I'll Be Watching You (38 page)

I

Donald O’Brien began his cross-examination of Mark Pascual with a bit of sarcasm, asking Pascual the most obvious question, getting the witness to admit that he faced capital felony murder charges, which could result in a death sentence. Then O’Brien made the assumption that the only reason Pascual had come forward to begin with was to save his own life. “And you went to the police and told them the information about what my client supposedly told you, correct?”

“Correct.”

“So you
knew
that if you did that, you could work yourself a deal where you wouldn’t get a lethal injection—”

“Correct.”

“So you’re testifying to save your own life, correct?”

“Yeah, I’m not denying that at all.”

“Uh-huh,” O’Brien said smartly. Then, with a shudder of cynicism, “You’d admit to the
Kennedy
assassination, too, to save your own life, wouldn’t you?”

Zagaja stood: “Objection. Argumentative.”

“Overruled.”

O’Brien picked up where he left off, asking Pascual, “Right?”

“No.”

“No?” A pause. Then more scorn and ridicule: “You’d say that your
brother
killed somebody in order to avoid the death penalty, wouldn’t you?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Objection,” Zagaja said. “I’d ask counsel not to respond to the witness’s responses.”

“All right. You know that’s improper.”

“I’m sorry,” O’Brien apologized, rolling his eyes.

And it was this type of back-and-forth, cross-fire-like exchange that took place between O’Brien and Pascual throughout the remainder of the afternoon: O’Brien questioned Pascual on everything he had told the police, and Pascual stuck to his story. O’Brien tried confusing Pascual, but Pascual slowed the testimony down, said he didn’t understand, and answered all of O’Brien’s questions without missing a beat.

Ned kept leaning over and, with his finger, motioning for O’Brien to come to him, whispering in his ear. But O’Brien didn’t have much to work with—he was left with what Ned had told him. He went through Pascual’s statement to the police, line by line, and asked him to repeat what he had already testified to on direct. In some instances, he’d catch Pascual on minor things—things that, in the grand scheme of how much of an impact Pascual’s testimony was going to have on Ned, added up to absolutely nothing.

Pea splitting and bean counting. The jury looked uncomfortable and restless.

“Did he tell you what the lighting conditions were in that open field?” O’Brien asked at one point.

“It was dark.”

“It was
dark
?” (Attorneys love to repeat answers.)

“Yeah.”

“This was, what, one o’clock in the morning, two o’clock in the morning?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it’s the back side of the Berlin Turnpike—of the Berlin Fairgrounds, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Did he have a flashlight?”

“A lantern, he said.”

“He had a lantern? Was it a flashlight or a lantern? Do you know?”

“He said a
lantern.
” (You could hear the frustration in Pascual’s voice.)

“But did you tell the police it was a flashlight
or
a lantern?”

“I believe I said it was a lantern.”

“If you can take a look at your statement and see if it refreshes your recollection.”

“Yeah, it says ‘flashlight’ or a ‘
lantern.
’” (Zagaja shook his head.)

“And that’s what you signed, correct?”

“Correct.”

The day was long and it was clear Pascual wasn’t budging. As early evening approached, O’Brien asked, “Mr. Snelgrove…sorry, it’s been a long day. I mean, Mr. Pascual, you never—in all your discussions with the police, state’s attorney—you never mentioned to them that Mr. Snelgrove had mentioned Ted Bundy, did you?”

“No.”

“He didn’t?”

“No.”

“Nothing further.”

I

Inside the waiting area of MacDougall-Walker Correctional, the prison that I interviewed Mark Pascual in, I sat and listened as several women argued over whose man was cleaner—yes, cleaner. “My man takes a shower right before every visit with me,” said one woman, a heavyset Spanish lady, her head bobbing and weaving, forefinger waving like a wiper blade. “He’s been doin’ it for twelve years.”

Twelve years,
I thought. This poor woman, like a half-dozen others there beside her, had been faithfully coming to this godforsaken smelly place to visit “her man.”

A dozen years. Three presidential terms. A cycle of schooling.

The visiting room was quite small. Quite vanilla. And rather claustrophobic. Pascual walked in first, a guard said something to him, and then they buzzed me from the waiting area into the visiting area, a large sliding metal door separating the two rooms. This occurred after making me wait, standing by the door, until the obvious personal conversation the two guards were having was over.

Pascual is a short, stocky man. He has long reddish hair flowing halfway down his back, pulled and tied tightly into what looks like a horse’s tail. As I approached him, he stared at me as if I have some sort of “get out of jail free” card for him, which, being someone who can connect him with the outside world, I guess I do.

We talked about his case. He expressed his sorrow for the man he had paid two other men to kill. He wished like heck he could do it all over. Take it back. “I’d just walk away from that woman,” he said, shaking his head in disgust at himself.

Love triangles. They never end in harmony.

“Tell me about Ned,” I said about twenty minutes into our conversation.

Pascual told me to keep my voice down. “The guards,” he said, cupping his hands around his mouth, pointing with his thumb, “they hear everything.”

He told me the story of how he and Ned met. “We got split up,” Pascual noted, “but then after I spoke to the cops, they put us back together again.” And this was when Pascual began to work on getting Ned to confess. They played chess. “Ned was a terrible chess player.” They watched television and hung around together, watching each other’s back. “Ned was scared. He’d gotten pummeled several times by friends and cousins of Carmen’s who had ended up in the same jail. Everyone wanted a piece of Ned once they found out how [sick] he was.” As Pascual talked, I studied his body language and facial expressions. My instinct told me he was speaking the truth as he knew it. He said Ned had told him about two additional homicides, on top of murdering Carmen. One was a prostitute Pascual claimed Ned said he had picked up off the streets of Hartford one month after he was released from prison, in 1999. “He did one right away”—Pascual was certain—“he had to. He told me that he couldn’t help himself. He punched this woman so hard that he thought he broke her jaw. Then he stripped off her top and bra, posed her, and did his thing.”

“His
thing
?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Pascual said, motioning a masturbation technique with his hand.

The next one, Pascual said, wasn’t until a year later. “Ned said he would always wait a year between them. Something about the planning. He wanted to plan the perfect murder, right down to every detail. It was part of what got him off on it all.”

II

“I wouldn’t put it past Ned,” one inside source told me, “to plant these homicides in Pascual’s mind to try to set up an alibi for himself later on. Remember, this stuff with Pascual, it all takes place pretrial, so Ned is perhaps working on Pascual to set up his own defense, knowing that Pascual will later testify.” The idea was that Ned planted enough details about several crimes in Pascual’s head, in addition to those details about Carmen’s murder, for the sake of confusing Pascual so Ned could turn around during his trial and prove that Pascual was a liar. “Ned was
that
smart. And it fits with his wanting to play a game with the law enforcement and the system.”

I checked into both of the murders Pascual told me about. He gave names. Dates. Locations. Specific details. All of which matched up with these crimes—crimes, I might add, that were not high-profile enough to garner extensive news coverage. The details Pascual gave me, in other words, matched the details of the crimes, but were not reported in the press in a manner that Pascual could have
studied,
as Ned would argue.

III

Pascual has no pedigree of crime or violence. Before he asked two guys to murder a rival, he had never been arrested for anything serious. It’s easy to see how Ned and Pascual formed this friendship, if we can call it such. Pascual has this sort of demeanor that seems honest and forthright. Yet, from Ned’s point of view, it’s also easy to see how he believed he could manipulate Pascual. With me, Pascual was sincere. I believed most of what he had told me. Our conversations continued, as did our letters. Pascual never asked me for anything.

I

Over the course of the next week, Zagaja’s case against Ned cruised along on autopilot: witnesses came in, witnesses walked out, each hammering one more nail into Ned’s coffin. The focus of the trial went from Ned’s admission to Mark Pascual to the mileage Ned had logged. Zagaja brought in his experts and explained how Ned had tried to fudge his record keeping to incorporate enough mileage into his accounting in order to make up for those additional miles he had traveled to Rhode Island to dump Carmen’s body. One after the other, the experts explained to the jury in layman’s terms how Ned had cooked his own books to try and hide the fact that he traveled an additional 140 miles. Michael O’Shaughnessy, who worked for NETS, which provided analytical services (primarily on vehicles) to a number of different agencies, including police, was asked if a request was made of his firm “to focus in the area of September 21 through September 25, 2001” and match those dates against the records Ned had kept. “On that particular instance, I took the actual reported fuel (from Ned and his receipts) and reported mileage driven and then calculated out,” he testified, “basically, how much fuel had to be replaced after those miles were driven. In other words, I got the mileage, again, similar to what I had done on this one. I did run into a problem on this, however.”

O’Shaughnessy hadn’t run into a problem with the other months Ned had kept records for. It was just this
one
particular period in which Carmen had happened to disappear.

What a coincidence.

“There were two instances where there was more fuel purchased than would appear to fit in the tank.” Zagaja encouraged him to explain. “Well, I took the miles driven and then compared the fuel that was put in the tank after those miles were driven and found that the actual fuel that’s gone into the tank was higher than what the mileage would indicate would have been used based on the overall average of this particular vehicle.”

Ned was caught red-handed—by his own mistake—with information
he
had volunteered and provided. “And you had two overall averages to use in your calculations?”

“Both of them were very, very close, one was twenty-nine, and on the last set of calculations we got, it was in the very low thirties.”

“And, specifically, can you draw our attention to what dates you considered and what calculations you used in coming to those conclusions?”

“On the paper that we had on September twenty-first there was ten gallons—well, 10.006 gallons purchased. Then, on September twenty-third, there was 9.131 gallons purchased.”

“In between those two purchases, how much mileage was reported to have been driven?”

“We received, after adding it up, we got about one hundred and twenty-six miles.”

“And based on your calculations with the determined average mileage to be somewhere between twenty-nine and the low thirties miles per gallon and the hundred and twenty-six miles driven, how many gallons of gas would be used up in that distance?”

“I used twenty-nine flat. I used a lower number, actually. I used below the lower number we received. And there was approximately four gallons more put into the tank than the actual mileage of this vehicle.”

“So four gallons—”

“Excess.”

“—of gas excess?”

“More than what the tank would have [been able to hold].” (It all came back to that day in the hospital when Ned—after trying to commit suicide—offered his mileage records to Hartford PD detective Luisa St. Pierre. Ned had rung this mileage bell.
Why
? St. Pierre had asked herself as she left the hospital. Because Ned thought he had it all covered. And here it was—in black and white—coming back to sink him. He had calculated wrong. He had fudged his mileage well enough, but he had forgotten to adjust the fuel.)

II

By January 20, Ned and O’Brien were bringing in their own witnesses. Many were former cell mates of Ned’s there to explain how Ned never said much about his personal life. He was quiet. Reserved. He never talked about his crimes. Ever. No one understood why he had chosen to open up to Mark Pascual. It was so unlike Ned.

The jury, sitting, listening, had to see that Ned was putting all of his chances for acquittal in Mark Pascual’s hands.
If we could just prove Pascual to be a liar…

Not true. Many of the jurors later said that they had tossed out Pascual’s testimony right away. They didn’t trust him.

Then again, they didn’t need him.

O’Brien called a few detectives in to try and prove that they had made things up about Ned in their reports. But it didn’t work.

Then he called Mark Pascual back to try to prove he was a liar. But again, it didn’t work.

As the days ticked by, it appeared that Ned had dug himself a hole. He and O’Brien keyed on certain issues that made little sense to anyone sitting in the courtroom, a room that was closing in on everyone as the trial dragged on into its third week.

But then, when things looked grim for Ned, a surprise—a witness with a confession: he knew who had murdered Carmen.

And it wasn’t Ned.