Lethal Guardian (20 page)

In the months since Haiman Clein and Beth Ann began sleeping together, Clein, now a love-struck Romeo, had said numerous times he’d do anything Beth Ann asked of him. Nary had a day gone by where the two lovebirds didn’t see each other, have sex or talk about what was now the main thrust and focus of their relationship: the decision between them to have Buzz Clinton killed. For Clein, he believed wholeheartedly that Buzz was the worst kind of human being imaginable—a sexual predator of children—and deserved a death sentence for his actions.

Yet, even if it were true, for two lawyers to put themselves in a position of judge, jury and executioner, many would later argue, made people like Beth Ann and Clein no better.

Clein had represented Mark Despres in the past on several occasions: notably, a gun possession charge, his divorce from Diana Trevethan and a real estate matter that had earned Despres a rather large payday for a piece of property he had owned. They had become good friends throughout the years. By the end of 1993, though, Despres was more to Clein than just a friend. Clein had been buying cocaine from Despres in large quantities for quite some time. It was that drug dealer–customer relationship that got Clein thinking, after Beth Ann had confronted him with the notion of having Buzz killed, that Despres just might be the man for the job.

Despres had told Clein he distributed cocaine mainly in the New York area. Others claimed Despres had been dealing cocaine out of a local bar in Ivoryton.

Nevertheless, one day, while Despres and Clein were discussing how Despres sold his drugs, Despres mentioned that he had to “off” people once in a while because of the dangerous situations he found himself in while in New York. Clein wasn’t all that surprised, he later said, that Despres had been involved in that type of behavior. He had almost expected it of him.

When Beth Ann asked Clein to kill Buzz, Clein remembered that previous conversation and thought,
Mark’s done it before. Why not ask him?

“I can trust him,” Clein said he told Beth Ann in late December when they were discussing hiring Despres. “I know Mark.”

From there, it was only a matter of asking.

With that, Clein called Mark one morning and told him he had a job for him—and it wasn’t making another dollhouse for his wife, or picking up a bag of dope.

“Come into the New London office,” Clein said. “I need to talk to you.”

A day later, Despres showed up.

Clein took him into a side office—according to Despres and Clein—and asked Beth Ann to join them.

“I have some personal things for you to do,” Clein said as Beth Ann looked on in quiet desperation. “I want you to take care of—
murder
—this real bad guy who is molesting a young girl. Can you make this person disappear?”

“All right,” Despres said, shrugging his shoulders as if Clein had ordered another bag of dope.

“We can talk about it further later on,” Clein said.

A few days after that first meeting, Clein had Despres come back to his office. This time, however, Beth Ann wasn’t around.

“I’m involved with a woman whose niece is being abused—and the only way to stop the abuse is to have him killed. Would you do it for us?”

“Yes,” Despres said.

Despres then explained how he wasn’t interested in who the woman was, and didn’t ask about her. Later, though, Despres admitted that he knew immediately it was Beth Ann.

Clein, however, had sent Beth Ann out of the office before Despres had arrived because he didn’t want Despres to see her again.

Being around Mark Despres, former friends recalled later, could be kind of intimidating. He was a very large man, about six feet one inches, three hundred pounds. Clein, a big man himself at six feet two inches, two hundred pounds, knew that underneath the baggy clothes Despres usually wore was a rock-solid machine of a man. Despres was brawny, like an NFL lineman, and his square shoulders seemingly ran all the way down to the ground. He had a biker appearance to him that was creepy and brassy.

As the two men continued to talk of the killing during that second meeting, at one point, Clein told Mark that the person he would be looking for was a local man named Anson Clinton.

“Is his nickname Buzz?” Despres asked.

Clein was surprised. “You know him?”

“Yup.”

“How?”

“I know some people who have had some bad drug deals with him, and he isn’t very well-liked.”

Clein shrugged. Okay, he said. Perhaps it made him feel a bit more certain about what he and Beth Ann were doing.

Next they began discussing the details. “I need a gun and a car,” Despres said. “An
old
car.”

“Okay—”

“When I did this before,” Despres added, interrupting Clein, “I used an old car to dispose of the body. I’ll do the same thing.”

“All right,” Clein agreed.

“I want eight thousand dollars.”

“I can do that.”

“I’ll need to know where he lives and works. I want marker plate numbers. I’ll figure out how to hook up with him or something like that.”

Clein really didn’t know much about Buzz besides what Beth Ann had told him. And she hadn’t yet said where Buzz lived or worked.

“I’ll get that information,” Clein said as the meeting drew to a close. “Don’t worry about it.”

Near Christmastime, Clein called Despres and told him he had all the information he had previously requested, and that he needed to come into the office. Giving it to him over the telephone wasn’t a good idea. In between the time they had last met, Clein had given Despres an envelope containing $3,500. It was a down payment for the murder, Clein later said, enough money to buy a car and gun.

Later that day, with Despres sitting in Clein’s office, Clein got up and said, “I’ll be right back…. Give me a few minutes.”

Clein then walked across the small hallway into Beth Ann’s office. She was waiting for him.

“I need that info,” he said.

“Hold on,” Beth Ann replied.

As Clein stood there and waited, he later recalled, Beth Ann called her mother, Cynthia, and asked for Buzz’s address. Then she inquired, “Where does he work? What’s the name on the side of his tow truck?”

Beth Ann, Clein later added, never told her mother why she needed the information—at least not while Clein was standing there.

After she was finished writing everything down, Beth Ann handed the piece of paper to Clein.

“I’ll rewrite it in my own handwriting and throw this piece of paper away,” Clein reassured her.

While Clein passed through the hallway, he stopped in the rest room and tore off a piece of paper towel.

Despres was waiting patiently when Clein came back into the office a few minutes later. Beth Ann stayed in her office.

“What’s up?” Despres asked.

“Here,” Clein offered, after copying the information down on the piece of paper towel.

“All right, then. We’re all set?”

“Yeah,” Clein said. “But throw that piece of paper away after you’ve memorized the info.”

Clein then reached into his pocket and took out another $500 in cash and gave it to Despres. “In a few days, I’ll have another fifteen hundred for you,” he promised.

Despres seemed satisfied with that.

Clein’s New London office usually held its annual Christmas party for clients a few days before the holidays began. Beth Ann and Clein had gone out the day of the party to lunch and showed up later that evening as it was already in full swing.

When she and Clein walked up to the door, Mark Despres was sitting in the lobby area waiting for them.

Dressed from head to toe in camouflage army fatigues, Despres had taken on the role of a hired killer to a rather perplexing extreme. Here was this massive human being, dressed like a marine ready to do battle in the jungles of Vietnam, sitting in the lobby of Clein’s law office with scores of festive professional people mingling around in the background. He had even dyed his hair. It was a surreal sight—quite opposite from the Hollywood stereotype: good-looking male, usually of Italian heritage, dressed in all black, packing a silencer.

When Clein first looked at Despres sitting there, he felt uneasy. It was as if Despres were getting a thrill out of the whole thing. He seemed enthusiastic about what was ahead. Beth Ann was nervous, no doubt scared someone was going to see them together and begin thinking something was up.

When Clein and Despres entered Clein’s office after getting some food and drink and talking with guests for a moment, Despres opened his jacket.

“Check it out, Haiman!” he said, smiling.

“You’re risking a lot by going around like this,” Clein said, shaking his head.

Despres had a huge handgun tucked inside a shoulder holster he was wearing.

Beth Ann then walked in. They all sat down and spoke very briefly. In Clein’s mind, the meeting was a way for the three of them to get acquainted. They had entered into this agreement together. At least they should know one another before Despres went through with the hit. Hiding Beth Ann from Despres wasn’t possible anymore, nor was it feasible, Clein had surmised. There was just no way to keep her out of it.

“This is the guy who is helping us with
that,
” Clein said to Beth Ann, looking over at Despres. It was an “oblique reference,” Clein later admitted. Even though he had made it in front of Despres, Clein was confident he still hadn’t confirmed to Despres that Beth Ann was the same person behind it all. Clein wasn’t stupid. He hadn’t gone to law school for nothing. He may not have been a criminal lawyer, but he knew the law. If Beth Ann’s name was never used specifically, there might be problems for anyone who might accuse her later on.

“Mark made the connection [that it was Beth Ann] very quickly, though,” Clein recalled.

Later that week, when Clein was talking to Despres on the phone one night, Despres said, “I knew that’s who you were talking about when I had seen her the first time.”

“Yup,” Clein finally confirmed. “That’s her, all right.”

Mark Despres met with Clein again in the early part of January 1994, and they further discussed how and where Buzz would be killed. Clein, perhaps wanting Despres to know why a lawyer with such a standing in the community would call a hit on a man he hardly knew, explained one time that he’d tried to take care of the matter in court, but he had failed. Murder, Clein insisted, was the only option they had left. Buzz, after all, was molesting the young girl. What else could they do?

Despres agreed. To him, Buzz was nothing more than a “scumbag” who deserved death. Molesting little girls, even to a criminal, was one of the worst offenses imaginable. In prison, “diddlers,” as they are commonly known, receive the most violent treatment from other inmates. One could butcher his own mother and father or rob a local church, but touch a kid and you’re doomed.

No one, however, discussed evidence. Where was all the evidence that Buzz had molested the girl?

There was none.

Around this same time, Chris Despres, Mark’s son, had not been getting along well with his mother, Diana Trevethan. So it was agreed that the best thing for Chris would be to move in with Mark.

Diana Trevethan, perhaps against her better judgment, agreed that Chris should go live with Mark.

At fifteen, Chris began going to Valley Regional Tech High School when he moved in with Mark. He was thrilled by his father’s unique talent of ripping apart car engines and putting them back together again, doing bodywork, along with how Mark had worked with his hands. In that respect, Chris wanted to follow in Mark’s footsteps. Living with dad, Chris later said, was a way not only to get closer to him, but to learn mechanics.

Soon after moving in, Chris began to skip school. To his surprise, Mark would even pick him up at school and encourage his truancy. Mark himself was never interested in school. He’d left in the eighth grade and never returned. Some later said Mark’s father, who had left the home when Mark was five, had beaten him and emotionally abused him for the short time he was around. Because of that, Mark hadn’t really known how to be a father. Even though Mark’s mother, Esther Lockwood, had remarried a man who treated Mark decently, Mark never really had a parental example to follow, Lockwood later said.

When he would pick Chris up from school, or on the days when Chris decided not to even bother going, they would go out and ride ATVs or just hang out at Fremut Texaco, the local garage in Essex where Mark had been working as a used-car salesman along with Joe Fremut. Sometimes, when Mark and Chris were bored, they would go out in the back of Despres’s Winthrop Road home in Essex or Fremut Texaco and fire one of Mark’s twenty weapons, setting up bottles and cans and taking target practice.

Fremut Texaco, which was on the other side of Essex, became a place for Mark and Chris to kill some time while Joe Fremut worked in the garage and sold cars. Despres had always considered Fremut one of his closest friends.

But Fremut viewed the relationship differently, he later admitted. He would call Mark “Fatboy” behind his back and make fun of him. Even to his face, Fremut would say insulting things such as, “Hi, fat fuck!”

Fremut and Catherine White, his drug-addict, prostitute girlfriend, were known as “Bonnie and Clyde.” Despres, Fremut and White were often collectively called the “Three Stooges.” They all carried guns.

But Mark and Chris not only had shooting guns, skipping school and riding ATVs in common; Mark had recently started turning his son onto something altogether more sinister. According to an old friend and, later, investigators, Mark and Chris would spray-paint pentagrams on the floor of Despres’s apartment, fill the room with lit candles and hold satanic rituals and séances, reciting verses from satanic literature.

“Chris said that he was really scared one night—that he had seen something during one of the séances,” a friend later recalled. “Because of that, Chris didn’t like doing it. But Mark was
really
into it.” Recalling how Mark treated Chris during this time, that same friend added, “Just the fact that he always treated Chris like a buddy and not a son. And that he encouraged him to do bad things, like go ahead and skip school or work so they could ride three-wheelers…drink and smoke pot. Mark was boisterous and loud. Kind of obnoxious. He thought he was—and I guess he really was—a tough guy.”