posed in a compromising position: pants and panties on, no shirt or bra, her large breasts fully exposed. “While he was strangling them or stabbing them,” Pascual noted, “looking into their eyes, he told me that the erection he got from this was more powerful than anything he could ever explain. After he posed them, he [gratified] himself sexually, but turned away from the body so he wouldn’t leave his DNA at the scene.”

II

At home, Ned was the same pack rat. Ropes. Toys. Maps. Notes. Gas receipts. Oil change receipts. Logbooks of his mileage. In saving all of these items—which was perhaps a symptom of a more clinical obsessive-compulsive condition his mother had discovered in his teens—Ned had, essentially, tied his own judicial noose: because all of it (the maps and mileage, especially, those same items Ned had blasted and laughed at Bundy for keeping) was going to come back and hang Ned during his murder trial.

III

A day or so after Ned told his story to Mark Pascual, Pascual and the other inmate were not so sure they could believe him. It seemed far-fetched. Like maybe Ned was using them to plant a seed for trial. The story was too grandiose and Hollywood-like. Ned was bragging. Maybe he was trying to expand on his tough-guy image. He was going to be in jail a long time. Even if he won an acquittal, there was no telling when his trial would start. A few stories of how sick he was, dropped here and there, spread around the prison, would send a message to inmates looking to hassle Ned.

This guy’s a wack job. Stay away from him.

Inmates lied—even to one another. Pascual knew this. Ned knew this. In many ways, prison is a fictional world. You can be whatever you want to be.

Feeling that maybe Ned had told them stories, the other inmate contacted his girlfriend and asked her to do some investigating based on the facts Ned had told them. “Check the Internet,” the convict suggested.

About a week later, Pascual said, that friend showed up at his cell. “Hey, check it out.” His girlfriend had sent him a long article detailing Ned’s history and charges.

“What is it?”

They both sat and read.

“This guy’s for real,” the convict told Pascual.

Just then, Ned came by the cell. “What’s going on? Let me see that.”

Pascual handed him the article.

Ned was quiet. He read. Flipping through the pages. Then he abruptly turned and walked away with the article.

A few days later, Ned returned the article to Pascual, but some pages were missing. So the guy asked his girlfriend to send another one.

Matching up the two copies, Pascual was confused. Ned had taken out anything having to do with his crimes in New Jersey. It seemed strange. As if he didn’t want anyone to know about his past.

IV

Pascual was moved a few weeks later to another “pod,” a unit or cell block in the same prison. That same day, Ned was moved to the same pod. (“He was very suspicious,” Pascual explained, “that we were both moved at the same time to the same pod.”)

A month later, Ned and Pascual, living in separate cells, went up to one of the corrections officers. “You think we can room together?” Pascual asked.

Sometime after that, they were put into the same cell. Not for a few days, or a month, but 159 days. It was here, during this time, that Pascual began to learn more about Ned and his crimes. And one of the first things Pascual noticed about his new roommate was Ned’s paranoia. Ned was the type to worry about
everything.
He wondered if investigators were listening to his every word, reading his mail, and watching him. (In fact, Ned was so paranoid that the prison was opening and reading his mail, when I started to receive letters from Ned in early 2007, he always sent me a subsequent letter in tandem a few days later, aside from his actual response to my particular questions, asking me to describe the way in which his letters had arrived in my mailbox. “Did you notice any tape on the back of the letter?” was a question Ned routinely asked me. In one instance, he even went so far as to send me a one-page letter with three questions and check boxes that he had drawn next to each question. Moreover, in all of his letters, Ned would put a staple in the corner that went through the envelope and his letter. Thus, if a prison official had opened his letter to read it, he or she would have to tear the letter.)

“A month after [Carmen went missing],” Ned said to Pascual one day, sitting in their new cell, “the police came to speak with me. They took my car twice.”

This blew Ned’s mind—the cops impounding his car. He believed there was a conspiracy, some sort of sneaky little con fleshed out by the cops to track his every move. “They attached a GPS [device] to [my] car to track wherever I drove,” Ned explained to Pascual.

“Huh?” Pascual couldn’t believe it. The story sounded so full of paranoia. Drama. So James Bond–like. Why go to such trouble when the state police could have just put a tail on the guy? He wasn’t
that
important.

“That second time they took the car,” Ned explained, “the police took the GPS off.”

I

The man responsible for putting Assistant State’s Attorney David Zagaja’s case against Ned in a neat little package and readying it for trial was Jim Rovella, a former Hartford cop with over twenty-five years of investigative experience. A big, hulking man, with white hair and a comforting smile, Rovella was introduced to the missing persons case of Carmen Rodriguez back in May 2003. Carmen’s case had been packaged inside a file of other “cold” cases that his new boss at the Cold Case Unit (CCU) of the office of the chief state’s attorney wanted him to take a look at.

Rovella’s quarter-century law enforcement career dated back to when he started as a patrol officer in Hartford in 1981, a time when there were about thirty-five murders per year in Hartford. When he was transferred to robbery and homicide in 1987, with the crack explosion and gang violence reaching Hartford’s North End, the murder rate doubled. It was here that Rovella’s people skills were utilized as he seemingly went from one homicide crime scene to the next: an endless disharmony of murder, sexual assaults, rapes, and violent crimes. (“You get a lot of experience in Hartford,” Rovella said later.)

In 2002, Rovella retired from the Hartford PD after spending two decades behind the badge, but found himself unable to stay away from the addictive pull of investigating crimes and solving cases. “So I went to work for the state’s attorney office.”

Part of the work Rovella does for the Cold Case Unit of the state’s attorney revolves around sitting and studying files for months. He has the advantage to take all of the police reports and witness statements, along with the evidence, sit down without the constraints of time, and go through the case, piece by piece. He may spend six months, a year, two years. Whatever it takes. It’s important to Rovella to try to eliminate a suspect. Take him out of the equation—which stood out to him right away as he started to study Ned in the realm of Carmen’s disappearance. “I kept trying to
exclude
Snelgrove from the case, but he kept popping up back in,” Rovella said. “The fact that he left the bar with Carmen. That he was a regular at the bar and he
stopped
going once Carmen disappeared, even before HPD started asking questions. These were all important factors to me.”

Then there was the gas receipts and the mileage that Rovella’s former colleague Luisa St. Pierre had brought into the case. To Rovella, it all added up to one answer.

II

Ned’s trial was the most high-profile court case the city of Hartford had seen in years. Not that murder was an uncommon affair in the city. But not for several years had a
potential
serial killer been brought before a Hartford judge. The Rodriguez family was getting most of the press as they stood vigil outside court every morning before proceedings began. For the most part, it was Luz, Sonia, and Kathy Perez leading the charge, with other family members joining them periodically. This first day of the actual trial, however, brought out nearly twenty members of the family.

All united.

All thumping their feet for justice.

For Carmen.

For Karen.

For Mary Ellen.

III

On January 4, 2005, a mildly cold Tuesday morning, Judge Carmen Espinosa addressed the jury. Ned sat wearing a sweater and slacks. He had decided not to wear his large-rimmed “Buddy Holly” glasses. He smirked ever so slightly, as if to say the entire process had been a witch hunt—which would become Ned’s mantra throughout the trial.

Pinning the murder of Carmen Rodriguez on him, Ned had convinced himself, was a reaction to his prior convictions in New Jersey. It was convenient. Once a con, always a con.

Regarding his glasses, “He didn’t wear them,” one investigator who was in the courtroom every day later told me, “because he believed they made him look like the person he was: a vicious serial killer.”

Ned tried pulling off the classic “guy next door” look: sweater and slacks, short hair, naïve manner, congenial demeanor. But as the trial commenced, Ned couldn’t hide from himself and started right away “stage whispering,” one courtroom observer told me. Ned whispered things to his lawyer loud enough so the jury could hear him. “He thought he was smart,” Jim Rovella added. “But in the end he disappointed me.”

IV

Judge Carmen Espinosa, the first Hispanic sworn in as a superior court judge in the state of Connecticut, a judge many who worked in her courtroom every day later said was as fair as any judge in the state, would end up being the target of Ned’s eventual anger and outbursts. Espinosa was a rather good-looking, middle-aged Hispanic woman. She had thick black hair, which she kept cut just above her neckline. Her dark eyebrows were cast against her slightly olive complexion. Her smile was radiant and contagious. Even comforting, some might say.

Her tenure on the superior court bench started in 1992. According to her bio, Espinosa was born in Puerto Rico and moved with her family to New Britain, a suburb of Hartford, at the age of three. After attending public schools in New Britain, she graduated from Central Connecticut State University in 1971, with majors in Spanish and secondary education. Continuing her studies, Espinosa received a Master of Arts degree in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and her law degree from George Washington University. What most don’t know about the judge is that she was once a special agent for the FBI. She had a brief run as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, beginning in 1980, and stayed on as a federal prosecutor until she was appointed a superior court judge. If there was one judge in the county who could preside over a trial that was sure to have its share of controversial moments, there was no better than Judge Espinosa.

“She’s almost too fair,” one man who knows her well told me later.

V

For the Rodriguez family, talking about Carmen, even years later, was difficult. Teary-eyed and choked up, many of Carmen’s relatives couldn’t handle sitting and sharing memories. But Luz Rodriguez, who, admittedly, had a difficult time with her sister’s death, took a step forward, along with Sonia, and seemed to be the spokeswoman for the family as Ned’s trial—and the ensuing media circus—got under way. (“It was hard,” Luz recalled, “don’t get me wrong, but we
had
to do it.”)

Carmen needed a voice. The family knew Ned was going to shoulder the blame on Carmen. Talk as though she didn’t matter. Make all sorts of excuses for her leaving the bar with him. So the family had to stick together in support of protecting her memory.

And, like they had during every hearing over the past few years, members of the Rodriguez family wore T-shirts and badges with Carmen’s photograph and sat together in back of David Zagaja’s table, where Rovella, whose job it was to make sure each witness was ready to testify, also sat.

Ned’s money had run out. Either that, or his mother and father weren’t about to drain what little savings they had left to pay for yet another defense, as they had in New Jersey twenty years prior. Donald O’Brien was a court-appointed special public defender. Ned was lucky to have him. Although Ned would undoubtedly be driving the bus and telling O’Brien what to do, O’Brien—who refused to talk to me—was a competent and well-prepared public defense attorney. He was in the courtroom every week, said one law enforcement official, defending some of the state’s most undesirables. O’Brien knew the ins and outs of murder trials.