“Well,” the detective said, “we greatly appreciate you coming out here. We know how hard this must be. I’ll have someone take you back to the hospital.”
V
Mary Ellen was just coming out of anesthesia when Diana got a chance to visit her. She was crying and looked, understandably, as if she had been left for dead. “It was awful,” Diana said, recalling that moment. “About as awful as it gets.”
The doctors had explained to Diana that Mary Ellen was going to be fine, at least physically. With some rest and recovery, her body would mend. The hospital that Mary Ellen was in, Diana believed, was not a nice place. She thought it was seedy and run-down. She felt odd about leaving her mother there. She couldn’t speak to Mary Ellen at any real length as of yet, simply because Mary Ellen was out of it. (“I was not happy with the hospital and wanted her to be moved,” Diana said.)
When she spoke to her mother about it the following day, Mary Ellen said she wanted to stay. There was no reason to be transferred. They had saved her life. That was good enough for her. Within a few days, Mary Ellen was able to get up and walk around.
Looking at her, Diana could only think of getting her out of there as soon as she could.
Leaving the hospital that night, Diana resolved to do something. “I have to get her home…soon.”
21
I
A few days after the attack, Mary Ellen indicated that she was well enough to speak with police again. They had interviewed her hours after the attack and she had provided a bit of information. But they needed more.
Senior investigator Dennis Textor, from the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office (Sex Crimes and Child Abuse Unit), and Detective Robert Kassai, from the EPPD, sat with Mary Ellen. Looking at her, they could see bruises on her neck, where Ned had placed his hands—a ring of yellow and purple, a blurry collage of colors representing the nasty reminder of the violence she had survived.
The detectives were told that one of the knife wounds had just missed Mary Ellen’s aorta.
After explaining where she lived and how she met Ned, Mary Ellen went straight into what she could recall from the night. She remembered things in detail. The episode was fresh in her mind.
“Describe Ned to me,” said one of the detectives.
“Um…,” Mary Ellen started to say before breaking down in tears.
“Take it easy…his approximate height, weight, and age?” Detective Kassai asked, trying to ease her into it.
“He’s five-nine…um”—she started crying again—“um…he weighs…I’m sorry, I would say, maybe one hundred and eighty pounds.”
“How old?”
“I’d say thirty,” Mary Ellen said. They had talked about her age, she recalled, but not his. She felt a bit more comfortable. Ned would do it again, she was convinced. And how would she ever be able to sit at home alone again with him on the street? He had her keys.
“How did you find out—I mean, how did you know his name was Ned?”
“Through conversation.” Ned had asked her what her name was and said he had an “unusual name.” Then he told her his name and she asked what Ned was short for, perhaps Edward?
“No, he told me,” Mary Ellen explained. “He said Ned was short for Edwin.”
“Did it appear to you that he knew anybody else at that club, whether it was employees or customers? Was he friendly with anybody?”
Mary Ellen thought about it. “A bartender,” she said a moment later, “who he called ‘Jimmy.’ He had dark hair.”
As the interview progressed, Mary Ellen explained how she and Ned ended up in the parking lot together. It was unclear whether Ned could have fixed Mary Ellen’s car so it wouldn’t start when she left the bar. She had used the restroom before she left. She couldn’t recall if she had told Ned what kind of car she drove before leaving him.
The investigators were in an odd position. There were questions they had to ask. If Mary Ellen had made a move on Ned and casual sex had turned violent, it was still a crime, but the attack would have to be investigated—and later prosecuted—differently.
“When you came into your apartment,” Kassai asked, “did you take any clothes off?”
Mary Ellen didn’t hesitate. “I took my shoes off. I always take my shoes off when I get home, so I won’t disturb my landlady.”
After they went through the next five minutes inside Mary Ellen’s apartment, one of the detectives asked her when the situation turned uncomfortable.
Mary Ellen pulled back a bit and tears welled up. “He grabbed my throat with both hands and both his thumbs on my Adam’s apple and his fingers [wrapped] around the back of my neck and he was staring into my eyes.”
It was obvious to Mary Ellen—as it would be to investigators in the coming years—that this procedure Ned had used, if it could be called such, had been something he had practiced. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was prepared. He hadn’t randomly grabbed her throat, she believed. He strategically grabbed it in a specific area.
Ned never expected Mary Ellen to survive. He had chosen a victim and what was obvious in the way he acted, and the information he shared with her, was that he never thought she would be sitting, talking to the police about the attack. Either that, or he never intended Mary Ellen as a victim in the first place, but he was overcome by those feelings of not being able to control himself around females and acted out.
Near the conclusion of the interview, Detective Kassai asked, “During the night, did Ned tell you anything about himself, where he lived or where he worked?”
“A few blocks from Kracker’s,” she said. “He stopped there after attending a friend’s wedding. I mentioned to him that I had just started a new job in Paramus, and he said that he worked in Paramus, on Century Road, for Hewlett-Packard.”
“Prior to meeting Ned, have you ever seen him before?”
“I never saw him in my life before that.”
Investigator Textor spoke up as the interview wound down. “Did he say anything that he wanted to go to bed with you or have any type of sex with you?”
“No!” Mary Ellen said, lashing out. She was offended by the question, but understood its validity. “When I mentioned that I was going to have cheese, because I am hypoglycemic and I have a high protein diet and I have to eat frequently…he said, ‘I don’t want you to have cheese….’” It was the last thing Ned had ever said to Mary Ellen—save for “be quiet,” as he put his hand over her mouth at the bottom of the stairs.
After thanking Mary Ellen for her time and cooperation, they asked her if there was anything else she wanted to add.
Mary Ellen thought about it. “Yes,” she said, “just that I believed that I was dead, except for the fact that I fought as hard…as hard”—she stumbled, obviously reliving that moment—“as hard as I possibly could.”
Finding a guy named Edwin who worked at Hewlett-Packard, one of the biggest employers in the immediate area, was not going to be too difficult.
22
I
According to Ned years later, the attack on Mary Ellen was never supposed to happen. It was something inside him, he wrote, he couldn’t control, which proved to him that it was not a premeditated event. As he explained it (or, rather, justified it), Mary Ellen invited him back to her apartment. He mentioned nothing of her car ever breaking down and his Good Samaritan work. Ned wrote that Mary Ellen had undone the top half of her dress and taken her bra off after they entered her apartment, which, he claimed, was too much for his sexually tangled mind to wrap itself around. Once he saw her breasts being offered up, he couldn’t help himself. It was something inside him that took over.
A demon. Devil. Different personality.
At some point, Ned explained, he and Mary Ellen were on the couch. He was on top of her. She was enjoying herself. But then, out of nowhere, he wrote, I could not stop my hands from squeezing her throat as hard as I could.
An uncontrollable impulse.
An involuntary act.
Stabbing Mary Ellen.
The blood, though, Ned explained later, was not part of the fantasy. The blood was a deal breaker.
A turnoff.
Saltpeter.
Still, to Ned, seeing Mary Ellen unclothed and in a vulnerable position was an invitation to fulfill his sexual fantasies. He blames Mary Ellen because, in his mind, it is her fault for being, essentially, in the wrong place at the wrong time and making herself available to him. This enables Ned to rationalize the crime in his warped sense of reality. Whether she invited him into her apartment and—for the sake of argument—took off her clothes voluntarily, or Ned ripped them off, is irrelevant to the end result. But in mitigating his behavior, Ned obviously felt the need to place the blame on Mary Ellen for putting herself in this position and offering her body to him.
A sacrificial lamb.
II
Talking about the crime itself, Ned later stated that Mary Ellen passed out “a few seconds” after he started strangling her. When that happened, he wrote, he dragged her into her bedroom, half-naked. It was at this moment, these feelings completely took over and there was no turning back.
In explaining that the act was never premeditated, Ned wrote that if he had planned it, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be seen leaving with this lady…. He would have, he added, also brought a weapon into the bedroom with him.
Likely, as Ned began to masturbate, “the lady,” as he explained it, woke up and began struggling with him. As that happened, he wrote, I ran back into the living room…in a panic, picked up a stupid…knife.
“Stupid” was an interesting adjective; it implied that if he had chosen a better weapon, he could have killed Mary Ellen.
In any event, Ned wrote that he had stabbed her, remembering how that worked to quiet things down years before when he had committed the same crime—but had instead killed the woman. [B]ut this time it did not work, he wrote.
He claimed Mary Ellen then began to scream and the phone started ringing. [I]t was the landlady calling from downstairs, he guessed in his letter.
He tried to leave at that point, but, of course, he was locked in.
So he jumped out the window.
As the letter continued, Ned blamed Mary Ellen over and again, saying that she was “obviously embarrassed” by what had happened and the fact that, according to him, she had invited him back to her apartment for sex. Moreover, he said, he never fixed her car or helped her with it because it had started right up.
Ned agreed that he needed help with his problem—that there was “something inside of” him that he could not “handle by” himself.
III
If there was one thing Ned had not embellished in describing the attack on Mary Ellen, it was that he had no criminal record and had not tried to hide his identity from Mary Ellen.
Then again, Ned admitted that he had never expected Mary Ellen to survive the attack. I botched it…, he wrote to a friend years later, this merely months after claiming he needed help for his condition. She didn’t die!
IV
Elmwood Park police detectives had little trouble locating Ned. Mary Ellen had described his build, recalled his first name—Edwin, which, to begin with, was rare—and remembered that he worked for Hewlett-Packard.
Detectives searched the immediate area around Mary Ellen’s apartment and didn’t find the knife or her keys. They photographed bloodstains running down the stairs by the landlady’s door, up the stairs into Mary Ellen’s bedroom. The sheets on her bed looked like old painting rags smeared with redwood stain. Bloodstains littered the door into her apartment, while spatter was all over the floor and walls.
On the top of the windowsill inside Mary Ellen’s living room, detectives located a few latent fingerprints, all of which were in perfect condition.
V
At around 10:30 P.M. on August 3, 1987, detectives spoke to several employees at Kracker’s, all of whom identified Ned as a “regular customer” who, Jimmy the bartender said, “liked to play golf and was employed by Hewlett-Packard.”
Investigator Textor took a ride over to Hewlett the following morning and spoke to the personnel director. “Ned? Sure,” he said, “I know Ned. His name is Edwin Fales Snelgrove.”
Ned was described as a model employee: a salesman who produced results while out on the road and worked hard when he was transferred to a desk job. The company, in fact, had high hopes for Ned. The white shirts saw Ned as a leader one day, someone who was going to run his own department. In addition, Ned’s fellow employees said he was an all-around “great guy,” captain of the company softball team, a genius when it came to stock market tips, even “charming,” a sort of “ladies’ man, good-looking” and a brilliant intellectual. In fact, there wasn’t an employee Ned knew who didn’t like him or have not good—but great—things to say about him.
He was pleasant. Funny. Calm and delightful. Always fun to be around. A regular jokester. No one could understand how Ned had gotten mixed up in any trouble. He’d worked at Hewlett for four years, lived in the area for eight. There must be some sort of terrible misunderstanding.
VI
Investigator Textor found Ned at the plant doing some paperwork at his desk. After reading him his rights, Textor explained that he would have to take a ride downtown.
As some of his fellow employees looked on with curiosity, Ned said, “No problem. Anything I can do to help.”
Once, Textor had Ned inside the confines of the police department, however, Ned was a different person. All of a sudden, he wasn’t so congenial and willing to talk.
“I want a lawyer.”
The detective explained the details of the case, while Ned sat and listened for what was three hours. Textor later wrote in his report how Ned refused to make any statements.
“Do you know the victim?” the investigator asked.
Ned shook his head.
“You’re going to be charged with attempted murder, aggravated sexual assault, and sexual contact,” Textor explained, looking up at Ned’s blank expression.
VII
Near 3:00 A.M., after being processed, Ned was placed in a cell, his bond set at $100,000, and the case referred to the first assistant prosecutor Dennis Calo. In the due course of New Jersey law, Calo would have to present the charges against Ned to a grand jury.
Textor sped over to the hospital and had Mary Ellen, who had just undergone yet another surgery, take a look at a photo lineup, which included a shot of Ned.
Mary Ellen was groggy and stoned. In and out of it. “That’s him,” she said through tears. Just the sight of his face was enough to bring her back to the moment. “That’s definitely him.” How could she forget that stare? The way he looked into her eyes, waiting, watching her die.
Ned’s car, a 1987 gray Ford sedan, was towed from Hewlett’s parking lot as a throng of Ned’s peers watched through the window blinds. It was brought to the EPPD, where forensics would have a go at it. Two investigators sped over to Ned’s apartment, taped it off, and began a search.
Within a few days, the FBI called Detective Robert Kassai and related some important information. The fingerprints Ned had given to Investigator Textor matched those found on Mary Ellen’s windowsill. It was clear that Ned had been inside her apartment and had jumped from her living-room window.
23
I
The first assi
stant prosecutor in Passaic County, Dennis Calo, was in charge of indicting Ned Snelgrove. From a prosecutorial standpoint, the case against Ned appeared to be ironclad. Talking to the press after Ned’s arrest, Calo said, “He helped her start her car and then agreed to follow her home to make sure she got home OK. He then asked if he could come in and clean up [and] tried to rape her and she struggled. He stabbed her twice in the chest with a knife.”
The Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office, in which Calo was also the chief of the investigation unit, had photographs, Calo explained to reporters, of Mary Ellen’s—a name they were not releasing at this time—neck and the injuries she had sustained from the knife wounds. Calo had secured Mary Ellen’s medical records. She had identified Ned in a photo lineup. They had a latent fingerprint matching Ned’s. Even if the argument came down to whether Mary Ellen invited Ned in for sex, there was no doubt Ned had stabbed and strangled her.
And then there was Ned’s past. Four years ago. That other case haunting investigators who believed Ned was their guy. Ned had been questioned. Cops had him on radar. They had always believed he had committed the crime, but they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. Maybe now they did.
II
EPPD Detective Robert Kassai was a street-smart cop with seventeen years on the job when he met up with Mary Ellen Renard—a job that would span several decades by the time he retired in 2000 to run a successful campaign for town council. He had dealt with guys like Ned throughout his career. For a number of years, Kassai had worked with the Crimes Against Women and Children Unit, where, he said, his passion for law enforcement was deeply rooted. There was something about Ned that struck Kassai right away, he recalled. It was a feeling he had about him that led the veteran cop to believe Ned fit into a certain, rare category of serial sex offenders. Kassai relayed that he had a “sixth sense that we had a predator on our hands. Somebody that’s capable of doing it again and again.”
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