It sounded as though Ned had rehearsed the conversation in his head.
“Were you dating her?” Watson wanted to know.
“In college, I did. But we broke up in August 1982.”
“What time did you leave the party?”
“About two A.M.—with Karen.”
“You left with her?”
“Not with her. I walked her out to her car, a little economy car. It was parked up the street from the party.”
“What next?”
“She went her way and I drove directly to my apartment alone.”
As they talked, Ned sounded more scripted than ever. Each little detail perfectly fit into the scheme of things. It was the way Ned added words—“alone,” “with Karen,” “August 1982”—as if he had gone over the conversation in his head all the way to Connecticut.
“When will you be back in town?” Watson asked.
“The day after Christmas.”
III
During the afternoon hours of December 26, detectives tracked down ten more potential suspects and questioned each regarding his whereabouts that night. All were men. All had known Karen in some capacity.
None, however, were taken seriously as suspects.
Whenever a suspect seemed promising, his alibi checked out. That was the thing about investigating a murder during the Christmas holiday: nearly everyone had someone who could vouch for them.
Everyone, that is, except Ned Snelgrove.
44
I
Whenever Ned found himself in a jam, he reacted. On his way back from Connecticut to New Jersey, after spending the holidays with his parents, Ned must have—I say “must have” because even though Ned would admit to a lot of things in the coming years, this is something he routinely denies—believed that by taking his own life he could escape the embarrassment of showing his true self to those who would now see that he was a failure and murderer. He later wrote that he was always the prime suspect in Karen’s homicide. The police, however, didn’t have one piece of substantial evidence to tie Ned to Karen’s murder.
As he made his way back to New Jersey, Ned began to “feel terrible from then on.” Killing Karen like that, he insisted, was not part of his plan. As evil or bizarre as it sounded, strangling Karen was part of the fantasy, but knifing her—at least according to Ned—wasn’t. Stabbing Karen and making a mess of things was never supposed to happen.
Murder as a contingency. How charming.
Back at his apartment, Ned was stewing, trying to figure out how in the heck he was going to get out of this one. How should he act? Should he call Karen’s family? Show up at her funeral? Run into the police station and throw himself on their mercy? Which was appropriate?
Tears, Ned believed. Tears were the answer. Yes, lots of crocodile tears.
Instead of facing it all, however, Ned decided to take the coward’s way out: disappear. So he swallowed a whole package of sixteen sleeping pills, he later wrote, and a bottle of iodine, believe it or not.
It didn’t work, though.
I didn’t die, he penned.
II
At 7:20 P.M., on December 26, 1983, twenty-three-year-old Ned Snelgrove—looking so much his age and, strikingly, bearing an uncanny resemblance to his later mentor, Ted Bundy—was sitting at the MCDB going over things with Detective Watson and several of his colleagues, all of whom by now had a gut “feeling,” an instinct, about Ned.
Ned had swallowed the pills and taken the iodine and was treated and released from the hospital. He was alive. He said he would “get help.”
Ned seemed calm and cool for a guy who had just tried to take his own life. He explained where he worked and where he lived, how he knew Karen, when they dated and when they broke up, how he helped her move into her apartment, and that he had just received a Christmas card from her three weeks before her death.
“I bumped into her a couple times since the breakup,” Ned explained.
It was important for Ned to place himself inside Karen’s apartment, which would account for his fingerprints and any possible hair or clothing fibers they might come up with.
After Ned went through and answered some of the same questions he had over the telephone the week before, he gave detectives consent—after they asked—to search his apartment. Ned had said he left for Connecticut on December 24, at about 1:30 or 2:00 P.M.
Watson’s report read: [Snelgrove] was advised of his Constitutional rights and he signed and dated a rights card—a search was conducted [of his apartment] with negative results.
III
Karen’s mother, Elizabeth Anne, her sister, Barbara, and stepfather, Arthur, of course, were dreading the process of burying Karen. What family wanted to bury their twenty-three-year-old child, a woman with so much promise and virtue and love to shower on the world? It was almost as if there were no words to describe how they felt. For Elizabeth Anne, her heart ached, literally. She was having trouble breathing. Talking. Sleeping. Eating.
Karen was special. She had played the flute, the guitar, the piano. She enjoyed photography and magic, which she learned from “the Great Oz,” her father, whom she was now standing with at the gates of heaven, Elizabeth Anne believed.
And yet, during a day that couldn’t seemingly get any worse, here came Ned Snelgrove, a man the family firmly believed had had something to do with their daughter’s death, sauntering into the funeral home to pay his respects to the woman he had killed.
No one truly knew, but what gall the guy had!
There were hundreds of family members and Karen’s friends on hand at the wake to say good-bye. The news media had called “relentlessly,” looking to interview anyone, Barbara later said, as the story of Karen’s murder was headline news and on the front page of the New York Times, but the family shooed them all away.
A college girl—no, a Rutgers girl—had been murdered in her apartment.
Big news story.
As the wake proceeded, Ned made his way up to Karen’s casket as all those around sobbed and shook their heads.
“What’s he doing here?” someone whispered.
“Can you believe this guy?”
Ned, Barbara later said, was “the person crying the loudest.”
Ned walked up. Knelt in front of the coffin of the woman he had murdered.
Bowed his head.
Cried.
And then stepped up, leaned inside the coffin, and kissed Karen good-bye.
Kissed her.
A peck.
“He made a spectacle of it all and made sure everyone knew he was grieving,” Barbara said. Detectives were there watching Ned. “But they could not do anything.”
IV
Detectives had several mitigating factors to look at, or, rather, as they like to say, “go on.” For one, Karen lived in a three-story tenement in a section of town that was not at all known for a history of high crime. The house she lived in was four blocks from the downtown district. To get into the building, you needed a key. There were no signs of forced entry into Karen’s building or her apartment.
Ned.
Detectives were confident that Karen knew her murderer.
Ned.
They were confident her murderer had been in her apartment before the murder.
Ned.
And had anger issues with Karen.
Ned. Ned. Ned.
No matter how they looked at it.
V
Detective Watson telephoned Ned on December 31. “We need you to come in,” Watson explained.
“For what?” Ned asked.
“Answer some questions, you know, and discuss maybe taking a polygraph.”
Ned’s stomach turned. “When?”
“How ’bout January third, say, um, nine A.M.?”
“That’ll work.”
Over the course of the next three days, the MCDB brought in several of Karen’s college friends—all males—who were at the house party. All agreed to take a polygraph.
&nbs
p; None failed.
When Ned hung up with Detective Watson, he immediately phoned his parents and, together, hired a lawyer. On January 3, 1984, Ned and his attorney, Clifford Kuhn, showed up on schedule to speak with detectives investigating Karen’s murder. Kuhn said he wanted to read his client’s previous statements to the police before allowing him to take a polygraph.
They didn’t stick around. Kuhn said he’d call after having a look at the statements.
Six days later, Kuhn called Watson. “I advised my client not to take a polygraph.”
“OK,” Watson said.
45
I
The MCDB continued interviewing suspects and dragging former college friends of Karen’s in for questioning and polygraph testing. And for weeks into the new year, everything kept pointing to one person.
Finally, by January 20, 1984, detectives were able to get a court order forcing Ned to give up exemplars: hair, blood, saliva, fingerprints. If nothing else, they could place Ned in Karen’s apartment. His story was that the last time he saw Karen was after the party out on the street as she wiped snow off the back of her window.
It was a lie, of course.
And the cops knew it.
The goal was to catch Ned lying, which would invite probable cause and, with any luck, force Ned into a corner.
But Ned was sticking to his story.
With Ned’s attorney present, Watson and his colleagues began asking Ned a series of questions after he gave up the exemplars. It was important to keep asking the same repetitive questions to see how accurate Ned was over a period of time. Lies are hard to keep track of, no matter how smart you are—whereas the truth is a cinch.
Ned gave up a few more names of men he had seen talking to Karen, he claimed, at the party. Then one of the detectives asked him if Karen had any foibles, any characteristics that could potentially cause her trouble. Like, for example, would she talk to strangers? Would she hitchhike or accept a ride from someone she didn’t know?
“Look,” Ned said rather defensively, “she was friendly toward strangers, but was not a tease,” as if they had insinuated such.
“OK…and your point is…”
“But she was not a Girl Scout, either.” Literally, she had been; figuratively, though, Ned was saying that Karen had a reputation for being promiscuous. Several other men they had interviewed had said the same thing. But the truth was, Karen liked to act like she was wild, when she was nothing more than an innocent young girl.
“But then,” Ned asked out loud, “was she a whore?”
Detectives wondered what the heck he was talking about.
“Did she hang around with any [other] people?” one of the detectives asked, changing the subject, trying to keep Ned focused.
“There were no black people at the party, nor did she know any that I know of.”
They cut Ned loose.
II
A friend of Karen’s, who along with several others had been asked to provide exemplars, called Detective Watson on March 2, 1984, to tell him he had found something he believed was important.
“What is it?”
III
There was a guy who liked Karen. He had a thing for her, you could say. He watched out for her. He had wanted to “take it to another level,” a friend later said, “but Karen wasn’t interested.”
The guy felt in his heart that Ned had killed Karen. No one could tell him different. So as time went forward, the guy became fixed on tripping Ned up and catching him in a lie. He’d send Ned letters from Karen. Cards from her, too.
Taunting him. Making him think.
As the second anniversary of Karen’s death came up, the guy placed a wreath on the house where Karen had attended that party before her murder. It was nothing more than a memorial.
IV
Watson asked his caller, again, “What is it?”
“A wreath.”
“Where?”
Someone had also placed a wreath in another location.
“It’s from an unknown person. It was placed [on Karen’s grave] between January twenty-second and January twenty-ninth. I spoke to Elizabeth Anne and she contacted every single family member, and no one they knew had placed the wreath….”
The twist to it all was that Karen’s headstone or name had not yet been placed where she was buried.
Watson called the cemetery. They had collected the wreath and discarded it. “Has anyone been in lately to ask where Karen Osmun is buried?” he asked.
The cemetery worker said no.
V
That December, Elizabeth Anne, with help from a local newspaper, the Home News, invited Dorothy Allison, a well-known, veteran psychic, to travel to New Brunswick, take a ride around town, and see what she could come up with. Middlesex County prosecutor Alan Rockoff, whose office was now driving the investigation, gave the Home News the most gratifying quote one could offer when dealing with psychics and murder investigations. He equated Dorothy Allison with “chicken soup,” saying her input “couldn’t hurt.”
As she drove around town with a reporter and detective, Allison made several broad statements regarding Karen’s killer, at one time saying that he had “very small ears, with pointed features like a mouse.”
One thing she did nail—yet it could have been the sheer chiseling down of facts and applying Karen’s lifestyle to the prediction—turned out to be that Karen’s killer, and she was adamant, traveled through the campus, which she called a “path the murderer took all the time.” She then said that she saw Karen leaving the party and being followed by a black-and-yellow car “driven by the murderer, who had been at the party with her.”
When she was asked to point out where the house party was, an address that hadn’t been publicized, Dorothy didn’t fare so well.
Bringing in the psychic did not advance the investigation. Still, it gave Elizabeth Anne a bit of solace in the fact she could at least, for that one day, grasp onto something—something that might lead her to her daughter’s killer, which was her only focus in life by this point. Barbara’s firstborn daughter, Lauren, who arrived that March, helped Elizabeth cope, but the impact of Karen’s death kept dragging her failing health down. She felt tired all the time. Quite sickly. Her heart was thick, tight in her chest, as if something was always wrong.
VI
“The police and friends of ours kept a close eye on Ned,” Barbara Delaney later said, “following his whereabouts. But no evidence surfaced.”
The case grew frigid.
Months turned into years.
Soon, two years had gone by and no arrest had been made.
Frustration.
For Barbara. For Arthur.
For Elizabeth Anne.
Then, out of nowhere, it happened.
Elizabeth Anne dropped to her knees one day and suffered a major heart attack. All that emotional pain had manifested into physical trauma.
46
I
According to Barbara, her mother was “living a life of constant agony.” She had suffered a heart attack solely because of Karen’s murder and the fact that Ned Snelgrove was out and about walking the streets. By now, it was almost a given among a small group of friends and family—and several investigators—that Ned had murdered Karen; but no one could do anything about it. Barbara had another child, Caitlin, and spending time with her grandchildren helped Elizabeth Anne to recover and heal. She soon joined Parents of Murdered Children and became extremely active in fighting for victims’ rights. “She tirelessly went to meetings, signed petitions, and talked to other parents of murdered children,” Barbara said. “It was her catharsis.”
A pacifier. A cause to help her bridge the gap between losing a child and understanding that there was nothing she could have done to protect her. That maternal instinct. That bond. The mother-daughter connection. Inseparable.
“By doing good for others,” Barbara said, “she was able to draw strength and maintain a purpose to go on.”
&n
bsp; Barbara joined a group, too: Voices for Victims. A group that fought for legislature to ensure that victims of crime were entitled to the same rights as criminals.
II
The pressure was off Ned for now. He had escaped justice. Later, in a letter to the court, in which he explained what was happening in his mind after the Osmun murder and before the attack on Mary Ellen Renard, Ned spoke of this period when he was in between attacks, if you will. He wrote that he couldn’t eat or sleep, that he promised [him]self [he] would never do anything like that again; at the same time rationalizing Karen’s murder, talking about the feelings he had toward females which were “so strong” he couldn’t help it.
Karen didn’t die, Ned insisted, because she was his ex-girlfriend. It had nothing to do with her breaking up with him. It wasn’t an act of revenge.
Instead, it was as simple as Karen being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His other side had come out and Karen was there. There was nothing he could have done to stop it.
Yes, according to Ned’s twisted way of analyzing his sick behavior, Karen was killed because she knew him and he had acted out on those stuffed feelings of violence against females.
For no other reason.
According to law enforcement, however, the strangest part of this time in Ned’s life is the lull in attacks. As most profilers will say, a person like Ned just doesn’t stop for four years and then pick up again. “No way,” said one profiler who had Ned on radar for twenty years regarding a murder in Essex County, New Jersey—a female with large breasts who was murdered shortly after Karen Osmun. “There’s no way a guy like Snelgrove could just stop for that long a period of time.”
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