Lethal Guardian (18 page)

“You’re harassing her!” Buzz yelled. Then, sometime later, “If I ever see you on Old Stagecoach Road, I will run you off the road with my tow truck. I’m Rebecca’s father! I will tell
you
what the rules are. If you continue to give me problems, so help me God, I will disappear with Kim and Rebecca. I’m adopting Rebecca shortly, anyway.”

At that point, Buzz said, “The psychologist says that you are the ones causing Rebecca problems!”

It didn’t take long after Buzz spoke his peace to pack Kim and Rebecca up and leave McDonald’s. The Carpenters were left with yet one more reason to continue with their fight. In their view, Buzz had snapped. He was living up to everything they had said he was.

Cynthia’s testimony of the events leading up to that showdown at McDonald’s ended by stating that every time Buzz called the Carpenters and said he would like to “put a resolution to the problems” he “immediately began by denying” Cynthia access to Kim.

The last time they had spoken, Buzz said, “I am Rebecca’s father. I control the situation. If you
ever
want to see Kim or Rebecca again, you will cooperate with me; or I will disappear with them.”

It was clear that Buzz was finished with any type of negotiation. He had put up with the Carpenters’ rules long enough. He and Kim were married now. Kim was expecting their first child. He was finished playing their games.

With that, Kim’s court-appointed lawyers filed a restraining order, urging the court to stop the Carpenters from “harassing, assaulting, or molesting the defendant until further order of the court.”

A hearing had been scheduled for April 6, 1993. Several new state counselors and attorneys had since become involved in what now appeared to be a situation that was turning uglier with each passing day. Buzz, Kim and the Carpenters just couldn’t come to any sort of agreement on their own. There needed to be mediation.

Linda Yuhas, a family relations counselor, had recently become involved and began looking into the case more closely. She referred the matter of visitation to the court, stipulating the need for a hearing to resolve it.

During court proceedings, Rebecca sat with Buzz and Kim while the Carpenters sat on the other side of the room. Whenever Kim would look at Beth Ann or her parents, she would “shake,” Dee later recalled.

By the end of the day, the judge made a decision. The Carpenters would be allowed unsupervised visitation with Rebecca, but they were ordered not to engage in any discussion with the child about Kim or Buzz. The court, the judge warned, would take action if they did.

Rebecca would get to see the Carpenters once a week, at the discretion of Kim, and one weekend per month. In a sense, they were right back to where they had started in October 1992.

Beth Ann called Tricia Baker on April 5, 1993, and asked her if she and her fiancé, John Gaul, would like to join her and Joseph Jebran at the Treehouse Comedy Club the following weekend for dinner and drinks. “It’s my birthday,” Baker answered, beaming. “We’d love to.”

Tricia and Beth Ann had been communicating by telephone for months now, but this was the first time they had actually made plans to go out socially. Whenever there was breaking news with Rebecca or the court, Beth Ann would phone Tricia so the two could chat.

On Saturday, April 10, John and Tricia drove to Ledyard and met Beth Ann and Joseph Jebran at the Carpenters’ home.

When they walked in, they sat down in the living room and began telling Dick, Cynthia, Beth Ann and Joseph how excited they were to be going out “on the town.” But, like every other time the two families had gotten together and talked, the conversation quickly turned to Rebecca.

“It’s so horrible,” Beth Ann said at one point, “that Rebecca is in this situation.”

“Sounds terrible,” Tricia said.

“He’s violent,” Beth Ann said. “He’s a stripper! He’s on lithium!”

“My tires were popped on my truck,” Dick Carpenter added at one point. “I know Buzz did it.”

When the conversation shifted to Buzz’s desire to adopt Rebecca, Beth Ann became angry and loud.

“It’s
not
going to happen,” she insisted.

It was obvious to John and Tricia that the source of the Carpenters’ problems was Buzz. Kim’s name barely came up in conversation.

As Beth Ann and Cynthia continued to talk about Rebecca and the abuse they thought Buzz was responsible for, John and Tricia sat and listened, shaking their heads in disbelief.

How could someone do those things to a child?

During the days and weeks following the dinner, Beth Ann and Tricia became as close as two friends could possibly become. They began talking on the phone, Tricia later said, every day, and hung out together at night. They went shopping. Tricia’s mother and father owned a beachfront home in Waterford. When the weather turned warmer, Beth Ann would stop by and lie out on the beach with Tricia. There were times when Tricia would go down to Beth Ann’s office in New London and just sit and talk.

“Sometimes once, twice a week—sometimes it seemed like I was there almost every day,” Tricia recalled.

When it came time for Beth Ann to go in front of the Washington, DC, bar to get sworn in as an attorney, Beth Ann invited Tricia.

The scope of their conversations was always geared toward Rebecca, the custody fight and how Buzz was this vicious abuser who needed to be stopped.

It was a campaign: a well-thought-out dialogue scripted around how awful a person Buzz was.

Tricia, a good person at heart, fell for it all. She felt sorry for Rebecca, Beth Ann and the family. If there was anything she and John could do to help, Tricia would say, she would discuss it with John and do what she could.

It wasn’t obvious to Tricia right away, but the friendship was based on only what Beth Ann could get out of her and John, nothing more. It had little to do with Beth Ann’s liking Tricia as a person. In fact, they were two totally different people, with very little in common. Beth Ann was a professional, a lawyer who was just beginning her career; Tricia worked at a hospital, her fiancé a blue-collar guy. Many people said later the only reason Beth Ann had befriended Tricia to begin with was to further the Carpenters’ goal of gaining custody of Rebecca.

With the blessing of her fiancé, Tricia Baker took control of the situation almost immediately after Beth Ann had baited her. After discussing things with John, the couple decided first to fight for visitation and, later, custody. Based on what Cynthia and Beth Ann had hammered into Tricia and John over a two-month period, beginning on Tricia’s birthday in April, Tricia and John concluded they couldn’t sit by and let Buzz abuse Rebecca without doing anything about it.

So she and John began meeting with the Carpenters at their Ledyard home so they could begin the process of getting to know Rebecca and begin devising a plan to gain custody.

Regarding the visits at the Carpenter house with Rebecca, Cynthia and Beth Ann told Tricia they didn’t want her or John at the house if Kim was dropping off Rebecca.

“Why?” Tricia asked.

“Because it wouldn’t look good,” Beth Ann said.

Cynthia and Beth Ann wanted to keep John and Tricia—and what they were about to do—a secret for as long as they could.

The first thing Beth Ann did, once she knew John and Tricia were on board, was find them a good family lawyer. Miriam Gardner-Frum, who had a reputation around town as a tough probate-type lawyer, had an office just down the block from Clein’s.

“She’s perfect,” Beth Ann told Tricia one morning. “You guys will like her.”

Then, when Tricia and John indicated that they were financially strapped and couldn’t really afford a lawyer, Beth Ann told them not to worry about it. She and her parents would come up with whatever funds they needed to retain Gardner-Frum.

Soon after that, the four of them—John, Tricia, Beth Ann and Cynthia—began meeting regularly to discuss a plan of attack.

During one visit, the entire Carpenter family, including son Richard, told John and Tricia repeatedly that it would be in the “best interest” of Rebecca if they were “in her life.” They made it clear that because John was the biological father, he had rights that no one else had. He needed to exercise those rights, if not for himself, then for Rebecca.

Tricia and John didn’t need a sales pitch at this point. They were convinced. The Carpenters, however, continued accusing Buzz of abusing Rebecca.

That same night, Beth Ann and Cynthia told Tricia and John they would “help with child support [payments] and everything if they would just get her,” meaning, of course, Rebecca.

A short time later, Beth Ann called Tricia and told her that everything was all set.

“What do you mean?” Tricia asked.

“You can come to my office and pick up a check to give to Miriam Gardner-Frum.”

A day later, Tricia showed up and picked up two checks for $750 to give to Gardner-Frum. What was odd, however, was that they were cashier’s checks, drawn from a local bank, not from Beth Ann’s personal account.

“What’s with the bank checks?” Tricia asked.

“The money,” Beth Ann explained, “has to come from you, not me. I’m a lawyer. It would be a ‘conflict of interest’ because we already have a case pending.”

When Tricia heard Beth Ann mention conflict of interest, she thought,
Oh, what the hell…she’s an attorney. She should know better than me what to do.

With a bank check, Beth Ann further explained, Tricia could go to the bank it was drawn on, cash it, then either give Gardner-Frum the cash or deposit it into her own account and write a check herself.

At a second meeting, Beth Ann handed Tricia a file as thick as a paperback novel.

“What’s this?”

“Everything you’ll need!”

It was all there: DCYS reports, hospital records, court records, reports, personal correspondence between the Carpenters and Clintons and, oddly enough, private investigation reports written by a local private investigator the Carpenters had hired some time ago.

Indeed, a local Thomas Magnum–type detective had been looking into Buzz’s life now for a few months, trying to get the dish on “old Buzzy Boy.”

To makes things even easier for Tricia and John, Dick offered John a job in his landscaping company, and John gladly accepted.

When Trish and John sat down and began to hash out what to do first, it took them all of about five minutes to come to the conclusion that Rebecca needed to be taken away from Buzz and Kim—at any cost. Based on what the Carpenters had been saying, Buzz and Kim were the worst parents a child could have.

“The Carpenters would take photos of Rebecca when she would come over for a visit,” Tricia recalled. They weren’t “Kodak moment” photos. Rebecca wasn’t sitting on the couch, or playing with her Barbies, or running around the yard pretending to be Wonder Woman. Instead, she was posing, exposing certain sections of her anatomy, which made the photos look more like mug shots than anything else.

The photos were to prove abuse, Beth Ann told Tricia when Tricia asked about them. Whenever Kim and Buzz would drop Rebecca off, Beth Ann said she was dirty. The Carpenters, she explained, just wanted to document it so they had hard evidence when the time came.

But every time Tricia had seen the child, sometimes only minutes after Kim had dropped her off, she always looked “beautiful.” There wasn’t one time where Tricia could remember that Rebecca looked anything like Beth Ann and Cynthia had described.

Later, Dee Clinton would say the same thing: whenever Rebecca left the house, she was always bathed and dressed well.

Yet it wasn’t only dirty clothing, Tricia soon realized, that Beth Ann was exaggerating. One time, Beth Ann called Tricia and told her that Rebecca had shown up at the house with rope burns around her neck.

“What?”
Tricia asked. She was horrified.

“Yup. Rope burns…”

“My God, Beth. What are we going to do?”

“We took a photo. I’ll show it to you the next time you come over.”

Terrified for Rebecca, Tricia drove to the Carpenter house the next day and asked to see the photos.

“Take a look at that!” Beth Ann said, handing her the photos.

“I didn’t see any rope burns,” Tricia said later. They just weren’t there.

As time passed, and Buzz and Kim tried to live up to their end of the visitation schedule set by the court, unforeseen problems always seemed to get in their way. Kim and Buzz had always had problems with their vehicles. On state assistance, with Buzz not holding down a regular nine-to-five job, transportation became more of an issue now only because the court had made it a stipulation that Buzz and Kim drop Rebecca off with the Carpenters.

As spring turned into summer, Buzz and Kim continually fell short on their court-ordered duties. There were several times where they didn’t drop Rebecca off or even call the Carpenters to inform them of their car troubles. The Carpenters, of course, were livid. It was all lies, they insisted. Buzz was up to his old tricks again.

The court had scheduled visitations one day per week, “to conform with [Kim’s] work schedule,” and one weekend per month, from Saturday noon to Sunday noon. There wasn’t anything Buzz or Kim could do about it. Further, Kim was ordered to deliver Rebecca and pick her up. For a few weeks, it worked out well. But as Buzz and Kim began to have car troubles—or so they claimed—the visits began to slack off.

In turn, the Carpenters exercised their legal rights and did what they had done every other time things didn’t go their way: they filed a complaint with the court.

If Buzz and Kim had, indeed, been missing visitations because of car troubles, they would have to set up some other type of arrangements. As Thomas Cloutier made clear in his latest complaint, it wasn’t the Carpenters’ problem that Buzz and Kim couldn’t afford a car in working order. It was their responsibility to have Rebecca in Ledyard at the times the court had set. End of story.

This latest complaint sent the matter back into the courtroom, which got the Family Services Unit of the superior court involved again. Linda Yuhas, a family counselor who had worked on the case once already, was back on it again.

The Carpenters had a solid argument. As Yuhas investigated the matter, she began to understand that maybe the Clintons had had some car troubles, but it was more about Buzz’s wielding his power as Rebecca’s stepfather.

Back on May 6, the court had set up a meeting for all the parties to discuss what had been going on. Kim “refused to engage in the mediation process without her husband….,” Yuhas later reported.

Because he wasn’t Rebecca’s natural father, Buzz was not a party to the action, and in the eyes of the court, he couldn’t participate in any of the proceedings during hearings and meetings—that is, unless he and Kim had written consent from Dick and Cynthia.

“It would be a violation of this agency’s policies, Mrs. Clinton,” the court told Kim, if it let Buzz participate.

When Buzz and Kim heard that, they left the meeting.

Kim was seven months pregnant at the time of the meeting. Did she need any more stress in her life? She was married to Buzz and couldn’t understand why he couldn’t be a part of the proceedings. He was a major part of Rebecca’s life and the closest thing Rebecca had
ever
had to a traditional father figure.

In a surprising move, the Carpenters, perhaps fearing that the more friction they caused the more problems Buzz would bring to the table, decided a few days later to allow Buzz to be involved in the process.

So the Family Services Unit scheduled another date: July 1, 1993.

On June 28, Kim called family services to say she had “other obligations” that day. She and Buzz wouldn’t be able to make the meeting.

“You need to reschedule your obligations, Mrs. Clinton, and attend this meeting,” Kim was told.

Buzz and Kim never showed up.

It was clear to Linda Yuhas that Buzz was the cause of the most recent problems. Kim was undoubtedly yielding to Buzz’s orders. The Carpenters even went so far as to agree to provide transportation for all the visits. In turn, however, they wanted extra time with Rebecca, along with a full week at some point during the summer and extra hours during the holiday season.

“Mrs. Clinton has not cooperated with this office,” Yuhas wrote. “It appears that Mr. Clinton may be an influence in that regard.”

She then explained that the Carpenters’ expectations were neither “unreasonable or unrealistic,” and she recommended the matter back to the court.