To Ned, it was no longer a fantasy. He had crossed the threshold into reality.
40
I
Ned was not a drug user. He drank, sure, but he wasn’t a guy who liked to get bombed and stumble all over the place. Ned’s highs in life came from those moments when he held a female’s life in his delicate hands and chose her time to die. Thus, as he choked Karen, that “dizziness” and shortness of breath, which he would describe in the years to come, was a sense of empowerment, a euphoria like no other he had ever experienced.
“Something inside me likes these feelings,” he later said.
Moreover, he wanted those feelings to increase. To never end. In fact, there was no drug or drink in the world that could replace this high of taking a life. The feeling of losing grip with reality and taking the breath from another human being was enormously stimulating for Ned.
He was God.
How liberating.
Glorifying.
II
At some point, Karen began to realize what was happening. That Ned was killing her. She was no match at five feet three inches, 115 pounds, even if Ned was no giant himself. I held Karen’s throat, Ned wrote later, pressing down with my thumbs…but she was still sputtering….
Karen’s eyes were closed, Ned described. Her tongue stuck out of her mouth.
As she struggled for breath, Ned explained, Karen began to make terrible, animal-like noises.
And it bothered him. He was having trouble strangling Karen to death, he recalled. As he squeezed harder and harder, he began to realize that, for him, killing a human being was much harder than it looked.
At this point, Karen’s life had come down to a psychopath comparing it to that of a scene in a horror film. Karen was twisting and turning, Ned explained. He was looking at her. Naked from the waist up, he later wrote, it was “driving” him crazy, allowing him to continue the torture, creating an erection like that of which he had never experienced.
And then, without warning, there was that adrenaline rush: seeing Karen bare-breasted, struggling for life. There came a point, Ned said, as she thrashed like a fish out of water, when Karen just stopped moving, like a machine that had run out of gas.
One minute she was kicking and straining for air…and the next, nothing.
No movement whatsoever.
The problem for Ned, however, was that Karen was still alive.
Staring at her, Ned thought, She’s going to wake up and call the police.
And there was no way he could allow that to happen.
III
With Karen unconscious, on the floor of her bedroom, Ned had to think fast. If she woke up, she’d realize he’d tried to kill her and immediately phone police.
Ned was no stranger. She could identify him.
He panicked, he later said. And ran into Karen’s kitchen.
Where are they…where are they? He silently questioned.
Opening drawers and rifling through cabinets…he couldn’t find one.
But then, there it was: a steak knife.
He ran back into the bedroom and, according to what Ned later wrote, he stabbed her in the abdomen.
Karen had once again began “making those noises,” Ned described. She wasn’t conscious or moving, but she was obviously still alive.
This, he said, made him “so scared.”
Imagine this: Karen was dying and Ned Snelgrove was scared. Still, even more revolting in its reflection, what scared Ned more than anything, more than anything that had taken place that entire night in Karen’s bedroom, what had totally turned him off by the entire ordeal, he later explained, was a “yellow mucus” drooling from Karen’s mouth and the blood now vigorously flowing from her abdomen.
All that blood.
All that mucus.
It wasn’t, Ned said, supposed to happen this way. It wasn’t part of the scene he had envisioned for all those years. No, he wrote, it was never part of my sexual fantasies.
For Ned, seeing all the blood “ruined it” for him.
It had drained the sexual drive from him.
IV
Ned needed to get the heck out of Karen Osmun’s apartment. Not that the murder had been loud—but it was Christmas. People would be looking for Karen. Her phone would be ringing.
And Philip…
Ned grabbed Karen’s keys and the steak knife that he later said he used to stab her to death and ran from the apartment. Within a few moments, he was at home cleaning himself up, preparing to leave for Connecticut to spend the holidays at home.
41
I
By 3:30 P.M. on Saturday, December 24, 1983, Christmas Eve day, Elizabeth Anne, Arthur Bilger, and Karen’s boyfriend, Philip, had not heard from Karen. It was so unlike her. Here it was Christmas Eve day and she was nowhere to be found.
Maybe she went out shopping?
No one was panicking yet.
But when Christmas Eve came and went, and it was getting late into the night and early Christmas Day morning, the family became frighteningly concerned. Barbara, pregnant, spent the previous night at her in-laws, and Arthur and Elizabeth Anne agreed not to tell her what was going on, for fear that she didn’t need any of the stress. At some point, Barbara called home, however. “We’ll be there tomorrow, Mom,” she said with holiday cheer in her voice.
Elizabeth Anne was somber. “OK” was all she said. Barbara didn’t recognize that her mother was overly worried about anything. (“You know, in retrospect,” Barbara said, “who is really looking for that?”)
II
Late into Christmas Day, the family was still in a frenzy: Where in the world is Karen? They kept calling her apartment. “Frantically,” one of them later said.
No answer.
They called several of Karen’s friends—anyone who might know where she was, but no one had seen or heard from her.
Elizabeth Anne’s intuition told her that something was terribly wrong. Karen was in trouble. She had said she’d be there by “late afternoon” on Christmas Eve day. They hadn’t heard from her in almost forty-eight hours.
Elizabeth Anne wasn’t waiting any longer. She picked up the phone and called the New Brunswick Police Department (NBPD). “Can you send a car over to my daughter’s apartment and check in on her? She was supposed to be here this afternoon and hasn’t arrived yet.”
“Ma’am,” she was told, “your daughter’s an adult. We can only check outside her apartment.”
III
At Karen’s apartment some time later, two officers rang Karen’s doorbell and knocked on her door.
No answer.
They tried again.
“Miss Osmun,” one of them yelled into the window, “you home?”
Nothing.
It was now close to 10:00 P.M. “Nothing happening here,” one of the officers called in and told dispatch. “Seems to be no foul play or anything.”
IV
Elizabeth Anne and Karen’s stepfather, Arthur, called Karen’s boyfriend, Philip, who was at his parents’ house. “Can you go over there and check on her?”
Philip said he would.
Arthur said he’d meet him there.
V
Elizabeth Anne knew. She had been worried sick by this point, as were other members of Karen’s immediate family. There was no way Karen had run off anywhere on her own. It was Christmastime. She wouldn’t have missed the celebration with family for anything.
Philip met Arthur at Karen’s door sometime after the police left.
They both knocked and rang the buzzer, yelling for Karen.
Not a peep.
It was snowing by this point. Cold and wet. Visibility was dim. The streets were getting slick. Philip had an idea. “I’ll be back,” he said.
There was a way to hop up onto the roof and look into Karen’s window to see if maybe she was in there or things looked odd. Philip didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he figured, what the heck, it couldn’t hurt.
Philip pulled himself up onto the roof and shimmied his way down so he could manage a glimpse into the window. It was slippery, but he was able to make it. There were curtains, however, blocking his view.
Shoot.
“I’ll get a screwdriver,” Arthur said. He went to his car and dug through the trunk.
According to a detailed police report, based on interviews with Arthur and Philip, it took a few minutes, but they were able to jimmy the door open and walk in.
Philip entered first.
After looking around, he went into the bedroom, where, he later told police, “I saw a green sleeping bag spread on the floor with what appeared to be a body lying underneath it.”
He walked over and lifted the end of the sleeping bag up, quickly seeing the feet of a female. Yet, he didn’t know for certain that it was Karen’s feet, so he lifted the upper portion of the sleeping bag off her face.
My God!
There she was.
Dead.
Philip stood. Tears. Shaking. Disbelief.
“In here…”
There were tiny puncture wounds to her chest. Blood all over the floor underneath her body. Light purple-and-blue-and-red bruises around her neck.
After the shock of seeing Karen just lying there dead, with dried blood all over her, Philip and Arthur put the sleeping bag back the way Philip said he had found it and “did not,” they explained later, “touch anything else in the apartment.”
42
I
Karen’s apartment was soon overcome with detectives and EMTs and cops asking questions of neighbors and flashing lights of blue and red—all that comes with the discovery of a bloodied body, a murder victim.
What was evident from the moment detectives started to study the crime scene was that Ned had posed Karen’s body. The way Ned described the murder years later didn’t necessarily gel with the scene that cops came upon. Maybe it was selective memory on Ned’s part. Or perhaps he saw it in his mind another way altogether. But Karen had been propped up with her back against the bed, stabbed upward of about fifteen times in the chest and abdomen (someone even later reported the stab wounds having a distinctive circular pattern to them), and that green sleeping bag had been placed over her corpse, not haphazardly, in haste, but as if it were a shroud.
“Even when murderers confess,” an investigator working Ned’s case later told me, “they pick and choose what they want to remember to downplay their role, their evil.”
II
Detective Dennis Watson, from second assistant prosecutor Thomas Kapsak’s Middlesex County Detective Bureau (MCDB), had arrived at Karen’s near sunup. Watson was in charge of the investigation. His notes and reports were clear and concise. Direct and very detailed.
It was extremely cold outside (“single digits”) when Watson arrived and met with Detective Joe Smith in the parking lot of Karen’s building. There were several other detectives from different bureaus on hand and Watson nodded to each that indelible “hello” cops give one another without having to say anything.
When they got inside, Watson noted that Karen was wearing blue jeans “which were zipped up and snapped” with a “belt tied.” She had blue socks on. Her panties had not been removed. Karen’s attacker was obviously only interested in her upper torso.
From the waist up, Karen was totally naked.
Watson knelt down and took a closer look at the injuries. There were six stab wounds, he counted, in the center of her chest area alone; several more—“puncture-type wounds”—near her lower front neck region. There were bruises on Karen’s neck, consistent with strangulation.
After the medical examiner cleared the scene, Watson and his colleagues headed back to the NBPD, where the arduous task of interviewing everyone Karen had come in contact with throughout the past few days, maybe even weeks, began.
This, no less, during the Christmas holiday season.
III
Barbara had called the house that morning. “We’ll be there this afternoon, Mom,” she said.
Elizabeth Anne was solemn.
“Mom?”
“OK, Barbara.”
Nothing more was said. How does a mother tell a daughter that her only sister is dead?
When Barbara and her husband left, Arthur Bilger called back and told Barbara’s in-laws what had happened. They didn’t want to worry Barbara now. Not with the baby and all. They would tell her in person when she arrived.
IV
A guy named Frank, along with his three roommates, hosted the party Karen and Ned had attended. Beyond describing how packed the house was, Frank offered investigators very little information regarding whom Karen spoke to or with whom she left. After that, detectives spoke with Elizabeth Anne, who was obviously broken up and totally overwhelmed by the loss. Karen was dead. One minute, her daughter was talking about the baby her sister was going to have, and the next moment, she was lying in the morgue.
It wasn’t fair.
Cops weren’t going to get much out of Elizabeth Anne—but they were extremely interested in speaking with Philip Costanzo. Philip was about to celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday. He had been going to Livingston College in Piscataway and worked part-time at a retail store, Shoppers World, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He and Karen had been dating for about three months, he explained. “I last saw Karen, let me see, Friday, December twenty-third,” Philip said. “It was approximately one-fifteen A.M.” Karen had just returned home, he said, from a night out with friends. Karen was tired and wanted to go to sleep. She came in for a while and then went across the hall to hit the sack.
Detectives asked Philip what he did the previous day. If he had seen Karen? Spent any time with her? Philip said he spent December 22 with Karen in her apartment drinking champagne and celebrating the end of the college semester. She was happy. Ready to face the holidays and have fun with her family. She said something about going to a party on campus that night, and Philip said he couldn’t go because of work and possibly traveling to his parents’ house after work.
Philip was visibly distraught. Poor Karen. Did he have to see her like that? There was an image now in his mind, etched like a nightmare, that would be there forever. A lasting memory of his girlfriend.
The sleeping bag.
The blood.
Her tiny feet.
Her face.
Those soulless, foggy eyes.
The stab wounds.
Philip had an ironclad alibi: he was working. There was no way he’d had anything to do with Karen’s death. After a thorough check, Detective Watson and his colleagues were sure of it. In truth, as they started talking to people, dragging friends of Karen’s into the station house and shining a light in their face, they quickly began to feel that Karen’s killer had attended the house party. Someone had perhaps met Karen and followed her home.
Stalked her.
But who? And how were they going to narrow it down from sixty party guests to one person?
V
Within a day, the MCDB had a list of house party guests. One after the other was brought in for questioning. The most plausible suspect was a guy who lived above Karen. He had gone to Cook College and knew Karen from class. He had last seen her on Friday morning, December 23, as he was leaving for work at People’s Express Airlines in Newark. He worked all day, he said, and then went shopping. When he returned home at about eleven that night, he knocked on Karen’s door before retiring upstairs.
“Why?” asked one of the detectives.
“Well,” he said, “I must have seen her car”—it was there in the parking lot outside—“because I wouldn’t have knocked if I knew she wasn’t home. But I got no answer.”
“You know Philip?”
“Yeah, we all hang out together.”
The guy explained that Philip was supposed to go down to his parents’ home that night, but he called and said he wasn’t going.
It sounded strange.
“It was snowing,” he added. “Phil didn’t want to
drive in the snow.”
He then explained that he and his roommate had watched a television movie, Cotton Candy, but his roommate left halfway into it. After the movie, he played his guitar, recorded some music until about 3:30 A.M., and went to bed.
The detectives asked him for permission to search his apartment.
“Sure.”
After a “brief search,” Watson noted, nothing was found.
Detectives going through Karen’s apartment found several names and numbers of what they presumed to be friends, but were now, of course, suspects.
All checked out.
And then, after speaking to nearly everyone at the party, detectives came to Ned Snelgrove. His name was in Karen’s address book.
“Yeah,” someone at the party said, “Ned was here. I saw him talking to Karen.”
43
I
That afternoon, Barbara made it to the shore house with her husband. Walking in, she took one look at everyone and knew, she recalled later, that something had happened. “It’s one of those moments in your life you never, ever forget,” Barbara told me. “I get chest pains just thinking about it now. I can feel the pain welling up when I think about it.”
II
There was no answer at Ned’s apartment when detectives, after finding his name and number in Karen’s address book, first called on him. One of his roommates—he lived with two friends from college—said that Ned had left for Connecticut to go spend the holidays with his parents.
After some checking around, they came up with Ned’s parents’ number. Detective Watson spoke to Ned. He sounded somewhat unfazed, but also jumpy, twitchy. Watson mentioned that the MCDB had heard Ned had been at the same party. “I went to the party alone,” Ned said. “It was approximately nine P.M. I saw Karen a couple of hours later and spoke to her briefly about what we were both doing with our lives.”
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