I'll Be Watching You

by M. William Phelps

  In his Berlin High School yearbook, Ned’s peers voted him “Class Headache” his senior year. He was in the service club and on the wrestling team. He was part of Berlin High’s National Honor Society. The Honor Society is not something to overlook. Not every student that tries gets in. During Ned’s day, there were only fourteen members out of a class of about 275 students. Those who make it are selected for their high academic averages, leadership qualities, extracurricular activities, and service projects.

  Ned was active in, and had mastered, all of them.

  Ned quoted Benjamin Franklin in his yearbook space underneath his senior photograph: Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of. According to Ned, his likes included willpower, Legion Baseball, ’75 World Series, A,B,C…Z, gaining weight, McDonald’s, and “Hey, Big Guy!”

  Whatever all of that meant.

  His dislikes were easier to understand: 128 lbs., “ninny,” running laps.

  His ambition was college.

  By all accounts, Ned Snelgrove was your average kid.

  On the outside, anyway. Inside, Ned was harboring some pretty evil thoughts.

  III

  Sports kept Ned busy. He wrestled and tried playing baseball, but didn’t have the size or the build to excel in either. It was the piano where Ned looked and felt the most comfortable. Like some sort of savant, he could sit for hours and belt out a tune he had heard only once.

  In some ways, Ned was the class clown. He soaked up the attention. It made him feel important. But then, there was a serious side to Ned—a formidable aspect of his character that fellow students hardly ever talked about or brought up to him. Ned’s intelligence stuck out. Academically speaking, he excelled at whatever he set his mind to. According to its history, Cook College, a subschool of Rutgers University, was conceived between 1967 and 1970 for the purposes of “teaching, research and outreach,” with a “theme of ‘Man and His Environment.’” How Ned fit into Cook’s mainly agricultural curriculum and focus on the environment was never quite clear, but he was accepted into the prestigious school during the fall of 1978 and seemed to embody the prominent status that came with attending, what some believed, was one of America’s foremost universities.

  Since leaving high school, Ned had grown out of the acne-faced kid he was into a “handsome, polite, and extremely friendly” man. Immediately his classmates and the recruiting officers for Fortune 500 companies with offices on the Rutgers campus noticed Ned’s gifts. His GPA was 3.8, far above most. The thing about Ned during those formative college years, so many of his female peers later said, was that he seemed so harmless. He was crass sometimes, liked to use his hands with the girls, sure. But what did that mean? For the most part, he was a pleasant person to be around. No one had any idea that Ned held such ill feelings toward women, or that he was battling thoughts of wanting to strangle females into a coma. And yet, there was always an unknown feeling some women had about the guy who, every once in a while, would act strange and say and do inappropriate things.

  IV

  One woman came forward to talk about Ned in this regard. It had been over twenty-five years since she’d even set eyes on Ned. They had met in upstate New York before Ned began his first full year at Rutgers. I’m sorry I opened this can of worms, she wrote after I had asked for her phone number so I could interview her. She said she didn’t want to revisit that time in her life after all. “I’m sorry for contacting you—I didn’t hang out with Ned. He was just a guy at a pub who asked me out all the time. Luckily, I said no. Case closed. I don’t want to think about what ‘might have’ been. It also might not have been. I feel bad for the victims of this man. I once thought he was an OK guy.”

  I asked her if she had any advice for women in general, seeing that she knew Ned personally, even though she refused to talk about her experiences with him. “If there was one thing” she had learned by knowing Ned, it was to “be afraid of everyone. Why? Because Ned seemed ‘normal,’ like a guy your mom would want you to date.”

  V

  But now, in late 1998, that same lunatic was planning from the prison he had called home for the past ten years to sit in front of the parole board and plead his case. It seemed almost impossible that the state of New Jersey would even consider letting a man out of prison who had, from that same prison, written a letter that expressed a desire once again to pick up where he left off, once he was out.

  But here they were. Preparing to consider Ned’s freedom.

  50

  I

  Carmen loved to pile her nieces and nephews in her sister Sonia’s car and head out to Ron-A-Roll in Vernon, Connecticut, an indoor roller-skating rink about a half hour from Hartford. Skating around, laughing and joking, falling down and scraping her knees, screaming until the blisters on her feet throbbed, Carmen took it all in as if she were a kid herself. There was something about the wind in her hair and the hum of those wheels gliding along the wooden floor—it was freeing and cathartic.

  She was born Carmen Rodriguez, the fourth child of ten brothers and sisters. From the oldest down, there was Carlos, Sonia, Petra, Maria, Carmen, Ruben, Rafael, Luis, Luz (pronounced “lose”), and Glendaliz (pronounced “Glenda Leez”). Luz, who was quite lively, spunky, and garrulous herself, later recalled Carmen as the beacon in their rather large family, the one sibling all the others were drawn to, for good or bad.

  With her boisterous spirit, Carmen could walk into a room of strangers and walk out of the same room with a posse of friends.

  It was her smile.

  Her magnetic charm.

  Her charisma.

  She was, said family and friends, the “life of any party.”

  There was a bond between Carmen and her mother, Rosa, that went far beyond that of the other siblings, Luz said. Carmen looked to her mother as a source of comfort and dependency. She had gone through the local Hartford public-school system, including Hartford Public High School during the late 1980s, went out on her own, and yet always found herself drifting back to her mom, while the others detached and went about their own lives, some moving to Puerto Rico for good, others sticking around Hartford.

  It was that strong-willed attitude Carmen exuded that her siblings—especially Luz and Glendaliz—recalled most vividly. “We were little,” said Luz, “Carmen was older. She used to like to take us to Pope Park swimming and roller-skating. She loved Pope Park.” Back then, Pope Park was a popular Hartford neighborhood hangout for families in and around the south end. Throughout the decades, however, as Hartford itself showed a “gradual decline” in housing development and crime, drugs and gang violence began to dominate, the park lost part of its beauty and safety. Still, on any given day, one or more of the Rodriguez kids was at the park doing something. Carmen couldn’t wait until autumn every year, especially as she grew into her teens. When the apples and pears of Pope Park were ready to be picked, she’d gather her younger siblings and march them all down to the park for a day of fruit picking. “She just loved to do that,” Luz remembered. “I don’t know what it was.”

  II

  There was one thing about Carmen that all of her siblings later agreed upon: She loved older men. For Carmen, it was, several suggested, an inherent need—and they had no idea where it came from—she absorbed as she grew older to be taken care of by these men. “She didn’t want to work,” Sonia, Carmen’s oldest sister, recalled. “She wanted a man to provide for her.”

  It started early. Very early.

  To the family’s surprise, Carmen ran off when she was fifteen, in 1983, with a man twenty-five years her senior, and got married. She didn’t see a problem with it. She was young. In love. And she wanted to spend her life with the guy. “But she didn’t know what she was doing,” Luz said. “She was so young. How could she?”

  Within a few months, Carmen was pregnant and eventually gave birth to her first child—Jacqueline “Jackie” Garcia—when she was only sixteen. The relationship lasted a year. Wh
en it was over and Carmen realized that being married and a mother at sixteen was not all that she had expected, she ran back to her own mother, who was living on Benton Street, in Hartford.

  Mom was that safety net. Always there to catch Carmen’s fall.

  51

  I

  Barbara Delaney had made it her business to write to the parole board anytime she felt compelled to remind them what Ned had done to her sister. Ever since Christmas 1983, Barbara had not spent a holiday season without reliving the nightmare all over again. Karen had been butchered. Ned had admittedly killed her. Her mom was dead. If Barbara and her family had to live with those losses the rest of their lives, how could the parole board even consider letting Ned out before he served his sentence?

  Not knowing that the letter wasn’t going to do any good whatsoever, in September 1998, Barbara sat down at her computer and stared at a blank screen. It would be hard to write out memories. Karen was a bright star, with so much life and energy. She had inspired Barbara, taught her things about herself no one else had. It had been nearly fifteen years, but it seemed like only yesterday.

  Edwin Snelgrove will come before you, Barbara tapped out, to ask for parole. She paused. It was still hard to write his name. Think about him. Imagine him in her parents’ cottage. At the funeral. Kissing the woman he had murdered.

  While he pleads to go free, she found the strength to continue, his victims will never get a second chance to live out their lives….

  She was speaking for Mary Ellen Renard, too.

  All victims, perhaps.

  How could those words—“attempted murder” and “aggravated manslaughter” and “parole”—be considered in the same breath? Here the guy was, not yet eleven years into a twenty-year sentence, preparing to be released from prison. Was there any justice in sentencing laws?

  As Barbara wrote, those deep-seated feelings of loss and anger came back. She spoke of Ned’s third victim, her mother, relating to the board that Elizabeth Anne, two years after Karen’s death, suffered her first heart attack. Then, after a long battle with heart problems, “directly related to my sister’s death,” died prematurely at the age of sixty-seven.

  Barbara took a break. Writing it all out—verbalizing it all over again—was emotionally exhausting. Recalling the horror. The trips to court. Seeing Ned’s photograph in the newspapers. Hearing him make excuses.

  Tears.

  Karen was Barbara’s only sister. She couldn’t even begin to explain how she’d gotten by. Pacing in her living room, Barbara wondered if the letter would fall on deaf ears. After all, how many of these letters have board members read? How many murderers have they considered for parole? Ned was likely another in a long list of murderers who would serve his time, do the right thing, and see the light of day. They’d pull out that word: “overcrowding.”

  Barbara had to let them know how she felt—if not for the sake of keeping Ned locked up, then for her own self-assurance. Her own sanity. And so she reminded the board that Ned had attacked again, in 1987, after getting away with killing Karen. She told Mary Ellen’s story after detailing how she and her family suffered through the Christmas of 1983. Five pages of a family’s agony. Then another page of Mary Ellen’s. That eleven-page letter Ned had written to the judge detailing how “sick” he was and how he could not control those strange, evil, violent thoughts about women. He needed to kill, Barbara pointed out. He needed to assuage those feelings of sexual violence. It was there in black and white—from his own pen. Had he gotten help for that? Could anyone, she wondered, cure such a sickness? Barbara wrote that there was a substantial likelihood that he will commit another crime if he is released. She asked the board if a relatively short sentence [would] deter him from future violence? If Ned was cut loose now, there was no doubt in her mind that he would hurt other women. That’s right: women. Plural.

  Barbara believed that God would ultimately punish Ned, she wrote. But we, as a society, needed to confine him so he couldn’t harm anyone else. Without repentance…he will have to face God’s consequence, the wages of sin is death, she wrote. I am satisfied with this.

  She asked if they had considered the idea that he would kill again if released. She said he had a reputation for lying and deception. He was smart in those ways. A con man. She said Ned himself had said he was a danger to society. He had even asked for and admitted he needed psychiatric help. Please heed to his call for help, she wrote. I plead with you to scrutinize this case. Examine the facts of the past…. It is your responsibility to protect us…. Deny his parole so we can rest, knowing that someone else will not become another victim…. May God help you in your decision.

  She sealed the letter, put a stamp on it, and sent it, not knowing that it wasn’t going to do any good whatsoever, because Ned wasn’t up for parole—he was due to be released on good behavior. He had served his sentence.

  52

  I

  After splitting up with her first husband, sixteen-year-old Carmen Rodriguez began living with her mom again—but she hadn’t learned a lesson, because she couldn’t stay away from older men. It was that wandering spirit, always out there looking for a man to carry her off into the sunset. “At that time,” Luz recalled, “she really didn’t want to do much.” Going back to school didn’t seem at all interesting to Carmen, neither did working or even joining many of her brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico. She enjoyed motherhood and being a homemaker.

  Inside the next few years, Carmen dated another older man and had two more children, Tanaris and Roberto, while Jacqueline, from her failed marriage, grew into a lively toddler. “He treated her very well,” said Carmen’s niece Kathy Perez, speaking of the new man in her life, “he was a good man. She loved him.”

  Her new man, Roberto, got a job in Springfield, Massachusetts, about a twenty-five minute drive north of Hartford, and Carmen and the kids followed him. Soon they were all living in a small, cozy apartment in downtown Springfield, but Carmen hated it. Almost every day, Luz said, chuckling at the memory, “she was back in Hartford at my mom’s house.” It was that maternal pull tugging at Carmen, as she lived twenty-five miles away from Mom, that made her drive back to Hartford “almost every day” to be with her mother and sisters. “She’d wake up Roberto,” pushing on him first thing in the morning. “‘Let’s go to Hartford. Take me home.’”

  Leaving the unity of the family gave Carmen a sense of disconnect; if she couldn’t make it to Hartford for some reason, she was calling to ask what was going on.

  The bond between mother and daughter was so strong that Luz and Sonia, after watching Carmen commute back and forth from Springfield to Hartford, found her an apartment next door—connected—to her mother’s apartment. But with three kids at home and a man who worked in Springfield, things became difficult for Carmen and Roberto. “They started to have problems,” Luz recalled.

  Those problems, though, began to affect Carmen’s mother, simply because she was living next door. “She (my mother) had to leave. My mother,” Luz added, “went to Puerto Rico and left Carmen behind.”

  It was 1988. Carmen was twenty years old. Now, without warning, her lifeline was gone. Not just a walk across the hallway, but her mom was in another country. Although she had her sisters close by, Carmen still felt alone.

  “She was devastated,” Luz remembered.

  At the time her mother took off, Carmen had been trying to work things out with Roberto. No sooner had her mother left did Carmen drop those reconciliation talks with Roberto and fly to Puerto Rico, too. “Momma is not next to me now,” Luz said, speaking for Carmen, “so she’s like, ‘bye’ to Roberto.”

  It was an easy decision. One of which had little to do with Roberto and more to do with the fact that Carmen didn’t feel safe unless she was next to her mother. Still, living in Puerto Rico was not what Carmen had expected. Within three months, she found herself back in Hartford, trying to work things out with Roberto.

  A few weeks after she returned to Hartford,
Carmen realized she was pregnant again. “The baby wasn’t his,” one of her sisters later said, speaking of Roberto. Six months after returning from Puerto Rico, Carmen gave birth to Rueben Negron.

  Back home now, without her mom to fall back on, Carmen relied on her oldest sister, Sonia, who lived on Capitol Avenue at the time, with her four children and husband. “She came to me,” Sonia recalled, “after she tried to make things work with Roberto.” Moving in with Sonia, Carmen had Rueben. Her three other kids were still in Puerto Rico with her mother. They were being well taken care of. Carmen didn’t have to worry. She knew enough to leave them there until she could get herself situated back in Hartford; then she would send for them.

  Sonia was an old-school homemaker. She believed in taking care of her family—to a certain extent. Her own children and husband had to come first. Carmen was living in Sonia’s apartment with a small child, but now she started to drink heavily. No one knew why. She liked to party, they all said, and it somehow got out of hand for her. “She liked to have a good time,” Luz remembered, “and got caught up in it.”

  II

  One day in 1990, Sonia, stressed with taking care of four kids of her own and putting up with Carmen’s drinking, called her mother in Puerto Rico. Carmen wasn’t drinking every day, she never did. But a few beers on Thursday night, Luz said, turned into a party for her until Sunday or Monday. “And then she’d go two weeks without a drop. But when she partied, she partied.”