Lethal Guardian (23 page)

After Suzanne hugged Buzz and kissed him on the cheek, she said in her comforting and well-mannered voice, “I love you, Buzz Clinton.”

“I love you, too, honey. But I have to get going now.”

With that, Buzz walked out the door of his childhood home en route toward a death sentence for which he had no idea he had already been tried, convicted and sentenced.

Chris and Mark showed up at HoJo’s early, about 7:05
P.M
. As soon as Mark pulled into the parking lot and spied who he thought was Buzz waiting for him, he knew he would have to scrap his previous plan of killing him in the wrecker—because Buzz was driving the old beat-up Firebird he and Kim had just bought.

Curious as to why Buzz wasn’t driving the wrecker, Despres pulled up alongside, rolled down his window and asked, “Are you the guy with the wrecker?”

“Yes,” Buzz said. “I want you to follow me to Niantic, where my house is. I’ll show you the wrecker there.”

Despres looked at his son for a moment without saying anything. Then, turning to Buzz, he said, “That’ll work.”

Buzz pulled out of the HoJo’s parking lot and began heading north on Interstate 95. Despres, his mind racing, stayed right behind him.

Despres was stuck. How the hell was he going to do it? He hadn’t made a contingency plan.

After Buzz drove over the Baldwin Bridge and continued on I-95 for about three minutes, he put his blinker on to get off on Exit 72, the Rocky Neck State Park Beach connector.

For Mark Despres, it was the perfect spot to commit murder.

“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Despres later said. “No cars were coming.”

As the two men drifted off the exit and began merging onto the connector, Chris, as Mark began flashing his lights at Buzz, asked what was going on. Buzz’s apartment was only miles down the road; they were going to be there in a few minutes.

“I’m going to kill him right here,” Mark said.

About midway down the connector, Buzz noticed that Despres was flashing his lights, so he pulled over.

With his car still running, the driver’s-side door wide open, Buzz got out and began walking toward Despres’s vehicle. Chris, looking down at the floorboards, knowing what was about to happen, froze. Reality and fantasy had now merged into a seamless blur of what Chris had thought all along was some sort of joke.

“What’s going on?” Buzz asked as he moved toward Despres.

“I need to get some gas,” Despres said as he got out of his car.

Without even thinking about what he was doing, Despres used his driver’s-side door as a rest to steady his .38, pointed it at Buzz and fired.

It took only seconds. Chris never looked up. He only heard the shots and saw flashes of light, like lightning, out of the corner of his eye.

Despres, quickly getting back into his car, watched as Buzz fell to the ground like a rag doll. Stunned, Chris turned and saw headlights coming over the crest of the hill in back of them.

A witness?

As the car came closer, Mark put the car in reverse—he had to back up a bit to get around Buzz’s body—hit the gas pedal and sped away.

“He backed up a little first,” Chris remembered later. “Turned left and drove off. I believe he ran over [Buzz].”

“I heard a thump under the car,” Despres added later, “and realized I ran [him] over.”

In what seemed like only seconds to Chris Despres, he and his father had driven from the Rocky Neck connector back to the Baldwin Bridge. When they had left the scene, Mark said later, he thought he was “going about eighty or ninety miles per hour.” Making a hard right at the end of the connector, Despres’s car went into a four-wheel slide as he twisted and turned the steering wheel to keep the vehicle on the road.

“Dad,”
Chris screamed, “don’t crash it now!”

When they arrived at Despres’s apartment, Mark pulled up alongside the garage. Scared, Chris took off inside while Mark went into the garage.

Once inside the garage, Mark took out a ball-peen hammer and, with violent strikes, began thrashing at the gun as small portions of it broke off and scattered. Then he got out a die grinder. The gun had no serial number, but he still needed to, as Clein had suggested, dismantle it.

By 9:00
P.M
., Mark had the gun broken down into several pieces, some of which he placed in his coat pocket. After sweeping what he could off the floor, he grabbed Chris and took off to Fremut’s apartment. Catherine White was there when they showed up. She remembered later that Mark was “frantic” and manic when they arrived.

“I did it, Joe,” Despres said in front of White.

Fremut didn’t say anything. Instead, he grabbed Mark by the arm and pulled him into the hallway.

“I didn’t know when to stop, Joe. I didn’t…I…,” Mark said, talking fast.

“What?”

“It was a rush, Joe.”

At that point, Mark and Joe took off, most likely to get rid of whatever was left of the gun. Fremut had tools in the garage, and investigators later found pieces of the weapon in the Dumpster out back of Fremut Texaco. Although White didn’t see them do it, it was possible they had gone into Fremut’s garage and cut the gun into smaller pieces.

With Joe and Mark gone, Chris sat with White inside Fremut’s apartment and talked.

“Have you been with your dad all night?” White asked.

“My dad’s cool,” Chris said. He was smiling and seemed unmoved by the night’s events. “He said he’s going to buy me a motorbike and take me camping.” Then he added, “I feel like smoking some drugs about now.”

Forty-five minutes after Mark and Joe had taken off, they returned. Without saying much, Mark motioned to Chris that it was time to go.

While driving south along Route 9, Mark pulled off Exit 3. Down at the end of the exit, to the right, was a Sunoco station.

Just off the exit ramp, Mark stopped the car, had Chris roll down his window, and told him to throw a few pieces of the .38 into the woods behind the Sunoco station.

After that, Mark hopped back onto Route 9 south and eventually ended up back on Interstate 95, heading north, in the direction of the Rocky Neck connector. Mark had decided to drive over to Jocelyn Johnson’s house in Old Lyme and hang out for a while. He was confused. He had just killed a man. As with most inexperienced murderers, Mark had planned everything up until the time of the actual murder. Now he was scrambling around, trying to get rid of evidence, wondering what to do next.

While crossing the Baldwin Bridge for the second time that night, Mark stopped midway over the bridge and threw the remaining pieces of the weapon into the Connecticut River below him. Less than a mile away, state police, local police and several bystanders were standing over the dead body of Anson “Buzz” Clinton. Dee Clinton was sitting in traffic only yards from where her son lay dead in the road—and she didn’t even know what was going on. Kim, seven months pregnant, unknowingly now a widow, was at home waiting for Dee to pick her up so they could go shopping.

When Chris and Mark arrived at Jocelyn Johnson’s house, Mark spied Johnson’s brother working on his car in the garage. Chris stayed in the car. Mark walked past Johnson’s brother without saying a word.

After only about five minutes, Mark emerged from Johnson’s house, having only made “small talk” with her, he later said, and he and Chris drove back home.

When they arrived, Mark turned on the television. And after watching the nightly news, he and Chris went to sleep.

Early the next morning, March 11, at about 6:30, Beth Ann called Haiman Clein at his home. Clein was in bed with his wife. They had been sleeping when the phone rang.

“Buzz has been killed,” Beth Ann said in a nervous slather of words. “Come over right away. I’m afraid. Scared. Come now!”

“I’ll be right over.”

While Clein was pulling up his trousers, Bonnie Clein woke up.

“What’s going on?”

“Buzz Clinton,” Haiman said, “has been killed. I’m going over to Beth’s to see if anybody needs me.”

Clein had been urging Despres for about the past two weeks to get the job done. Driving over to Beth Ann’s, Clein now knew he had but only a few things left to do—the first, of course, was to pay Despres the remainder of the money he owed him. If Clein had had the upper hand on March 10 and the days preceding it, Despres now controlled the situation. Clein wasn’t stupid. He knew Despres would be calling him shortly for the money.

As if it were just another day, Clein stopped first at a doughnut shop down the street from Beth Ann’s condo to pick up coffee and doughnuts. But as soon as he opened the door to her condo, he could tell Beth Ann had been devastated by what had happened.

“She was scared out of her mind,” Clein later said.

Setting the doughnuts and coffee on the counter, Clein tried reassuring her that everything was going to be all right. “You don’t have to be scared,” he said. “No one can know about anything.”

As far as Clein understood it, he, Despres and Beth Ann were the only ones who had known about the murder. In truth, though, seven different people were involved—one of whom was a teenager. The chances of one of them not coming forward once the pressure was put on were unrealistic. Mark Despres had broken the one golden rule any professional hit man adhered to: tell no one.

While Clein comforted Beth Ann, telling her repeatedly that everything was going to be okay, she began pointing at the ceiling. Then, pulling Clein down toward her, she whispered into his ear, “Bugs.”

“It couldn’t be,” Clein said.

Indeed, there was no chance that law enforcement, even if it had known that Clein and Beth Ann had been involved, could have placed a bug in her condo that quickly. It was impossible.

But for Beth Ann, fear had now replaced any hate she had for Buzz. She was petrified that someone was going to find out. It was another sign, some later concluded, of her guilt.

During the two hours Clein spent at Beth Ann’s condo that morning, he later said, she had “several conversations” with her parents by telephone. But every time Clein tried to bring up the murder and discuss their next move, she would put her hand over his mouth and tell him, in a whisper, to keep quiet. Then she’d point to the ceiling…

Bugs.

After speaking to her parents one final time that morning, Beth Ann hung up the phone and told Clein the cops were in Ledyard asking her parents questions. “We need to get over there right now.”

“Okay,” Clein said. Then he said, “Relax, would you?”

Bugs.

During the car ride, Beth Ann refused to discuss anything having to do with the murder. The car was bugged, she repeated over and over and over. Clein later said she was “frantic,” worried sick that someone was listening to their every word.

Mark Despres had finally gotten hold of Clein on Friday, March 11, the day after the killing. Clein said he couldn’t meet with Despres on that particular day, but they would hook up soon. During the conversation, Despres told Clein everything he could remember about the details of the murder—including the fact he had brought along Chris.

“But I need the rest of that money, Haiman,” Despres begged.

Clein fell silent, then said, “Meet me at the office on Monday.”

Over the past few days, Beth Ann had become so obsessed with the notion of the cops tracking her and Clein’s every move and listening in on their conversations that she refused to speak to him at all. When Clein finally told her what Despres had said about bringing along Chris, it only added to her paranoia. Every time she saw Clein, she wouldn’t utter a word without first patting him down to see if he was wired like an informant. To Clein, it wasn’t a big deal. He felt closer to her now than he ever had.

The only thing that bothered Clein was that they weren’t discussing things enough. They needed to talk about times, dates and where they were on the day of the murder.

One day, as Beth Ann was patting Clein down, she whispered, “I’m in denial, Haiman.”

Clein didn’t know what to think, so he continued trying to get her to talk. But she repeatedly refused.

Then they took off with two other couples to Madison Square Garden in New York City for a college basketball tournament. Clein had insisted they go. They had to do normal things.

While in their New York hotel room, Clein thought it was the perfect place to discuss the murder and how they were going to handle the next few weeks and months. But Beth Ann “freaked out” and kept “shushing” him, not letting him finish a thought. Then she would walk around the room and point behind the radiators and up at the ceiling.

Bugs.

When they got inside a cab to go downtown, Clein tried once again to talk about things, but she shook her head, held her fingers to her lips and pointed at the cabdriver.

“We can’t talk.
Shhh…
”

By Saturday, March 12, 1994, the impact of her eldest son’s death had finally hit Dee Clinton. Like any mother, Dee was consumed by grief and sorrow. She had sat in traffic on the night her son was murdered, merely yards away from his dead body, and didn’t know it until later that night when state police gave her the heartbreaking news. Now, days later, with the cruelty and horror of Buzz’s death unearthed, Dee somehow had to find the strength to manage a business and plan a funeral.

How life could change in an instant.

Suzanne Clinton was old enough to understand what had happened to her brother, and his death hit her, perhaps, the hardest.

During the morning hours of March 11, Dee was fiddling around in the kitchen when Suzanne came running out of her bedroom after talking to Billy, her younger brother. Dee had to take only one look at Suzanne’s face to know what little Billy had said.

“Billy said,” Suzanne began saying…and then dropped to her knees and began crying.

“Buzz,” Dee later said, “was Suzanne’s ‘everything.’ He was gone this time for good. He wasn’t coming back. And she knew it.”

After Dee consoled Suzanne, she walked out to the kennel and turned to a poster she’d put up some years before and just stared at it. A devout woman who believed wholeheartedly in God and His role in everyday life, it was one of Dee’s favorite pieces of literature to meditate on. Now, she thought, was as good a time as any to take the words in:

In the poem, the man asked why there had been only one set of footprints in the sand at times in his life when he needed the Lord the most. The Lord said it was at that moment when He was carrying the man.

“Footprints in the Sand,” written by Margaret Fishback Powers, was a popular, inspirational poem based on faith, hope and belief in Jesus Christ that one can get through anything with enough faith. Dee relied on the poem’s resonance to get her through what was amounting to be the toughest thing she ever had to deal with.

After reading the poem, Dee sat down and said out loud, “Dear Lord, You’d better be carrying my ass, because there’s no way in hell I am going to be able to get through this without You.”

On Saturday, March 12, Dee woke early and, to her surprise, felt an “unbelievable amount of peace rush over” her. She was able to accept the fact that someone had taken her son’s life and there was nothing she could do about it. Buzz was dead. He wasn’t coming home.

Still, she had a sense that it was going to be okay.

As sure as her feeling of peace was, it also bothered Dee.
Why?
she thought.
Is there something wrong with me?
Maybe it was the beginning of a nervous breakdown? There was no way she should feel this calm and this tolerant over having to bury her son in a few days.

When Dee got out of bed, the eulogy for her son’s funeral she had been putting off writing, out of nowhere, began to come to her as if someone was dictating it.

Get a paper and pen and write it down,
she said to herself.
Don’t wait. Do it now.

While writing, Dee recalled later, she was in a state of subconsciousness, as if she had no idea what she was writing or where it was coming from.

“It just came out.”

In the middle of composing the eulogy, however, something else happened. Without warning, Dee stopped writing and went back to bed, lay down and began to cry. At first, it was just mild sobbing that went along with grief. But then, after a few moments, she began to go into a “guttural cry so deep and physically painful that it was worse than any labor pain” she had ever experienced—as if every pleasant moment she had ever spent with her son was somehow coming back to her in the form of tears and pain.

But as Dee held on to her stomach, rocking back and forth like a junkie, shaking and crying, she began to think about the eulogy.

If I continue in this dark, desolate and hurtful place, I will lose the eulogy.

She couldn’t let that happen.

“I can’t explain it. But in the blink of an eye, I was back in that peace I had left a moment earlier.”

Dee later explained that ever since that morning, she had come to terms with her son’s death, accepted it and decided not to waste time on tears and anguish. “How my son got that way, however,” she added, “is not okay. But I have come to accept that he is gone.”

As the ED-MCS began to investigate Buzz’s death during the middle part of March 1994, questioning the Carpenters, Buzz’s former friends and relatives, trying to piece together what had happened during his final days, Beth Ann had some rather remarkable news for Haiman Clein—a bit of information that would surely throw a wrench in their wheel of deception and secrecy.

“I’m pregnant,” Beth Ann told Clein one night in late March.

“What?”

But that wasn’t the end of it. “Twins!” she added. “I’m going to have twins, Haiman.”

On Monday, March 14, Mark Despres arrived at Haiman Clein’s office at about 2:30
P.M
. Clein’s legal secretary, Marilyn Rubitski, and Beth Ann were there when Despres walked in. As soon as Clein saw Despres, he grabbed him by the arm, retreated into his office and closed the door behind them.

“It’s done, huh?” Clein said first, in almost a celebratory fashion.

“Yes.”

After a moment of small talk, for a second time, Despres laid out exactly what had happened, leaving no detail out.

“So, you took your son with you?” Clein asked.

“Yeah,” Despres said.

Despite his thinking that bringing along a fifteen-year-old kid to commit a murder for hire wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do, Clein didn’t say much more about it. Instead, he walked over to Despres and hugged him as if he were indoctrinating him into the Mafia.

“We’re married now, Mark,” Clein said. “You know that, don’t you?”

After Clein sat down at his desk, Despres asked, “What have you heard?”

“The cops are investigating everyone in the family. I’m staying away because I’m a friend of the family.”

“What else?”

“I hope the fuck you got rid of that gun and car, Mark.”

“I took care of it.”

Despres was desperate now to get the rest of his money so he could plot his next move. To complicate matters further, he had been running around town with a young girl,
Jackie Powers,
he had met in December 1993, and she was now living with him and Chris. In fact, at one time, Chris had been dating the same girl, an old family friend later claimed. She was only fifteen. Mark had been telling people he planned to go to Florida with her as soon as Clein paid him off. He was going to open a body shop in Daytona and just lay low. He was also saying that he hadn’t slept much since the murder, but Chris had been sleeping just fine.

The car Despres had used in the murder had been sold to a dealer in Lyme, Despres then explained to Clein. The gun was gone, too.

“Follow me to the bank,” Clein said. “I’ll get you some more money.”

Within minutes, Mark and Chris were sitting in the parking lot of the Bank of Southeastern Connecticut in Waterford, just a few miles up the road from Clein’s law office, waiting for Clein, who had since gone into the bank.

A few moments later, Clein emerged from the bank carrying an envelope.

“Don’t come and see me for a while,” Clein said, handing Despres the envelope. Mark took a quick peek inside while Clein continued to talk. There were thirty-five $100 bills inside.

“Okay,” Despres said.

“Lay very low, Mark.”

Despres said he understood.

Leaving the bank, Despres drove to Fremut Texaco.

When he and Chris arrived at what had become their home away from home for the past few weeks, Joe Fremut walked over and, as though he were proud of what they had done, smiled.

“He paid you, didn’t he?” Fremut asked when Despres approached him.

“Yeah,” Despres said. “He paid me.”

By this time, Catherine White had joined Fremut and Despres. Despres had mentioned that they should go around to the back of the garage and talk. It was more secluded.

“You did a good job,” Fremut said. “What are you going to do with the money?”

Despres said he wanted to open up a body shop in Florida.

By this point, Despres felt Fremut was itching to get his hands on some of the money. He kept referring to “the money, the money.” How much? When was the rest of it coming? He kept prying. Despres was getting frustrated. He wasn’t going to give Fremut a dime. After all, Fremut hadn’t done anything but plan the murder. He hadn’t carried out on his earlier promise to go along with Despres. Why should he get anything?

“You should go to the casino and spend that money,” Fremut suggested, explaining how the casino was the perfect place to launder it.

With her shoulder-length brown hair, Old Lyme resident Jocelyn Johnson was a slim, fit, relatively tall and plain-looking woman in her late thirties. She had known Mark Despres, and had dated him, over the past twelve years. An avid rider of horses, Johnson was, some later said, one of the only good things Mark Despres had going in his life at the time he killed Buzz Clinton.

“I always thought she was nice…good for Mark,” a person who knew Johnson later said. “She seemed to have had her head on straight. She was always pleasant.”

On one or two occasions, Despres had told Johnson about his plans to murder Buzz long before he had carried them out. He would also, Johnson later said, make comments regarding the progress he was making. One time, he’d even admitted that Haiman Clein had hired him.

But Johnson always wrote it off as another one of Despres’s harebrained schemes and never took him seriously.

In just about everyone’s estimation, Mark Despres was good with his hands, had little problem fixing anything wrong with a car and had made sculptures out of metal and wood he used to give people as gifts. His mother later said he had even nursed animals back to life when he was younger. He helped people. He cared about people. He could fix anything.

But the one thing Mark Despres couldn’t do was fix the fact that he was now, among all those other things, a cold-blooded murderer who was scurrying around like a hunted rabbit wondering what to do next.

With the thought of what Joe Fremut had said regarding laundering the money, Despres picked Johnson up at her home around March 16 and drove to the Foxwoods casino in Ledyard. Fremut had made a valid point when he suggested Despres launder the cash.

After exchanging the cash for chips, Despres hit the blackjack tables and, he later said, “lost.”

As Johnson stood by and watched, at one point, she mentioned how she’d seen on the news that someone had been killed in East Lyme. Apparently, she still hadn’t convinced herself that Despres had been serious about the murder. Up until that point, she and Despres hadn’t discussed it much. But having seen the news report, putting two and two together, Johnson wanted to know if Despres had had anything to do with it.

“I told her I did,” Despres later said.

Later that night, Despres let Johnson in on all the details.

“I told [her] that Haiman Clein was the one who paid me to get rid of a guy who was molesting a little girl.”

Johnson now had no choice but to believe what she was hearing. Yet regardless of whether she believed him, Jocelyn Johnson sat on the information and ultimately decided, for whatever reason, not to go to the police. Instead she continued her relationship with Despres.

Joseph Jebran had drifted apart from Beth Ann during the past six months or so; in many ways, though, he still continued to view the relationship as salvageable. Beth Ann still took care of Jebran’s money and picked him up at the train depot when he came home on weekends. None of that had changed. The only difference now? Beth Ann was sleeping with Clein behind Jebran’s back.

In early April, when Beth Ann showed up at the New London train station to pick Joseph up for the weekend, she seemed a bit nervous. Something was obviously wrong, Jebran thought.

“What’s going on, Beth?” he asked.

Beth Ann began crying. “Nothing.”

“
Nothing?
What is it? Tell me.”

“I’ve been seeing Haiman,” she finally admitted.

Joseph had had his suspicions, he later said. He may have been a bit naive, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew something had been going on.

“Okay,” he replied.

“There’s more, though,” Beth Ann continued. “I got pregnant.”

It was the last thing Jebran had expected to hear. He still loved her. It was clear in the letters and cards he had sent her. They had known each other for about six years. With this latest news, however, he now knew there was no chance for them. It was over, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

“I had a miscarriage,” Beth Ann further explained. She didn’t mention, according to what Joseph later said, that she had been carrying twins and had lost only one child. Or that the other child she was carrying was still alive. Joseph Jebran, on that day, was left with the impression that she wasn’t pregnant anymore.

“Would you have kept the baby if you hadn’t had a miscarriage?” he then asked.

“Yes! Of course. It’s been rough on me, Joseph. I’ve had a tough time. With Haiman still being married, I’m jealous.”

Jebran was appalled. Here she was wanting sympathy from a man she had two-timed, a man who had given her whatever she wanted.

By this point in the conversation, Jebran had heard enough. To get her off a subject that was, undoubtedly, ripping his heart out with each word spoken, Jebran began asking about Buzz and the murder investigation.

“Who do you think killed Buzz?” he asked.

“It was probably drug-related,” Beth Ann said.

It was better, Joseph suggested, that Beth Ann drop him off at his cousin’s house in New London. He couldn’t stay at the Carpenters’ house in Ledyard anymore. Murder? Miscarriage? Haiman Clein? Joseph Jebran wanted no part of it.